Saturday, March 04, 2006

The 7 Secrets of Internet Marketing

Author: Michael Cheney
Many marketers have been shifting their marketing budgets to the
web over the past few years. Marketing online allows you to
target specific audiences and easily track return on investment,
commonly referred to as ROI. Unlike traditional marketing
methods, results of Internet marketing campaigns are almost
immediate. This allows you to better evaluate what elements of
your campaign are producing results and which are not. When
buying online media, you must be willing to shift your marketing
dollars to the online methods that produce a positive return.

To be successful at Internet marketing, you must understand the
essential secrets of Internet marketing. These secrets can allow
you to achieve success by finding the right audience,
communicating your message properly, and leading consumers down
the path to purchase. These secrets include:

1. Website Directory Listings. Before you begin any marketing
campaign, make sure that the website you're promoting has been
listed in the common directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, and
Google. Even if you're using a marketing page off of the root
directory of your website, be sure that the primary site is
listed. This ensures that prospects can continue to find your
marketing pages long after you've launched your campaign.

2. Generating Traffic. In order to realize a return on your
investment, you need to generate traffic to your marketing
pages. There are a number of ways to do so online. Some of the
most popular include Google AdSense, Overture, and Looksmart.
Other methods include affiliate programs and targeted website
advertising. Research other websites that have the audience
you're looking for and negotiate favorable ad rates for your
online marketing campaign.

3. Marketing Pages. Don't lead prospective purchasers to a
generic website. If you do, potential buyers won't know what to
do next. The easier you make if for prospects to take advantage
of your offer, the better. Whenever creating a marketing
campaign online, provide a specific page for leading purchasers
to your product or service or a billboard that showcases the
offer. Take the guess work out of making a purchase and more
consumers will buy.

4. Testimonials. Customer testimonials are the most powerful way
to sell your product or service. When consumers hear from those
who have purchased and used your product or service, they gain a
certain level of trust and comfort in what you have to offer.
Solicit testimonials after each purchase and use those that are
the most convincing to prospective purchasers.

5. Create a Compelling Offer. Be sure to offer something that no
one else is currently offering. If your offer is similar to your
competitors or is not very interesting, consumers have no reason
to learn more. Of course providing something for FREE is often a
great way to entice potential customers. Maybe it's a 3-day free
trial or a free evaluation of some kind. Be creative, try
something new, and measure the response.

6. Developing Trust. Before anyone will buy from you, your
website or company needs to be seen as reputable. This means
that consumers can purchase from you and not worry about the
safety of their credit card information, personal information,
or anything else being exchanged. A good method for developing
trust is to purchase and display safety and reliability icons
such as BBB Online, Trust-e, and VeriSign.

7. Provide a Guarantee. Nothing makes a consumer more
comfortable with a purchase than offering a guarantee. Perhaps
you can offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee or a money back
guarantee. A guarantee is a great way ease the risk of making a
purchase. If your competitors are offering a guarantee, you want
yours to be equal or better.

Internet marketing is an incredibly powerful medium for
segmenting your prospects and delivering targeted advertising.
Online, you can easily measure you return on investment and
refine your marketing campaign over time to improve results.

If you are a local business you can benefit from Internet
marketing as well. Look for local directories to list your
business or service. Or, you can supplement your local
advertising with product marketing pages on your website.
Internet marketing is more than just placing ads online, it's
using the web to communicate the value of your products and
services.

Best wish...

Michael Cheney

http://www.websitemarketingbible.com
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Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Author: Bing Zou
Broadly speaking, affiliate program seems including everything,
no matter as hot as pay per click advertising or as old as pay
per impression or pay per sale or lead marketing. So, it is true
that all businesses, no matter big or small, are making money
online with affiliate programs. The doubt is only how to select
suitable affiliate programs to make money.

What is a partner? What is an affiliate? A partner is an
associate who works with others toward a common goal. An
affiliate is a subsidiary or subordinate organization that is
affiliated with another organization. It seems the difference is
there but the basic meaning is the same - for sharing benefit.

For home base business, affiliate programs have huge advantages:
1. no hustle and be your own boss; 2. with low or even no cost
to set up; 3. no hard task to deal with, such as customer
service, shipping or inventory management; 4. high income
potential and keep running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no
holiday no stop and sales everywhere.

Based on individual company's policy, there are some rules that
do not allow you to sign up all affiliate programs, such as PPC
search engines or gambling affiliate programs may be not
compatible. Meanwhile, you may know that every company has its
minimum payout and commission rate is different.

In my personal experience, I strongly recommend you sign up
third party for your affiliate programs. This will bring you two
major advantages: one is save your time; the other is collecting
your money together.

There is thousands of individual affiliate programs offered on
the internet, many being through third party affiliate program
networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare. and so on. These
companies connect a large number of advertisers and publishers
together via their own network.

As a publisher, one registration gives you access to tens, even
hundreds of advertisers simultaneously. Tracking partner
performance is easy: there is only one technical support contact
and easier to manage, like only using one user id and one
password. The payment is received as your monthly revenue.
Another is third party check affiliate programs' credit and
reputation.

Payment thresholds can often be fairly high - a $50 US minimum
is common for international publishers. Finally, a payment delay
of two months or more from the date of a sale/lead generation
can occur often. Not mention some affiliate programs have been
known for not fairly treat affiliate to track sales and leads
properly as honestly as they could be. Not mention some
affiliate programs announce they are not responsible for missing
check. Can we ask whether they really send check?

For those big affiliate programs, like Google AdSense, Amazon,
you may participate directly with their affiliate programs.

How should you choose an individual affiliate program? My
suggestion is not to choose a affiliate program only according
to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of
people who are likely to visit your website, it means relevance.
For example, if you are targeting home based business on your
site, links to affiliate programs with school recruiting
program, text-books sale and the like may generate less revenue
than banners that link to paid survey companies. The most
important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your
target audience.

Another suggestion is not necessary to join every single
affiliate program that comes your way. Some gurus suggest that
sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are only
sign up a small amount of affiliate programs.

About the author:
Bing Zou is the owner of website www.haveatry.com and www.onlyworkonline.com.
Haveatry.com is designed for making money at home with a new
lifestyle. Onlyworkonline.com recommends opportunities to make
money fast. You can contact him at email: infofreetoyou@yahoo.ca
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7 reasons adsense stats are killing your business and how you

Author: Eric Koshinsky
Google adsense has to be the best thing to hit online business
since the invention of the internet. The service has allowed
average people and huge corporations alike to make a very decent
income online with very little trouble at all. Put in a little
effort to create a decent site that gets a little traffic and
you can be in the money. Make better sites with more traffic and
you can really rake in the cash.

However the key to any business success is to be able to track
where your business is coming from and how it is interacting
with your websites. Unfortunately the stats that google provides
for you in your adsense account are VERY weak. In fact they
provide just enough information to make it seem like you are
actually getting all the information you need to succeed. Sadly
that just isn't true.

In fact, relying on google's adsense stats could very well be
killing your business. Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm absolutely
NOT accusing google of doing anything wrong, far from it.
However the information they provide just isn't anywhere nearly
enough to let you make informed decisions about how to develop
your web business in the ways that are most profitable for you.
Below are explained some of the main reasons why relying on
google's adsense stats could be a critical business mistake. At
the end of the article we offer an explanation of what you can
do to 'rescue' yourself from adsense stat doom.

Here then are some of the critical elements missing from
google's adsense stats.

1) They provide only vague information. The stats only show page
impressions or #'s of ads loaded on a site. To get any kind of
precise information you need to set up channels for EVERY ad
unit you display on EVERY page of EVERY site. Not likely.

2) They are updated very slowly While it is getting faster,
stats are still on a delay. If you run a high traffic site and
want to test a change which turns out bad, you could stand to
lose hundreds of dollars in the hours that it takes google stats
to update.

3) You have NO IDEA what pages are generating revenue and which
aren't - As I said before, yes you can have channels for
specific pages, but if you have a site with more than a few
dozen pages it becomes a HUGE hassle, and if you have several
sites with several hundred pages each...well it just doesn't
work. So there you are spending hours and cash getting traffic
to certain sections of your site, but you have no real idea if
that section is actually generating revenue without resorting to
the clunky channel system.

4) You have NO WAY TO KNOW what ads are being clicked. Lets face
it you want to have people clicking on ads that pay you the
most, not the ones that are paying out .05/click. But you can't
get this info from your adsense stats. Without this info how can
you possibly 'block' low paying ads from showing on your site
with your adsense 'competitors' block list. And if you don't
block these..well google's got to serve the ads to someone, and
they're very happy to send you the .05c/click ads.

5) It is IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL where your traffic is coming from
and what it is doing on your site. - Oh sure you can look at
your web stats, but there is absolutely no way to match that to
your adsense stats. Perhaps your stats show that you are getting
lots of referral traffic from www.somedomain.com, but how can
you tell if they are actually clicking on your ads. If they
aren't that traffic isn't really worth anything.

6) Visitor behaviour is unknown. You have no way of telling if
your adsense revenue is coming from a few active visitors who
click several ads on several pages or if it is coming from
single clicks from every visitor. Why does this matter? Well if
only 1% of your visitors actually click an ad (but they click
lots), you have 99% of your visitors that you have to 'convince'
to click at least something.

7) Content relevance of your pages. Do your pages show all the
ads possible, or is your content not relevant 'enough' to
qualify for full ad quota displays? You MUST know this
information. The less relevant your content means google will
send you fewer ads, or PSA ads just to fill the space. You ain't
gonna make much on PSA's (actually you make NOTHING).

There are other reasons why google adsense stats just aren't
enough, but I think the 7 above should be enough to make the
point. Rely on google's stats at your own expense.

This isn't the right place to go into a detailed explanation of
how to fix this cash killing problem. However it isn't all that
difficult to solve all these problems and more that come from
depending on google adsense stats. Simply said, all that is
required is to add a little code to your web pages that grabs
the extra essential information you need to be able to properly
and accurately track your adsense earnings. Getting your hands
on this vital information will let you see exactly what you need
to do to make a dramatic change in your adsense earnings.

For a more detailed explaination of what you need to do here:
http://www.newbie-guides.com/adsense-stats-lifeline/

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I wish you all the
very best of success.

About the author:
Newbie-guides.com provide useful tips and guidance for online
marketers and website managers. For late-breaking critical
information on adsense please drop by:
http://www.newbie-guides.com/adsense-stats-lifeline/
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7 Ways to Drive Laser-Targeted Traffic To Your Website

Author: Keith Gardner
An affiliate marketer may have all the things needed for him to
be able to succeed in a business such as affiliate marketing. He
may have the necessary drive, diligence and perseverance to be
able to understand how the system works. He may have all the
tools necessary in maintaining the business, including a really
unique and interesting website which could earn him a fortune if
only the whole world could see it. However, all these would
prove useless if he does not know how to drive traffic to his
website. His business would sink into oblivion together with all
the sales, fortune and dreams that he might have realized if he
only knew how to do this particular task. Getting people who
matter to see one's website is a difficult undertaking if he
tries to consider the fact that there are rivals everywhere
waiting to pin him down. The immensity of the internet as well
as the affiliate marketing world has given birth to the fierce
competition between affiliate marketers, each of whom has his
own great product to offer. With all the websites piling on top
of each other, how would one be able to stand out? The seven
best ways to drive laser-targeted traffic to one's own website
would help those who are bent on sticking it out with this
business wherever it is bound to take them.

The first step in driving traffic to one's website is by relying
on search engines and what they can do for the affiliate
marketer concerned. Because they are popular for driving free
targeted traffic, they should not be ignored by all means.
Having top search engine rankings is vital in building
popularity links, and the use of the right keywords is important
in attaining this goal. Once a website is on top of the list, it
is easily accessible to anyone who wants to see it for himself.

The second way in driving traffic to one's website is by
contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange
partnership. Locating websites that are related to one's own
website is the primary task. Once there, he should be able to
establish communication by personalizing everything as much as
possible. It is then possible to make reciprocal link exchanges
between webmasters whichever way the affiliate marketer prefers.

The third way is through writing one's own articles. This is an
effective way in promoting a website, because good content that
is appreciated by readers will lead them to visit the writer's
very own website out of sheer interest.

The fourth way is through joint venture marketing. This is one
of the most effective ways of promoting a product or a service.
Having a partner through ad swap or link exchange is beneficial
to both parties as it allows them to reach a wide customer base
in a short amount of time.

The fifth is through joining affiliate programs. Having
affiliates to do the work means allowing them to bring tons of
traffic to a website. Skyrocketing sales would be realized as a
result, and both the affiliate and the website owner will
benefit from the situation.

The sixth is by having a list of subscribers that one can refer
to every so often, because they are those which would prove to
be valuable assets for the marketer concerned. The use of
autoresponders and personalized newsletters is one way of
keeping track of them all, and holding on to them by letting
them know about new products and services is an essential task
that should be done by the affiliate marketer concerned.

The seventh is by knowing one's market through and through. It
is important for traffic to be targeted to those who might have
a special interest in the theme or topic of one's website. This
way, a solid customer base is going to be created. Once a
potential customer shows an interest in a particular website by
paying it a visit, one must not waste time in trying to show him
that his effort is worth it.

Traffic generating strategies are important in trying to make
one's affiliate marketing career inch forward. It is always
advantageous to plan one's moves in any business that he might
undertake. This is particularly so in affiliate marketing. If
one knows how to get people to see what he has to offer, then he
is on the right track.

For the exciting details, visit:

http://superaffiliatehandbook.com
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The Adsense Site Blue Print

Author: Darren Yates
A good money making Adsense site needs a number of elements in
place before it will succeed.

In the article below I discuss technical assets and techniques
you should be using. You should also consider the site design,
but that's a whole other article.

I've broken down the basics below -

1: Regular Content Updates

Ideally you are adding fresh, unique, keyword targeted content
to you site on a regular basis. Every few days at a minimum,
daily if possible.

The search engines will come back to your site more often, rank
it higher and in turn provide more traffic if you consistently
add fresh unique content.

A naturally growing site gets the search engines interested and
keeps them interested.

If you don't like to write or can't write then you can outsource
this chore to a third party.

On the other hand you can also use freely available articles
from the numerous article directories out there. This is not
ideal because the content is not unique and will most likely be
found on hundreds of other sites.

Another option is to use 'Private Label Rights' articles. These
are articles that you buy and use as starting point for your own
unique article. Essentially you re-write the PLR article. Don't
be tempted to use these as is, otherwise you may as well use the
article directories as your article source instead.

Which ever route you choose you should start with a good number
of pages on which to build.

You need to place your Adsense directly into the body copy of
each of your articles for the highest CTR (Click Through Rate).
My software Ad Injector can do this for you across hundreds of
pages fast saving you hours of time doing it by hand -

http://www.ad-injector.com

2: Rotate Your Content

It's fine consistently adding new content but if your homepage
stays the same you're seriously missing out.

You should endeavour to have content rotate on a daily basis on
your homepage. This gives the impression of a site update. You
can do this by hand or you can have a script on your site rotate
content. I know which I

would choose. :)

In fact I have a script that chooses a random article from the
hundreds on my site and posts it automatically to my homepage
for 24hrs before selecting a new article and doing the same
again for the next 24hrs.

In essence to both visitors and the search engines my site is
updated daily. :)

You can get this exact script as a bonus with Ad Injector.

3: RSS Feeds

To further make you site appear to update regularly you should
introduce a relevant RSS feed. I won't go into the details of
exactly what RSS is here. If you're not sure do a Google. :)

Basically you will get fresh relevant links appearing on your
site at regular intervals.

There are numerous site scripts available now to allow you to
show RSS feeds on your site. When you choose one make sure it is
either PHP, CGI or ASP. Don't use javascript!

The reason for this is that the above mentioned languages will
display the RSS feeds as HTML which the search engines read as
content.

Javascript will be ignored! It does not convert the feed to a
search engine friendly format which the above languages will do.

If you are interested in a free RSS feed converter for your site
email me at the site below.

4: Place Your Adsense Ads

You must place your Adsense ads within the body of your article.
It's a proven fact that the area to the top right of the content
receives the highest CTR.

You can view the actual Google graphic indicating the 'Hotspot'
on the Ad Injector site -

http://www.ad-injector.com

Beyond the body copy the next two hotspots are across the top of
the page and down the left hand side. The two areas that Net
users naturally look to for a sites navigation.

5: Place Your Ad Links Ads

The Google Ad Links ads have been found to work best when placed
either above or below the site navigation, again either across
the top or down the left hand side.

A further boost can be had by 'blending' the look of the ads
with your site navigation. By that I simply mean having your
navigation match the ads in both font type, size and colour.

Many Adsense publishers have experienced a large boost in
revenue after blending all there navigation to match their ads.

6: A Site Map

This is very important. Without a good site map to which you can
add your newly uploaded content the search engines will never
know you are updating your site. They'll never be able to find
the new content without a link going to it.

Be sure not to forget to update your site map each time you add
new site content.

There you have it. That's a general overview of a working
Adsense site. Of course I haven't the space to go in to much
detail but I hope you found what I have revealed of use. ;)

About the author:
Darren Yates is the developer of Ad Injector. Unique software
designed to boost your Adsense profits and speed up Adsense site
creation. Sign up for the f.ree Adsense Mini Guide for more Adsense tips.
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