Archive for July, 2009

Email Marketing- Here are 3 Reasons Why is it so Important

We know that email marketing works, but where is the pull for a small internet marketer who is just starting out and who is on a tight budget? There are three very good reasons for making email marketing and integral part of promoting your website and products.

1. It’s Cheap- It doesn’t cost an arm and leg like other forms of advertising. You set up an account with an auto responder service and  send out information or what ever you want to send out to your list with a single push of a button.

2. It’s successful- Email marketing is regularly ranked top’s by the DMA for return on investment (ROI) among direct marketing tactics. Email marketing can be easily targeted and personalized. Internet marketers can persuade their customers to purchase with special offers specific to their target market.

3. It is easy to track and measure- It is easy to track and measure the success of an email marketing campaign. There’s an old advertising saying that goes “I know I wasted half my advertising budget, I just don’t know which half”. You know how effective your email campaign is compared to the number of responses and you can adjust your ad campaign accordingly.

I just wanted to share some hard earned advice that I have learned about Adwords

I am sure you know that Google Adwords is the quickest way to make some insane money or the fastest way to go broke if you aren’t careful. The 2 most important things to remember are split test your ads and make sure that you are picking the right keywords.

Both of these steps are easy to follow, but from my experience I don’t think
that most people do it. Success with Adwords can be very simple if you just do these two things. So how can we fix this? STOP ALL YOUR ADWORDS ADS NOW UNTIL YOU DO THIS.    

STEP 1. Start split testing your ads. Change the titles. This little change can make a huge difference in the click through rates.

STEP 2. Start your campaign off with the right keywords. You can’t use the exact
same keywords as everybody else is using and expect to get a different result. Remember that Google gives you a lot of keywords but don’t you think that everybody else is bidding on the same keywords you are using.  
 
So how do we get some different keywords so we can have better results?  Well we can short cut the learning curve and leave everybody else in the dust with a killer keyword tool.

Check out this link to see what I’m talking about:       www.adwordanalyzer.com

Once you get this keyword tool you can develop a huge list of money
sucking keywords.

Discover 2 Ways You Can Get Highly Targeted Leads Through Article Marketing

If you are looking for a method of advertising where you are able to get massive amounts of targeted traffic, then article marketing will be for you. Targeted traffic:

1. Who is your market? Who is it that you want to visit your website or blog? When someone does a search and your article pops up, it’s important to remember that they are looking for the information that you have to offer. You have the solution to their problem. When they click on your resource box and visit your site, they are looking for you to solve their problem. They are highly targeted leads and now it is time for you to tell them what action to take.

2. The call to action. Tell them what you want them to do. Have them fill out your opt in box to get free tips or a free e-book. Give them quality content and they will be back for more.

The nice thing about article marketing is:

• You get highly targeted and qualified leads
• Your articles can be floating around for years to come. People can pass your articles on to others or post them on their website or blog with your resource box.
• It shows that you are knowledgeable and an expert in your field
• The Number 1 best thing- IT’S FREE!

Discover 8 Secret Tips to Getting to the Top of the Search Engines Rankings

Getting found by the search engines can be a frustrating experience if you are not sure what you are doing. There is nothing to be afraid of though, this article will help you get started on your way to much higher search engine rankings. So let’s get started:

1. Keep your old domain name and do not purchase a new domain name unless you absolutely have to. The search engines like domains that have been around for a while. You could also redirect your old domain to your new one in order not to go down in the ranking. If you’re redesigning your site or building a new site and have to use a new domain, you can expect at least somewhat of a loss in search engine traffic. It could be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months or longer to get back where you were.

2. Don’t optimize your website for the search engines. Make sure you are optimizing for your target market. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into the search engines search box. If these people are typing in search words that relate to what your website offers, then they are most likely part of your target market. Good keywords and keyword phrases, found through research, are crucial in getting high search engine rankings.

3. Design your website around your keywords. Don’t even start writing copy until you have found your keywords and then you will want to sprinkle your keywords all over your site and your pages. Also, make use of long tail keywords or phrases. These really help to qualify your target market and leads to higher quality leads. They know exactly what they are looking for and when they are led to your site they will be more likely ready to buy.

4. Make sure you make your site friendly to the search engine spiders. Search engines can’t interpret graphics, fill out forms and can’t read Java Script links and menus. You still want to use them, but make sure that the search engine spiders can navigate your site and can find the other pages on your site. The search engine spiders will never find a drop down menu and will never know about your other pages.

5. Label your internal text links and clickable images (alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as you possible can. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. Important hint, use your keywords and key phrases to describe.

6. Write copy for your website that uses your keyword phrases, but make sure your copy is compelling to you target market. This is so important for a successful website. The search engines want to read keyword rich copy on your pages so they know how to classify your site. Don’t hide your copy in graphics or in flash. Write your copy using your most relevant keyword phrases while you are giving your visitors the information they have been looking for.

7. Title tags are given a lot of weight by the search engines. What ever keyword phrase you have written about in your copy, should be used in your title tag. The information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it is on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your site.

8.  Make sure that other sites can link with your site. The ability for other sites to link to your site is extremely important for successful search engine optimization, because all the major search engines place more emphasis on your sites link popularity. You also want to be very careful not to link to a crappy site. Both your customers and the search engines will frown on you and will hurt you search engine ranking.

If you have done the above 8 things correctly, you should start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. Using free Google Analytics, you can track and measure the things you want to know. It is also a good idea to add new content every once in awhile.  All of these steps taken together will go a long way in helping you with your search engine optimization and search engine ranking.

Six Minutes To Success

Hi everyone, I placed a new link at the top on the right hand side “Six Minutes To Success”. Please take a look at this. The Six Minutes to Success can be applied to anything you want in your life. Now I started not to put this up, but I decided that it was important. I use it and believe that it has helped me tremendously. I put it up on the sight just in case you are interested. Please let me know what you think. For that matter, let me know what you think about anything.

=> Click Here!

Thanks and have a great day! Don Meyer

Commission Blue Print

First off, I want to thank  those of you who have signed up on my website for internet marketing and list building tips. I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of the techniques that I’ll be sharing with you over time.

But, the reason for this post is to share my own experiences with a new product called the “Commission Blueprint”.

Internet marketing can be a tough business. Although everything is going great now, the truth is it wasn’t always plain sailing.

The problem I had (and I’m sure you can agree with this) was that when I started, I tried to pursue way too many systems at the same time without ever sticking to
one for more than a couple of weeks. Not to mention the total information over load just from emails alone.

I spent an absolute fortune snapping up every little bit of information I could get my hands on in the hope of finding the ‘magic system’ that would make me an internet millionaire over night.

In hind sight I know see that most of these so-called systems had been produced by people who’d never actually made a dime themselves – they were simply cashing in on short term ‘get rich quick’ fads by creating products that had been rehashed from other sources. In other words, I was destined to fail before I had even started.

I still have some good courses that I saved, but they didn’t help much either because at the time I lacked the experience necessary to implement their strategies.

Whether you’re successful or not depends entirely on whether you have the time, money, or skill to set things up in the correctly while avoiding the common pitfalls.

Set things up right, you create a community of buyers around your business and make a ton of cash. Do it wrong, and you’re just wasting your time. 95% of product creators don’t go far enough in order to help people use their method successfully. Either they can’t be bothered or they’re making the whole thing up as they go along.

This is exactly where the “Commission Blueprint course is SO DIFFERENT from all the other stuff you see. Because it’s full of the actual tools you need to quickly side-step the most common mistakes and stay on the road to on-going profits.

Everything is done for you. You get the tools, the landing pages, the auto-responder messages, not to mention 5 hours of instructional videos showing you precisely how to set everything up for maximum profit.

=>   Click Here

Discover Why The Money Is In List Building

There are many techniques an internet marketer will use to promote products and to drive quality traffic to their website; but there is one free method of advertising that stands out from the rest. You’ve heard it before, “the money is in the list”.  We are talking about list building to promote products and to drive quality traffic to your website.

When you are list building, you collect email addresses of people who visit your website and want to be contacted whenever you have something new to share. It could be an e-book, or a new tip, or a newsletter. When you build a large list you will have contact with thousands of quality leads who will be interested in what you have to say. With one click of your mouse you can send out an email to thousands with your information.

One way of list building is to put a sign up form on the top of you web page where no one will miss it. Ask for their first name and email. Over the top of the sign up form, write, “Get List Building Tips by Email” or “To Receive Your Free E-Book Sign In Here”. These are customers that you can contact over and over again when you have new products or new information.

Pop up forms are another good device that many Internet marketers use to collect names. The nice thing about them are you don’t have to change your pages to include a pop up form because this floats over your page.

Repeat business is extremely important to internet marketers. By capturing their email you have access to them when ever you have new information. With your email information you send them you are showing them your knowledge in your field and building trust with the people on your list. You work very hard to build a list; don’t do anything that could destroy it. Treat the people on your list with total respect and don’t swamp them with emails. Nothing will turn a person off quicker.

So that you are not mistaken as a spammer, you must have a double opt-in list. A double opt-in is when the customer gives you their name and email. They are giving permission to be emailed by you. They will then be sent an email asking them to confirm that they want to be part of you list. You also required to place an unsubscribe message at the bottom of each email, so they can opt-out out if they are no longer interested.

So start your list building today. Imagine if you had a small list of only 1,000 subscribers and what if only 2% wanted to buy your product, and you were making $20 in commissions on each sale? Think about it $400 for typing up one little email on your auturesponder and clicking send. What if you had a list of 100,000 people, or more!

Discover How Article Marketing Can Catapult Your Business

You could have the best product or service in the world, but if you don’t have traffic, you’re not going to have sales. Some website owners started out thinking early on in their careers – if I build it, they will come. They find out quickly that this is totally false. It takes marketing effort to build an interest among people to drive quality traffic to your site and make sales.

In building any business you need to figure out who your target market is. Then you have to come up with an advertising plan to get buying customers to your site. There are many ways to advertise your website. Many cost money and many are free. If you are just starting out and are on a limited budget article marketing is ideal.

Instead of forcing your advertising on potential customers, why not give them what they want. Consider how and why people use the internet. What they are looking for most is information. People go online to find answers to problems, information about products, services and advice. This is where article marketing comes in. Article marketing is a great way to build your customer base; to establish your website as a place people can come to for answers. Good article marketing follows good search engine optimization practices and builds credibility within your niche. A reputation for knowledge and good content is far more valuable than a flashy banner. Offer an opt-in for a newsletter and publish regular articles, tips and solutions, and you build your mailing list as you fill your website with quality traffic.

When people are looking on the internet for a product or service they will do a search on a search engine using a descriptive word or phrase. A descriptive word is way too broad for us; the competition on one word could be in the millions. We will look for a descriptive phrase (or a long tail keyword) which will have far less competition. You also have a high quality relevant keyword, because people are typing in that exact matching phrase for what they are looking for. When you are writing your articles for article marketing, you would want to use that keyword phrase several times in your article so the search engines will pick it up and they will give your article a high ranking.

Article marketing is also valuable in getting back links to your site.  A back link is a link from another site to your site. This is also important for search engine optimization. Search engines like back linking, so this helps to optimize your site and moves you higher on the organic searches. The most important thing to note is that by sticking to your subject, the traffic you attract are people who are looking for exactly what you’re selling, making article marketing the very definition of targeted advertising.

Driving Quality Traffic to Your Website Using Keywords Search

Using keywords search to drive quality traffic to your website has become one of the most important things you can do as an affiliate marketer. Although it takes a lot of time in research and testing, the time you spend to do it right will more than pay for itself.

The purpose of keywords search is to find the most popular keywords people will use when they are searching on the internet for a product, service, website or any other things they want to find. As a website owner, I want to find these important keywords people are using so that I can draw quality traffic to my website. This is called search engine optimization or SEO for short.

Search engine optimization is the process of driving as much quality traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic (natural) search, using relevant keywords.   The higher the ranking in the organic results with a search engine, the more traffic you should have to your site.

You must learn the demographics of your target market. Commonly used demographics that an affiliate marketer may look at include: area of the country their customers are from, their occupation, age, sex, income level, education level, etc. You want to get into their heads and try to think how they would enter a search for your product or service.

For example; you are selling snow shovels on your website. You wouldn’t have much trouble selling someone a snow shovel in New Hampshire, but who in South Florida wants to buy a snow shovel. Well, what about a construction company that is cleaning construction debris off the floor, or a landscaper shoveling mulch out of the back of the truck. You need to know your market, how your product can be used and you need to determine the relevant keywords to draw customers to your site.

As mentioned above a keywords search can be time consuming, but with some practice you can easily master it. There are many tools to help you find relevant keywords, some are free and some you pay for. These include tools; such as, keyword research tools, keyword suggestion tools, keyword density analysis tools and keyword valuation tools, just to name a few.

To conduct a keywords research for the right keywords, you need to know the demographics of your target group as mentioned above. You must also know the specific industry terms used for product searches. Broad words will bring about huge competition. We are looking for less competition, but high quality leads. Using long tail keywords will help tremendously. For example, if I were selling a weight loss product and I use weight loss as a relevant keyword; I would have competition from 11,100,000 other people on the global monthly searches. Here’s what happens when I change the keyword:

Weight loss                 11,100,000   Searches

Healthy weight loss           90,500   Searches

Weight loss Help               40,500   Searches

Safe weight loss                 27,100  Searches

The number of searches is going down, but now we are down to more qualified searches. What if we tried: “fastest way to lose weight”  we would have 65,000 searches, still a lot of competition, but it is closer to where I would want to be. You see the long tail keyword, “fastest way to lose weight”, will drive high quality traffic to your website as compared to the broad keyword “weight loss”.

Keyword research is very important for search engine optimization and should never be ignored. The right set of relevant keywords can make a huge difference in your website’s traffic and sales.

Should I Build a Blog or a Website … Which is Better for Promoting My Affiliate Products?

Which is the best way of advertising and promoting my products on the web? Should I build a blog or should I build a website. This is a question I hear a lot from people. So I decided to write some thought about the two and first define what a blog is and compare it to a website.

It is very important to realize that a blog (or a web log) is a type of website. The difference is that blogging is a dynamic choice for someone who has something to sell or say over the internet. The entries can be commentary or news about events that interest the visitors to the blog and the readers have the ability to leave comments to the posts, making it an interactive dialogue for all.

A website is like a blog, except that it is static; it is not dynamic like a blog. A website  is where you actually describe and can show your products and/or services. You can update a website as often as you like, but this is usually only done if you change your products. People can’t just type in comments for everyone to see. Also with a website there are no posts to update. The nice thing with the new blog software out now, it can be very difficult to tell whether it is a blog or a website.

 A huge advantage of a blog is that blogs allows you to post written text, audio and video and have it online within minutes. Unlike traditional static websites which can take hours to update and cost a lot of money if you’re not familiar with building or editing web sites. 

The biggest advantage of having a blog, to me, is that you get the site up quick. You write your first post hit publish and you are ready for business online.

A blog is far easier to optimizing for the search engines. Ever time you write a new post (new content) on your blog, you do something called “pinging”. You are notifying the search engines that you have new content on your site. The search engines will visit your site and index your site more often than a static website. It is much cheaper to set up a blog and maintain the site than it is for a static website.

Bloggers also tend to build credibility faster than someone running a static website. The blogger is constantly posting and adding new content. The blogger is actually building a relationship with the readers, where the readers have the ability to comment back.

When you want to make a post on your blog, you enter your back office type your post and it is sent out instantly. With a static website, you have to open up your editor, write the article, update the page properties before uploading that page to your site using FTP software. After all that, you have to wait for the search engines to visit your site to get it indexed again.

There are many reasons that I could still add to the argument for a blog, but I hope I’ve shown you how versatile the blog can be compared to a static website. Don’t get me wrong, websites are important. I think the best way would be to have a blog where you can post and a website that has your products. You could send people from your blog to your website or send them from your website to your blog, by linking them.