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.
Posted on: December 22, 2009 by Peter
There are not many parts of Internet Marketing which is easy to screw up, but if there was a list, copywriting would probably be at the top. You see, although most people are able to bash a few paragraphs together, creating something that talks to people, provokes a response and converts is an art and the greatest copywriters dedicate their entire lives to pursuing this art form.
The way in which you present your business, your offer, your product or your service can make or break your bottom line, which is why many people choose to outsource the copywriting to a professional. However, if you decide to take the task upon your shoulders, there are a few things you need to know:
It’s all about the headlines: Taking the time to come up with the best headline you can is essential, it can literally mean the difference between success and a flop. Take for example this headline: “Lose Weight In 4 Steps”, it’s ok, it tells the reader what the article is about, but do you think it would be clicked on as much as “Look and Feel Fantastic With Our Easy To Follow Plan”?
Always leave a hook: If you are writing an article to promote your business, you need to give some juicy information but let them know that there is still more to learn because that is guaranteed to get clicks to your website.
Grammar and Spelling: Yes, I know it should go without saying but you would be amazed at the amount of people that put out absolute crap on the Internet. Even relying on Word isn’t a failsafe option because how does it know that ‘there’ was supposed to be ‘their’, as far as Word is concerned, you got the spelling right so nothing is wrong. Dot the i’s and cross the t’s before submitting!
Don’t Sell: There is a saying, don’t sell but pre-sell. The job of the article is not to sell your product but to get them warmed up and thinking about ideas and possibilities. You lead people where you want them to go but always leave them hanging for more so they have to click the link in your bios.
The Authors Bio: After the article headline this is the make or break part of the article, unless there is a clear call to action within the bio then the article has been a waste because the aim is to get people clicking through to read your sales pitch.
At the end of the day, you need to make sure your copywriting is up to scratch otherwise you are either wasting your efforts or worse, ruining the reputation of your business.
Posted on: December 22, 2009 by Peter
Buzz marketing is one of the terms that’s not thrown around too much and talked about even less and as such it has a bit of air of mystery about it which is a shame because when used correctly buzz marketing can have a dramatic effect on increasing your sales. Although you may not have heard of the term buzz marketing, I’m sure you have heard of the phrase “creating a buzz” which is very much the same thing – it’s about getting people to talk about your product, and more importantly talking positively about it.
You want your message to go viral when you undertake a buzz marketing campaign, have a think about the email forwards you get from time to time, funny pictures or funny jokes, or if you have ever been on a website and liked it enough to email, tweet or IM someone else about it – well that’s what you want to aim for in buzz marketing.
Just creating something that gets passed around though is not always enough, it needs to have a clear message back to your website and promote your brand. Follow these three methods to leverage your buzz marketing campaign:
Use Social Media: This is nearly always overlooked by many Internet Marketers who tend to focus on email lists, PPC and search engines, but there are so many more people who can easily be targeted on places like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace to get the buzz going on a particular product. It is best achieved by joining already active groups in niches that your product is aimed at and starting to name drop (not spam) your product in the conversation.
Don’t Sell! This may sound counter intuitive, but the aim of buzz marketing is to get people talking about your product, not for you to sell your product. Sales pitches don’t make for good viral campaigns, people don’t like to mention sales pitches or think they are trying to be sold something so anything salesy is strictly off limits. You need to have a rapport and acceptance of the community before you begin to mention your product.
Be Consistent: As with so many marketing methods on the internet, you must be consistent when interacting with people and it’s got to be done in a natural way, simply updating all the conversations with single sentence replies is considered bad form, you need to dedicate time every day to really get involved with the conversation at hand, creating the buzz doesn’t happen overnight.
By now your own head should be ‘buzzing’ with new ideas about buzz marketing and strategies you can use to get people talking about your product simply by engaging and networking with them. The ultimate goal of course is to have people talking about your product without even mentioning it yourself!
Posted on: December 21, 2009 by Peter
When you first hear the term “bum marketing” you may think what the hell? Now, depending on which story you subscribe to, bum marketing can either mean one of two things, it can either refer to sitting on your bum all day making money or if you were homeless (ie. a bum) and living on the street, you could make money online with bum marketing because it requires only free methods to generate income – well, except an Internet connection of course.
If you have a very small, limited budget, then you can still make money online, just follow the bum marketing principles such as:
Action: Wow, this is an important step, as a bum marketer everything is about ACTION. You can’t afford to outsource, you can’t afford to wait for someone to do it for you, you have to take action and do things every single day. If you are not taking any action, you are not working. Reading a forum is not action, checking emails is not action either. Action is doing something that will actively help you earn money.
Prolific Writer: Bum marketing is all about how much content you can get out there and submit to article directories. You will be spending the bulk of your time writing articles and submitting them. Take advantage of all the free places you can create webpages like Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger and Weebly and get content on there that is related to the niche you are targeting. Remember, without content, you can’t drive traffic to the places that will make you money – and you won’t be able to eat!
Forget Perfection: Business is not about being perfect, it’s about doing enough to earn you money and being consistent in taking action each and every day. As long as you are writing articles and promoting your free sites in directories and social media sites the money will eventually take care of itself. You can’t focus on whether you are doing things in the right order or using the right method, simply get articles out there and get traffic.
Bum marketing is a great introduction for most Internet Marketers because it makes them realize how much work, time and effort is involved in making money, it’s not simply a push button system which sends a steady stream of cash to your bank account, whether you can afford to outsource or have to rely on being a bum marketer for a while, you won’t make money without taking action.
Posted on: December 20, 2009 by Peter
It seems that in the Internet Marketing world not a day goes by when there is a the launch of some next big product which will turn us from wage slaves in to financially free individuals if we just shell out $97 and follow some system. If we were to believe everything and buy everything that was promoted, we’d be going broke pretty quickly!
As every savvy and experienced marketer knows the web is very similar to the old Wild West as there are so many snake oil salesmen desperate to make a quick buck and will push anything that makes them a few dollars, regardless of the quality and effectiveness of the product in question.
Having said that, Affiliate Marketing can be very profitable even if you only promote the quality products and are open and honest about who the product would be suitable for – it’s not very ethical to promote an AdWords product when a person doesn’t even know how to set up a website.
With that in mind, here are three top tips to help you boost your Affiliate income:
Pick a niche and stick with it: While it is easy to lose focus and the grass always looks greener in other niches, it is important to pick a single niche and focus all your energy and attention on it before moving on to something else. As human beings, we tend to be able to do one thing very well and it’s proven that our overall effectiveness reduces when we are given too much to do. While it might seem logical to venture in to many different niches to maximize your income, focusing on one single niche – at least in the beginning – is the number one way to make the most money from affiliate commission. However, if after several weeks of work there is not much money coming in, it may be worth moving in to a different niche.
Leave the big niches alone: Look, there are already companies with marketing budgets that run in to the millions of dollars, they employ an army of writers, graphic designers and promoters to dominate the large niches like travel, health, money and other such broad topics, so trying to crack these markets is going to be like banging your head against a brick wall. Instead, target the tiny little niches, the hobbies and personal interest. The Internet is a multi-billion dollar industry, just because a particular niche is ‘only’ worth $10m a year, even if you took 1% of that you will be making a fantastic income.
Explore different avenues: Just because you find an affiliate network offering something that’s related to the niche you are targeting doesn’t mean it has to stop there. There are many affiliate networks such as Amazon and Clickbank where you can find multiple complimentary products to promote without encroaching on the sales of each other. It’s always important to split test the offers as well, because if one product converts at 1% and the other product converts at 2% then potentially (depending on how much commission you earn) you could earn more by promoting a single product.
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money (after Google AdSense), all it takes is a bit more thought and effort about the type of products to promote and how to promote them. If you get it right, the road to riches can be cut very short indeed! Many Internet Marketers already make full time livings from simply promoting other peoples products and rake in insane amounts of cash each month. If you are willing to invest the time and energy in to making it work, following the tips above, then you too could start down that wealthy road.
Posted on: December 17, 2009 by Peter
Marketing your blog is a relatively straight forward concept but is not fully utilized by Internet Marketers to get the maximum benefit out of it. Too many people are under the impression that by simply building a free blog about their areas of interest or expertise, knock out a couple of posts a month, that they can just kick back and watch the dollars come flowing in. It’s not going to come as a surprise that there is no such thing as a free lunch and this is not how you make money from blogging. As with pretty much any money making method, writing and maintaining a blog effectively involves plenty of man-hours.
With that in mind, I’ve come up with 3 top tips that every marketing needs to consider when it comes to blog marketing and making money with their blog.
1. Content Is King: Hopefully this goes without saying, the notion that you can throw up previously used PLR articles or spun content on to a blog and expect great results is not just wrong, it’s pointless. The more unique, insightful and indepth the content is, the more visitors will stick around and click on your ads.
2. Time to get systematic: A blog is a beast that needs to be fed. Without fresh new content it will simply roll over and die, disappearing from the SERPS (that’s Search Engine Ranking Pages) and gather cyber dust until the domain expires. But there is good news, most blogging platforms have a scheduling feature which allows you to enter all your blog posts in one go and schedule them to post on what ever time and date you specify, it’s possible to even schedule posts every day for years (although it would probably take about a week to set up!).
3. List Building: We all know that money is in the list (unless you really are that much of newbie) but failing to establish a mailing list on your new blog is like leaving thousands of dollars on the table. Think about it, people interested in your niche and when a new product comes along that targets them, you send the offer to your list and BAM! You’ve just had a $1,000 day in commissions.
Blog marketing has captured the imaginations of tens of thousands of people and yet only a handful are making any significant money. The majority of blog marketers fail to implement the above essential points and then complain about how they are not making enough money! Be clever, add unique relevant content on a consistent basis and build your list to get people coming back to your site time and again.
Posted on: December 16, 2009 by Peter
You can’t have been involved with the internet marketing industry for more than a few months and never heard of the term article marketing. In the last few years the popularity of article marketing has literally exploded as it has enabled anyone to write an article, submit it to a high traffic directory and start driving traffic to their site or an offer – earning money in the process. There are loads of guides (free and paid) and training courses about article marketing but in reality there are five essential things that you must follow when you write articles for the purpose of driving traffic and hopefully convert them in to sales. The top 5 points to follow are:
- Who is going to read your article? To which audience are you trying to target? You need to consider who is going to read your article before you begin wriging. For example, if you are writing about how to play snooker, you would not want to write in terms that a new snooker player would not understand. Similarly if you decide to write an article aimed at expert snooker players, you would not want to patronize them by using simply terminology and snooker related phrases.
- Does your headline make people want to click on it? One of the major pitfalls many new (and even experienced!) writers fall in to is writing a boring headline that no one wants to click on. Your headline is one of the most important aspects of article marketing and must compel the person to click on it. Here’s an example of an ineffective headline “”What You Need to Know about Arthritis”. And here’s an example of a highly clickable headline “How to Kick Arthritis to the Curb and Stop the Pain Today!”
- Are you giving away too much information? People seem to go to one extreme or another. Either they do not give enough information in the article to make it interesting or they tell everything so that there is nothing left to tell when they get to your website!
- The authors bio: This is sometimes referenced as the Resource Box, other sites will call it the bio, however the thing about this space is that you are allowed to put your links, it’s like the “thank you for reading, now if you want to know more please click here”. However, it should be written in a way that entices the reader to click on your link to go to the website you are promoting. It also has the added benefit of giving you some link juice for Google.
- Become prolific! There’s no such thing as a saturation point when it comes to article marketing, the more articles you have out there the better. The more eyeballs are going to see it and the bigger chance of people clicking on your links.
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