How to Create an Online Branding Strategy
A lot of people get a little confused when it comes to branding, so I recorded this video on how to create an online branding strategy to help you put together a plan that will develop trust in your brand.. whether it is a product, service, company or simply your name; increase visibility on search engines and a corresponding increase in traffic from search engines; and finally increased visibility on other websites such as Web 2.0 and social sites plus an increase of referred traffic from these websites.
If you have comments or questions please use the comment form below. Please feel free to share, ReTweet or send this video to your friends who might find it helpful.
SEO is Feng Shui for Websites
Happy Chinese New Year to friends and some of my relatives!
I thought I’d write this post, and say SEO is actually Feng Shui for websites… a fitting and timely post for the Chinese New Year.
A lot of people believe SEO to be mysterious and difficult. I disagree.
First, what likely makes it mysterious is the fact that the rules to ranking well through SEO are not known, since these rules change often. Google itself may not even know with certainty how it ranks a website since the algorithm is composed of so many rules, and likely different teams working on each.
Second… SEO being difficult. It has actually become even easier, so easy that anyone can do it and what has made it easy is that there are so many social sites and user generated sites out there that are high authority high traffic websites that can be leveraged to achieve SEO goals.
But what is SEO?
To simplify, SEO is a traffic generating strategy that involves improving both website content (design, layout, structure, etc) and website visibility / accessibility on other sites (through links) that result in better visibility on search engines for keyword searches made by your desired visitors or target audience.
What is Feng Shui?
While there are several mysterious sounding esoteric definitions of Feng Shui, I subscribe to the idea that it is the practical placement and arrangement of items, ideas, designs or things that create the least resistance to movement or use and thus enhance efficiency or productivity.
In Relation to Your Website Attributes
Each and every item on your website and each of the pages have a purpose and that is to lead a visitor to perform a specific conversion goal.
At the page level, each and every page has to have the right layout, design, use the right images and the right text in order to make the visitor’s experience on that page fluid and with least resistance. They are guided smoothly to what you eventually want them to do.
At the website level, all pages and their content are connected together through a well thought out structure of links, making visitor navigability and ease of going from one page to the next, the top priority.
In Relation to Your Website Visibility / Accessibility
Now that you have optimized your website you would need to invite people to see it. Much like a well appointed home which you have spent a lot of time decorating, making sure to arrange everything in a manner that feels comfortable and stress free… you would then invite people to your home.
To get people to visit your home on the web, you would need to create action on other websites where people you would want visiting your home are found. What I mean by creating action is to initiate contact or activity such as being proactive on social media and social networking sites, interacting with other people and making sure that there is a link within those interactions so that people you interact with as well as people following the discussion can visit your website through those links.
You would need to also choose the right places/website, use the right words to get attention, and use the right offer or incentives that would make people want to visit your website.
Simplified.. that is how SEO actually works… ensuring your website is ready to welcome visitors from all the links you have been able to create on the web, that in turn yields more visitors that find you through rankings on search engines for keywords relevant to content on each of the pages of your website.
#1 Reason Why Most Websites are Not Making Money
They violate this fundamental law of marketing: “It takes more than one contact to generate a sale.” Therefore: “The more expensive the item that is offered for sale, the more contacts it will take.”
You must design a marketing program that offers a series of action steps to the prospective customer. The sooner you do this, the faster your Internet investment will pay off.
Direct markets use an acronym to remind them of what every marketing campaign needs: AIDA. This stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.
Attention is step one. If the visitor has arrived at your Web site, it had better grab his attention. I hope your site does this rapidly. Visitors get bored, fast.
I suggest that you make a promise or offer, stated early, and clearly visible on your site within a few seconds. I also suggest that you minimize graphics. Graphics reduce download time.
Let’s say that you have his attention. You must now interest him. You must find a way to present information to him that will keep him from clicking to another site.
Maybe you remind him of a problem he now faces or will soon face (fear). Maybe you present an opportunity that he has not thought of (greed). Fear and greed are the buyers’ great motivators in business-related sales.
You have his interest. You must now produce desire. The question is: Desire to do what? You are leading him to take action.
The action you should motivate him to take is to identify himself, so that you can contact him again by automated e-mail. You must persuade him to request something: a free report, a short course, a list of specifications – something. Whatever it is, by requesting it, he sends you his e-mail address.
This is the key to profitability. Your Web site should have several useful functions: to gain the visitor’s attention, to create interest, to create desire, and to generate an action step. Very few Web site designers have self-consciously applied AIDA. They are technicians and artists, not marketers. Not that many marketers understand AIDA.
His action steps should not cost him any money. You want his e-mail address. Offer him something of immediate value to get that e-mail address. Offer him several things, if you can.
Think carefully about what you would want from your site if you were a first-time visitor to your site. Empathize.
What do you want him to do after he reads a special report? What is the next action step you want him to take? Design everything in your free reports to generate one final action step per report. I suggest that you get him to subscribe to a newsletter. Then you can contact him regularly.
Another possibility: get him to sign up for a free e- mail course. For this, you should probably use a sequential or follow-up autoresponder. You can offer a course using only free one-shot autoresponders, but you must rely on the reader to click a click-and-send link to receive each subsequent lesson. He may forget. It’s usually better to have an automated system mail them at regular intervals. Your goal in sending a course is simple: you gain additional contacts with him. He requests these contacts.
Assume in everything you do on your retail sales site that your number-one assignment is to get his e-mail address. If he leaves your site without having identified himself, your site has failed to achieve its most important goal.
It’s nice to make a sale on your site from a first- time visitor. It’s also incredibly rare. Don’t try. Get him to order a free report.
For more tips go to www.WebMediaExpert.com
“Powerful Internet Marketing Solutions for your business!”
3 Simple Online Branding Tips that Won’t Break Your Budget
I thought I’d record a video and dish out 3 online branding tips that are both simple, easy to do and best of all can actually significantly improve your brand online, despite being really simple ideas. Also these are definitely cheaper alternatives to hiring an advertising agency that will cost you an arm and a leg.
There are three key points I try to deliver on the video below…
- constant personal interaction leads to brand retention
- brand buzz increases and sustains brand awareness
- brand awareness and retention PLUS consistent delivery of your offers via advertising = SALES
To know how to accomplish those three… watch the video below.
If you have questions or comments about Online Branding, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.
Why Test Advertising Messages?
Every business owner needs to test advertising messages. If you do not test messages before rolling out your ad campaign you might be doing more harm than good, wasting your advertising budget on an effort that is destined to fail, or will fall short of your expectations or targets.
I have spent a significant part of my advertising life producing radio commercials for small to medium businesses. These are typically the type of companies who do not have the budget for a full service advertising agency, or might have their own in-house marketing department who needed someone to produce their ads. I have also been hired by advertising agencies to produce commercials for their clients. In fact, I still do radio commercials today. I have a simple radio commercial blog where you can find samples of my work… you can find it my just simply searching for radio commercials on Google… it is ranked number 1 for searchers in the Philippines, primarily because my primary client base is in the Philippines. I have also spent some time producing TV ads and local travel shows. This is how it usually works and if you are a business owner, you might know this to be true.
Let’s say you need to advertise a dated promo or a sale, or maybe even an institutional radio commercial for your business. I am sure the first people you get to talk to about this would likely be the radio station where you plan to advertise on, they would likely offer to produce your radio commercial for you free of charge, and include it in the advertising package. This happens when the Account Executive for your account also produces radio ads, if it is a big enough account then he makes a hefty commission from the placement and so would not mind producing the ad himself. He can also opt to pay a colleague a nominal fee to produce the ad. Either way what they usually do is just get information from you, then put together the radio ad copy, get it approved by you, then produce it. After they produce it, they start airing it, and voila.. your radio ad is now on the airwaves.
Ask yourself this question, what basis or data do you have to say that the advertising messages in the radio copy are going to be effective. How do you know that the wording or offer in the ad will cause a listener to take action? You don’t! There is no data, there is no testing.
This is pretty much the same on TV; where SME’s who wish to advertise on TV tap a TV company to give them a proposal for TV advertising spots and maybe a budget for the production of a TV ad. Some companies engage the services of multimedia or video production companies like Eight Thumbs to produce their TV commercial. Again the process works the same as above, production company puts together a concept or story, presents client with concept/budget, client approves, production company gets to work and submits final and approved product to the client.
Again, no testing of messages or offers to see which would be most effective in getting the TV ad viewer to take action.
This is also the same for print and design.
So how do you test your advertising messages? Here is the process I recommend.
Step 1 – Create Your Offer (O)
Write down 1-2 offers or a unique selling proposition that you want to get across to your audience.
You would need 1-2 offers to see which one is the most compelling as far as wording. This pretty much can be the same offer, but only worded differently using power words that catch consumers attention fast.
Step 2 – Create a Call to Action (A)
Identify specific and quantifiable actions that you want your target audience to do. Ask yourself this question, at the end of the advertisement, what is it you want your audience to do? Call a number, send an email, visit a website, visit your store? Write down 1-2 of these.
This way, you are able to identify which action is likely to be the most effective, and then use that action on your ad copy or across the board (radio, tv, print) to ensure that your ad will deliver the highest number of actions from your audience.
Step 3 – Create a Fast Action Bonus or One Time Offer (B)
What added fast action bonus or one time offer can you give them to serve as an incentive to immediately take the action you want them to do? Do you want them to call today and get an added 20% on a purchase? Or if they email you with their contact details they get a free product (tie up partner) with their purchase? Again, write down 1-2 of these.
You want to find out which bonus is most appealing to your audience that serves as the right motivation for them to perform the desired action.
Step 4 – Testing
You would need to combine the elements above, with the ultimate goal of finding out which combination of the three above, delivered the highest number of conversions.
To do that, you would need to put them to the test on the web, since testing on the web is affordable and accountable, and allows you to track behavior of your audience. Behavior in relation to the wording of your online advertisement text you use for the test and behavior in relation to the offer on the page they land on.
Landing Page Creation
So given the 2 variants of each element above, you would have a total of 8 different test messages. You would then need to create 8 different landing pages on your website, each landing page focused on each of those messages.
Let me give you a legend.
O=Offer
A=Action
B=Bonus
So the different versions would yield the following combinations.
Test Message 1
O1=Offer Version 1
A1=Action Version 1
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 2
O2=Offer Version 2
A2=Action Version 2
B2=Bonus Version 2
Test Message 3
O1=Offer Version 1
A1=Action Version 1
B2=Bonus Version 2
Test Message 4
O1=Offer Version 1
A2=Action Version 2
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 5
O2=Offer Version 2
A1=Action Version 1
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 6
O2=Offer Version 2
A2=Action Version 2
B1=Bonus Version 1
Test Message 7
O2=Offer Version 2
A1=Action Version 1
B2=Bonus Version 2
Test Message 8
O1=Offer Version 1
A2=Action Version 2
B2=Bonus Version 2
Send Traffic to Landing Pages
There are man ways to send traffic but I will keep things simple and recommend 2 methods. What is important is, you would need to use Google’s Free Web Optimizer so that you send traffic to one URL, but the web optimizer will rotate all the 8 pages displaying a different page for every new visitor that lands on the URL. Each time a new visitor lands on that URL they see a different page/advertisement, but if they go back to the URL, they will only see the same page that they saw when they first landed so they are not aware that you are testing and rotating different pages with different messages.
Make sure that you have Google Analytics tracking installed on your pages so that you are able to see the behavior of visitors on those pages.
Email. You can simply send out a message via email with a link that you want them to click.
Social Networks. You can post a link on your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, Linked In) for people to click.
Step 5 – Evaluating Results
There are generally two things I would look for to establish if a web page and content on a page (your test advertising message) is effective.
First, is engagement. I would check how people that landed on a page behaved. Did they stay long and browse other pages or did they leave in a matter of seconds. Staying long on a site and browsing more pages are signs of good engagement, which means the offer on the landing page (page that they first landed on your site) which you are testing is effective.
Second, is conversions. The Google Optimizer and Google Analytics asks you to create a goal page, this is a page that visitors arrive at only after performing a certain action. Find out which of the 8 different pages you are testing has the highest number of conversions, then you have found your winning advertising message. If however an action you want to measure is a phone call, and are testing two different actions, each action should have its own phone number. So that if people call phone number 1 (associated with A1) more times than they call phone number 2 (associated with A2) you know which offer or bonus is more effective.
An even simpler method of testing is to simply create two different advertising messages, and put them on two different pages. Then send a batch of visitors to one page and another batch of visitors to the other page and track which converts better.
If you do not want conversions as a metrics gauge for your test, you can simply get a poll or survey. Where you send out an email to people asking them to rate which of the two pages had an advertising message they were more likely to take action on.
What is important here is, you have been able to methodically develop data to support your choice of advertising messages that you use on your radio, TV or print ad copy. Advertising messages that are either proven to work or voted by people as messages that would work on them.
Using this strategy will help improve conversions on your advertising efforts, allowing you to maximize on your advertising budget.
If you have questions or comments about Testing Ad Copy, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.
3 Simple Tips to Easily Increase Business through Your Website
Here are 3 Simple Tips to Easily Increase Business through Your Website, and it is not about high tech optimization, complicated programming or advanced SEO or marketing strategies. These tips are very simple, basic tips which I believe to be rudimentary to website usability, and are a must to ensure that you are converting your visitors into leads or even customers.
I always look at websites as marketing tools to achieve very specific and quantifiable goals, and these will certainly increase your figures, if you are not already doing these on your website.
Add Working Business Number on the Website
How many people do you think went through your website and had the urge to immediately get more information by simply picking up the phone and calling you?
Believe it or not, a lot of business websites make the mistake of not putting a working phone number, or do have a number on it but routes to a voice mail box or a facsimile machine. Not a lot of people like to leave voice messages on the first contact, and for those that do, they are no longer hot leads or “hot” about your product when you call them back later. Of course, I do not need to elaborate on how annoying it is to get a fax tone instead of a human voice ready to answer your inquiries.
This just happened very recently to me, I wanted to take the family out to dinner at this restaurant I have been hearing good things about but have never been to. So I searched for their website on Google to find out about reservations; I did find their website and found their number. I called a total of three times and each time, I always got a FAX machine. I gave up and dialed another restaurant and made my reservation. So here is a question; how much business do you think that restaurant is losing from calls from potential customers who get a FAX tone?
Add Simple Contact Form on the Website
Yes contact forms are much better than simply putting your email address on your website in text form. This is because if you put your email address in text format, it is going to get harvested by SPAM bots then you are going to get spammed with all these PPC crap… by PPC I mean porn, pills and casinos.
I notice that a lot of websites have complicated contact forms with too much information to fill in. You want to make things easy for your visitors, so try to keep your contact form to just the name, email address and the inquiry. If you have a product whose audience might be open to providing a phone number, then go for it. The idea is, to make sure your visitors are comfortable about contacting you and that they do so knowing their information is safe. Typically name, email address and inquiry box is sufficient, but what I would suggest is run a test, and do a split test on the contact form, one with and the other without a call back number. That way you are able to see which one is more effective.
It is also important that you reply to them withing a reasonable amount of time. It is ideally best to include a notice near the contact form indicating that, “their personal information is safe with you and that this data will not be sold to other parties or used for other purposes” and “state the amount of time you are likely able to get back to them”. If you say you can get back to them in two business days, strive to get back to them in less and not more.
I do a lot inquiring about products and services online, and let me tell you, a lot of them do not reply on time and by the time they do, I had already contact and given the business to someone else. Again the question is; how much business are the late repliers losing to those who promptly address inquiries?
Prepare a Script and Bonus or One Time Offer
By this I mean, you should have a set of ready made answers to questions you already know you will get asked, whether it is on the phone or through email. Always sound prepared because it makes you sound like you do know what you are talking about, even if you did know what you were talking about but fumble about in your answers, that does not make a good impression.
Always END with a quick action bonus or one time offer, tell them that you happen to have a special promotion on going, then tell them about the offer. If you are selling one specific product or service, then the special offer must be about the service. Otherwise if you carry a variety of products or services, the offer must be specific to the product/service the person is inquiring about. You are going to significantly increase conversions by offering them additional value to a purchase if they act within a specific time. You can also offer them membership to your newsletter if you have one. Newsletters are great ways to not only deliver useful information to your subscribers but is also a way of building on that rapport you have with them and warming them up to your product/service. Marketing is about relationships, and the decision to purchase from someone is in part influenced by the amount of trust a potential buyer has on the seller.
Put these critical elements into your website and into your website marketing mix and you will certainly see an increase in conversions.
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3 Ingredients to Effective Online Brand Management
Online Brand Management is actually easy to do, much easier to do than traditional brand management. Primarily because monitoring and metrics are so easy to acquire and more accurate in the online marketing space. You can also make faster changes to adjust your campaigns according to data you are able to instantly get.
So what are the 3 ingredients that are going to ensure the success of managing your brand identity over the internet?
Social Media
There are so many blogs, social networks and online forums and communities out there today that people use regularly, and where a lot of consumer often talk about a product, company, a service, a BRAND.
In a recent article on GirlsInTech.net entitled Online Brand Management: How to Respond to Negative Feedback About Your Brand Online, the author mentions that a lot of negative feedback from consumers typically appear on these sites and while it is impossible to control negative commentary, the best thing for product owners to do is be in touch with their market, be ready with a plan or a set of responses to deal with specific issues, and if something catches you off guard that you did not prepare for, respond quickly.
This is usually how online reputation management professionals deal with these situations, but if you want to really build your brand identity online, don’t simply be reactionary but be proactive, adhere to good business practices and make customers happy. Prevention is always better than cure.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about brand identity management and how a key element was developing a set of keywords that you may use consistently as part of your offer or positioning in order to successfully associate your brand with those keywords.
SEO knowledge will help ensure that your publicly viewable correspondence or communications about your brand on social sites will get top visibility on search engines to build a healthy search engine reputation. This is brand reputation management specifically targeted at search engines, where keyword searches for your brand coupled with other keyword modifiers yield results that help prospects who are researching your brand, decide on buying you.
Tracking and Documentation Skills
Each online marketing strategy has specific goals and those goals are evaluated based on very specific quantifiable data that you need to acquire, measure, track and use as basis to further tweak whatever you are doing for brand reputation or brand identity management efforts.
If you have questions or comments about Online Branding, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.
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You can republish this article on your own blogs and websites, as long as you retain all the links above.
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3 Questions to Ask Before Marketing Online
Marketing your product, service or business on the internet can have several advantages. However before you sit down and start planning out your online marketing campaign, ask yourself these 3 questions.
Are your customers online? Knocked Up trailer
To put this simply, it really would not make sense to put money on an advertising medium that does not generate revenue because your audience is not on that same medium.
This fundamental principle in advertising applies to all media. If you want to sell a product then you need to advertise on radio and TV stations that the audience you are after listens to and watches; focus your below the line efforts on events that your market has an interest in and will likely be in attendance, and so on.
So if you want to push your product over the internet, ask yourself if your target audience is online.
Finding out if your target demographic is on the internet can be done through surveys or traditional market research, or through online research.
Will your audience perform a conversion online?
????? ?????? ???? ???? ?????????
A conversion is a specific and predetermined action that you want the recipient of your ad to take. As an advertiser, your goals are probably to make a sale or get a customer.
If you are a pizza place advertising on radio with a radio ad telling the listener to call a number to get a fresh pizza at a discounted price delivered to their doorstep in 30 minutes, then it is obvious the conversion goal here is the call-in and sale.
However your business may not be the type that does transactions over the internet, conversely your product customers may not be the type who buy online.
So you have to then clearly know what your goals for marketing online are.
Each marketing campaign comes with specific goals and online marketing is no different. You should know first what it is you want to achieve through your online advertisements. Do you want to make purchasing or transactions possible over the internet, or are you simply using the internet to gather leads or get inquiries about your product.
Advertising over the internet offers several advantages over media. Aside from the fact that it can potentially be a lot cheaper and more efficient, online advertising is accountable, with data readily available and with the ability to track audience behavior and reaction to advertising, that helps in fine tuning aspects of your campaign.
In the end, all you need to do is determine if your effort online can get you a customer, regardless if instant with a sale done right on your website, or protracted and through a process that starts with getting a lead, to relationship building and then the sale.
Is it worth the expense?
Again, online marketing can cost you much less than traditional media placements, but marketing costs can vary depending on the online marketing strategy or strategies that your consultant lays out for you… and there are several methods; PPC, SEO, email marketing, banner advertising, etc.
It boils down to basic figures; knowing how much you spend, knowing how much profit you make, and knowing the cost per acquisition of every customer and finding ways to get more customers for the same cost of acquisition or lower.
This in turn also goes back to the first question, about your audience being on the internet, and how huge that market could be. As it may turn out, it may not be viable for you if the online audience for your product is too small, and that small volume may not be enough to justify your online spending.
Online advertising is a great way to promote a business, whether you have a product to sell or a service you provide; the internet erases all geographical limits and gives you a worldwide audience, and for those that sell online you can have a store that sells and earns you money while you sleep. That being said, the internet is just another medium to evaluate and use if necessary to reach out to what is actually most relevant to your business, your customers.
The Zero to $100 Million Dollar Challenge by Russel Brunson
The Zero to $100 Million Dollar Challenge is the both a lesson and content for newbies in internet marketing marketing.
This is your change to learn how to make money online without having to pay top dollars, but don’t think that there is no value to this course-slash-contest… the lessons are valuable, the applications simple, and the possibilities endless.
The Zero to $100 Million Dollar Challenge
is from internet marketing extraordinaire Russel Brunson, and he is no new name to the industry, he has been around a while and has countles successful students to boast of.
So, What Can I Do With $100 Million Dollars? Not a clue just yet… but I can sure think of one think if I had just a million dollars, and that’s RETIRE.
So what are people saying about The Zero to $100 Million Dollar Challenge? Read the blog excerpts below.
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Sponsored by DotComSecrets and Russell Brunson, this event will accomplish two goals:
1) Help a worthy cause: World Teacher Aid. Help feeding and educating kids worldwide
2) Help the contestants collectively create $100 Million!
3) The winner will win a sports car hand delivered by Russel himself!
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On the site, there’s lots of educational material on how to market both online and offline, and that’s something I can use for all of my businesses. So, you can click on the image above, or you can click on the link below, or you can look to the right column somewhere and find the link and click on it there, because I’ll be adding it pretty quickly. You can also invite your friends to sign up, and you can do it by email or through the site. I decided to go this route first.
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Too good to be true!
So, I close the window and left.
But then, I see many people are promoting this. So, I gave it a second change. From the second visit, I sign up.
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Also to encourage you to get started and continue working through the challenge, he will be buying a brand new 2009 Corvette and giving it to the winner of the challenge. What color corvette would you like? Black or Red? And to keep you inspired throughout the challenge he is going to be offering additional high quality prizes such as a 42 inch TV.
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Basically, it’s free Internet Marketing Training. You get the chance to grow your business using the methods he’s going to be teaching between now and February 2009. The winner of the challenge gets a brand new corvette.
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The members area has a ton of cool stuff – In fact I would have to say it the the most kick ass members area I have ever seen. It certainly made me frantically scribble down notes, because Russell really raised the bar for the rest of use here.
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Russell’s also donating proceeds from the contest to World Teacher Aid–which helps to bring education to children in third-world countries.
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I want to let you in on a cool contgest my buddy Russel Bruson is doing. It’s a contest where you get training at no cost… and you can win a New Corvette!
Read more Back to the Future movie .
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Get Wealth Training At No Cost And Win A Corvette!
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As you see a lot of people are abuzz over this new offer from Russel Brunson. Check out The Zero to $100 Million Dollar Challenge now!untraceable online download
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