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.
