As we approach the end of 2009 I have to admit that I haven’t exactly followed the path I had in mind for my first full year in internet marketing. Ideas that I thought we a dead cert to work have fallen flat on their face, and other things I’ve tried have been surprisingly successful.
One such success story was a tactic I discovered to cash in on the Christmas period as an amazon affiliate. After discovering the idea I spent a couple of days in November setting it up (I really wish I had spent more time now!) and netted around $500 in sales commisioned. Not a huge amount I know, but I only really had time to test the water to see whether it would work, and the idea is totally scalable. Next year I will be looking for some people to join me in creating a network of affiliate sites for amazon so we can all benefit from this tactic.
I have also been working on a membership site for people who want to become affiliate marketers. It probably won’t be for those who are looking to become big name internet marketing millionaire guru’s (you’ll have to buy some other course for that) but for the average Joe who wants to make a decent income just from being a behind the scenes affiliate. Not everybody likes the limelight, I realise, so this site will be about giving you all the tools and training to succeed in affiliate marketing. I will also be looking to use the power of the collective members to help in the promotion of products.
So I hope everyone has a great Christmas and a very prosperous New Year, and look out for more from me very soon.
Filed under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Membership Sites 
Are you a website owner who desires funds to keep your internet site running? Or is your site the only real way for you to earn income? Whichever you are for so long as you’re a website owner or a web publisher and you want money, affiliate promotion may work fine for you. With affiliate promotion, you will get lots of money pouring into your checking account simply. And if your internet site is loaded in great contents and you wish to earn more profit, why don’t you get into the Google Adsense program as well? Why associate Marketing? Well, just because affiliate internet marketing is the simplest and potentially the only way to earn money online, unless otherwise you’re a businessman and would rather sell your own products on the internet than publicize other businessperson’s products on your internet site. But even online outlets can gain advantage from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate promotion basically works for merchants as well as it works for the associates. Affiliate marketing, simply announced, is a relationship or agreement made between 2 websites, with one site being the merchant’s site and the other being the affiliate ‘s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant publicize his products on the affiliate ‘s site.
The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the associate in whatever technique they have concluded into. This would generally mean simple revenue for the affiliate , as he would do nothing apart from place the retailer’s ad on his site. This would also be really favorable for the merchant, as getting affiliates to publicize their products would be more reasonable than hiring an advertising firm to market their products.
There are a spread of techniques on the way the merchant would compensate the associate for his services, and for the web-master, these techniques simply translates to the strategy by which he would earn simple money.
Among the more common systems of compensation are the pay per click strategy, the pay-per-lead strategy, and the pay-per-sale system. The PPC methodology is the technique most preferred by affiliates , for their site’s visitor would only need to visit the marketer’s site for them to gain cash. The other 2 strategies, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they’d just need to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products. What about Google Adsense? Google Adsense is basically some variety of an internet marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the associates and the merchants. The merchant, or the promoter, would simply join up with Google and supply the second with text adverts relating to their products.
These adverts, which is basically a link to the marketer’s internet site, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the web sites owned by the affiliates, or by those website owners who have enrolled with the Google Adsense program. While one can find a large amount of likenesses between Google Adsense and other affiliate promotion programs, you may also see a large amount of differences. In Google Adsense, all of the web designer has to do is place a code on his site and Google looks after the rest. The adverts that Google would place on your site would usually be important to the content of your internet site. This would be satisfactory both for you and for the promoter, as the visitors of your internet site would kind of be really interested with the products being publicized. The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a PPC basis. The advertisers would pay Google a specific amount every time their ad on your internet site is clicked and Google would then forward this sum to you thru checks, though only after Google have subtracted their chunk of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly.
Also, the Google Adsense program provides web designers with a tracking tool that enables you to monitor the takings you get from a certain ad. So, where do all these lead us to? Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether or not you are the merchant or the affiliate . For the merchant’s side, lots of cash can be saved if advertising effort is focused on affiliate marketing instead of on dealing with advertising firms. For the website manager, you can simply gain lots of profits by doing what you do best, and that’s by making web sites.
And if you mix all of your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it might certainly convert to an enormous quantity of money.
Filed under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing
We’ve all heard people telling us that we’ll never make money online, it’s all a waste of time, it’ll never work and many other negative things about internet marketing.
But it does work. Some people become rich and others make nothing at all, even lose money. So what’s the difference between these people? The people who succeed know the lies in this business and do not believe them.
Here are 5 big internet business lies:
Lie #1: Starting and running a internet business is expensive.
You can actually start an internet business with very little cost. There are many high quality affiliate programs where all you have to do is concentrate on marketing. The follow up, product delivery and support are all done by the owner of the affiliate program.
Lie #2: You can make easy money on the internet.
People still have a tendancy to believe that they can make money on the internet overnight by doing hardly anything. We are constantly being bombarded with systems that have made people millions in just a few days. Which may well be true for that particular launch, but it takes months even years of work to get yourself in a position to use a system that will make you millions.
Lie #3: You must know HTML, web programming and graphic design to start your business.
You don’t need to know all of these at all. Or even any of them. There are marketing guru’s out there that don’t even have the first clue how to put up a website. The trick is in finding the right people to work with. You can outsource jobs that you can’t do yourself, or joint venture with other marketers to combine your skill sets.
Lie #4: You don’t need to know how to sell on the internet.
Many people hate selling, and these people get attracted to ads that claim ‘no selling necessary’ or even ‘this product sells itself’. Usually these products are unfeasible and run by fly-by-night marketers. Do you really think it’s possible to have a successful business by doing nothing at all? The trick is not to try to sell to people, but to educate and inform them. Show them the benefits to their life if they owned your product.
Lie #5: You don’t need to build a mailing list.
I know you’ve all heard the ‘money is in the list’ mantra. There’s a reason you’ve heard it so often though, because it’s true! But more importantly, the money is in the relationship with your list. Deliver value over and above their expectations and you’ll be well on your way to success.
The above 5 are just a few of the internet business lies out there. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Filed under Internet Marketing
Alex Jeffreys is one of the fastest rising stars of the internet marketing world. In the latter part of last year I realised that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this internet marketing malarky unless I found myself a mentor who has done what I am trying to do. Like many of you, I follow a lot of the big guru’s and subscribe to their lists. I can’t actually remember which one it was that put me on to Alex, but I decided to sign up to his very reasonably priced coaching program. It was only open to 500 students so I was very pleased to get my spot, and also knew that whatever I was taught, only a very small percentage of people out there trying to make it, would be learning with me.
This coaching program totally changed my thinking and the way I went about building my online business. He tells it like it is, and doesn’t try to sell us some pipe dream that is never going to work. He has given me the tools to build a solid business foundation, which I will be implenting over the course of this year to create my successful online business.
Alex is determined to give his students everything that he didn’t have when he started off in internet marketing. There is no quick and easy, push button way to create a profitable online business (regardless of what many internet marketers will try to tell you) but Alex Jeffreys coaching program is helping us to avoid some of the mistakes that he made along his way. In 2008 Alex reached his first 6 figure income target, and plans to hit his first $1 million by the end of this year, although most of us know it will end up way more than that.
If you are interested in learning more about what Alex Jeffreys teaches, you can download a free report about his list building system here.
Filed under Internet Marketing
I decided that before I blindly ran off trying to drive traffic from here, there and everywhere it would be a good idea to do a little keyword research first. Afterall this is a long term plan, so knowing which keywords I want to rank well with, and that I have a chance at ranking well with, will help me with my overall traffic strategy.
I’ve done a fair bit of SEO and keyword research before as a few years ago I set up my own dating website (www.phlirtz.com) and spent a lot of time trying to get the site up in the search engine rankings.
So I started off today with this great bit of software called Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/). I was originally using it for adwords campaigns, but its good for general keyword research too. For the full version you have to pay, but the keyword research tool works great with the free version.
Basically, you enter a generic keyword phrase, I used ‘Internet Marketing’ and it goes out to find all the keywords it can, using Googles synonym tool. It can also use SEO digger to generate keywords but this is a paid service so you would have to be a member of SEO digger for that option to work.
This generated 103 keywords for me. I then went to google’s keyword tool and used the option to get keyword ideas using a website’s content. Now seeing as I am trying to get keyword idea for my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to see which keywords google thinks are appropriate to the top blogs that Alex showed us in module 4. So I took 2 of the top blogs in that list and plugged them in. Google came back with a load of keywords that it thought these blogs were about.
I plugged these in to Market Samurai as well. The good thing about doing this is that Market Samurai automatically ignores any duplicates. This bumped my keyword list up to 276.
The next step was to use Market Samurai to analyse these keywords. So pressing the ‘Analyse Keywords’ button gives me a few options to choose. I want to know how many people are searching on these terms and how much competition for them is out there. There is also an option for it to estimate how much adwords traffic you should get with them, it’s up to you if you want to check this, if you’re running any paid traffic campaigns it might be worth it. I also checked the SEO Comp option. Usually the only way to gauge the competition for keywords would be to count the search results returned by google for that keyword phrase. Market Samurai uses a different algorithm to gauge the quality of the sites you are competing against as well. For example, if wikipedia.org or amazon.com are ranking highly for certain keywords, then you are unlikely to ever be able to compete with these and Market Samurai takes this in to account.
Once you have all this data, you can then use something called Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) to determine which keywords are going to be worth targeting. KEI is worked out with this formula:
Searches * Searches / Number of Results.
I worked out the KEI using the the SEO Comp number from Market Samurai as the ‘Results’ parameter, which should be a more accurate reading.
This should give you an idea of which keywords people are searching on in this niche, but that don’t have overwhelming competition for them. The higher the KEI the better. Some keywords I would ignore as they are too broad to be worth competing on at the moment. And some will be out of context. But some of the more specific, high KEI keywords will be handy to know for using in blog titles, anchor text for incoming links, headings, phrases to use in your blog posts etc etc.
And if you can’t be bothered to go through all this yourself, you can download the data I came up with here.
I have hardly touched on the surface of Market Samurai but it looks like a very impressive bit of software for creating traffic friendly websites, and it’s still only in beta! I will probably upgrade to the full version when I have time to sit down and make proper use of it.
Filed under Keyword Research