Posted on: February 7, 2010 by Peter
Myspace started many years ago and although it wasn’t the first social network it certainly takes the prize of igniting the web 2.0 era. It’s such a household name that I’m sure I don’t have to explain what it is – and if you don’t, are you sure you are an Internet marketer?!
MySpace is very different to Facebook because it is an open social network and it encourages people who don’t know each other to become friends. This can create a much more powerful marketing platform that Facebook because you can get the word out about your site to more people. Often it’s a case of if you add someone as your friend they’ll add you back.
However, before you go ahead and add everyone as your friend there are some things you need to know about MySpace marketing before you begin.
1. Do NOT Sell on myspace! This is one of the biggest mistakes newbies (and spammers) make when they begin marketing on social network sites. You are there to network, interact, not to promote your business (directly at least). You need to be a little bit more savvy about how you work your website or offer in to the conversation, just posting your links over and over again is not the way to do it!
2. MySpace is about you, not your business. While it’s ok to have a little something about your site or business, it should only be a brief mention. You don’t want to be turning your friends and colleagues in to customers just yet!
3. Get Chatting! I know this seems like a weird thing to say but don’t just sign up, edit your profile and never go back, get involved, even if it’s just an area you are interested in and not necessarily directly linked to your business. The aim of the game is to build a network of relationships – and those people might know people that need your product or service!
At the end of the day people are more comfortable dealing with people they know or they think they know. Even brief contact on a social network site stands you in good stead to get business and referrals when ever someone needs them.
Posted on: February 7, 2010 by Peter
At the forefront of many Internet Marketers minds is how to increase the amount of traffic they get to their website. At the end of the day, without traffic your website might as well not exist. However, there is a big difference between getting traffic and getting targeted traffic. Given the choice between getting 1,000 visitors a day and 100 targeted visitors a day I’d take the latter! Without targeted traffic you won’t be making as many sales as you could.
Some marketers think that by simply writing one good article they will be able to get all the targeted traffic they need, however although it might give an initial burst of traffic, writing one article may not be enough to sustain your sales over a period of time. To get targeted traffic it requires consistent work (not hard work, just be consistent!). Follow these tips to help ensure a steady flow of traffic for the long term.
1. Content: create great content on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this is to create lists like the “The Top 10 Actors Ever” or “5 Great Films You Haven’t Seen” (assuming you are making a website about films). These are great for link bait and publishing on social bookmarking sites to get hits. They take a bit of effort to write, but done properly they can attract enormous amounts of traffic.
2. Social Networking: Use Facebook and Twitter to let your friends and followers know about the latest blog post. I don’t know about you but I get a huge spike in traffic when I post about my latest blog on social network sites.
3. Article Marketing: Don’t underestimate the power of the large article directories to send targeted traffic to your site. EzineArticles in particular is very good for targeting long tail keywords to get traffic to your site.
4. Social bookmarking: Use sites like digg, stumbleupon and propeller to send loads of traffic to your site. I’ve had a lot of success with stumbleupon for a quick shot of traffic.
5. Search Engine Optimization: Ensure you are using the correct tags and good SEO on your site so Google recognizes it as good relevant content for your target niche
6. Forums: Use Google to find forums located in your niche and start talking to people and ask questions. Don’t promote your site directly, just include it in your signature link otherwise you could be accused of spamming.
7. Create a sitemap: Allow search engines to discover all the pages of your site by using a properly formated XML sitemap. There are online generators that can do this for you or if you have wordpress there are plugins that will do it for you automatically.
These are just 7 ways in which you can get traffic to your website, but there are hundreds of other methods. At the end of the day even if you just choose a few methods you must keep at it and do it consistently to ensure long term profits.
There are hundreds of ways to get more traffic to your blog or website. These are just a few to try, but remember that generating traffic is one of those tasks you should never stop doing!
Posted on: February 2, 2010 by Peter
Niche marketing is simply the art of choosing narrow topics that are very focused and then marketing to that niche. Many marketers make the mistake of trying to target a niche that is far too large and not targeted enough, for example targeting health instead of acne in adults. Health isn’t targeted enough and it becomes very difficult to know exactly what the person is looking to buy, however if someone is searching for acne in adults then you can be quite certain that they are trying to cure acne and you can effectively market acne cures to them.
Follow these three simple steps and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an ace niche marketer.
1. Keep it narrow and avoid top level niches: As I mentioned above you need to avoid the top level niches if you want to make your money online. It’s the difference between making nothing and making a fortune online. Broad niches are untargeted and best left to the large corporations who have got the huge amount of resources to go after these mass market niches, you on the other hand probably have very few resources so need to target the low hanging fruit. Take another example like weight loss, it’s already saturated with huge amounts of very large competition with marketing budgets that run in to the tens of millions of dollars. However, you could target “weight loss in women” or to further narrow it down, “weight loss after pregnancy”. Essentially the narrower you go the more chance you have of dominating your niche.
2. Know your market: There are many ways to skin a cat and likewise there are many ways to do niche research. Some people will say just to look at the search volumes and only pick niches with certain volumes, others will say look at the number of competitors and only pick niches with less than “X” amount. Ideally you want a balance of a high amount of searches and some competition – a niche with no competition could raise alarm bells because others may have tried it and found it to be not profitable.
3. Know your enemy: Don’t be afraid of your competitors websites, visit them and see what they are doing, what do they do well, what do they do badly. How are they ranking their websites, check their backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer and see how viable it is to beat them.
Posted on: January 7, 2010 by Peter
2009 was the year Twitter came in to the mainstream with celebs and non-techs adopting it as a new platform to spout their views and opinions.
It acts as your own personal billboard in which you can announce things to your list of followers – very nearly like email marketing in that you can put your message out to your list, but you are restricted to 140 characters.
Some people are making thousands of dollars using Twitter as part of their marketing campaign simply because they are able to get their message out to thousands and thousands of followers who have no option but to read the message.
Here are four great tips on how to increase the effectiveness of your Twitter campaigns.
Consistency: You have to be regular with your tweets and it takes time to build up a following of people who are interested in what you are saying. Writing on a consistent basis not only keeps your followers but helps increase them aswell.
Stick to Business: If you are tweeting to build up your business and you have a following of clients telling them that you were out at the pub last night getting drunk probably doesn’t send out the right message.
Don’t Be Boring: If you’ve just written a blog post, don’t say “new blog post available here” write “have you ever wondered what the best way to survive a nuclear attack is?”, it’s more likely going to get clicks and you are on Twitter to make a splash, not bore people to death!
Follow Others: Twitter is about having a conversation and by following others they may say something that you can reply with. The connection helps build trust between you and your followers and they’ll start to look out for your messages.
Find The Gurus: Find the gurus in your niche and follow them, see which people are following them as well. By following those people, they are likely to follow you back, meaning you can leverage the popularity of others.
Twitter can be a lucrative tool to have in your arsenal as you are marketing and promoting your websites. However, it is essential that you understand how it works and how to use it best for your business.
Posted on: January 6, 2010 by Peter
As with any high tech industry, Internet Marketing has more than its fair share of jargon terms that will sound like a foreign language to the new comer. Phrases like seo, indexing, bum marketing, spinning, cost per click, pay per click, ftp and so many more is enough to send anyones head spinning.
Rest assured thought that once you become immersed in to the Internet marketing world, these terms will become as familiar to you as every day language. One phrase that you will hear time and again is PLR which actually stands for Private Label Rights.
Private label rights basically means you have full permissions to do whatever you like with the content or media. You can give it away as is, re-write it, put your name on it, turn it in to something else, submit to websites etc.
But there are some important factors you need to consider, as discussed below:
Understand the license terms: Some PLR licenses have zero restrictions, others may say you can’t resell it and others may state that you can’t claim the copyright on the work. You need to read the license carefully to ensure you are not doing anything that could land you in hot water later down the line.
Good Content: It can be difficult to find high quality PLR content. Be very careful of sites giving PLR content away for free or for a very low cost, the quality may be poor or even worse it could be ripped off content. Use established, trusted providers like PLRArticleShop.com to buy your PLR articles.
Find Bulk Deals: Often PLR providers will give bulk deals which makes the price lower than if you were to pay for it individually. This is especially true for PLR articles where you may be able to find packs of 25 articles for as little as $5.
Change the Content: As great as PLR is, it shouldn’t be viewed as the golden bullet. You should view it as a framework on which to put your own words and twist. By changing the content you are making it original and much more valuable.
PLR has been the springboard for many highly successful individuals, so don’t discount it just because hundreds of other people are getting access to the same content.
Posted on: January 5, 2010 by Peter
Viral marketing is a phrase that may confuse many people but is actually fairly easy to understand once you know the logic behind it. A virus, when left unchecked can rapidly multiple and get passed around from person to person with very little effort.
A marketing campaign that people willingly pass on to other people like their friends and family is often referred to as ‘gone viral’ in that there is no stopping it.
A viral campaign is what marketers aspire to because it means getting other people to pass on their marketing message for them and for zero cost.
But creating a campaign that can go viral is not easy and may take many ‘misses’ before a successful one is done.
Follow these 5 tips and your chances of succeeding will be greatly increased.
Quality Matters: If you create top quality content it will get linked to time and again, people will refer to it as the authority place because it will make them seem slightly more authoritative. The more people like it, the more likely they are to link to it. Spinning and reformating PLR articles is not top quality content 
Press Releases: Try and get in to the habit of syndicating a press release whenever you launch a new product or website. You never know, if your news is relevant it may get picked up by a media company.
Short Reports: This is one of the best methods of viral marketing in the Internet marketing arena. By creating short, focused reports full of data and analysis you are giving people high quality content. You then give people the opportunity to freely pass around these reports to their readers so that they can provide them with high quality content. The reports contain links back to your sites and affiliate links, almost guaranteeing more money to you.
Social Networking: With the meteoric rise in popularity of social networks there has never been a better time to get your message out there and get it read by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and more are great places to go to get your content read.
Article Writing: Writing very high quality articles full of juicy facts and data and letting other people put that on their website with a link back to your site is one of the original forms of viral marketing, but just because it’s original doesn’t mean it’s lost any potency. Getting your articles on other people’s sites is still one of the best ways to virally promote your website.
Posted on: December 28, 2009 by Peter
There’s not an Internet marketer in the world worth his salt that doesn’t know what Google AdWords is, it’s the millionaire maker, but also the heartbreaker. You can make your fortune, but use it wrong and you can lose far more than you thought.
Just incase you have been living under a rock for the last 5 years, AdWords allows you to bid on any keyword and pay Google every time someone clicks on your add. The amount you pay is reliant on many different factors from the number of other advertisers, number of clicks you get to how well optimized your landing page is.
The actual amount you pay can be 5 cents or $5, it’s very variable.
Before you get started with Google AdSense and driving traffic to your site there are a few things you need to know.
- You can select multiple different formats from text, images and even video ads. Naturally you should try out all three variations on different sites to see which one drives the most traffic for you.
- Your ad rankings are based on numerous different factors including the most relevant keywords and text, high click thru rates (CTR) and higher cost-per-click bids than your competitors
- You should consider purchasing an ebook or a coaching session with someone who will walk you through the process and help you set up your first campaign. Remember, you are playing with real money so cutting down the learning curve is only going to be a good thing!
- You can lose your shirt with AdWords if you are not careful. Overlooking something as simple as setting a daily budget has caught out more than a few people in the past, and there are no refunds.
- AdWords is pretty advanced stuff, so you might want to get the hang of other marketing basics like creating sales copy that converts, driving traffic to your site from free methods and the like. Maybe even use your online income to fund your experiments with AdWords rather than your own out of pocket money.
Posted on: December 26, 2009 by Peter
One thing many marketers dream of is releasing their own product which contains everything they know of to help others in some way, whether it’s to make or save money, grow their business or something else. There isn’t much that can beat the satisfaction of releasing your own product and seeing the sales come rolling in.
However, if you get the product launch game plan wrong then your entire effort could be wasted because not enough people know about your product and you throw away all that time and effort.
Even if you already have a list, getting people to buy your new product is not as simple as just sending an email announcing the launch. To maximize the amount of money you make from your product launch, follow these simple tips:
Get a buzz going: You have to tread a very fine line between creating a buzz and over hyping something and annoying people. Be careful not to just spam your list you could end up with a list size of zero! Create a buzz and get people reading your emails be giving away sneak peaks and free information related to the product you plan to launch.
Hosting logistics: There’s nothing worse than laying all the ground work, launching your site and then getting a call from your hosting company complaining of too much traffic and being informed they had to pull your site. Talk to your web host well in advance and tell them that you are expecting a big spike in traffic and they will recommend a solution to handle it.
JV’s on Board: Leveraging the power of other people’s lists is the number one path to untold riches. By getting several JV’s (that’s Joint Ventures) on board can mean the difference between a product launch that takes in a few thousand and a product launch that rakes in 6 figures. JV’s are discussed in more detail in another article on this website
Posted on: December 25, 2009 by Peter
Google Adsense revolutionized the way people earn money online, suddenly even people with no experience in earning money online were able to put Google Ads on their site and start earning a steady, consistent income from people just clicking on the contextually relevant ads.
Although most people use Adsense to earn a bit of beer money every month there are some people that have take it to a whole new level and earn a full time income just from people clicking on their ads.
To get to the level where you are making thousands of dollars a month you need to invest time and energy, but if you follow these three simple and proven tips you can start down the path of earning a full time living from Google AdSense.
Read the rules: Yes, I know the terms of services are full of jargon but they contain extremely important information. Everyday you read about people complaining that their AdSense accounts have been shut down, and if you are making a full time living from it, that can be a huge threat to your lifestyle. Don’t get your account shut down because you asked your friends to click on the ads!
Make your ads not look like ads: You have to be careful on this one, but time and again split testing has shown that when your ads don’t look like ads and blend in with your content (same background colour, same link colour etc) more people will click on it. If you make your ads stand out and scream “I’m an ad”, guess what? Very few people click on it. However, you can only go so far and writing something like “Suggested Links” above the ad is a definite no-no!
Test, and test, oh, and test: Where’s the best place for the ads on your site? If you have two ads does it earn more than 3 ads? If you change the size, do you earn more? There are hundreds of variables that can increase (or limit) your earnings and unless you take the time to split test all the variables you could potentially be leaving hundreds of dollars on the table!
Using the Google AdSense programme is probably the easiest way to get setup and earning money online, if you want to get serious about earning money from it, take a note of the tips above to make sure you are maximizing your revenue.
Posted on: December 23, 2009 by Peter
So many people come online and try and start an Internet business with little or no cashflow. After a period of time, sometimes weeks, sometimes months they come to the steady realization that making money online isn’t as easy as some people claim it is, or they are simply not making as much as they thought they would.
At this point the budding internet marketer will probably start to wonder what personal skills they have that they might be able to offer to other people as a paid service as a means to boost their income. The fortunate amongst us have design skills or programming skills but there’s one thing that nearly all of us can do and that is write. Tens of thousands of people need content for their websites, so there is no limit to the amount of writers the Internet needs.
While offering some services like this, people can direct the cash in to their online business to increase their residual income.
Freelancing can be a way to make some quick, guaranteed money but you need to approach it correctly. Follow these simple five steps to make sure you get the most from your freelancing service.
Advertise your services: Many fellow internet marketers would be glad to hire you if you can provide quality work at an affordable price with a professional service. You may have to start by offering your services at a lower rate or even for free so people learn to trust you and you can build your reputation to get higher paying customers.
Determine what your skills really are: It goes without saying but if you are a designer, don’t offer a programming service. Similarly if you can knock a few lines of code together, don’t offer your services as a programmer unless it’s for really basic fixes. Also, don’t try and offer dozens of services, focus on a single one and do it well.
Decide how you will get paid: Ensure that you charge at least a portion of your fees upfront, this is quite normal and most people shouldn’t have a problem with this. If you don’t get some of the fee upfront, you could be working for hours and not get paid at the end of it!
Ask for those testimonials! People love to find out about the experiences other people have had working with you. It’s not big deal to ask your customers to provide a testimonial if you think you’ve given them a great service.
Get yourself on freelance sites: There are dozens of freelancing sites like scriptlance, getafreelancer, odesk and elance where you can find tens of thousands of dollars worth of work all in one place. It’s probably one of the easiest ways to make money, however, beware that some of the other people on these sites are prepared to bid absolute bottom dollar so you may have to get some very small paying projects to build up your reputation first.
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