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 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 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.
