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Tuesday, 24 June 2008
- By: Daniel Millions, 2008-06-24 Many Internet entrepreneurs start companies with little or no money to build momentum with. While it is certainly true that money makes things easier and accelerates growth, it is not a necessity to become successful. Lack of money is one of the primary reasons so many e-businesses fail, although the failure is not because of an inability to pay expenses. It takes longer to grow a business without money, and many entrepreneurs get discouraged when they do not see results after a short period of time. With such a get-rich-quick attitude, business owners give up swiftly, thinking that they were doing something wrong, or they just had bad luck. What most people do not realize, even though they are told over and over again, is that with persistence and consistent determination, success is inevitable. The hands down best way to attract visitors to your website is through search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is the process of influencing search engines to display your website first for certain keywords and key phrases. There are multitudes of companies that charge top dollar for SEO services, although one can do it themselves with the proper knowledge and a willingness to work. The greatest way to optimize your website is to simply have great content. Focus on creating content that will satisfy and stimulate users. It is critical that you also include the keywords and key phrases you are targeting in your content multiple times. Do not get caught up in creating content just to please search engines, as it is the human visitor who is most important. People who get caught up in only bettering their websites for search engines often do get high rankings, but most of their visitors leave immediately because they do not find the site appealing. As an Internet marketer, the whole purpose of your website is to make sales, and it is people who buy products, not machines. Having a good amount of quality, inbound links is the subsequent necessity to achieving high rankings. It is easy to find related websites who are willing to sell links to you, but why buy links when you can get them for free! After a website launches, the first thing a webmaster should do is submit the website to as many free directories as possible. Directories are databases of websites organized by category, and anybody is free to submit a website to that directory. Stronger directories usually require an inclusion fee, and directories of this sort are great to submit to once your business has a positive cash flow. In addition to directories, you can utilize article marketing, social bookmarking, and forum posting as a means to gain free links. Do not fall victim to the lure of link farms, which are just pages comprised solely of links. While you can easily gain access to a link farm, the value of the link you get is worthless and may even hurt you. Before you decide on any marketing strategy, consult someone who has more experience than you and ask their opinion. Again and again, entrepreneurs make mistakes that could easily have been avoided if they had just asked someone. Experienced marketers know what works and what does not, and are invaluable resources when it comes to making any decision. The ideal route to take is to find a mentor; someone you can quickly consult when faced with a challenging problem. In addition to their advice, mentors provide a source of inspiration, keep you on the right track, and stop you from quitting when times get tough. With a knowledgeable partner, you can adopt time tested, proven strategies, and speed past the competition while they are still experimenting. Perhaps best of all, mentors are free, and only require that you listen to and respect them. If you want to learn about Internet Marketing I suggest you browse our free Free Internet Marketing Tutorials and guides. 
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Monday, 23 June 2008
- By: Jonathan Zemeckis, 2008-06-23 A very popular method for online marketing is called video marketing. I'm sure you have watched your share of YouTube videos, either for entertainment or instruction. If you have the patience and technical expertise to create a video, you can capitalize on it and gain increased exposure for your product or service. Videos are no different than any other form of parasite hosting (for a full description of parasite hosting, please read the corresponding article in this article series). The only difference is you are required to upload a video in order to get your page indexed by the search engines Google (and other search engines) like to present their search engine users with a variety of relevant content. Let's say you perform a search for your favorite pop star. Well, Google is going to usually show several types of websites on the first page results. An example mix would be: youtube, myspace, squidoo, hubpages, gather, ezinearticles, a blog, etc. You will never see two or three of the top 10 results pointing to the exact same domain. Google will always show a variety of relevant websites in their search results page (also called SERP). What Google doesn't want to do is show multiple pages from the same domain. So, while there may very well be 1,000 different lenses on paid surveys at Squidoo, Google will always show only ONE of those pages in the top 10 results. For the other 999 lenses who don't show up on the first page, Google pushes them into the supplemental index. What exactly does this mean? It means Video Marketing is a relatively unexplored form of marketing that can be used to rank in the top 10 results for almost any term. While this is very true for video marketing, you can take this same thought process and instead of creating a Squidoo lens for the next product you promote, you should create a parasite page on a rather unknown (but large) domain and you might actually rank quicker and with less work than if you created a Squidoo lens. This is particularly true if you already have extensive competition at Squidoo for your chosen product or niche. Although Squidoo and other parasite domains are a great form of marketing that can easily rank in the top 10 search results for the keywords of your choice, a smart marketer will use YouTube and rank much quicker (and easier!) for the exact same terms. Not too mention, there will be far less competition in the video realm than there will be in the normal realm of your typical "text" web page. Creating a video is not as hard as it seems. You can use Windows Movie Maker to create your video, or you can use any number of free online video editing programs. To find a list of free video editors that are available for instant download, visit the website Download. While every program is free to use (at least for a limited time), some will require that you make either a donation or purchase a license after a trial period. Usually their licensing fee is minimal compared to commercial products of the same type (most licenses can be bought for anywhere from $5 to $50 which is exceptionally cheap if you compare it to brand name software). Video capturing and editing is beyond the scope of this article. However, there are plenty of free editing tutorials available on the internet. Just perform a search and you will find plenty of free information on how to capture and edit video footage. While some marketers go to great lengths to create original marketing videos, there are many marketers who don't bother to create original videos. They simply download existing videos on youtube (or elsewhere) and then stamp their name and web address into the video (called "titling"), and then they re-upload the video. Downloading, editing, and then re-uploading videos that belong to other people is really a form of black hat marketing; you are using material that is legally copyrighted by someone else. Can you get into legal trouble? Most likely not. But your videos will be removed if the original publisher discovers them and submits an official complaint to the video hosting site. If you decide to create a video and use it to promote your website or to drive traffic, just remember that there are hundreds of video sites on the internet - don't just upload your video to YouTube, also upload it to MySpace and as many other video sites as you possibly can. And don't forget to get back links for each video! (I recommend at least 10 back links for every parasite page that you create.) Quick ways to make cash: free paid surveys, paid surveys, paid online surveys. 
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- By: Jonathan Zemeckis, 2008-06-23 Would you like to make continuous money from an established list of customer's? If so, keep reading! Bought traffic and free traffic can both be developed into a continuous income stream by way of what is called an "auto responder". When your targeted traffic visits your website, you should be capturing their name and email address so you can send them weekly emails. In order to capture their email in an organized fashion that also protects you against spam complaints, you should be using an auto responder service. There are many such services available at affordable rates - anywhere from $10 to $30 per month. Two popular services are Aweber and GetResponse; both can easily serve your email list needs. To encourage visitors to "opt in" for your newsletter, you can offer them something free for joining your list: "Get my free report when you sign up for my weekly newsletter!" Visitors will then enter their information, verify their email address, and be given instant access to your free book or report. This is basically "incentivizing" your opt-in list and is an extremely common strategy among marketers. Building a list is relatively easy and doesn't require any technical knowledge whatsoever: once you have your auto responder account, just copy and paste their code into your web page and the necessary form will be visible to anyone who visits your site. Once you have your list of targeted visitors, you can create weekly emails that will be sent out like clockwork from the moment the person verifies his or her email. Your newsletters should be informative and provide useful information to your email list. In addition to the free information you give them, you can recommend they purchase a product or service. You should include your recommendation and your purchase link at the bottom of your email. It's debatable as to how often a marketer should try to sell something to his or her email list. Some people say once every two emails while others say only once a month. Personally, I think as long as you provide useful information in each newsletter, it's perfectly fine to throw a link or two at the bottom of every email. If you are providing free information that helps them further their business or personal goals, I believe they will be OK with a marketing link (or two!). Building a list is a method of building a long-term business. You can market to this list on a continuing basis and generate revenue indefinitely without having to ever pay for traffic again. A friend of mine has an extremely responsive list of 10,000 members. He emails them on a weekly basis and offers both free and paid advice. His best 24-period of revenue from his list was $41,000! Would you like to generate $41,000 in revenue with one email campaign? Of course you would! A marketer who wants to build a long-term business that he or she can earn revenue from for years would be well advised to look into building, maintaining, and marketing to a highly targeted list of customers. It does take work and (as you can imagine) you will need to be well informed about your particular niche. After all, you will need a lot of content in order to mail out weekly letters indefinitely! The individuals that seem to generate massive amounts of revenue with an auto responder seem to focus on only one subject or niche, and they take great pride in providing sound, free advice to their list. You can make money with surveys: paid online surveys, free paid surveys, paid surveys. 
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- By: Jonathan Zemeckis, 2008-06-23 Lead generation is one of my favorite methods of online marketing. Why? Because you are not asking your website visitor to spend money; you're only asking for their contact information. Most successful products average a 1% conversion rate. That is, for every 100 visitors to a website, only 1 is going to make a purchase. That is a very low rate. Based on a 1% conversion rate, if you are buying traffic, your clicks need to be costing you substantially less than the commission you will earn on an actual sale. If every click is costing you $1 and your commission is only $95 per successful transaction, then it's a losing scenario and you need to tweak the campaign in order to squeeze out more profits (or drop the campaign altogether). If you are getting free traffic, then a 1% conversion rate is fine. But increasing the amount of traffic via free methods will be a long haul and you must take into consideration your time when building free traffic streams. Because of the above listed factors, I don't like selling products online. My preferred method of marketing online is lead generation. And that doesn't mean it should become your preferred method, it's just that I am better at CPA than I am with any other type of marketing. It suits my style of marketing. There are two primary types of lead generation campaigns: incentive and non-incentive. While both types have their pros and cons, I prefer incentive-approved campaigns. You cannot offer a reward for non-incentive campaigns. You cannot say to a website visitor, "enter your information here and I'll give you a free book!" If you "incentivize" a non-incentive offer, you will probably get your affiliate account terminated. Non-incentive traffic generally results in higher quality leads. Because of this, the payouts are typically higher for all non-incentive campaigns. On the flip side, incentive-approved campaigns can be used to squeeze a customer or otherwise force them to take an action in order to have a specific reward. Do you have a great book on fly fishing that you would like to give away for free? Great! Add a description about your book and then tell your visitor, "Enter your information here and you will get a copy of my book for free!" When the visitor submits their information, you can have a link that allows them to instantly download your fly fishing ebook. To make an incentive campaign work smoothly, it is a good idea to install what is called a "post back script". When your network generates a successful lead from one of your affiliate links, they can "post back" to your website that the lead was successful. And with a properly installed script, your website essentially knows that the person completed the offer and will then allow them to download the ebook. Offering a free book in exchange for a consumer's information can be very profitable. I typically average a 30% conversion rate for my free ebooks, and I get anywhere from $1 to $2 per lead. If you do the maths, giving away a free book can be more profitable than trying to sell a product. Like any method for making money online, you need a lot of traffic to make substantial profits with the free book strategy. But if you have invested significant time into learning how to market, then you probably already know many ways to acquire traffic. Other ways to make money online: paid surveys, free paid surveys, paid online surveys. 
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- By: Jonathan Zemeckis, 2008-06-23 Free traffic is available in abundance on the internet; you just need to know how to find it! There are two types of free internet available for the online marketer: search engine traffic and traffic received from strategically placed back links. Search engine marketing is a science in itself. If you want your website to rank high in the search engines, you need to study and stay on top of the ever-changing search engine optimization world. I can provide a few pointers for ranking your website high in the search engines, but I strongly recommend you purchase an SEO ebook or take an online course in learning how to properly promote your website. Search engines rank their results based on many factors. Two of these factors are within your control: your website content and your back links. Your content should always be relevant to your product (never copy text from elsewhere on the internet! Always write original content for your site). The more relevant content you provide for your particular product or service, the more search engines will view your site as a valuable resource for web surfers. Search engines keep track of how many links on the internet point to your website. The more links, the higher your site will rank in the search results. Another factor is the anchor text used in your back link. If you use the anchor text "email marketing" in your back link, search engines will rank your site higher for any searches that use that exact phrase. Although not entirely within your control, back links can be placed on the internet via many free methods. You can acquire back links through: writing articles, asking other websites for a link exchange, adding your site to social book marking sites, providing "ink bait", adding your website to online directories, and the list goes on. There are many, many ways to acquire back links to your website. I suggest you perform a search for how to get back links and you will find enough ideas to keep you busy twenty-four hours a day. The more back links you acquire, the higher your site will rank. While you can purchase back links to your website, it is advisable you make sure those links do not pass "page rank" from the host site to your site. If the purchased links pass page rank to your site, it is possible that Google may penalize your site in the search rankings. Another great method of back linking is to use a signature on user forums. Let's say you have a website that promotes dog training products. You can join a user forum that focuses on dog training (or dog ownership or pet ownership, etc). Within your forum profile, you can add a link to your website and a brief line of text, such as "Please visit my website to get my free dog training tips!" Once your profile is in place, you can start communicating with the forum by joining their conversations and providing your input. As long as you provide worthwhile input to the forum, other users will not object to your signature promoting your website. However, not all forums allow commercial signatures, so make sure you examine other user's signatures before you invest any substantial amount of time participating in forum discussions. Another great method for getting direct traffic from a back link is to post comments on blogs. There are many blog search engines available online. When you find one, perform a search for your niche keywords and you will get a list of blogs that are relevant to your content. Then, read the author's posts and place a non-spam, relevant comment. Your comment will include a back link to your site which will draw visitors to that particular blog to your site. You can make money with surveys: paid online surveys, free paid surveys, paid surveys. 
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