Guide SEO for everyone

Is SEO Really

2008-07-26T05:23:00.000-07:00

Is SEO Really Worth The Effort?

With the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN seemingly changing their algorithms on a regular basis, it sometimes feels like you're fighting a losing battle trying to keep up with them.

We're all constantly tweaking our websites and chasing links in a desperate attempt to grab, or hold on to, that elusive spot on the first page of results for our chosen keywords, so is SEO really worth the effort?

Well firstly if you have optimized your site well, both through onpage and offpage optimization, and manage to obtain top rankings in the search engines, then you can get a great deal of free traffic to your site, depending on how popular your keywords are that you are ranking well for. So yes of course in this instance SEO is most definitely worth spending time over.

The problem, however, is that if you are launching a new site and plan to get the bulk of your traffic from search engines, you may end up being disappointed because it can take many months before you even get close to achieving high rankings. This is particularly true of Google and Yahoo. MSN is easier to rank highly for, but this is negated by the fact that a lot less people use MSN than Google and Yahoo.

This is why when I now launch a new site I'm focused more on receiving traffic from other sources, and concentrating almost solely on building my own list of subscribers. There are endless ways to start getting immediate traffic to a new site and start building your list.

I personally like to post in forums, write and submit articles to article directories and relevant ezines, pay for advertising in these same ezines, write and submit press releases, promote a squeeze page on traffic exchanges (if my site is related to making money online), credit-based safelists (free safelists are a waste of time) and other list-building services. I also like to write free reports and ebooks (containing links to my site) which can be freely given away (and rebranded for greater distribution) creating a viral effect.

I still carry out the standard onpage search engine optimization techniques, and offpage techniques such as getting keyword-rich text links from directories and other related sites, but I now no longer base my whole future profit model on obtaining top search engine rankings. My thoughts are that if they come they come, but whatever happens as long as I keep building a list of subscribers for each of my sites I know that I can always achieve good profits regardless of where I rank in the search engines.

It also eliminates any stress that can occur when the leading search engines change their algorithms. I've seen many instances of long-established websites whose entire livelihood relied on the traffic they received as a result of being at the top of the search engines, but who suddenly saw their sites disappear from the first few pages of results, wiping their profits out almost immediately. Some of these sites had no mailing lists either so they had no alternative profit model in place.

Hopefully you can see that while everyone wants top search engine rankings, it's not the be all and end all, and certainly shouldn't be used to base your whole business model on. There are numerous successful websites online who couldn't care less about SEO, and indeed are nowhere to be found in the search engines. They rely on other traffic-generating techniques, such as viral marketing, joint venturing, or recruiting affiliates, for example, to build and grow their online business.

To conclude, while it's important to spend some time optimizing your website and obtaining links for SEO purposes, spending several hours a day tweaking every page of your site just to please the search engines is not a productive way to spend your time. Instead you should be focusing on building your list of targeted subscribers, using other more immediate traffic-generating methods where you can see results very quickly, and not have to wait several months before you're ranking highly in the search engines.

Just keep adding good quality content to your site, and providing a reason for your visitors to return to your site. This should have the effect of boosting your search engine rankings anyway, without having to spend hours on SEO, because other sites will start linking to you automatically, and the search engines will generally reward your site with a higher ranking if it is constantly updated with good content.

How To Use Forums

2008-07-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

How To Use Forums To Promote Your Website
Forums are a tried and tested way of getting free traffic to your website. By posting on forums that allow sig files (those messages that appear below each post) you can indirectly advertise your website or affiliate program every time you post a comment.

It sounds pretty straight forward, but a lot of people are still failing to make best use of this method of promotion. In this article I discuss exactly what to do and what not to do when posting on forums.

The first thing you should do is to find the most popular forums in your particular niche. Start by doing a search on your favoured search engines for relevant forums, and then read a few posts and see if they allow sig files. If they do, jot down the url of each forum, until you have a nice list of suitable forums. Then I recommend going to alexa.com and typing each forum's website address into the traffic ranking box and seeing how much traffic each forum gets. Ideally you want as low a number as possible for it's ranking, and as a rule I generally tend to favour forums that have a ranking of 50,000 or lower. This ensures you don't waste your time posting on forums that hardly anyone is visiting.

Once you have your list of forums you can start registering for them and creating your own sig files. This is where SEO becomes a factor, because not only should you create links that contain your main keywords that you want to rank highly for, but you should also vary them slightly so the search engines don't think that you are simply buying links, because they all use the same anchor text.

Now you can begin posting some messages. Your ultimate objective of posting on forums is to get people to click on your sig file and visit your site, however there is a right way and a wrong way of doing this.

The wrong way is by spamming forums and posting endless worthless comments that don't add anything to the topics being discussed. The end result of all this is that other readers of the forum will soon suss you out and regard you as a forum spammer and so will have no interest in clicking on your sig files and visiting your site.

The right way to get the most people you can to click on your sig file, without spamming forums, is to brand yourself as an expert in your particular niche. By bearing this in mind when posting each individual message you will start to become respected and people will naturally want to find out more about you and your website. How will they find out this information? Through your sig file of course.

There's a few other things you can do to maximise your click-thrus from sig files.

Firstly, if you are posting on forums for any length of time, you should change the wording of your sig file every so often. People get bored with seeing the same sig file over and over again, and tend to gloss over it after a while, so it's important to spice it up every so often (while keeping it keyword rich of course).

Secondly, on every forum you will generally find one or more epic threads, ie those threads that have simply taken off, with several pages of posts, each of which has been viewed hundreds, if not thousands of times. These are the kinds of threads that you should try and post a comment or two on for maximum exposure.

In addition you should also try and start your own epic threads. By being the first person to post on one of these threads your sig file could be seen thousands of times by other readers of the forum. The best ways of doing this are by either starting controversial topics that people will be begging to add their own opinions to, or by starting an open-ended discussion that could lead to many additional topics being discussed, all on the same thread. Either way your initial post containing your sig file could potentially get exposed to thousands of readers.

If you follow the basic guidelines outlined in this article you should create a steady stream of traffic to your website just from forums alone. Combine this promotional method with any of the other numerous traffic-generating methods, and you will soon have a high traffic website on your hands.

How To Use Ebay

2008-07-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

How To Use Ebay To Build Your List Of Subscribers

“The money's in the list” is a phrase often quoted by internet marketers, but for good reason.

If you don't have a way of collecting email addresses through an opt-in form on your site, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

When people visit your website and leave without buying anything, you may never get the chance to sell to them again if they don't come back to your site. However, if people opt in to receive more information from you through occasional emails, then you can send follow-up messages, and dramatically increase your chances of making a sale in the future.

There are many ways of building a list, but in this article I want to focus on a strategy often overlooked by the majority of marketers, and that's through Ebay. When you see listings for $0.01, there's a good chance the seller is using backend sales tactics or trying to encourage you to join their newsletter, otherwise they would be losing money for every sale, due to Ebay's fees being higher than the sales price.

A good way of generating a lot of sales, and therefore potential subscribers is to get your hands on some ebooks which offer resale rights, and listing them on Ebay. There are numerous sites where you can pick them up, often for free. If not, there are membership sites, where for a one-off fee you can get access to hundreds of ebooks all with resellers rights, or you could of course buy one of these ebooks offering resellers rights on Ebay, often at a ridiculously low price, then resell it yourself.

Unfortunately, you won't get rich just from selling many of these ebooks on Ebay alone, because the sellers have forced the prices down to very low levels. However, you can benefit very nicely financially from persuading the buyer of your ebook to subscribe to your newsletter or ezine.

It's estimated that every subscriber in your list is worth $1 per month, so if you had 1000 subscribers, you could expect, on average, to earn $1000 per month. This figure obviously varies a lot depending on your sales copy, and the quality and credibility of your mailings, but even so it's easy to see why having your own list is potentially very lucrative.

The key is to offer on your main site several quality free bonuses to each new subscriber that opts in to receive your newsletter. Then when a buyer buys an ebook from you, and you send them the email with the download link included, you can upsell your newsletter by mentioning the further free bonuses they could receive on top of the ebook they've just purchased, and including the link to your main site where the opt in form is located.

I've had great success doing this, because the majority of people, myself included, love freebies, and the buyer will be more than happy to receive extra free ebooks, on top of their original purchase, just for filling out a simple form.

The only thing to bear in mind is that the sale price of your ebook should cover any Ebay fees, although there's nothing stopping you from offering it for $0.01 just to hopefully guarantee a sale. You will lose money on every sale, but it all depends on how much each subscriber is worth to you. If you have a top-quality newsletter or ezine with hardly any unsubscribe requests, then it may be worth doing because you are likely to make any minimal losses back many times over in the future.

How To Sell

2008-07-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

How To Sell More Resale Rights Products Than Your Competitors
One of the easiest and quickest ways to make money online is by acquiring resale rights products and selling them on to a target market. However in most instances many people find that there are also many other people selling these same products, and so they subsequently fail to generate any real profits from resale rights products because the competition is so stiff. So how can you outsell your competition?

Well one of the most important factors in determining how much money you can generate is the actual product itself. Be very selective in choosing which resale rights products you are going to promote. For optimum profits you ideally want to find fresh and innovative products that have just been released and have therefore not yet reached saturation point. That's not to say you can't do well from promoting older products, because you can if they are of good quality, and have not yet been heavily promoted.

Another thing you should do is to actually get to know the product yourself before you start selling it, to ensure it is of a high quality. Promoting poor quality products will only damage your reputation in the long run.

Once you've found a quality product, you should then aim to create your own unique selling angle, so your offer stands out from your competition.

One way of doing this is by creating your own sales page for the product. Many people simply upload the sales page that came with the product, and start driving traffic to that page. However, this is what most other resellers are doing as well, so by creating your own sales copy, that is ideally better than the original copy, you can easily make more sales than your rivals.

Not only can you use your own sales copy, but you can also add your own unique bonuses to the product. These should complement the product you are selling. For example, if you were selling an ebook on SEO, then to make your offer stand out, you could also add other SEO-related ebooks or software that you have the rights to, as additional bonuses.

Other bonuses that work well are things like training videos, that you can easily compile nowadays, that will help the buyer use the product that they have purchased, or a personal consultation from yourself, if the price of the product is high enough to make this worthwhile.

Similarly another way of adding value to a basic resale rights product is by compiling the product with other related resale rights products, and coming up with a new package of products (that only you are selling). For example, going back to the SEO ebook, you could add additional bonuses as I've already mentioned, but alternatively you could create an entirely new product by creating a compendium of SEO-related products. This is a highly effective way of outselling your competitors.

Whatever your sales angle, the key to success with resale rights products is to be different, and to make your offer stand out by adding value to the product. Many resellers try and compete on price, which only leads to more and more people lowering the price and devaluing the product, until it inevitably ends up on eBay for $0.99.

If you compete on value, you can maintain a higher price by adding value to the product, using the methods I've already discussed, and therefore generate a lot more profits than your competitors because your target market will be more inclined to buy from you.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

However in most instances many people find that there are also many other people selling these same products, and so they subsequently fail to generate any real profits from resale rights products because the competition is so stiff. So how can you outsell your competition?

Well one of the most important factors in determining how much money you can generate is the actual product itself. Be very selective in choosing which resale rights products you are going to promote. For optimum profits you ideally want to find fresh and innovative products that have just been released and have therefore not yet reached saturation point. That's not to say you can't do well from promoting older products, because you can if they are of good quality, and have not yet been heavily promoted.

Another thing you should do is to actually get to know the product yourself before you start selling it, to ensure it is of a high quality. Promoting poor quality products will only damage your reputation in the long run.

Once you've found a quality product, you should then aim to create your own unique selling angle, so your offer stands out from your competition.

One way of doing this is by creating your own sales page for the product. Many people simply upload the sales page that came with the product, and start driving traffic to that page. However, this is what most other resellers are doing as well, so by creating your own sales copy, that is ideally better than the original copy, you can easily make more sales than your rivals.

Not only can you use your own sales copy, but you can also add your own unique bonuses to the product. These should complement the product you are selling. For example, if you were selling an ebook on SEO, then to make your offer stand out, you could also add other SEO-related ebooks or software that you have the rights to, as additional bonuses.

Other bonuses that work well are things like training videos, that you can easily compile nowadays, that will help the buyer use the product that they have purchased, or a personal consultation from yourself, if the price of the product is high enough to make this worthwhile.

Similarly another way of adding value to a basic resale rights product is by compiling the product with other related resale rights products, and coming up with a new package of products (that only you are selling). For example, going back to the SEO ebook, you could add additional bonuses as I've already mentioned, but alternatively you could create an entirely new product by creating a compendium of SEO-related products. This is a highly effective way of outselling your competitors.

Whatever your sales angle, the key to success with resale rights products is to be different, and to make your offer stand out by adding value to the product. Many resellers try and compete on price, which only leads to more and more people lowering the price and devaluing the product, until it inevitably ends up on eBay for $0.99.

If you compete on value, you can maintain a higher price by adding value to the product, using the methods I've already discussed, and therefore generate a lot more profits than your competitors because your target market will be more inclined to buy from you.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

How To Profit

2008-07-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

How To Profit From Untapped Affiliate Markets
Affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative as we all know, but when you're just starting out it can be daunting looking for affiliate products or programs to promote because most of them are already being heavily promoted by more experienced affiliate marketers than yourself.

So how can you find untapped, and therefore potentially highly profitable products to promote as an affiliate?

Well let's start off with Clickbank, the leading retailer of digital products, and one of the most popular affiliate networks.

You're probably wondering why I'm mentioning Clickbank, as most of these products have incredibly fierce competition, but because they sell so many products there are still some very profitable opportunities.

For example, most people naturally go straight to the best-selling products in each category to find products to promote. However, while it's a natural assumption to make that all the best products on Clickbank are the biggest sellers, you will often find some hidden gems that haven't yet taken off for whatever reason, that you can make very good profits from promoting on PPC search engines, in email promotions, on your websites, etc.

That's one way of profiting from Clickbank products. An even better way is to find new products and promote them heavily as soon as they go on sale, particularly the quality products that have strong sales pages. I'm not talking about the internet marketing / make money products here, as these are often heavily promoted by the internet marketing gurus, but the various different niche products which have far less competition.

This can be extremely lucrative, and is now very easy to do because there are specialist sites that will allow you to constantly scan for any new products that have just entered the marketplace.

Okay, let's now look beyond Clickbank, as there are many other untapped affiliate markets out there.

Do a search for 'affiliate networks' and you will come across hundreds of different affiliate networks, each of which will often list plenty of companies and their respective products that you can promote as an affiliate.

These networks present plenty of opportunities because the sheer volume of companies out there that have an affiliate program means that there will inevitably be some companies that are under-represented by affiliates, particularly on Google Adwords and other PPC search engines.

This is particularly true outside of the US, where you will generally find that there is far less competition in both the organic search results and the paid search results. Furthermore, if you look outside of the US, and look out for companies that don't belong to an affiliate network but instead have their own individual affiliate program, you can make substantial profits as you will have far fewer competitors.

This leads me on to my final point – promoting affiliate programs in non-English speaking countries. While you will find slightly less competition promoting affiliate products in countries like the UK, Canada and Australia, you will find that you will have substantially less competition in the various non-English speaking countries of the world.

This is potentially an absolute goldmine. The problem you have of course is not finding suitable products, but translating your sales page or website into a different language. Most translation software simply won't cut it as they very rarely translate perfectly into the natural language, and therefore will look amateurish, which will adversely affect your affiliate commissions.

The best way of translating your website, therefore, is by going directly to a native in-country translator. You can do this either through making friends with someone from that country over the internet, or by going to one of the many freelance sites out there and hiring someone to do the work for you.

Okay that basically sums up just some of the ways you can find affiliate products to promote that have limited competition. Remember there are so many opportunities out there because you will never run out of companies to promote. The world's a big place and there will always be good companies out there who need more affiliates in all kinds of different niches.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free money-making tips and bonuses.

How To Leverage

2008-07-26T05:15:00.000-07:00

How To Leverage Other People's Lists To Build Your Own List

List building should be the main priority of any online business.

Having your own in-house list of opt-in subscribers allows you to send marketing messages or recommendations via email to your prospects many times over, increasing your chances of making a sale, or making multiple sales if you're an affiliate marketer.

The tricky part is actually building a decent sized list to begin with that you can start profiting from.

In my experience the best way is undoubtedly by using other people's lists. What I mean by this is simply finding other marketers who have a good sized list, finding a way of accessing that list, and persuading them to join your list.

These people are the ideal people to have on your list because they are already familiar with the concept of receiving email messages from online marketers. Also if they're already subscribed to one marketer's newsletter, and are prepared to join yours as well, then they are, in all probability, happy to not only receive offers from you, but to spend money with you as well. In other words, they're the perfect subscriber that every marketer wants on their list.

So how do you access these other marketers' lists?

Well my preferred method is through writing articles, like this one you're reading at the moment. Writing good quality articles and submitting them to as many article directories as you can will result in a lot of people reading your articles, and subsequently clicking on the link to your site (where your own opt-in page is located) which you should include in the resource box.

More importantly, however, is the fact that these article directories are used by ezine and newsletter publishers to find content for their subscribers. If they pick up your article and include it in their next edition, then your article could potentially be read by several thousand subscribers, who may then click through to your opt-in page and sign up to your newsletter.

To increase your chances of your article being included in ezines, you should also submit your articles directly to the ezine publishers themselves, rather than relying on the off-chance that they will find your article in an article directory.

You should now start to see why so many marketers are using articles to promote their business and drive traffic to their sites. You can get a lot of good quality, targeted subscribers very quickly just by using this method alone, however there are other ways that you can get your site seen by other marketers' subscribers.

One free way is through finding ezine owners who allow their subscribers to place adverts in their ezine for free. This is obviously not as effective as writing articles as less people tend to take any notice of the free ads section of ezines. However, it's free so you might as well use it, even if it's just a one-time offer to new subscribers. You may only get one new subscriber from it, but you never know how much money you could potentially earn from that one person in the future.

A more effective way is by actively purchasing prominent ads in ezines. These cost more simply because they get seen more. Prices vary depending on where in the ezine you want your ad to feature. Writing articles is my preferred method of ezine advertising (albeit an indirect form of advertising), but when I do pay for advertising I don't tend to use positional ads, but instead opt for solo ads. These have constantly got me the best results, and the most subscribers, because they are sent separately from the ezine, so each subscriber only sees your message.

To conclude, there are many ways to build your list that I haven't even touched upon in this article. However, if you want a quality list, ie highly targeted opt-in subscribers who are likely to spend money with you, then advertising, either indirectly through articles, or directly through free or paid advertising in other marketers' newsletters, will deliver the type of subscriber every marketer wants.

James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses.

How To Get Free

2008-07-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

How To Get Free Traffic To Your Website

Many website owners start a website and find they only have a limited budget, if any, to spend on advertising.

This is not necessarily a problem, however, because there are several ways of promoting your site for free.

The most obvious way is to submit your site to sites offering free classified ads. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of these sites on the internet. Start with some of the more popular ones and begin experimenting with different ad copies to see which ads attract the most readers, and stick with them when posting on other free classified sites.

You can also sign up to various traffic exchanges, and promote your site to other users. This is a great way of getting guaranteed hits to your site, although it is untargeted traffic. I recommend manual exchanges over automatic because this way people have to physically click on ads themselves, so more people will actually see your site. For optimum results you should join 8-10 of the largest traffic exchanges, and download a browser such as crazybrowser, which will allow you to have upto 10 windows open in the same page. Therefore you can surf them all at the same time, and quickly amass hundreds of hits to your site.

Submitting your site to directories is also a good way of getting free traffic to your site. Plus not only will you get a small steady stream of traffic, but it will also benefit you in terms of search engine rankings. You want to target high pagerank (from the downloadable Google toolbar) directories, and those where your site will be listed on a high pagerank page. This will boost your own pagerank, and help you achieve higher rankings in the future, allowing you to get subsequent free traffic from the search engines.

Similarly getting links from other related sites, either one-way or more commonly reciprocal links, will also improve your pagerank, and search engine rankings. If you are able to get links from popular sites, or get prominent links, for example from a home page of a popular site, then you can get a lot of free traffic from these sites.

Safelists are a traditional form of free advertising, and although not as effective as they once were, they can still deliver reasonable results, particularly if you are building a list of subscribers. A safelist is essentially just of list of opt-in email subscribers, who are free to send and receive emails to and from each other. You should make sure you use a free email address as your inbox will be filled with hundreds of emails.

Posting on popular forums that allow sig files (external links at the bottom of each post) can be a very effective way of receiving free traffic to your site. You should create a compelling link in your sig file, and the link should use anchor text which contains your main keyword(s) for SEO purposes. You should then make helpful and useful posts to these forums, which will build your reputation and get your link seen of course. Just make sure you don't post worthless posts, just so you can promote your sig file.

A truly viral way of getting lots of free traffic to your site is by writing and creating your own free report or ebook, based on the subject of your site. This should include links to your site embedded within it. You can then contact popular related sites, free ebook sites, ezine owners or people with large lists, etc, and offer your free ebook to them, and tell them that they have permission to freely distribute it on their site or to their subscribers.

Finally, another great viral advertising method which can also result in a large increase in traffic over time is by writing articles. Simply write informative articles related to your site and submit them to as many article directories as possible. Each article should contain a resource box which tells the reader about yourself and also includes that crucial link (using keyword rich anchor text if possible) to your site. For even greater results you can track down ezine owners with large lists who accept article submissions, and submit your articles directly to them, offering you immediate access, if accepted, to potentially thousands of readers.

As you can see you don't necessarily need to pay out lots of money to promote your website successfully. There are some equally effective free methods that can deliver excellent results, particularly those last two methods that I mentioned, writing free reports and articles.

Whatever methods of advertising you choose to persue, you should make sure that you use some kind of ad tracking software to track your results. This will tell you which methods of promotion are delivering results, and are worth continuing, and which ones are simply not worth wasting your time over.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses.

How To Find

2008-07-26T05:10:00.000-07:00

How To Find Your Own Profitable Niche

To start making money online relatively quickly, you need to find those subject areas that are not currently over-saturated by other marketers. You need to find your own niche, and one that is relatively uncompetitive.

Topics like health, internet marketing, gambling, etc, are all fiercely competitive, and very difficult for inexperienced marketers to make any decent money from. You can of course target these markets over time, but I recommend finding your own niche first, and marketing to those people in these more narrow markets. These people are most likely not yet over-exposed to traditional marketing methods associated with internet marketing like squeeze pages, opt-in forms, sales letters, and so on, so you are more likely to be successful.

A potentially profitable niche would be one that has a decent number of keyword searches conducted every month, I would say at least a few thousand, and one where you could potentially achieve the number one spot, or at least get on the first page of results, for this keyword with a pagerank of 5 or less. This is Google's measure of how many links and the quality of links that a site has, and although it is not the only deciding factor, a higher figure will generally result in a higher ranking.

If you carry out a good link-building campaign, and fully optimize your website, it is not too difficult to achieve a pagerank of 5 or more within just a few months, and start climbing up the rankings. However, you have to remember that it can take several months for this high PR to be rewarded with a good ranking, particularly with Google and Yahoo.

To begin thinking up potential niches I recommend starting off with a blank piece of paper, or a blank page on your computer, and start brainstorming. Start listing all the things you're interested in, and also break these down into smaller, more narrow subjects as well.

You can also find out what other people online are talking about. Visit blogs, article directories, forums, groups, etc, and see which subjects seem to be cropping up over and over again. Again list any related keywords you can think of. You never know, one of these may be a potential goldmine.

Next take a look at the book and magazine sections of Amazon, and see which type of publications people are currently buying by looking at the top 100 or bestsellers list. Similarly you can go to Ebay and find out which items are selling more than others, and are therefore currently in demand.

Also look around you, closer to home. Visit libraries for potential ideas, and also go into newsagents, and look at the magazine section. If there's a magazine on a particular niche subject then there must be a decent demand for it, otherwise it wouldn't be in circulation.

Just be creative and you will soon have a large list of potential subjects and related keywords. Once you have this information you are ready to start conducting keyword research, as I mentioned earlier. There are various tools available, both free and paid services, but a good place to start is Yahoo's search marketing site. Just keep entering the keywords you've gathered, and you will soon uncover high demand, low supply keywords that you could potentially base a website on, and start making some money from.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses.

How To Choose

2008-07-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

How To Choose A Profitable Domain Name

Choosing a domain name for your website is a very important decision, and should not be taken lightly.

A bad choice of name could seriously affect the potential profitability of your online business, and prevent it achieving as much success as it should do.

There are many factors you should consider when selecting a domain name.

Firstly, you should try and include your main keyword(s) in your name if at all possible. This will help your site in terms of search engine rankings, because search engines generally rank websites slightly higher if they include their main keyword(s) in their domain name.

In saying that though, ideally it should be relatively short and easy to remember. This is fairly obvious, but is a mistake that a lot of webmasters make. I always prefer names without any dashes or numbers in, as this increases the risk of people mistyping your address into their browsers, and try to keep them as short and as memorable as possible.

Sometimes though it's just not possible or desirable to include your keywords in your domain name. For example, your main keyword terms or phrases could be two or three words long, and if they're long words as well, then any available domain name you find that contains these keywords may simply be too long. Also, you may decide that any domain name containing your main keywords would be too generic and unmemorable, so in this instance you would probably have more success trying to brand yourself, and creating a unique, distinctive domain name, that sets you apart from your competition.

Indeed a lot of major companies now prefer to brand themselves with a memorable domain name, and don't include any keywords at all in their name. You only have to look at some of the biggest companies online to see evidence of this. A lot of offline companies also do this when building an online presence, by simply using their offline company name as their domain name.

One other thing to consider is that you should not use a trademarked name in your own domain name. This is again fairly obvious, but can be a serious problem. You should double-check before you choose a domain name as you could potentially face legal action in the future when the company who owns the trademarked name finds out about your site. At the very least they could demand that you give up the right to the domain name, which could be catastrophic to your business if you have to suddenly drop your name and go for a completely new one.

Finally, whatever name you choose, I recommend, if at all possible, to choose a name with the suffix .com. This will instantly give your website increased credibility, as people still refer to online businesses as dot-coms, even those people that have never used the internet. Also I know from personal experience that when I browse various websites I will always give more credence to a website ending in .com, than one ending in .info or .biz, for example.

James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses

How To Build

2008-07-26T05:03:00.000-07:00

How To Build Your List For Free Using Google Adwords
There are numerous ways you can go about building your list, but in my opinion using Google Adwords, and indeed other pay-per-click sites, is one of the best ways of building a highly targeted list of responsive subscribers.

Not only that, but if done correctly, you can effectively build your list for free, as I will demonstrate in the remainder of this article.

I own numerous websites in a variety of niches, and have successfully built up large lists of subscribers for a lot of these sites. A large percentage of these subscribers have come from Google Adwords alone, and best of all it's hardly cost me anything at all.

It all comes down to one thing – Backend Commissions.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Find targeted, but relatively cheap keywords you can use to advertise your site on Google Adwords (less than $0.40 per click). The lower the better, and as any Adwords expert will tell you, you should start off by bidding low to be placed in the top 5-10 results in the pay-per-click results, and concentrate on maximising your click-thru rate with a compelling headline and compelling sales copy, to obtain a higher position without having to increase your cost-per-click.

2. Create an opt-in page and send the traffic you receive to this page. This site has to be compelling enough for the visitors you receive to fill out the opt-in form to subscribe to your list. You should offer a free report and/or bonus to get as many visitors to subscribe as possible.

3. Here's the crucial part. On your thank you page that your visitors are sent to after they have filled-in your form, you should place links to either your own product, or to a quality affiliate product that you can earn commissions from.

This is a highly effective way of earning backend commissions and effectively recouping your advertising costs, if you have a good offer. You'd be surprised at just how many people purchase from this thank you page. In my experience a typical response rate is often anywhere between 2% and 10%, and for certain sites I've received a 30% success rate, so in some instances I have actually made more money from sales than I actually paid out in pay-per-click advertising. Therefore, I'm effectively building my list for free, and earning small profits along the way.

If you think about it, it's not surprising people take you up on your offer because they have already trusted you enough to leave their name and email address with you, so why wouldn't they take you up on your offer?

One thing I will say though is that the product or offer that you place on your thank you page must be affordable (I would say $47 or less) otherwise you may find that none of your opt-in subscribers take you up on your offer. Look at it objectively and ask yourself whether you'd be tempted to purchase the offer if it was someone else's site, and you were the one that had just opted in.

In addition to using your thank you page as a way of recouping your advertising costs, another good way of achieving this goal is by giving away free reports or ebooks to your opt-in subscribers which contain your affiliate links. This provides another way of earning backend commissions, and although, in my experience, not quite as profitable as the thank you page method, can still deliver the occasional sale, which all helps to cover your pay-per-click advertising costs.

To sum up then, if you're building your list, make sure that you are fully utilising your thank you page as a way of earning commissions. If done correctly, you can successfully recoup your Adwords costs, or indeed those costs that arise from any other forms of promotion, and build your list for free. As I have hopefully demonstrated, this thank you page can be a very profitable page of your website, but unfortunately most people simply don't take advantage of this space and leave it blank, or just provide basic instructions for completing the opt-in process. I've been guilty of this myself in the past, but I now make sure that I have a way of receiving backend commissions on the thank you page of all of my niche websites.

Admittedly, there are some niches where the high cost-per-click means that it is very hard to recoup your advertising costs completely from backend commissions, but even so, you can still claw back some of your costs by using the methods I've discussed in this article.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

How Can I Start

2008-07-26T04:59:00.000-07:00

How Can I Start Making Money Online?
This is a question I see being asked so many times in various forums. How can little old me start making money online? Well in this article, I'm going to reveal the exact strategy that I have used to consistently make money online.

This strategy involves finding an information product that you can sell, and selling it to a target market.

The first thing you need, therefore, is a product. There are basically three ways you can go here. You can either buy a product that comes with resale rights, buy a private label rights product and either sell it as is, or make changes to and improve the product, or you can create an entirely new product (which will probably generate you the most profits).

Then you need to price the product and create a simple sales page. It's beyond the scope of this article to explain how to price your product, and create a highly-converting sales page, but there's plenty of free material available on the internet that covers these topics.

Once you have your product, the next thing you should do is to create a free report that is essentially a mini-version and teaser product for the main product that you are selling. In other words, this free report should have only one objective – to encourage readers to go on and purchase the main product.

For example, say your main product was a comprehensive guide to forex trading. Your free report, therefore, could be “10 Common Mistakes That Forex Traders Make”, for example, which would only cover a very small part of your overall product, so you're not giving too much away. Within this report and at the end of the report, you could sell the benefits of purchasing your main product, and include prominent links to your sales page.

The next step is to create an opt-in page where this free report can be downloaded in exchange for the visitors' name and email address. This will allow you to follow-up with your subscribers via email and continue to push your product and it's benefits, even after they've read your report (in case they haven't yet taken the desired action of buying your main product).

Then it's simply a case of driving as much traffic as you possibly can to this opt-in page, where the automated sales process begins.

The best ways are through writing articles and submitting them to various article directories and related ezines, posting on relevant forums (that allow sig files), advertising on Google Adwords and other PPC search engines, and through various methods of social networking. You could also create a blog linking to and promoting your main product to help with search engine optimization.

There are numerous ways of making money online, and this is just one of the methods that I have used in the past, but it is highly effective. The great thing about this method is that it works in so many niches, so you can simply move from niche to niche and keep on creating additional profitable information products.

Once you become good at creating your own products you can move on to the next level, and start using the power of affiliates and joint venture partners to generate additional sales, and increase your profits dramatically.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free money-making tips and bonuses.

Have You Started

2008-07-26T04:57:00.000-07:00

Have You Started Building Your Virtual Real Estate Empire Yet?
In the offline world, a real estate empire is something that every property investor strives to achieve.

Similarly, in the online world, many webmasters and business owners aim to create and manage a network of profit-generating websites, all earning them income, and creating long-term wealth. These profit-pulling websites are essentially a form of virtual real estate.

Many people make the mistake of building a website and spending all of their time on that one website. They add content, build links, etc, to build that website's presence, which is perfectly fine, but it's very dangerous to rely on the income from one website alone because of other factors that are beyond your control.

For example, your income may depend heavily on the traffic you receive from the search engines. So if, for example, the search engines change their algorithms one day, you may suddenly find your website has dropped significantly in the search engines, and you've lost most of your traffic. Similarly, if you are selling your own products, you may suddenly find that the demand for your products has slowly dwindled away and you now have an unprofitable website.

One way of negating this risk is to create your own virtual real estate portfolio. This way, if you have multiple profitable websites, even if one or two of your websites become unprofitable, you still have other websites earning you money.

Virtual real estate is similar in many ways to the real-world property market, in that in general terms the value of your websites should increase over time. This is mainly because when you create websites, and consistently build quality incoming links to these sites, over time as your site ages, you will be rewarded for building these links with a higher page rank and higher search engine rankings. This not only increases your chances of making more profits through increased traffic, but also enables you to charge more for links or advertising space on your website, and also increases the value of your website if you wish to sell it at some point.

One thing you should bear in mind, however, is that if you're serious about building your virtual real estate empire, for long-term profits you have to make sure you're building quality websites that will stand the test of time. Junk sites will often receive low rankings, or may even get de-indexed completely, wiping out profits overnight. One thing you have to ask yourself is that if someone from Google or Yahoo, for example, visited your site, would they come to the conclusion that your site offers real quality content, or provides products that would satisfy it's visitors, and therefore merits high search engine rankings? You should be able to answer yes to this question for every website in your virtual real estate portfolio, for consistent long-term success.

So to conclude, just get out there and start building your virtual real estate empire right now. It's easier than you think. You don't need to create lots of websites that sell a certain product or range of products. You can simply create websites which provide information, where you could then display Google Adsense or Yahoo ads, for example, sell advertising space to other webmasters, or include affiliate links to products you're affiliated with. Not only that but you could also build a list of subscribers for each website through an opt-in form, so you can market to these people over and over again legitimately through email, increasing your profits further.

It is a time-consuming process marketing these websites to make them profitable, and certainly too big a subject to cover in this article, but the long-term financial rewards that comes from owning your own virtual real estate empire definitely makes it worthwhile.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

Why Is Viral Marketing

2008-07-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

Why Is Viral Marketing So Powerful?
Viral marketing is without doubt one of the most effective forms of marketing out there, and one of the cheapest as well.

While a number of people will spend huge sums of money advertising their online business, with no guarantees of making any return on their investment, the smart marketers are using the power of viral marketing to drive hordes of traffic to their sites. So why is viral marketing so powerful, and how can you utilize it to it's full potential?

Viral marketing is best achieved when you initially create something of value that will subsequently spread around the internet like a virus, as people pass it on and effectively promote it themselves, meaning no further action is required from yourself.

This makes viral marketing extremely powerful because it is often very cheap to implement, if done correctly, and the results can be almost instantaneous. Not only that, but as word spreads, the overall effects can be long-lasting and you can often continue to see results in years to come.

As you can see, this is a far quicker and more cost-effective way to drive targeted visitors to your site than spending many weeks and months trying to optimize your site to get high search engine rankings, for example, which can take several months before you start to see any results.

So how do you successfully create this viral effect?

Well the first method I want to discuss is writing articles. This is one of my favourite ways of generating traffic to my various websites. By writing good quality articles and distributing them to various article directories you can get significant traffic not only from the article directories themselves, but also as a result of ezine publishers picking up your article and running it in their ezine.

Because you can include a resource box with each article, where you can provide a link to your site, you can generate significant traffic from people clicking this link to find out more about you and your website. For greater distribution you can even approach website owners and ezine publishers directly to offer them your articles.

Another form of content that you can produce relatively easily, that can be passed around virally, are free reports and ebooks. Again by creating good content, placing links to your site within the content, and offering giveaway rights, you can effectively see your work being shared all over the internet as people offer it to their list, offer it as a bonus to a paid product, upload it to a forum, etc.

To create an even greater viral effect, you can make parts of the content rebrandable. For example, by placing affiliate links within your content, and stating that the recipient of the report can change these affiliate links to their own, there is a greater incentive for them to pass on the report to others.

Another way of creating a viral effect with your reports or ebooks is by not making the product free, but instead offering master resale rights to the product. This is also very effective because people can actually profit from selling as many copies of your work as possible.

The last point I want to make relates to the actual website that you are trying to drive traffic to. You should try and make your website as compelling and unique as possible so people will gladly talk about your site on forums, blogs, and social networking sites. Don't be afraid to be different or do things that other websites aren't doing because this is what will make people talk about your site and share it with other people.

Let me give you a case in point. One of my niche websites talks about tips and strategies for winning on betting exchanges. I was a full-time trader on the exchanges for four years so I know quite a lot about this area. Anyway, instead of selling this information in the form of an ebook, like many marketers are doing, I gave away this information for free on my site.

This had a dramatic viral effect because although I have promoted the site to some extent, the vast majority of my traffic (around 400 visitors per day) comes from other people talking about my site on forums, discussion boards, and social networking sites. Therefore this means I have a constant supply of traffic to my site with no additional effort needed from myself. I simply cash the cheques from the strategically placed affiliate links on my site.

So to conclude, if you haven't yet considered viral marketing as a way of driving traffic to your site, then you should seriously start considering it. It's one of the most underused but effective ways of driving traffic to your site.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free money-making tips and bonuses.

Why Are People

2008-07-26T04:54:00.000-07:00

Why Are People Unsubscribing From My List?
This is a question many online marketers who own their own list, particularly those relatively inexperienced marketers, ask themselves on a regular basis. No-one wants to see people unsubscribing from their list.

It essentially amounts to someone telling you that your products are rubbish, your messages are rubbish, you're offers are rubbish, hell you're just rubbish! Each unsubscribe request is like a stab in the heart. Right...?

Wrong. This is completely the wrong mindset to have.

Firstly, people unsubscribe from marketers' lists for any number of reasons. They may only have signed up to receive your free bonuses, they may find that they're simply not interested in the products or content you're offering them, or it may just be a case of them cutting down on the number of newsletters and emails that they are receiving in their inbox every day.

That's perfectly normal and is not a bad thing at all if these people unsubscribe. If they are freebie seekers, or have no interest in the products that you are promoting, then there's no point having them on your list in the first place. You only want quality prospects on your list, people who want to learn from you, or look forward to receiving emails from you. It's these people you want on your list because they are a lot more receptive to your offers.

Even the greatest online marketers have a small percentage of unsubscribe requests on a daily basis. It's a perfectly normal occurance. Just think of it as an exercise in improving the quality of your list. What would you rather have, a list of 1000 keen subscribers who love receiving offers from you and regularly buy your products or recommendations, or 100,000 freebie seekers who have absolutely no interest in your offers and are unlikely to ever buy anything from you?

In saying that though, if your unsubscibe rate becomes too high, say 5-10%, or even higher, then you may have to sit down and analyze your email marketing strategy. In this instance you may find you are losing a percentage of quality subscribers who were originally interested in receiving offers from you, but you've gone about it all wrong in your emails to them.

For example, a common way of losing potentially good quality, receptive subscribers is by bombarding them with lots of product offers only, and not offering any real content. People will soon realise this and see that they're essentially just another customer, and you're only interested in selling them something. You have to give something back to your subscribers. Educate them, offer free and useful content occasionally, personally answer any emails you receive, and just build relationships. This is the key to building a good quality, receptive list.

To conclude then, just keep building your list, and don't let the small number of unsubscribe requests you receive get you down. This is a normal occurance. Just concentrate on offering a quality newsletter, which although may contain some product offers or recommendations, also includes good informative content as well. If you do this then you know that the small number of subscribers that do choose to unsubscribe from your newsletter probably were not interested in what you had to offer in the first place, and therefore unlikely to ever buy anything from you.

Why Are Long Tail

2008-07-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Why Are Long Tail Keywords So Important?
Long tail keywords is a term you will often come across in SEO circles, and basically refers to the less popular keywords that get fewer searches per month in the search engines, but are easier to rank highly for, because there are far fewer sites competing for that term.

In short, they can be the difference between getting little or no traffic, and getting hordes of traffic to your website.

Let me explain in more depth why they are so important.

If you think of each keyword as a potential doorway into your site from the search engines, then obviously the more keywords you are optimizing your site and it's respective pages for, then the more traffic you should expect to receive.

That's correct in theory, but the reality is that if you are optimizing every page of your site for the most popular keywords in your niche, then even if you are heavily optimizing your site, you are still looking at many months before you start ranking anywhere near the top of the search engines.

So while you should target the most popular keywords in the long-term, you have to think about getting traffic in the immediate future. This can be best achieved by targeting the less popular keywords that have far less competition in the search engines.

You can use any number of keyword research tools to discover these keywords and phrases. They are usually between two and five word phrases long, and as I've already mentioned have far less websites competing for that particular phrase.

So what you will want to do is to find a popular keyword that you want to rank highly for for every page of your site, but also look for three or four of these long tail keywords or phrases, and focus on optimizing for these terms initially. This way by adopting the usual SEO methods, and having a good internal linking structure, you will start attracting traffic from the search engines to numerous pages of your site from these various different long tail keywords.

That basically explains why long tail keywords are so important in relation to SEO, but I should also point out that these longer terms are also good selling terms, and therefore convert very well. This is because these longer terms often better convey exactly what the searcher is looking for.

For example, let's say your site collects leads for a particular dentist in San Diego. Now a page optimized for the term 'San Diego dentist' would obviously have very high conversions, whereas a page optimized for the broader term 'dentists' would receive a lot more traffic (if ranked highly) but would see minimal, if any conversions. So this is another reason why you should target those long tail keywords.

This also ties in with pay-per-click advertising because while most inexperienced advertisers will target the highly searched broader terms, the advertisers who are cleaning up are those bidding on the long tail keywords that get less traffic, but are far more targeted and have far less competition.

So to conclude, if you have any kind of website and are only optimizing your site and it's respective pages for the most popular, and most competitive search terms, then you are missing out on a lot of free and targeted traffic from the search engines. This is equally applicable to pay-per-click advertising, so the importance of long tail keywords cannot be underestimated.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free money-making tips and bonuses.

What Are The Major

2008-07-26T04:52:00.000-07:00

What Are The Major Benefits Of Niche Marketing?
Many newbies hear about the riches that are being made from websites in popular markets like insurance, poker and real estate, to name just a few, and decide to target these markets themselves.

Unfortunately, however, the harsh reality is that however well-designed their website may be, the vast majority will never make any significant income from these markets, because they simply do not have the experience or the required knowledge to be able to compete with the big players in these popular markets.

The big money-earners in these markets, ie those people whose websites are at the top of the search engines for the most popular keywords, will inevitably have years of experience and will probably have thousands of links pointing to them to keep them at the top of the search engines, and because of their high profits will almost certainly have a large advertising budget as well. Therefore this is why I always recommend to people new to internet marketing that they should start off by targeting smaller markets and concentrate on dominating that smaller niche market first of all.

The major advantage of niche marketing is that in most cases your competition is significantly reduced, meaning it's a lot easier to start earning an income from that smaller niche market, and it's certainly easier to rank higher in the search engines.

It's important to note that in my experience most webmasters who run websites in these smaller niches will only have a basic grasp of SEO, and will almost certainly not be experts in this area. This even applies to the top ranked sites in these particular niches, so if you can take some time to read up on SEO and learn some of the techniques, you'll be surprised to see just how easy it is to get your website ranked highly in these smaller niches.

Let me demonstrate by showing you a real-life example. After spending a little bit of time on keyword research I've discovered a keyword phrase that, at the time of writing, gets 21,365 searches every month on Yahoo alone. The term is “peach cobbler recipe”, and after searching on Google and Yahoo, the two main search engines, it's clear that it would be fairly easy to rank highly for this term within just a few months, with good onpage search engine optimization, and a good link-building campaign.

The competing sites already at the top of the rankings, with the exception of the two top-ranked sites all have a low PR (page rank) of 3 or less, so this means that they don't have a large number of quality links pointing to their site. Therefore as it is fairly easy to obtain a PR of 4 or higher, just a basic grounding in SEO will enable you to outrank these sites and get on the first page of results. It's a fairly safe assumption to make that the webmasters of these current top-ranking sites, as I've mentioned before, are probably not experts in SEO.

In this example, you could monetize your website by selling related cookbooks as an affiliate, displaying ads, or you could simply offer a newsletter where people could receive recipes and offers from you, which would enable you to market to these people over and over again and earn profits this way.

The message that I want to get across is that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of untapped niches out there. It's just a case of going out there and finding them.

You will have far less competition in these smaller niches, and therefore you could easily become a leading player in numerous niches over time.

It's not all about SEO either. People are becoming more and more accustomed to buying information products online, and they are doing so in all kinds of niches. Therefore you could fill a niche by creating your own information product and marketing it to this niche. You could then offer a generous commission to affiliates to promote the program for you, and, if carried out successfully, this would allow you to make a very nice income from this niche without having to build a website and spend time optimizing it until it gets high search engine rankings. You can simply advertise it yourself, or better still allow your affiliates to advertise for you.

So to conclude, just go out there and fill those smaller niches. Some niches will already have attracted the likes of myself, and other experienced marketers, but the world is constantly evolving and new niches are appearing all the time, so there's no excuse for not finding your own profitable niche market.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

What Are The Best Types

2008-07-26T04:47:00.000-07:00

What Are The Best Types Of Products To Promote As An Affiliate?
Think of any product nowadays and you can be pretty sure there's an affiliate program attached where you can earn commissions on any sales of that product that you may make as an affiliate.

But with all this choice how do you decide which products you should be promoting?

As a list owner, I get asked this type of question quite a lot by my subscribers, and my answer is always the same. Rather than chase those products with high commissions, I recommend starting off my promoting products that offer commissions on a recurring basis. Classic examples of such products include autoresponders, web hosting services, and membership sites.

These sites will generally pay you a certain percentage in commission for every person you sign up and for every month they remain a member. So therefore, you can see that by promoting these types of products, you can create a constant residual income for yourself every single month, with no extra effort needed on your part.

The great thing about these types of products, particularly autoresponders and web hosting providers, is that if you can find and promote really top quality providers, you will find that very few members will change to a different provider because they are so happy with their current service. So you can potentially earn recurring monthly commissions for many years.

Compare this with the one-time commission that the vast majority of companies pay out and you can see exactly why I recommend that you find products that pay out recurring commissions. Sure you can promote products that pay one-time commissions, but make sure that you spend at least some of your time promoting products that offer you a recurring residual income, so you know you have a steady monthly income coming in in future months.

Other products that I recommend you promote are those that pay commissions on a two-tier basis. By that I mean products that pay out not only a commission for each direct sale you make, but also pay you a set commission on any sales that your customers may make.

For example, let's say you are promoting a product that costs $100, and which pays out 30% commission on every sale you make, and 10% on any sales your customers make. So in this case you can see that not only can you make $30 per sale, but you also earn $10 for every sale your customers make as an affiliate, so again your chances of earning additional income are greatly enhanced, with no extra effort needed on your part.

So to sum up, and to answer the original question, in my opinion the best types of products to promote as an affiliate are those that offer recurring commissions, or those that provide additional income opportunities such as two-tier commissions. These types of programs require the same level of effort to promote as products that pay one-time commissions, yet can offer far greater financial rewards.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

The SEO Benefits

2008-07-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

The SEO Benefits Of Interlinking All Your Web Pages

Many webmasters spend a lot of time optimizing their home page only. They do this by optimizing onpage factors like H1 tags, title, keyword density, alt tags, etc, and offpage factors like the number and quality of inward links from other sites. That's fine and is something you should definitely do,

but you should also take some time to optimize all of your inner web pages as well.

This is because if you can get a good pagerank for all of your inner pages, as well as your home page, it increases the chances of these pages being ranked highly in the search engines for their chosen keywords, and increases the number of visitors you could get.

So how do you achieve this? Well firstly I recommend that all of your main web pages are just one click away from your home page. You should have a well-structured navigation menu on your home page. Each link within the menu should be an anchor text link containing your main keyword(s). For example, let's say you had an inner page about hair loss. Now you may have done keyword research and found the term “hair loss” to be too competitive, so let's say you have decided to optimize your web page for the less competitive term “male hair loss”. In this example, your link from the navigation menu should be “male hair loss” rather than “hair loss”.

You can dramatically enhance this interlinking structure and boost the pagerank of your inner web pages further by including this navigation menu on all of your inner web pages. This means that all of your main inner web pages are always just one click away and will dramatically boost the number of inward links that each page has. This can be very powerful because with higher pagerank and more links comes higher search engine rankings, but surprisingly is something that many so-called SEO experts fail to recognise.

Another way of achieving this effect if you do not want to include a navigation menu on every page is by including a link tree on every one of your inner pages. These are those links that you often find at the bottom of pages, and are again a very good way of interlinking your web pages. As before, be sure to include your main keyword(s) within each link.

I personally include a left-hand navigation menu on all of my websites, as well as a link tree at the bottom of each web page. This ensures not only that each page of each site has the maximum number of internal inward links, which boosts my pagerank and search engine rankings, but also ensures that the visitors to the site are always just one click away from each main page of the site. This is important if they enter at one of your inner pages, because often they will then want to navigate to the home page.

To conclude, to rank highly in the search engines, you should focus on on-page optimization, and more so off-page optimization. Just as every inward link to your site from another website acts as a vote for your site, and boosts your pagerank and search engine rankings, a link from another page within your site also acts as a vote and will also have a positive effect on your ranking. A good interlinking structure within your site will ensure that every page is fully optimized and has the optimum number of links from your other pages allowing you to rank higher for all of your inner pages as well as your home page.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses.

Reinvest For Success

2008-07-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

Many people when they start to make some money online make the mistake of spending any profits they make.

Now obviously we all have living expenses which should of course be taken care of, but any surplus profits left over from your online ventures should be reinvested back into your business to achieve long term success.

I always think your primary aim as an online business should be to build a large database of subscribers, who you can contact over and over again for as long as they're subscribed to your ezine or newsletter. If you can build up a good relationship with your subscribers, over time they will become very receptive to your offers, and actually look forward to receiving your emails, meaning increased long-term profits for you.

This should be your main focus. Getting traffic to your site is something you should aim to do, but a large percentage of those people who leave your site without purchasing anything may never return to your site. However, if you encourage them to sign up to your newsletter by displaying a prominent sign-up form, or maybe creating a pop-up form, you can send them follow-up messages over time and increase your chances of making a sale.

Therefore you should reinvest any profits you make, and your time, which is also a valuable commodity, back into your business with the aim of increasing your database of subscribers.

What are the best ways of doing this?

Well I've always had great success with writing articles and submitting them not only to all the major article directories, but also directly to ezines relating to the subject of my site. This doesn't cost anything and is something I do regularly to generate a lot of traffic to my sites, which usually take the form of an opt-in page where subscribers can sign up to my newsletter, or the home page of my site which prominently displays the opt-in form.

In addition to this, you can also guarantee inclusion in an ezine, if they accept advertising, by paying the ezine owner to run your advert. This can take the form of sponsor ads, top/middle/bottom ads (top ads usually get seen the most so they obviously cost more than middle or bottom ads), and solo ads, which I've always found to be the most effective.

You could also invest in pay-per-click campaigns. This is also another effective form of advertising as you can use highly targeted keywords which ensures that any visitors are pre-qualified and will already be interested in your site when they click on the link to your site.

There are many other forms of paid advertising such as buying text links or banner space on other sites, as well as many types of offline advertising methods you could use. However, in my opinion getting your articles and paid adverts seen in related ezines, and using pay-per-click advertising are the most successful forms of advertising.

Whatever types of advertising you decide to persue, just keep reinvesting your profits (and your time) into your business and focus on growing your online business. You will reap the rewards in the long run.

James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses

Are Traffic Exchanges A Waste Of Time?

2008-07-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

This is a question I see so often in marketing forums, and annoyingly the people who respond to such a question predominantly agree that traffic exchanges are a waste of time. In this article I want to put the record straight.

The fact is that traffic exchanges DO work, and ARE an effective way of promoting your website. You just need to know how to use them correctly.

There's a common belief that traffic exchanges will only deliver untargeted, almost worthless traffic to your website. To some extent this is true. In my experience if you try to sell anything on traffic exchanges, whether it's your own product or an affiliate product, then yes maybe they are a waste of time.

However, what you need to do to get results from traffic exchanges is to create and promote a squeeze page to capture the visitors' name and email address. Offer a free product or report, for example, as an incentive for people to sign up to your list. Once they're subscribed and have opted-in to receive email messages from you, then you can begin building a relationship with them and earning their trust, before promoting products to them in due course and making money this way (you should provide good content in your emails as well, and not just product offers).

In addition to this you will get optimum results if your site is related in some way to making money online or getting more traffic, for example, as this is what most users of traffic exchanges are predominantly interested in.

To get the most success, ie the most number of subscribers to join your list, you need to maximise the hits you receive from the various traffic exchanges that you are using. There are several ways to do this (other than surfing for hours on end). You could simply buy credits, which is fine, but I personally prefer to cross-promote the various traffic exchanges and build a downline of referrals in each one, who earn me credits automatically every time they surf, eliminating the need to do a lot of surfing myself.

For example, I use crazybrowser which allows you to have multiple tabs open, and provides easy scrolling between each one, making it very easy to surf multiple exchanges at once. What I like to do is promote one exchange at a time (my referral page) on all the different exchanges and build a nice downline, and then promote another and so on until I have a nice downline in each one.

Once I have done this I can start to promote my own squeeze page and use the credits earned by my downline to receive hits to my site automatically. I do surf myself as well on occasions but it's good to know that you will receive credits even if you don't have the time to surf yourself.

Using these methods I'm adding subscribers to my list on a daily basis, and although there may be a case for arguing that traffic exchange users are not the most profitable subscribers to have on your list, I've found that some of my most profitable subscribers, ie those that spend the most money, are those who originally signed up from a traffic exchange.

To conclude then, in answer to the original question posed, traffic exchanges are most definitely NOT a waste of time. The people who claim they are are simply not using them correctly. If you promote a squeeze page which encourages people to sign up to your list, then you should attract a steady stream of new subscribers, who could earn you some nice profits in the long term.

James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses

Get Incoming

2008-07-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

10 Ways To Get Incoming Links To Your Website
Obtaining incoming links to your website fulfills two main objectives.

Firstly it increases the traffic you could potentially receive to your site because the more links you have the more traffic you should receive, and secondly, by obtaining links from pages with a good page rank you can increase your own page rank which, although not the deciding factor, will help boost your ranking in the search engines.

Listed below are ten ways in which you can obtain these sought-after links.

1. Exchange Links With Other Websites

This process, known as reciprocal linking, is common place on the internet, and is something most webmasters do. However, while it's something you should do, it's important to note that search engines place more importance on one-way links than two-way or reciprocal links.

2. Submit Your Website To Directories

This is a good way of getting one-way links to your site (if a reciprocal link is not required). There are numerous directories you can submit to, offering both free and paid submissions. When deciding on whether paid submissions are worth it, you should look at the page where your link is expected to appear and see if it has a reasonable page rank, and the number of other links that appear on that page, with the fewer the better.

3. Build A Network Of Websites And Interlink Them

When building multiple websites it makes sense to interlink them, preferably from a home page link for maximum benefit. This can be very beneficial if each of your websites is on a different server, but be careful if they are hosted on the same server, as the search engines will think you're deliberately manipulating their results, and will most likely prevent you from achieving higher rankings.

4. Write Articles

This is a very powerful method of obtaining a lot of incoming one-way links to your site. By submitting your articles, which include the all important resource box with the link to your site, to multiple article directories you can pick up backlinks from not only these article directories but from other websites who pick up your articles and include them on their website or blog.

5. Write Press Releases

Writing a compelling news-worthy press release about your site or related topic, can also result in multiple websites and news sources picking it up and linking to your site. This is a very effective way of obtaining numerous one-way links very quickly, but doesn't offer the long-term benefits that articles do.

6. Create A Blog

Blogs are very easy to create with multiple websites offering free services, so there is no excuse for not creating a blog related to and linking to your main website. You could post anything - your thoughts, articles, or affiliate program reviews, for example, but make sure you include a link to your site in the links section, and at the end of each post if appropriate.

7. Leave Comments On Blogs And Guestbooks

You've got to be careful with this method that you don't abuse it and start spamming other people's blogs or guestbooks. Leave legitimate comments, and make it look like you actually have something to contribute. For example, just saying “Great Blog!” and then leaving your link is rightly considered to be spam, and will also damage your reputation in the long run.

8. Post On Forums That Allow Sig Files

Sig files are the line(s) that appear at the bottom of each message and act as a discreet way of advertising your site. You won't get a great deal of benefit in terms of page rank, as most forums do not have a high page rank for their threads, but you will build up a good number of links, and as forums generally tend to get spidered by the search engines regularly, they will follow the links to your site and subsequently spider your site on a regular basis.

9. Write Testimonials

By writing and submitting testimonials to websites that you have previously purchased products or services from, you can get high-quality links to your site, often from the home pages of the sites in question.

10. Buy Links

The final way to obtain incoming links is by simply buying them. This can have a dramatic effect on your page rank and subsequently your search engine rankings if you can get links from PR6+ sites, however the only problem with this is that most links for sale are often for a set period of time, usually a month, and so you have to keep buying them to maintain your higher page rank and rankings.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing.

Monetize Your Newsletter

2008-07-25T21:58:00.001-07:00

7 Ways To Monetize Your Newsletter

have your own in-house list of subscribers who subscribe to your newsletter, then this newsletter should fulfill two main objectives.

Firstly, it should provide valuable content to your subscribers, so that they actually look forward to receiving your newsletter (and stay subscribed), and secondly, unless you're writing for fun, it should produce an income for you as the writer of the newsletter.

This is the area I want to focus on in this article and listed below are seven methods that you can use to successfully monetize your newsletter or ezine.

1. Promote Products

This is the most obvious way - promoting your own products, and providing endorsements and recommendations of other products that you can earn affiliate commissions from. Try to promote a few products where you can earn either recurring commissions, for example monthly membership sites, web hosting etc, or products or programs that can earn you commissions on two or more levels through subaffiliates or downline members, to create long-term residual income streams. The one thing I will say about this though is that you should not overwhelm your subscribers with product endorsements and sales pitches, you should offer them good quality content as well, otherwise you will lose a lot of subscribers.

You can also promote products discreetly, even when providing content only, by including an affiliate link or two at the bottom of each newsletter, below your name.

2. Direct Your Subscribers To Monetized Content Pages Of Your Website

This is a great way of providing valuable content and earning money at the same time. I do this a lot with the articles I write. When I write articles and add them to my site, I simply let my subscribers know that I have written a new article and direct them to the website address. By running a few ads around these articles, you should see a lot of people reading the article and inevitably clicking on a few ads. This is a great way of earning money even when you're not promoting anything.

3. Offer Rebrandable Reports To Your Subscribers

This is another indirect money earner where you can generate revenues from good quality free content. By seeking out quality reports or ebooks that can be rebranded to include your own affiliate links, you can then simply offer this report to your subscribers, providing valuable content, whilst at the same time earning money from your affiliate links within this report.

4. Promote Free Membership Sites That Have Backend Sales Or One-Time Offers

These are extremely common in the internet marketing field at the moment, although I think it's only a matter of time before internet marketers start to use them in other niches. Examples of these include free giveaway sites, where in exchange for leaving your name and email address, you receive numerous free products. A lot of these sites have one-time offers where you can receive an upgraded package, for example. Therefore you can earn money as an affiliate every time you send someone to this site who purchases this offer. The one drawback is that although you may be earning the occasional affiliate commission, you are sending your own subscribers to other sites and having them join up to other people's lists, increasing your competition.

5. Offer Paid Advertising In Your Newsletter

I would say you need at least a few thousand subscribers to go down this route otherwise you may struggle to attract any advertisers or attract any significant advertising revenue. It's not something I do myself (at the time of writing this article), as I believe I can make more money myself from my own ads than selling the ad space to other people, but it's still another option to consider.

6. Train Your Subscribers To Be Successful Affiliates And Promote Your Product(s)

This only really applies if you have your own product, but if you do it can be an extremely powerful way of generating a lot of additional sales. By constantly providing useful tips in your newsletter offering advice on how to generate significant affiliate commissions, both you and your subscribers will benefit enormously.

7. Offer One-On-One Coaching To Your Subscribers

This depends on the subject of your newsletter, and your authority as the newsletter publisher, but if you are considered an expert in your field then it's something worth considering. You could also offer this service free to people who purchase high-ticket items from you to boost your affiliate commissions.

James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses.

7 Ways

2008-07-25T21:57:00.001-07:00

7 Ways To Ensure Your Websites Are Still Profitable In 5 Years Time

Many entrepreneurs, such as myself, have created a number of websites designed to make money, but with more and more people coming online everyday,

and the competition in the various different niches increasing all the time, how can you ensure that your websites will still be around, and more importantly making money, in 5 years time?

Well I've come up with 7 ways you can secure long term profits for your various websites:

1. Keep Building Links To Your Site For SEO Purposes.

There are a number of ways you can get traffic to your websites, but nothing beats the free targeted traffic that you can get from ranking highly in the search engines for various keywords. Therefore, to ensure you get to and stay at the top of the search engines, you have to keep building links to your websites on an ongoing basis, as this is the main factor that will help you rank higher. Effective ways of doing this include writing press releases and articles, posting on forums, and exchanging links with other websites.

2. Keep Adding Fresh Content To Your Site.

This ties in with the previous point, in that not only do the search engines favour sites with lots of incoming links from related sites, but they will also reward sites that regularly add fresh content to their pages with higher rankings. Adding RSS feeds is a good way of doing this, but even better ways are those that involve visitor participation, such as forums and comments sections, because this increases the chances of your visitors returning to your site in the future.

3. Keep Building Your List Of Subscribers.

This should be your main priority because this is where the vast majority of your income is likely to be coming from. By having a list of receptive subscribers who you have built up a relationship with, you can generate a lot of income by sending occasional product recommendations to them via email, which can be either your own products, or those that you are promoting as an affiliate. This also provides security in case your inevitable increasing competition starts to outrank you in the search engines, because you will still have your own list that you can market to if your traffic starts to fall.

4. Reinvest Your Profits.

This applies to all types of businesses, and is extremely important. It's all too easy to fritter away any initial profits you may make from your websites, but you have to think about your long term profits. Your amount of competition is only going to increase in future years, so you have to constantly invest money into your online ventures to ensure you stay one step ahead of your competition.

5. Brand Yourself And Your Business As Much As Possible.

Whatever niche you are in, one of your main aims should be to brand yourself and your business to ensure that not only do people in your niche begin to recognise and remember your name, but they also start to see you as a leading authority in your particular niche. One of the best ways of doing this is by regularly writing articles and submitting them to as many places as possible, including article directories, and related websites and ezine publishers in your niche.

6. Embrace New Technology And Ideas.

The internet is constantly evolving, so it's important to keep up with new technology and embrace new ideas. For example, many webmasters are using the power of social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube to send hordes of traffic to their websites. My advice is to embrace new innovations and not ignore them, because you can be sure that some of your competitors will be taking full advantage of them.

7. Never Stop Learning.

This is the final point I want to get across. It doesn't matter how successful you or your business are, it's still vitally important you keep on learning new things about how you can grow your business. Ask any successful internet marketer or business owner, and I'm pretty sure they will all tell you they are constantly reading and learning from other successful people. The ones who don't are simply being left behind, and will never be as successful as they could be. It's very often the little things you learn about that can have a major impact on your overall profits.

So to conclude, if you take all of the above factors into consideration now and in future years, you should have profitable websites for years to come in whatever niches you are in, and will not be adversely affected by increased competition.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a website and newsletter, dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing

7 Things

2008-07-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

7 Things To Consider Before Joining A Network Marketing Program

Network marketing programs, also commonly referred to as MLM or downline programs, can bring huge financial rewards if marketed well.

They provide a way of working at home and building your own monthly income through your efforts to introduce and sell the network marketing company's products or services to other people, who then introduce them to other people, and so on. It sounds simple enough but how do you know if a company is legitimate and will pay you on time or even at all, and will they be around in the long term?

In this article I have listed seven factors that I personally take into consideration before choosing to join an MLM company:

1. Are the products offered good enough to be sold on their own without the downline incentive?

The first thing you should look at is the products or services that the company is offering. If you don't believe they represent value for money, or you simply aren't impressed with them, then the likelihood is that other people won't be either. Therefore you will probably have difficulty selling the products to other people, and so your potential profits could be limited.

2. Has the company already established itself?

It's important to find out how long the company you're considering joining has been operating. Although there's no guarantees on whether a company will be around in the long-term, I still favour companies that are at least a year old. Yes some of these may subsequently go out of business at some point in the future, but at least you know they're not a fly-by-night outfit.

3. Does the company offer a good compensation plan?

Let's be honest, this is the factor that most of us are primarily interested in. Time is a very valuable commodity, so we don't want to spend it promoting a network marketing company's products unless we are being well rewarded financially for our efforts.

4. Does it offer spillover?

Spillover occurs when say for example, if the company uses a 5x5 matrix then when you refer 6 people, the first 5 will fill the top level, and the 6th person will go under one of your initial referrals creating an incentive for them to continue with the program because they are benefiting from your efforts as well as their own.

5. Does the company have a reputable owner or management team in place?

This information can be slightly difficult to find out, but in this internet age it is becoming much easier to carry out independent research. If you can't find sufficient information yourself you can almost guarantee that there will be a forum somewhere which discusses the company, and where someone has already done a background check on the owner or management team.

6. Is it strongly endorsed by other members of the company?

Forums and discussion groups are great places to obtain this information. Although most people will obviously praise the company that they are promoting in order to get more signups, you will inevitably find a few negative comments from disgruntled recruiters. It's these comments that you should read carefully. Most of the time they will be minor issues or faults, but sometimes you can come across red flag signals such as the company suddenly starting to delay payments, for example.

7. Does the company still have plenty of room to grow, or has it already reached saturation point?

This is the final point I want to mention, but nevertheless a very important one. You don't want to join a company that everyone is seemingly already a member of, and one that is already promoted heavily. For optimum results you want a company that has already established itself yet still has plenty of scope to grow and attract new members, therefore being relatively easy to promote.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer and a heavy promoter of network marketing programs. To find out which programs he is currently promoting click here:

Network marketing programs, also commonly referred to as MLM or downline programs, can bring huge financial rewards if marketed well. They provide a way of working at home and building your own monthly income through your efforts to introduce and sell the network marketing company's products or services to other people, who then introduce them to other people, and so on. It sounds simple enough but how do you know if a company is legitimate and will pay you on time or even at all, and will they be around in the long term?

In this article I have listed seven factors that I personally take into consideration before choosing to join an MLM company:

1. Are the products offered good enough to be sold on their own without the downline incentive?

The first thing you should look at is the products or services that the company is offering. If you don't believe they represent value for money, or you simply aren't impressed with them, then the likelihood is that other people won't be either. Therefore you will probably have difficulty selling the products to other people, and so your potential profits could be limited.

2. Has the company already established itself?

It's important to find out how long the company you're considering joining has been operating. Although there's no guarantees on whether a company will be around in the long-term, I still favour companies that are at least a year old. Yes some of these may subsequently go out of business at some point in the future, but at least you know they're not a fly-by-night outfit.

3. Does the company offer a good compensation plan?

Let's be honest, this is the factor that most of us are primarily interested in. Time is a very valuable commodity, so we don't want to spend it promoting a network marketing company's products unless we are being well rewarded financially for our efforts.

4. Does it offer spillover?

Spillover occurs when say for example, if the company uses a 5x5 matrix then when you refer 6 people, the first 5 will fill the top level, and the 6th person will go under one of your initial referrals creating an incentive for them to continue with the program because they are benefiting from your efforts as well as their own.

5. Does the company have a reputable owner or management team in place?

This information can be slightly difficult to find out, but in this internet age it is becoming much easier to carry out independent research. If you can't find sufficient information yourself you can almost guarantee that there will be a forum somewhere which discusses the company, and where someone has already done a background check on the owner or management team.

6. Is it strongly endorsed by other members of the company?

Forums and discussion groups are great places to obtain this information. Although most people will obviously praise the company that they are promoting in order to get more signups, you will inevitably find a few negative comments from disgruntled recruiters. It's these comments that you should read carefully. Most of the time they will be minor issues or faults, but sometimes you can come across red flag signals such as the company suddenly starting to delay payments, for example.

7. Does the company still have plenty of room to grow, or has it already reached saturation point?

This is the final point I want to mention, but nevertheless a very important one. You don't want to join a company that everyone is seemingly already a member of, and one that is already promoted heavily. For optimum results you want a company that has already established itself yet still has plenty of scope to grow and attract new members, therefore being relatively easy to promote.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer and a heavy promoter of network marketing programs

Viral Marketing

2008-07-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

Viral marketing can be a very powerful and effective strategy to get more traffic to your site, and therefore more sales. Think of viral marketing as the online equivalent of the effect that word of mouth has on small businesses in the offline world.

Most small businesses depend on their loyal customers recommending them to their friends, who tell their friends, and so on.

This is also true to some extent in the online world as well, except here you can actively encourage this process yourself by employing various marketing techniques to spread the word about your website. The first one I would like to mention is through articles. I have already discussed this in the articles section, but it should be reiterated that this is a very powerful marketing strategy. An article that you submit today will not only be picked up by websites in the coming weeks or months, but will continue to be seen by potential visitors in years to come. Now think of the potential visitors you could get if you submit a few articles a week, all year round.

If you are selling a product at your site, and have an affiliate program to increase sales, then another great viral marketing strategy is to produce a free viral ebook on a subject closely related to your site. This viral ebook could be given away to every customer who buys your product, or webmasters in a similar field who have a large database of subscribers to email to, for example.

The free viral ebook should include links to your site, which can be freely altered to include the affiliate's own affiliate link. You benefit from extra sales, and your affiliates receive extra commissions by distributing the ebook containing their affiliate link to as many people as possible.

As you can see you don't necessarily need to spend lots of money on advertising to be successful online, as these extremely cheap and simple techniques can be just as effective. If you want to be more creative, and set yourself apart from other sites, you could embrace new technology and create MP3 interviews or podcasts that again can be passed on and on, spreading virally.

Traffic Exchanges

2008-07-25T21:51:00.001-07:00

Traffic exchanges are good for getting traffic to your site, but you should remember that most of the time this traffic is untargeted, meaning 99%+ of those visitors you receive from traffic exchanges will not be interested in your site or products.

There are literally thousands of different traffic exchanges out there, but most involve some work on your part, such as manually clicking on ads, or watching an auto-rotator of ads, in order to get other traffic exchange users to your site. You can avoid this by paying for x number of hits, but as you are paying for untargeted traffic I personally don't believe it's worth it.

In the past I've tried out several different traffic exchanges and have had limited results trying to promote affiliate products. However you shouldn't rule them out completely.

I have found them to be excellent for promoting squeeze pages, which are simply pages designed with the sole purpose of capturing the visitor's name and email address. Offer a free report or bonus products to encourage them to sign up to your list. Once they have subscribed you can start to build a relationship with them, earn their trust, and promote your products in due course over a series of email messages, and earn money this way.

If you're looking at building a list of subscribers then traffic exchanges can be very effective for this. Also they are quite effective if you are looking to build a downline for example, or you are promoting products on how to get traffic, because the other users using these exchanges are most likely interested in this very subject.

The exchange I've had the best results with in this regard is Traffic Swarm, but I also use several other exchanges, such as TS25, Webbizinsider, Fast Freeway, Trafficpods, and Hitpulse, and cross-promote to try and build a downline of referrals in each one.

If you haven't already done so I recommend signing up to my newsletter (from the homepage) where you will receive the 'Amazing Traffic Formula' which offers some excellent information on getting the most out of traffic exchanges.

As with any method of promotion, use ad tracking software to track the effectiveness of any given ad, and stick with those that are producing good results.

Traffic Exchanges

2008-07-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Submission

2008-07-25T21:50:00.001-07:00

Once you have a site created, set-up with your web host, and therefore live on the internet, you need to think about getting indexed and listed in the search engines. Unless you have a large database of prospects you can email, or have a lot of affiliates promoting your site, then search engines are going to be the primary way that people will find your site.

This is therefore very important, and should be done as soon as your site goes live.

There are two main ways you can go about getting your site included in the search engines. The most traditional and obvious way is to actually tell the search engines that your site exists. This can be done by going to each individual search engine (start with the big three of Google, Yahoo and MSN), going to a link that says "submit url" or "add url" and filling out a form.

There is nothing wrong with this method, but the only trouble is is that it can take many weeks, and often several months, to get your site included in each individual search engine. Now I don't know about you, but I expect my sites to be indexed and getting good search engine rankings for my main keywords after a few months, not simply waiting to get listed.

There is a way that you can bypass this waiting period, and that's to make the search engine robots find your site, and subsequently index your site themselves. This can be very effective, and for most of my sites I've managed to get indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN in less than a week.

The key to getting indexed quickly is to get some incoming links to your site, ideally from largish sites with a good pagerank (PR) that get indexed regularly. Therefore when the robots index their site, which they do on a regular basis for high PR well-established sites with regularly updated content, the robots will come across and follow the links to your site. If these robots see enough of these links on a number of different sites, your site will get indexed very quickly, and therefore listed in the search engines.

A common method touted by various search engine experts is to simply buy a text link from a site with a pagerank of 6 or above. There are sites such as textlinkbrokers.com who offer this service. The links are usually sold on a monthly basis, but you only need to buy a one-month link, just until your site's listed.

Being the cheapskate that I am, I prefer the free alternatives to get my sites listed quickly. These have been discussed in detail in other sections, but include the following:

- Posting in popular forums on subjects related to my site, with a link to my site (keyword rich of course) in my signature.

- Creating a free blog on blogger.com relating to my site, and posting daily with a link to my site at the end of each post, and pinging it with pingomatic.com after each post is added.

- Submitting my site to directories with good PR. If you can afford it, get paid submissions to get your site listed quickly.

- Writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Article Marketer can distribute them to around 30,000+ publishers for you.

- List your site on free advertising boards, such as Inetgiant, and other popular free advertising sites. The best one of all, in my opinion, is Craigslist because of it's very high PR ranking on almost every page and category.

- Exchange links with other sites, preferably sites in the same niche as you. Link Metro and Link Market are both excellent sites for finding link exchange partners.

If you use some, if not all of these methods, then the search engines will soon spider your site after following these links from other sites. Therefore you will quickly get indexed and will start appearing in the search engines. To check whether you are indexed , simply enter the URL of your site into the search box. As soon as you are actually in the search engines you can start targeting high rankings. See Search Engine Optimization for more details

Search Engine Optimization

2008-07-25T21:48:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization is basically the process of optimizing your site to obtain high rankings in the search engines for your chosen keywords. When deciding where to place you in their results page for a specific keyword, search engines look at onpage factors and offpage factors.

I'll discuss the basics of SEO below, but if you want the definitive search engine optimisation ebook, which I think is the best free ebook I've ever come across, and one which I have learnt so much from, then please visit the home page, and enter your name and email address into the form provided.

Let's start with the onpage factors. These are things you can alter on your webpages to fully optimise your site in order to please the search engines:

- Title - This appears in the blue box at the very top of the page, and should include your main keyword(s) and be as short as possible to give them more weight.

- Header Tags - You should make a point of including these tags, and again include your main keyword(s) within them, particularly the H1 tag which is usually simply the title of your content. Other keywords should appear in sub-headings, which are your H2 tags. You should also bold and underline these titles containing your keywords.

- Keyword Density - You should include your main keyword(s) as often as possible without making the content seem spammy or nonsensical. Opinion is divided as to what the optimum percentage is regarding how often your main keyword should appear in your content. In the past a webpage with the main keyword making up anywhere between 5% and 15% of the content was considered to a well-optimised page. However I've been reading recently that Google and other search engines are starting to favour sites with less than 5%.

- Meta Tags / Descriptions - You should use meta tags to write a description of your webpage's content. This will not appear on the actual webpage, but in the description in the search engine results. It should be compelling so visitors click on the link to your site, as well as including your main keyword(s) for optimisation purposes.

- Image Tags - If you have any graphics on your site, then you should include your main keyword(s) in the alt tag of each image.

Now let's move onto offpage optimisation, which is even more important, in terms of obtaining high rankings, than onpage optimization. This can basically be summed up in one word, LINKS. You can think of each link as a vote or recommendation for your site, and the more you have the higher you will rank.

Google, and most other search engines, place great emphasis on both the quality and quantity of inward links to your site. In general terms you want to get as many as possible, but you should place more emphasis on getting quality links from sites similar in subject to your own, and from pages with high page rank (PR). The PR of a site can be viewed by downloading the Google toolbar, and is a measure of the number and quality of links pointing to a site, between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best.

I discussed all the different ways of getting links to your site in other sections. These include articles, blogs, directories, forums, traffic exchanges, and so on, but you should also actively exchange links with other sites.

There are many ways you can do this. You can simply find popular sites in the same niche as yours, find a contact form or address and write a polite email saying how much you like their site, and ask them if they would link to your site in return for you linking to their site. Make sure you add their site to your links page before you contact them, and give them the URL where their link is located.

You can also go to and join various sites who have a whole directory of sites who are all actively seeking reciprocal links. The two most popular ones are Link Metro and Link Market. Both offer free options, and are a great way of building up a good number of links to your site in a relatively short space of time. However, you should remember that search engines place more importance on one-way links than two-way or reciprocal links, so don't forget to keep writing articles and submitting to directories for those valuable one-way links.

Ultimately, the key to good search engine optimization, and obtaining those precious high rankings is to analyze your competition for your main keyword(s) and basically copy their optimization methods, but go that little bit further to outrank them. Now you can do this manually but this is really time consuming. There is an excellent piece of software that I use on all my sites to obtain high rankings and that's SEO Elite.

SEO Elite will allow you to basically analyze your competition for any keyword, and will tell you things like what sites link to them, their respective PR, how valuable each link is in terms of SEO, contact address of link partner and much more. This will enable you to contact these good link partners yourself and get them to link to your site as well.

The software will also allow you to find link partners for any keyword of your choice, as well as checking that all your current link partners are still linking back to you. It will also tell you where you rank in the major search engines for any given keyword.

There are so many invaluable features included in the software, that I couldn't now imagine trying to optimize a site without it. It really is an incredibly powerful piece of software. Please take a few minutes to visit the site by clicking here, and don't forget to go to the home page of this site and enter your name and email address to get your hands on a 90-page ebook, that will tell you everything you could possibly need to know about search engine optimization and obtaining those high rankings.

Safelists

2008-07-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

Safelists are basically lists of people who have opted in to receive email messages from, and send messages to, other people. This is a good way of getting your site seen by thousands of people, and is relatively cheap (free in some cases), particularly if you use some kind of safelist submitter that will send messages to hundreds of different safelists for you.

However, like traffic exchanges, your ultimate success with this form of promotion will depend largely on the theme of your site. For example, safelists can be a great way of building a list of people who are specifically interested in your site or products. In my experience they are not as effective if you are selling a tangible product, because if you think about it everyone on the list is interested in one thing, promoting their site or product. No-one signs up to safelists looking for good offers or potential products to buy.

Safelists do offer a number of benefits. Firstly they are a cheap way to test the effectiveness of your email sales copy or headline, before you embark on more expensive email campaigns. Remember that your email message will only get read if people open that email, and the only way of making sure this happens is to write a compelling title or call to action in the subject box. Something like "How To..." or if you are offering a free service include the word "FREE" in your message. Not surprisingly, tests have shown that emails that include the word "free" in the subject box get a much higher response rate, despite certain email providers' spam filters starting to block emails containing this and certain other words.

Another benefit is that you don't have to worry about being accused of spamming because everyone on the list has opted in to receive messages, hence the name, safelist.

The main downside of safelists is the fact that you will receive thousands of emails from the other members, so if you do decide to use safelists make sure you sign-up for and use a free email account, and not your main one.

Overall though if you are just starting out in internet marketing I would recommend trying out a few safelists, test different titles and sales copies. This will give you a good grounding for future email campaigns, particularly if you're planning on building your own list. The response rates won't be as good as your own individual list but you should still make some sales, and if not then it hasn't cost you very much to find out, with safelists being so cheap to use.

Press Releases

2008-07-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

Press releases are a link-building and traffic generating tool that are very much ignored by the majority of webmasters.

However these people are missing out on potentially hundreds of one-way backlinks to their site, and of course the extra traffic that press releases generate.

Press releases are basically short articles that you can distribute to the media, that contain newsworthy information relating to your site. It's vitally important that you have something newsworthy to say either about your site, for example a hot new product launch, or a hot topic related to the theme of your site. Don't just write a blatant ad for your site and submit it to a press release company, otherwise it will quickly be disregarded and you will have wasted your money. Also don't flood the press release agency that you use with lots of submissions. One occasional top quality newsworthy release is enough.

Written correctly, they can be used to generate a lot of publicity, and subsequently sales, for your site. To be effective the press release should have a compelling headline, and short concise content that is relevant, interesting and captivating to the reader. Include your main point(s) in your headline and opening paragraph, and expand on these points in subsequent paragraphs. The content must also be written in a journalistic way, ie look as if it's been written by a reporter, and should not contain any hype.

There are many different press release agencies that you can use, both online and offline, many of which are free. However if you want true global distribution online, and therefore the potential of many one-way backlinks and a good flow of traffic, then I recommend PRWeb, one of the largest and most reputable agencies on the internet.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

2008-07-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

As I have discussed elsewhere it can take a few months to get good search engine rankings, even with a well-optimised site and a lot of incoming links to your site, particularly in Google and Yahoo. However there is a way that you can get on the first page of results for the major search engines, even with competitive keywords, and that's through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

There are a lot of search engines offering this service but the two major ones are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. If you visit these search engines and do a search for a particular keyword, you will probably have seen the boxes on the right hand side of the search result pages. Well these are adverts that advertisers have bid on, with the highest bidder being the advertiser showing at the top, and therefore the most prominent position on the page.

Advertisers bid on specific keywords based on the price per click, so every time a search engine user types in that keyword and then clicks on your advert you pay the search engine this specified price per click. Bids can sometimes be as low as $0.05-$0.10 per click for less popular keywords, but as high as $50-$100 for the ultra competitive keywords. The higher you bid the higher you will appear in the sponsored results.

Obviously you need to make more from any sales you make from PPC advertising, than you are paying out in advertising costs. Therefore when starting out you should track your sales conversions closely, and determine what you can afford to pay per click. Look at what keywords are working and try different adverts. I also recommend starting out with less competitive keywords with very low cost-per-clicks to start off with.

The PPC ads themselves consist of a headline, and a few lines of text so you need to make them stand out from your competitors, so the person clicks on your ad and not any of your competitors. This can be a good way of paying less per click but getting more clicks than the higher bidding advertisers. For example say you are the 4th highest bidder and therefore appear 4th in the sponsored results. If you write a more compelling ad than the three other advertisers above you, then you are likely to get more clicks than them, so in this case you don't need to try and outbid them for a higher spot.

Also Google Adwords isn't based entirely on the price you bid. This is a factor, but it also rewards PPC ads that get high click-throughs with higher rankings. Therefore if you can't justify paying the highest bid, then you should start with a lower bid and then aim to write the most compelling advert to boost your click-through rate, and jump up a few places.

For a more comprehensive study of PPC advertising I can thoroughly recommend the following two ebooks:

- Adwords Miracle - This is an outstanding package which, along with Perry Marshall's course (see below), will give you all the information you could possibly need to profit from pay-per-click advertising. One of the best and most comprehensive guides I've ever purchased.

- The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords - Perry Marshall is generally regarded as the main man when it comes to Google Adwords, and this top-selling ebook is an excellent guide for anyone wanting to make money from PPC advertising.

List Building

2008-07-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

If you are serious about making money online, then you need to build an opt-in list of subscribers or prospects that you can send emails to. You may have come across the saying "The money's in the list". This is a term often quoted by successful marketers, and for good reason. Ask any internet marketer what their most valuable asset, and most will say their list of subscribers.

Let me explain why. If for example you have a new product or website launching, then if you have built up a list of say 10,000 subscribers who respect you and listen to what you have to say, then you could immediately reach all these people with one simple email. You obviously don't have to send 10,000 emails by hand, you can just use an autoresponder. This will immediately get upto 10,000 targeted visitors to your site, who are already interested in your products or sites. Even if you got just a 1% response rate, that's still 100 sales, and it didn't cost you anything either.

Obviously if you are to be respected you need to offer something of value to your subscribers. If you simply bombard them with product offers, all with your affiliate links included in the email, then you are likely to get a lot of people unsubscribe from your list.

Offering free ebooks is a good way to attract subscribers, as are free reports on how to do something, particularly if you write these yourself. You can include your affiliate or site links in these reports, or make it viral by stating that your report can be given away to other people. To keep subscribers initially, rather than signing up for the freebies, then unsubscribing when they've received them, you can offer a multi-part course or tutorial. This should be spread out over a few weeks ideally. Perry Marshall is one person who immediately springs to mind, who does this successfully.

Whatever else you do to your site, just keep building that list. Don't rely on just one source of traffic, such as search engines. You may find yourself at the top of the search engines, and get 95% of your sales from them, but what happens if the search engines suddenly change their algorithms, and you suddenly drop out of the top pages? Or maybe you suddenly get a load of sites who have overtaken you in the ranking through better use of SEO techniques, or even through using questionable black cloak tactics? If you have a decent sized list, however, this needn't be a major concern, as you will always have a large audience that you can reach.

Joint Ventures

2008-07-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

Joint Ventures are an incredibly powerful way to get a lot of immediate traffic to your site, and sales for your products. Joint ventures are basically where two people (or more) come together, share their assets or resources, and come out with more than they had before, ie more cash in most cases, so both parties benefit.

Joint venture partners will usually have one of two things. Either a product to sell, or people to sell to, such as a database of subscribers. Therefore if, for example, you've just launched a hot new product, and you want to reach a large number of people, you could offer 50%+ commissions on every sale that is generated, and target people in the same niche with a large list. This is effectively a win-win situation for both parties because you will benefit from selling more products, and the marketer will receive 50% of every sale generated just from sending out one single email to their database of subscribers.

Another example could be if you have two different products, but two similar sized lists. For example, let's say that you both had a list of 10,000 people you can email to. You could simply set up a deal whereby you will both email your list recommending the other person's product. This should create more sales for both of you. As you can see this is an extremely powerful form of marketing, and the best thing of all is that it's completely free.

Let's talk about how you actually go about creating these joint venture deals. Firstly before you even think about approaching potential joint venture partners, you need to think about what your targets and expectations are from a potential joint venture deal. This could be a sales or profit figure, or you may simply want to get your product out there if it's relatively new. You should also think about what you have to offer, whether it's a generous commission, or recurring commissions from each sale for example. Top marketers with large lists get proposals every day so make yours stand out, with an outstanding product, or very high commissions to make it worth their while.

So how do you find these successful marketers? Well there are a few ways. My first piece of advice would be to subscribe to as many newsletters and ezines as you can. Read their emails, and see which ones are offering good articles, useful information or quality products to their subscribers. You want to find joint venture partners you can trust, and who are respected by their subscribers, so this is a great way to weed out those that are simply full of hype.

Another good place to look is through specialised joint venture sites. These act as a marketplace where people seeking joint venture deals can come together and find other joint venture partners. There are more and more of these sites cropping up, but the best one I've come across is JVAlert. It's not cheap, but here you will find some of the most famous internet marketers on the planet, most of whom have enormous lists.

One free alternative, and generally just a brilliant internet marketing forum, is the Warrior Forum. Here you can find dedicated sections of the forum devoted to joint ventures, where you can advertise what you have to offer a potential partner. There are some very knowledgeable people on this forum, some of whom have very large lists, so this is a great place to find joint venture partners.

Another obvious way is through the search engines. You could search for "internet marketing gurus" for example, which would give you the sites of the some of the bigger players with the large lists. You could also search for "_____ newsletter or ezine" where _____ is your website niche.

When you have identified some well-respected potential joint venture partners, go to alexa.com or ranking.com and see how popular their site is. Also read subject-related forums and see what other people are saying about this marketer. If they have a large established site, with a lot of traffic (and therefore most likely a large list), and a lot of other people have good things to say about this marketer, then this sounds like an ideal joint venture partner.

I recommend trying to build up a relationship with a potential partner before you even mention your joint venture offer. For example, ask them how they got started in internet marketing, or what plans they have for the future. After you've built up just a basic relationship via email, you will have a higher chance of your offer being accepted, because the marketer knows you, even if it is only via a few email communications.

Then it's just a case of offering the deal and making it happen. As I mentioned earlier you should make your offer as appealing as possible, as serious credible marketers will only send out emails to their list maybe no more than once or twice a week, so there has to be a real incentive for them to accept your offer. It should be both financially profitable, and easy to carry out.

You don't need to make any joint venture deals full business arrangements, unless it's a major long-term deal, for example, but it's important to follow up and keep in constant touch with your partners to make sure that they have carried out their side of the deal.

Just one successful, well-executed, and profitable joint venture deal can lead to lucrative future deals with that partner, and also enhances your reputation, helping you get future deals with other marketers.

Forums

2008-07-25T21:40:00.001-07:00

Forums can be a great way to generate traffic to your site, particularly if you're just starting out and you have a limited budget, because posting on forums doesn't cost anything. The trick is to find popular forums relating to the subject of your site that allow you to make posts and include a signature in every post, where you can indirectly advertise your site.

Note you shouldn't make it look as if you are only posting to advertise your site, make sure you add something constructive to the discussion, and actually have something worthwhile to say otherwise you will possibly get banned from that forum.

So how do you find these popular forums? Well you should first go to one of the search engines, and enter "____ forum" where ____ is the subject of your site. Go through each site that comes up, read a few threads to see if they allow signatures. then if so, go to alexa.com, and check it's traffic ranking to see how popular it is. I would say any forum that is in the top 50,000 sites on the net is worth signing up for. You obviously don't want to join forums that has a traffic rank of 2,000,000 that hardly anyone visits.

This process can be quite time-consuming but it's definitely worth it. Once you've joined some forums it's time to create your sig message. This should be in the form of anchor text rather than your URL, and should include your main keyword(s). This will help you get higher search engine rankings in the long run. Don't use the same anchor text for every message in every forum, mix it up occasionally.

Now you are ready to start writing some messages. As I mentioned above, although your ultimate aim is to get forum readers to click on your sig file link to your site, you shouldn't constantly draw attention to it, or blatently advertise it. I've found the best way to get people to visit your site is by not even mentioning the link in your posts. Your aim should be to come across as an expert in your field, or to give the impression that you at least know what you're talking about. So when people read your message they will instinctively wonder what your site is, or will want to read more about you and see what you have to say. How will they get this information? Simple, they just look at your sig message below every posting you make, and click on the link that takes them to your site.

People will not respect you or your opinion, and therefore will not click on your link if you simply post spammy messages such as "I totally agree" which looks like you're just posting to get your sig message seen, or you simply post messages to lots of threads that don't add anything to the discussion.

If you want to increase the traffic you receive from forums, you could consider starting interesting threads that you think will attract many posts in the future. These really long threads can end up generating thousands of hits, and because you started this interesting thread, your opening message and hence your sig file link will get seen by potentially many thousands of forumites, increasing the chances of them visiting your site. Also you could add constructive posts to an already existing thread that has been viewed thousands of times. You will usually find a few of these epic threads on every forum.

Ezines

2008-07-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

Selecting and marketing to ezines relating to the subject area of your site is an excellent way of receiving highly targeted traffic, and is probably my number one way of driving thousands of visitors to my sites.

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can get your articles picked up my ezine editors, but you should also submit your articles directly to these editors, particularly those that have a large number of subscribers.

There are no guarantees that your articles will be included, however, so if you want guaranteed inclusion in specific ezines, maybe those with high readership, you can also pay for advertising. Although more costly, but still very cheap in most cases, it can bring equally good results, particular top-sponsor and solo-ads which I have always found to be the most effective.

You should start off my compiling a list of possible ezines that relate to your niche market. There are plenty of ezine directories and search tools out there to help you with this task. When you have done this, target those popular ones with high readership. See whether they accept free article submissions firstly, and look for any free advertising opportunities if possible. Some ezines will allow you to run a trial ad to test it's results, before you commit yourself to running paid ad campaigns with them. If they don't appear to offer this option, it doesn't hurt to ask the editors if you can have a free trial run.

The very best resource for finding relevant ezines is without doubt the Directory of Ezines. I use this all the time to find high readership, related ezines to submit my articles to, and to find good value advertising opportunities.

If you are writing an ad to be included in an ezine, as with any form of advertising, your ad needs to be compelling, even if it's just a free ad. Create a headline that will set you apart from the other ads on the page. Be sure to include the major benefits and features of your product in your ad.

You should use some kind of ad tracking software to track the effectiveness of this and any other forms of advertising. See the ad tracking section for more details. This will allow you to try out different headlines and descriptions, in future ezine ads to find the most effective ad.

To conclude, if you can you should target high readership ezines or newsletters, and write and submit articles directly to the editors for inclusion in their ezines. You can also use free ad options, if available, for another free and highly effective method of promoting your site. However, don't discount paid ads, particularly in the most popular ezines. You'll be surprised at how cheap this form of advertising is, and the effectiveness of these campaigns. Finally, be sure to check out the Directory of Ezines. For a one-off fee you will have immediate access to hundreds of related ezines, and therefore the potential to attract thousands of targeted visitors to your site.

Email Marketing

2008-07-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

In the autoresponder section I discuss how you can use autoresponders to pre-schedule and completely automate your email marketing campaigns. I also highlight, in the list building section, the importance of building your own in-house list of subscribers, to send useful information and offers to. In this section I focus on what you should include in the actual email to get the best results.

When you send out mailings, whether it's to your own list or to a list of leads that you have purchased, for example, you obviously want as many people as possible to open and read your email message. Therefore you need to create a compelling heading in the subject box, so people open it when they sift through all the emails in their inbox.

Firstly you should look to personalise each email you send out, which starts with the subject box, so every subject box should include the email recipient's first name. Most autoresponders will take care of this for you. The headline should then include the major benefit of your site, and how it will benefit that particular recipient. For example, say you had a site that sold Spanish language CD's. A good email could have a subject heading such as:

"David, learn how to speak Spanish in 4 weeks"

Try to keep the headline as short as possible, otherwise the subject box will cut off some of your message, and don't mislead the email recipient. This is the domain of spammers, and although you may get more people open your emails, most will soon delete your email when they see that it doesn't relate to the subject heading. It will also damage your reputation and credibility as a serious marketer or retailer.

There are also a few other things you should consider regarding the words you use in the subject line. Many email account providers are increasingly clamping down on spam, and constantly making changes to their spam filters. As a result some of these spam filters are automatically programmed to block, or send to the junk folder, emails which contain certain words in the subject line. These include words such as "free", "home business", "make money" etc. Therefore if you do include words like these this could seriously impact upon your response rate. My best advice would be to set up free email accounts with the major email providers such as Yahoo and MSN, and do some testing by sending various emails to yourself through different addresses to see which ones get through.

Regarding the content of the email, the ultimate aim is to get people to read the entire message and click on the link at the end of the email. Therefore it shouldn't be too long. It should also be written in short paragraphs of one or two sentences otherwise it will put people off reading it. Each paragraph should lead nicely on to the next, and encourage the reader to keep on reading right through to the end of the message.

A popular approach, if your site is in the form of a sales letter, is to just modify and shorten this sales letter, including relevant headlines and sub-headlines, and send it out as an email. Obviously you don't want to do this if you are sending it to people who are already your subscribers and therefore are already familar with your site, but to new prospects such as purchased leads or joint venture partners' lists.

Your message should begin with Hi "recipient's name" and should contain compelling sales copy, and compel the reader to click on the link at the end for more information or to buy the product. You should not only outline the major benefits of your product or service, but should also list major problems that the reader may have on this subject, and explain how your product can resolve these problems. For example, going back to the Spanish CD example, you could use a sub-heading like:

"Do you struggle to learn new languages?"

You could then go on to explain how your CD's are devided into clear easy to understand sections, and will help even the most basic beginners to start speaking Spanish, for example.

There are two forms your email may take, HTML and plain text. HTML are more graphical and flashy, but often at the expense of good sales copy. HTML emails may be more pleasing to the eye, but you should remember that they will also take longer to fully load, particularly if the reader has a slow internet connection. Indeed unsurprisingly research carried out still suggests that plain text emails get better results than HTML emails.

Finally, as with other forms of marketing, don't forget to keep testing with different headlines and sales copy to find the one that gets the best results

Directories

2008-07-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

One of the first things you should do when you've launched your site is to submit your site to as many directories as possible. This ensures that you get some good quality one-way links (although some directories do ask for a reciprocal link).

You should start off by submitting your site to the largest directories that have the greatest Page Rank (a measure of how many sites link to a particular site, with 10 being the best, which sites like Google and Blogger have) for the category your site will show up in. This will help you get a good PR yourself and ultimately improve your search engine rankings.

The first two directories that you should submit to are the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory Project. These are the two biggest, and have a great PR rank for pretty much every category page. Also because they are so popular, they literally get thousands of submissions every day, and therefore it can take several months to get your site listed, so you want to do this straight away.

As regards other directories, you can search for them yourself, but there are some sites that list all the major directories and their PR. There are also some sites that offer to submit to hundreds of directories for you, which will save you a lot of time.

In addition to this, you should also look for directories specialising specifically in your particular niche. For example, if your site is related to gambling, you could do a search for "gambling directories" which will bring up a number of additional directories you can submit your site to.

Finally, most directories have a free and paid submission option, or may charge a fee to get your site listed. Don't discount the directories that charge a fee as these can be extremely beneficial, as not only can you get your site listed quickly, but the directories that charge fees often have very high PR pages, so some of this PR will pass to your site, helping you to achieve higher rankings.

Articles

2008-07-25T21:34:00.001-07:00

If you have read the section on search engine optimization you will know that in order to get traffic from search engines, you need lots of links to your site from hundreds, if not thousands, of sites, depending on how competitive your main keywords are. You can do this by reciprocal link exchanges, but this can take a long time, plus the fact that search engines place more importance on one-way links than two-way links.

So what's the best way of getting plenty of one-way links? Submitting your sites to directories is a good start, but you should also write articles and submit them to article directories. Search engines love sites that have fresh and constantly updated content, and therefore webmasters are always on the look out for fresh content that they can add to their site. Ezine publishers, also, are always looking for articles they can include in the latest edition of their ezine. Finding and importing articles from article banks (providing they leave the article intact and include your resource box with your link of course) is a great way of doing this.

Now this may seem daunting to a lot of webmasters but if you want thousands of one-way links then this is the best way to go about it. You needn't write long essays for every article, it could be just 300-500 words, which you could easily do in less than an hour. I can usually knock up a good quality 500+ word article in this time. If you're not a good writer, then you can always hire someone to do it for you from a site like elance.

These links will give you higher search engine rankings, plus you will of course get plenty of traffic directly from the people who read your articles, and then click on your link to your site for more information. If you write a couple of articles every week or even one per day, then over time as more and more sites pick up your articles the number of inward links to your site will rise dramatically, and your articles will literally be all over the internet in numerous different places. I personally write a few articles each week for each of my sites. I think it's better to focus on quality rather than quantity. It's better to write two top-quality articles every week than one mediocre article every day. People will respect your articles and your opinions more this way.

Let me explain how it works. Ideally your site should have lots of content and different subjects you can write about. A good example would be if your site is about cars. There are endless things you could write about, such as how to choose a car, all the different aspects of car maintenence, new car reviews, etc.

Let's assume you've just written your first article on one of these subjects. You can now manually submit your article to as many article directories as you can find for maximum exposure. Two of the larger, most popular ones are goarticles and ezinearticles. Just open a free account, and then copy and paste your article, including a compelling title, a brief description of the article if required, state what category your article falls under, and write a small bio about yourself with a link to your site.

This bio or resource box at the end of the article is extremely important as it tells the reader about yourself, and includes the crucial link back to your site. This link should include anchor text, if the directory allows HTML, with your main keyword(s), to help achieve the long-term goal of high search engine rankings. Make sure you mix them up from time to time, as you don't want hundreds of inward links all with the same anchor text. See the search engine optimization section for more information.

Now if you're submitting each article you write manually to each individual article directory you will soon find out that this is extremely time consuming. There is a fantastic company that I use that you can submit your article to, and they will submit your article for you to over 30,000 publishers, which includes all the major article directories that I mentioned earlier in this article, like goarticles and ezinearticles, saving you hours of time. The best thing of all is that for a one-time payment you can submit as many articles as you like, and you only need to submit each article once. They will take care of the distribution. The name of this company is Article Marketer.

Affiliates

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If you are relatively new to the world of internet marketing then affiliate programs are a good place to start. Affiliate marketing is simply where you promote other people's products, and in exchange you earn a certain percentage or set fee for every sale that you make. This can be as high as 75% in some instances.

They are very easy to get started with. You don't even need a web site in some cases, although I do recommend that you do if you want to make some serious money. To find a suitable affiliate program you could simply go to any major retail site on the net. Most will have their own affiliates section or partner programs. Alternatively you could visit an affiliate network who will give a whole directory of potential programs you can join together with their respective payout rates. There are many of these networks all over the net, but by far the most popular are Clickbank and Commission Junction.

As regards how it actually works, basically when you sign up to a company as an affiliate they will give you a special URL with your affiliate ID embedded in it. For example, company-you're-promoting.com/youraffiliateID. This will allow them to track the sales that they make and to know which affiliate to credit for the sale.

In addition in some cases they will give you all kinds of marketing tools, such as banners, text links, special promotions, etc, all with your unique affiliate URL embedded in them. You could use these on your own site, or if you don't yet have your own website you could use them in email campaigns, traffic exchanges, free ads, or any other promotional campaign.

I should point out that while it's tempting to simply pick affiliate programs with the highest payouts, you should pick products that are likely to get most sales from your site visitors or potential prospects. For example, given a choice between promoting a product where I can receive a $300 commission per sale, but it is not at all targeted towards my target audience, and a highly targeted and relevant product offering $30 per sale, I would choose the latter every time.

Also, if you're planning on setting up your own website think about how you're going to get traffic to that site, and how much competition you're likely to face. For example, if you're planning on setting up a mortgage website and promoting mortgage companies that pay per lead then you're going to be competing in an already over-saturated market, and your chances of getting lots of traffic in this area are very slim.

To conclude this section on affiliate marketing I just want to leave you with three excellent affiliate marketing ebooks that I have bought myself:

Affiliate Project X - This is probably the best guide to affiliate marketing on the internet. It's less general than other informational guides, being strongly focused towards promoting Clickbank products, but nevertheless shows you the exact methods that the author uses himself to make thousands of dollars every month from affiliate marketing. I've since used some of the methods myself, and have seen my own affiliate commissions increase dramatically as a result, so I can assure you that these methods actually work.

Secret Affiliate Weapon - This is a terrific package by the renowned super-affiliate Ewen Chia. Packed to the rafters with useful tips on how you too can become a super-affiliate. Just getting access to his secret blog alone is worth the ridiculously low price of $9.97 but you get so much more besides, including the chance to rebrand his free viral reports and videos with your own affiliate links, and give them away, earning you cash in the process.

Super Affiliate Handbook - This ebook focuses entirely on affiliate marketing and offers some invaluable advice on how you can make it pay. The advice offered comes from Rosalind Gardner, a highly successful and renowned affiliate marketer, so you know you are getting the very best advice.

Getting Traffic / Sales

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This section deals with the crucial area of actually getting people to visit your site, and therefore generate sales. Included below are all the various methods used by marketers to generate traffic to their sites:

Shopping Cart

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If you are selling several products on your website, then you will need a shopping cart. A shopping cart is a piece of software that is basically a site's ordering and checkout system. It calculates any shipping costs, any applicable taxes, and acts as a shopping basket with the option to add and remove items, before the transaction gets passed to the merchant account or payment processor who accepts or declines the transaction.

A lot of shopping cart software are now fully integrated with merchant accounts or payment processors, and come as one package. They allow customers to add products to a basket, and also have the capacity to accept or decline credit card transactions.

Paypal is a good example. They provide free shopping basket capabilities so customers can add multiple products, if applicable, to their basket, as well as integrating it with their payment system which is a good one because it accepts credit card payments. Therefore if you use an autoresponder to send every buyer a confirmation email or download link, then you can fully automate the buying process. If you are selling information products, then Clickbank are also highly recommended, being relatively simple to set-up and fully automated.

If you are selling hundreds of products on your site, and want a complete ecommerce store then you will obviously want a more advanced shopping cart system. This can be extremely complicated to set up, and certainly a lot more expensive than your standard pay processor and shopping cart package.

RSS

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RSS is a relatively new phenomenen, and stands for Really Simple Syndication. Subscribing to an RSS feed allows you to receive the latest news from websites (who support RSS), as soon as they add fresh content to their site. This saves you the hassle of having to trawl through your favourite sites to check whether they've added anything new to their site.

To view these latest updates, all you need is a free news reader, where you can simply add RSS, and add the URL of the site you want to recieve the fresh content from. Most sites who support this will give full instructions on how to use the service.

You can benefit from this yourself in two ways. Firstly you can add an RSS feed to your site, and receive fresh content from other sites. As I have discussed in other sections, search engines like and reward sites with not only good content, but fresh and regulared updated content. Therefore adding and displaying an RSS feed on your site will automatically add fresh content to your site, from sites that you have opted to recieve feeds from. This will also help to keep people coming back to your site.

For example, let's say you had a site about fishing, and you had found a good fishing writer from an article directory who wrote some excellent articles, which would be of benefit to your visitors. Most article directories now support RSS feeds, so you can simply subscribe to this feed and every time this particular writer adds a new article to the directory, this article, or the link to the article will be delivered to your newsreader and displayed on your site if you so wished.

Another way you can benefit is by allowing other people to subscribe to your feeds. Therefore when you update your site, this fresh content will be delivered to everyone who has opted-in and subscribed to your RSS feed. Also, not only can subscribers receive the latest updates through their selected news reader, but it's also possible to deliver updates directly to a specified email address as well.

To summarise, content is very important, both in terms of achieving good search engines and encouraging repeat visitors to your site, so make sure you're constantly adding new content to your site. Writing original content will always be the best method, but adding RSS feeds from relevant sites related to yours is also recommended.

Payment Processors

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If you have created your website and have a product to sell, then you will need to find a way to accept payments from your customers. When the internet was in its infancy most people sent cheques by post, but now customers expect much more. They want to have a choice of payment options, and most will want to pay by credit or debit card. Studies have shown that if your site does not accept credit cards then you are missing out on 90-95% of sales.

Therefore you will need to utilise a payment processor that is capable of handling credit and debit card transactions. You can do this through either having your own merchant account or using a third-party payment processor.

Let's start by discussing merchant accounts. These are essentially bank accounts set up with a merchant bank that allow you to accept payments from credit card users. The money flows directly into your personal or business' bank account, in a very short period of time, often about three business days. In the past, merchant accounts have only been available to large well-established businesses, but they are slowly becoming more accessible to smaller businesses, and are becoming less stringent in their criteria and credit checks.

Third-party payment processors, such as Paypal, 2CO and Clickbank (all of which I can recommend) are very good for small sites, such as those that sell only one item, or sites that have just launched, and are also ideal for those people who cannot get a merchant account. However, you should note that with some payment processors you will have to wait sometimes thirty days or more to get paid the sum total of your latest batch of sales. This could potentially be a big problem, particularly if it's a lesser-known payment processor that subsequently goes out of business, because you may never get the money owed to you. Even if this wasn't the case, you still have to wait a long time to reinvest this money into your business and marketing efforts.

You should also remember that whereas with merchant accounts you own all your customer data, with third-party payment processors they store all this information. This means that they could potentially use this information for their own purposes.

Another point to consider is how your choice of payment processor will be perceived by your potential customers. For example, a merchant account provides credibility to your website, and appears very professional. It indicates that you have a secure and reliable way of accepting payments, which is an important factor for potential buyers. If you just have a third-party payment processor, visitors to your site may question whether you are just a small amateurish home-based business, for example, or may think that for some reason you couldn't qualify for a merchant account, or you lost your merchant account. Therefore this could potentially put them off buying from you.

I would say if you can get a merchant account, but third-party payment processors will serve a purpose particularly if you are just starting out selling online, or your business is at an early stage of development. Whichever one you choose, there are a few things you should also consider:

- Set-up fees - This varies from company to company. Some have no set-up fees, while others can be very expensive to set up an account.

- Transaction fees - Most are quite low, 2-5%, but any higher than this and they can really eat into your profits.

- Types of products accepted - For example, don't assume that your payment processor or merchant account will automatically accept transactions for your particular product.

- Frequency of payments - As I mentioned above, check how often you receive payments from any sales made.

- Hidden charges - Read all the small-print and make sure there are no additional fees, such as annual fees, for example, that you may have to pay.

- Customer support - You obviously want a merchant account that responds quickly to any customer enquiries.

Autoresponders

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An autoresponder is simply an email address, owned by a unique user that can, when sent emails, auto-reply with one, or a series of emails scheduled to be sent out over a number of days. This can be done either when someone specifically sends you an email to this autoresponder email address, or when someone fills out a form on your website. If you are building a database of prospects I recommend the latter because this way you get more information about the subscriber, which will help in the rare cases of you being wrongfully accused of spamming.

If you want to email your subscribers with various offers you can of course do all this manually, but once you get a decent sized list this will take forever. Therefore autosponders will literally save you hours of time. If you want to send maybe a series of emails spread out over several weeks, then you can schedule them using the autoresponder software. All you need to do is enter the different email copies that make up the series, and enter it into the system. Therefore the autoresponder will completely automate both your email collection process and the sending out of emails.

As well as this you can also enter individual email addresses, or even a whole database of leads, into the autoresponder. This will then enter them into the system and they will start receiving your series of emails as per the schedule you've preset.

Writing a series of emails and scheduling them with an autoresponder is very common amongst internet marketers, but there may be times when you simply want to send out a single email to your entire database, maybe details of a new product launch, for example. Autoresponders will also allow you to do this, commonly referred to as a broadcast email, so they really do cater for every possible requirement.

One thing you need to be very wary of is spam. This is why you should ideally collect some information about the subscriber, usually through a form, when they sign-up. It's also very important to make sure that all your subscribers have double opted-in. A single opt-in is simply when a subscriber has filled in a form one time only, before receiving emails from you, whereas double opt-ins have filled out a form, but have also been emailed a confirmation email, for example, asking them to click a link to confirm that they have signed up.

This applies to any leads you may purchase as well. If you have purchased a large database of leads to enter into your autoresponder system and start sending emails to, make sure they are well-qualified and double opt-in leads. These are often more expensive than single opt-ins, but are definitely worth paying the extra for.

You should also include in every email an unsubscribe link, so email recipients can opt out at any time. Don't bombard your subscribers with emails either, as this will only upset your recipients who will eventually opt out. Emails should be spread out at least three days apart.

There are numerous autoresponders available, some even being free, but these cheaper ones are usually poor quality, that maybe receive a lot of spam complaints, or their email delivery rates are poor. The one that I, and the majority of other marketers that I know, use and can recommend is Aweber.

They boast an excellent delivery rate of over 99%, and offer all the features that you could possibly need from an autoresponder, such as a double opt-in system, scheduled preset email delivery, unsubscribe option, ability to import lists of email addresses or leads, etc. Overall, just a very professional service.

Ad Tracking

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For successful on the internet, it's important that you test various different things and select those that give you the best results. This is really important, particularly if you are employing various different types of advertising campaigns. You need to find out which ads are performing the best, and stick with them, and weed out those that are not performing, or adjust the ad copy and test them again.

Ad trackers are programs that will track how well your ads are performing for you. They will idenitfy where every click-through to your site has come from. You will know exactly how many and which of your links people visiting your site clicked on. It will also tell you how many emails were opened, and how many then clicked through to your site, if you are running an email campaign. Ad trackers also tell you how many of these visitors from different ad campaigns went on and bought your product from your site.

Some web hosting providers will provide some tracking information. For example, my web host, BlueHost, who I can highly recommend by the way, provide some excellent stats in it's control panel, from three different tracking programs. This tells you where all your visitors are coming from, and what parts of the site they are visiting. However ad tracking software will give you far more comprehensive information, such as what your ROI (Return On Investment) is for different advertising campaigns, which is so crucial to your success.

There are plenty of ad tracking software available but the one I favour is AdTrackz. This will track everything for you, all for one one-off price, rather than monthly fees that some sites charge, and comes with a full 90-day guarantee. Please visit the site to see it's impressive list of features.

Web Hosting

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Once you've designed and created your website you need to find a web host who will host your site on their server, therefore allowing internet users to access your site. This can be a daunting prospect because there are thousands of web hosts on the internet, all offering different features in terms of the type of software they use, eg Linux/Unix, the actual disk space allocated to your website, the bandwidth allowance, technical support etc.

Let's discuss some of these factors that you should take into consideration when choosing a web host, starting with the server software. Any web host that uses Linux or Unix, which most do, should be fine. This is not an area I know a great deal about, but most webmasters I know favour Linux.

Another factor to consider is the actual disk space that you are allowed. Most websites use relatively little disk space so this is not really too big an issue. Web pages generally are about 40KB (1MB=1000KB, 1GB=1000MB), so you can do a quick calculation based on how many web pages you are planning to have in the future. If you are planning to run a large ecommerce site, or one with a lot of graphics or images, for example, then you should seriously take this into consideration.

Similarly you should look at the monthly bandwidth allowance that you are allowed. In simple terms this is derived from the disk space of the pages viewed multiplied by the number of visitors. This is an important factor to consider, particularly if you expect your site to grow, and eventually get a lot of traffic. The last thing you want is for you to exceed your allowance before the end of the month, and therefore have your site down, or have to pay for extra bandwidth.

You should also look at the technical support offered by the web host. For example, look at the different ways you can contact them, whether they offer 24 hour support, etc. You can get a good idea of how good their support is by reading other people's comments on web hosting forums.

There are a few other factors that may be relevant to your individual requirements. For example, how many email accounts you require, what website visitor tracking software is included, what add-on scripts are included such as forums, shopping carts, etc, whether you can host video on your site, and so on.

Ultimately the decision of which web host you choose is down to you, but is one that should not be taken lightly. Don't just go with the cheapest host you can find, and be careful about committing yourself to a long-term plan, because they may turn out to be a poor web host, for example your site could be down for long periods at a time, or they could have poor technical support.

I don't have a lot of experience of different web hosts because I have only ever used one host for all my sites. I spent hours researching which web host I should choose after I had built my very first site, and read endless posts on web hosting forums. Thankfully I ended up choosing a web host that has been excellent, and have used them ever since. The name of this company is BlueHost.

If you don't want to spend hours researching web hosts then I can highly recommend BlueHost. They're one of the most popular web hosting providers on the net and for good reason. For just a low price of just $7.95 a month you get an incredible 10,000MB of disk space and 250GB of bandwidth per month. This is far more than any other web host, and even with a very large site with a lot of traffic, you will be hard pushed to get anywhere near close to exceeding this limit. Because of this you are allowed to host upto 6 domains all on the same account.

Add to that the fact that their server's downtime is next to nothing (some hosts' servers can be down for hours at a time). They also have a reputation for providing excellent support, which includes online FAQs, guides, freephone telephone number and email support. I've always had an almost immediate response within one hour when emailing them a question.

The list of additional features is endless. They provide upto 2500 email accounts, excellent website stats, free domain name, many useful scripts and database options, and so much more. To see the full list of features please visit Bluehost. I can highly recommend them.

Site Design

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You can have a unique and potentially lucrative idea for a website, but if your site is designed poorly this can seriously impact upon the eventual success of your site. There are several things you should consider when designing the layout of your site.

Firstly you can be creative and radical, but I think your basic site layout should conform to the majority of sites on the internet because internet users are used to this layout. You can always change it later if you wish. This common layout consists of a header, left and/or right panel, which could include a navigation menu, Adsense, sign-up form, etc, and a page footer with links to all your main pages.

Also try to keep things simple when designing your site. Don't try and impress your visitors with flashy graphics, most of which will take ages to load for those visitors with slow internet connections. This will often result in those people just becoming impatient and leaving your site before it's fully loaded.

Don't give your visitors too many options. If you have a home page with many different links scattered all over your page, to many different pages, then visitors can be put off by having so many options. Have a clear, user-friendly navigation menu, and interlink every page of your site, ensuring that there is always an easy link back to your home page. Focus their attention on the areas of your site that you want them to end up. For example, if your aim is to get visitors to buy your product from the product page, then draw attention to this page in the various pages of your site, and create prominent links to it.

As I also mentioned in the sales letter page, if you are trying to get customers to buy products from you and send you money, then your site needs to have credibility. You should include as much information about yourself, plus a photo of yourself ideally, and provide lots of contact information.

To get visitors to return to your site then you may want to provide a way for them to interact with you and your site. This could be done through a forum or message board, or possibly through competitions for example, or simply by including RSS feeds which will ensure that your site is constanted updated with fresh content.

Finally, and most importantly, your site must have good content. There is no point spending ages on your site design if the actual content that people read is poor. Do the basic things like spell checking and checking grammar, and make sure that you are providing information that you yourself would find interesting to read if it was someone else's site.

Site Building

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The thought of building your website can be extremely daunting if you've never created one before. As I discussed in the blogs section, a blog is a great way for you to get your own presence on the web. However they're not very flexible in terms of layout and design.

Also if you are using a free service like Blogger, you don't have full control over the site, as the site is hosted on their server, and its not uncommon for certain blogs to be deleted.

Even if you do have some success with a blog, there will inevitably come a time when you feel you need your own site. There are a number of good pieces of software out there that are very good for building sites. Two of the more popular ones are Frontpage and Dreamweaver. However they are very expensive and are not very easy to master for anyone with limited knowledge of HTML.

Don't despair however, because there are now a few excellent pieces of software that allow you to build your own site without having any knowledge whatsoever of HTML. The one I use and can really recommend is XSitePro. This really is an incredible piece of software. I use it to build all my sites, and it is so much easier and quicker to use than more advanced applications. It uses a WYSIWYG editor, which stands for What You See Is What You Get. This basically allows you to add any number of features just by pointing and clicking. The software takes care of all the HTML coding for you. It will literally save you hours of time and will allow you to create any number of sites really quickly.

It's not cheap at $197 but is still a lot cheaper than the more expensive applications out there and much better value. Plus they also offer an incredible 365 day guarantee. Therefore you effectively get a year's free trial to try it out and build a few sites, but I'm sure you won't want to return it as it's an incredible product. I couldn't have imagined a few years ago that there would come a time when I'm constantly churning out a number of websites on a variety of subjects, and yet knowing very little about HTML and computer programming.

Selling Your Own Product

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Affiliate programs are a great way of getting started on the internet, and can be very lucrative, but most people will agree that if you want to make some serious money then selling your own products is the way to go. It does involve extra work, but this is often rewarded in terms of far greater profits.

As regards what products you can sell online, it could literally be anything, from mainstream products like watches and clothes, for example, to smaller niche products like cat baskets and car manuals. If you can get good wholesale prices for any particular item or line, then you can potentially make money online. However, remember you have to actively go out there and work hard to get traffic to your site. Many people still make the mistake of designing and publishing a website, and just expect traffic to come naturally. In this respect you are likely to have more success with a smaller niche product because of less competition, and often it is easier to rank higher in the search engines for these smaller niches.

Just like in the offline world, you also must still have a quality product and one which is priced and marketed well, otherwise you ultimately will not succeed. As I mentioned above, selling your own product rather than an affiliate product does involve a lot more work. You have to deal with accepting and handling payments on your site, emailing the customer with an order confirmation, the physical delivery of the products, and any follow-ups such as product returns.

At first this may sound very daunting, but in these days of automation there are many tools that will do most of this work for you. For example, you could put a Paypal button on your site to accept payments, which is pretty straightforward, and you could use an autoresponder to email the customer their order confirmation. These tools are discussed in more detail in the Site Tools section.

If you are delivering physical products through the post, then unfortunately you will still have to deal with delivery and any product returns, which can be very time consuming, particularly if your business takes off. However, you do not necessarily have to sell physical products online. In fact the hottest products to sell online for internet marketers are currently informational products and software, both of which can be delivered directly to customers via email in most cases, and often automatically by an autoresponder.

The major advantage of information products is that once you have a product then any sales you make is almost entirely pure profit. This is because you don't have to worry about buying products, because you just have the one product which you can sell over and over again. Also, your delivery expenses are next to nothing as they are delivered in the majority of cases via email, or from a download page on your site.

So how do you go about getting your own information product or ebook? Well ideally you would want your own unique product that you have researched and written yourself, and therefore no-one else is selling. If you're not a good writer then you could hire someone from a site like Elance to write one for you for a specified price. Alternatively you could buy a product which has resale rights meaning you can sell this product yourself and keep all the profits you generate.

Once you have this product you are free to design and promote a website, often taking the form of a sales letter, and start making some money. Or, if you don't want to create your own website yet, you can of course use Ebay to sell your products. These three points, creating ebooks, selling on Ebay, and selling resale rights products, that I have just touched on briefly, are discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site.

Selling On Ebay

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I'm sure there's very few people left who have never heard of Ebay. For good reason as well, they are a global phenomenen. They are of course the biggest online auction site on the internet, and are a great way to find bargains.

In general, any products, whether second-hand or new, are cheaper on Ebay than traditional retailers. They are also enormously beneficial for both individual traders or part-time sellers, and larger established businesses who have products to sell.

There are small costs involved in listing items on Ebay, but for newcomers to the internet in particular, they are a great way to start your online business. You don't have to worry about setting up a site and working hard and spending money on advertising to get traffic to your site. With Ebay being one of the most visited sites on the net, the traffic is already there. The only thing you have to worry about is doing some research, finding a supplier, or creating your own product to sell, and then creating a good listing or sales copy for your product(s).

To make money selling on Ebay you obviously need to have a product whose average final sale price, minus any deductions from Ebay, is greater than what you paid for it. Look at what other people are selling, see what the average final sales price is, and then go about finding a wholesaler or supplier. You don't necessarily need to find a traditional wholesaler either. For example, I've made decent profits myself on a casual basis just by buying quality products from sites like hotukdeals.com, and retail shops who have huge sales or closing down sales, and then listing them on Ebay and selling at a much higher price than I paid for them.

Information products such as ebooks, as discussed in other pages of this site, are a very lucrative business because clearly you don't have to worry about buying and stocking goods from a wholesaler. In most cases you will have one product, either that you have created yourself or that you have full resale rights to, which can be sold over and over again because the buyer can simply download it from a link.

Another way of making money from selling on Ebay is through dropshipping. This is basically where you find a dropshipper, list their product(s) on Ebay, then when the product is sold the buyer pays you, and you pay the supplier a set price, who then delivers the product to the buyer, whose details you supply at the end of the auction. If you have sold the product for more than this set price then you get to keep the surplus profit.

This sounds like an ideal business set-up, particularly as you have no stock to look after. However, this isn't something I've personally tried and I don't intend to either. This is simply because I have heard too many negative things about dropshipping. These range from suppliers running out of stock, not delivering to the correct address, products not turning up, all of which negatively impacts upon your Ebay sellers' rating, and therefore your future profitability.

If I was to seriously get into selling on Ebay, I would either go about creating an ebook, and selling it continuously, or conducting extensive research on what products are selling well, and finding wholesalers that offer prices low enough to generate sizeable profits. There are loads of wholesale directories on the internet, but you have to pay for these, and a lot of these lists are often out-of-date, or generally worthless.

The Rich Jerk, which is an excellent ebook generally, offers some excellent advice on buying from wholesalers, and lists some good wholesale suppliers.

Sales Letter

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When you have finished compiling your ebook or have a product ready to sell, you will need to build a site or webpage to promote it to potential customers. This usually takes the form of a one page sales letter.

You've probably seen many of these if you've been browsing the internet for any length of time, but if not just visit Clickbank who literally have thousands of these information products, and you will see the sales letter for each of these products. Look at the top sellers in each category and make a note of the techniques they use as they are obviously working.

From my experience there are several common features that every successful sales letter must have. These are listed below:

1. Compelling headline.

This is one of the most important aspects of your sales letter. It must describe the major benefit of your product and compel visitors to read your letter. An ineffective headline will often result in visitors leaving your site almost immediately.

2. Good sales copy.

The actual text should be in a font that's easily read by all visitors, and should fit entirely on the page, without requiring the reader to scroll left and right. You should also split your letter into sections, each with their own sub-heading. These sections should include short paragraphs and/or lots of bullet points listing the main features of your product. This will help keep your reader's attention. There's nothing more off-putting, from a reader's point of view, than seeing big blocks of text that you have to read. Every single line should compel your reader to read on and get to the end of the letter.

3. Keep it simple.

Don't fill your page with fancy graphics or animations, or audio recordings. Remember that not everyone has a high-speed internet connection, and for these people these features will cause your site to load extremely slowly on their browsers and most will simply leave your site straight away.

4. Testimonials.

Include at least two testimonials on your main sales page. These will add some credibility to your product and will boost your sales dramatically. These should be genuine, and ideally from reputable figures. Ask a few people online that you know or people with similar sites to review your product. Give them your product for free if it helps and then offer to include their testimonial including a free link to their site on your sales page.

5. Include the price.

It really annoys me when I read a sales letter, extolling the virtues of a particular product, yet there's no mention of the price. You can only see how much it costs by clicking on the order now button. This always gives me the impression that the seller is afraid to give the price in case it will scare people off. I think the opposite is true and in a lot of cases readers are encouraged by a slighter higher price because they figure your product must be good quality for you to be charging so much.

6. Extra bonuses.

Don't go mad here, three or four extra bonuses are plenty. Any more than this and it looks like you're trying to compensate for the poor quality of your product. Even if they are just free bonuses with giveaway rights, make sure they are of a decent quality and relevant to what you are selling.

7. Call to action.

Encourage your visitor to buy now and not risk them considering buying your product at a later date, and subsequently forgetting all about it. Say something like "Buy now, only xx left!" or sell a certain number at a special introductory price and tell your visitors that this price will go up on a certain date.

8. Guarantee.

You should always include a money-back guarantee and the longer the better. Avoid short guarantees like a 14 day guarantee for example. If anything you'll probably get more returns this way as people will use or read your product straight away because they know they only have a short period to try your product, and if it's not 100% to their satisfaction they will return it. With a longer guarantee people will take longer to use your product as they know they have a long guarantee period and you should get less returns. XSitePro who I can thoroughly recommend (all of my sites, including this one, are created using their software) offer a 365 day guarantee at the time of writing because they are so confident in their own product.

9. Include your contact information.

The more information you include about yourself the better. There are a lot of scammers on the net, and people will want to know they are buying from a genuine person or company. At the very least you should include your name and email address, but I recommend also including a photo of yourself and a phone number and address. This will add credibility to your product.

10. Collect email addresses.

This will allow you to follow with email letters at a later date, increasing the chances of you making a sale. Offer a free bonus or report, for example, related to your product in return for their name and email address. This should be included somewhere on your sales letter, and possibly on an exit pop-up as well.

Resale Rights

2008-07-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

If you want to sell a product, but are struggling to come up with products you can sell, then there are some products that you can buy and subsequently sell on to other people. These products have what's commonly referred to as resale rights and allow you to set your own price, within reason, and sell them on to anyone, any way you like.

The major advantage is you get to keep all the revenue generated from any sales you make. You also do not have the added expense of buying and/or stocking your own products, because as most of these products are in the form of information products or ebooks, they can be easily downloaded from a page on your site or the link can be emailed directly to the customer. Therefore there are no delivery costs that are associated with delivering physical products. Also, you don't necessarily need your own website as you could sell them on Ebay or other auction sites (if the license terms allows it).

There's no shortage of places where you can pick up resale rights products that you can sell on to end users. You only have to go to Ebay to find thousands of ebooks that come with resell rights, and there's also numerous websites offering resale rights products or monthly memberships where you receive new products every month.

For maximum profits, you find to find either new products that have just hit the market, or ones that are of good quality, but have not yet been heavily promoted, so saturation point has not yet been reached.

Most resale rights products come with their own sales and download/thankyou pages, so it's very easy to get started. In these instances you just have to change the payment link to your own, upload the files to your web server, and start driving traffic to this site. However, for greater success you should distinguish yourself from other resellers by making your offer stand out, such as creating an improved sales page, and offering additional bonuses to the basic product. This will give you an edge over your competitors and help you outsell them.

Another way to profit from resale rights products is by creating your own product and selling the resale rights to the product to other resellers. If you limit the number of resale rights licenses available, you can charge a high premium for these rights and generate significant profits in a relatively short space of time.

Whatever you decide to do with resell rights products, it's important that you familiarise yourself with the various rights terms that come with resale rights products, and abide by the license agreement. If in doubt you should always contact the original author of the product. Here's a guide to the various different types of resale rights that come with products:

Basic Resale Rights - You are allowed to resell the product yourself, but the people who buy from you do not have the rights to sell it on themselves.

Master Resale Rights - You are allowed to resell the product, and you can also sell the basic resale rights to your buyers, so that they can resell the product themselves.

Giveaway Rights - As the name suggests, you are allowed to give the product away for free.

Private Label Rights - I discuss this in the 'Private Label Rights' section. You are allowed to change the content in any way you like and even put your name to it as the author in some cases, although every license agreement is different.

Rebranding Rights - Similar to private label rights in that you are allowed to rebrand some of the content, often some of the affiliate links contained within the product.

Royalty Rights - You can resell the product yourself, but you have to pay the original author a specified percentage or commission per sale. Often applies more to physical products than digital products.

Source Code Rights - These are generally applicable only to software, and allow you to alter the source code that comes with the product.

Private Label Rights

2008-07-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

Private Label Rights (PLR) products are basically products that can be altered or modified in some way by the buyer or acquirer of the product, and can be extremely profitable both to the creator and the buyer of the product.

They differ from resale rights products in that with these products you only have the rights to sell the product in it's original form, whereas with PLR products you can add to or modify the content, and even put your name to it as the author or creator in some cases. Therefore by acquiring these products and customizing them yourself, you can instantly create your own product, without having to spend money on hiring a ghostwriter if you are writing an ebook, or a software developer if you want to sell your own software.

There are two main ways you can profit from private label rights products:

- Create your own PLR products and sell the rights to other marketers.

This can be an extremely easy way to make a lot of cash in a very short space of time if you have a top quality product, and is ideally suited to those people who are good product creators, but not necessarily good marketers. Because you can charge a lot more than the suggested retail price for the private label rights to a product, you can make a lot of money from these products. Many product creators don't want to worry about selling the product themselves, setting up an affiliate program, dealing with customer service etc, so instead simply create a product, sell a specified number of PLR licences at a premium price until they've sold out, and then move on to their next product. A lot of clever marketers also make this process even simpler by hiring a ghostwriter or software developer to create their product for them.

- Buy the rights to PLR products, customize them to suit your needs, and market them yourself.

Again as I've already mentioned, this can be a great way of creating your own product for a minimal price, and instantly inheriting the respect and reaping the financial rewards that comes from being a product author or creator.

It's this second point that I want to focus on for the remainder of this section, because I want to illustrate the numerous different ways you can benefit from buying or acquiring private label rights products.

Before I do that though, I just want to point out that you should always read the licence agreement that comes with the PLR product very closely, and find out exactly what you can and cannot do to a product to ensure you fully comply with the author's terms and conditions. This is very important. Not all products come with the same rights so you should never assume you have certain rights, and should always ask the original author if you are unsure of any rights issues.

Okay with that in mind here's a list of ways you can benefit from private label rights, subject to the author's permission of course:

- Market and sell the product in it's original form.

- Customize the product, add your own content to make it as good as possible, add your affiliate links to create backend commissions where appropriate, and put your name on it as the original author so you can claim it as your own.

- Change the content, sales page, ebook cover etc, to create a completely new product (which no-one else is selling) so you can set up an affiliate program and generate sales from the marketing efforts of other people.

- Break up the content of the private label product and use it to create a series of articles which you can then submit to article directories and ezines to bring traffic to your website. It's important to note that to get your articles accepted by all the major article directories, you should alter the content so it looks like it's your own unique work.

- Break up the content and use it as content for your website, again changing it into your own words so the search engines will see it as being unique content.

- Modify and improve upon the content, and add value to it by publishing it in a different format. For example, take a PLR ebook and create an audio course, a DVD course, or a home study package, which would command a much higher price than a simple ebook.

- Break up the content and use it to create and constantly update your own blog, which you could monetize by displaying ads or promoting affiliate products. Search engines love sites that add fresh content on a regular basis.

- Create free viral ebooks or reports using the content from the private label rights product, which could include your own affiliate links and of course that crucial link back to your main website which captures the reader's name and email address for future profits.

As you can see, there are just so many ways you can profit from private label rights. So if you are just starting out online then buying private label rights products and modifying them if necessary, can be a highly effective way of creating profitable income streams and list-building opportunities.

If I was just starting out online today, I think my main focus would be on acquiring private label rights products and using them to create my own unique products, both to market online, and to use as free viral ebooks to build my list.

-->Success University

2008-07-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

Success University is a program that I am very excited about. So much so that I devoted nearly two weeks to writing an ebook that will help anyone who joins the program under me to build their own downline, but more about this later. First here's my review of Success University.

Success University is essentially a company comprising over 50 of the world's leading personal achievement authors, speakers and teachers, whose aim it is to teach people all over the world how to become successful and achieve anything they want to achieve in life, whether it's achieving financial success or simply becoming healthy, or improving your relationships for example.

Some well-known names associated with this program include Jay Abraham, Brian Tracey, Les Brown, Cynthia Kersey and Robert Allen to name just a few.

The program costs $49.95 a month, which gives you full unlimited access to the back office which is essentially a huge learning centre with information worth thousands of dollars. It contains numerous ebooks and audio files to help you achieve success, plus it offers regular lessons you can enroll in and learn at your own pace, and live calls that you can listen to. It really is an excellent package.

If that wasn't enough you can also potentially earn a vast sum of money every month by referring others to the program. This is where it gets really interesting.

The compensation plan, although at first glance appears slightly complicated, is actually quite straight forward once you take the time to learn more about it. I recommend listening to Tricia Smith's compensation training plan, available in the back office, which explains everything really clearly.

In basic terms, firstly you can earn between $20 and $40 for each personal referral depending on your ranking within the organization. Secondly you can earn money from the efforts of your downline infinite levels deep (which includes spillover from your upline). Your downline consists of two legs, and in order to start making money from your downline you just need to personally recruit two members and place one in each leg. Then you can start earning $40 for every cycle of 6 members with at least a 1/3 : 2/3 balance, ie 2 in one leg, 4 in the other, 3 in one and 3 in the other, 4 in one and 2 in the other.

Again this sounds fairly complicated, and to be honest it took me a while to get my head around it, but once I listened to Trisha Smith's excellent call from the membership area everything became a lot clearer.

I recommend signing up to Success University and trying out the program for free for 14 days. This will give you plenty of time to learn more about the program, and the compensation plan that is making a lot of internet marketers very wealthy. All that is required is that you make a small donation of $2 to Feed The Children, a very worthy cause.

As I mentioned at the start of this review, every member who joins my Success University team, even if it's only as a free trial member, will receive my 28-part MLM course (in ebook format) that I'm promoting over at www.jimsmlmtips.com. Simply sign up using the link provided and I will email you a copy as soon as I receive the new member confirmation message from Success University.

I want to ultimately build one of the strongest Success University teams out there, so therefore I want everyone in my downline to be successful in building their own downline. The information contained in this ebook should help to achieve this objective, but in addition I will also be on hand to answer questions and offer advice to individual members of my team

-->The NPN

2008-07-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

The NPN stands for the New Plan Network, and is a program that provides various tools to promote your online business for a low fee of just $10 per month.

When you sign up you get access to various promotional products including access to a multi-product autoresponder system, a multi-program downline builder, unlimited banner impressions, url tracking system/rotator, NPN internal messaging system, and much more.

These products are easily worth $10 per month alone as they will help you add prospects to your list or downline program, but what I really like about this program is the genuine opportunity to make a lot of money by referring others to this program.

The NPN uses a 5x5 downline system, which basically means your first 5 referrals go immediately below you on the top-level before subsequent referrals spill over to the next level below, and so on, until you fill the downline 5 levels deep. This means you would need 5+25+125+625+3125 = 3905 members to fill your downline.

The great thing is you don't need to personally refer 3905 members, the efforts of your downline will help to fill up your matrix for you.

As regards how much you can potentially earn, firstly you will receive $5 per month for every member you personally refer (who stays subscribed), and $0.5 per month for every other member in your downline, ie those people your downline members refer. This may not sound a lot but $0.5 x 3905 = $1952.50 per month for a full matrix (which doesn't take into account any personal referrals you may make, where you receive $5 per referral).

You could in theory sign up under me or another online marketer and fill up your downline levels purely from the spillover from your sponsor, but I recommend seeking out your own referrals for quicker and more lucrative results.

As you can hopefully see, this looks like a fairly good compensation plan already, but you can also potentially earn unlimited profits from a 100% matching bonus on all your personal referrals. So in other words if one of your personal referrals is earning $1000 from their 5x5 downline per month, then you will receive $1000 as well.

I've been watching this program for a while and think it has enormous potential. At the time of writing (July 2006), the NPN has been running successfully for well over a year, and has built up close to 20,000 subscribers (which means it still has a very small membership base compared to other programs and a largely untapped market). In addition to this in recent months membership levels have started to rise significantly, and looks to be finally taking off. Combine this with the fact that I've only read positive comments about the NPN on marketing and MLM forums, and this program appears to be an excellent program to promote, and one which you could easily bring in new referrals.

MLM / Downline Programs

2008-07-25T20:30:00.001-07:00

MLM (short for Multi-Level Marketing) programs are basically programs where you can earn money from not only those initial people you refer, but from the downline of people that these top-level referals subsequently sign up.

The major benefits of these types of programs are that they allow you to work from home with minimal start-up costs, and the potential of making a large long-term residual income. Also with the power of the internet, it is now a lot easier to build a profitable downline using ever-evolving internet-based promotion techniques rather than the traditional recruitment system of buying and cold-calling leads.

Traditionally these programs have always received a bad press because in some cases there's a fine line between MLM's and pyramid schemes, but in the last few years more and more reputable companies are adopting a downline or referral based system to recruit product distributors, increase their database of customers, and ultimately increase their sales.

When deciding whether a network marketing company is legitimate, and not just a glorified pyramid scheme, you need to ask yourself whether the products available would interest you as a consumer regardless of the possibility of making money from building a downline. If you can answer yes to this question, and the company does indeed have a good solid product, then in most cases it cannot be labeled a pyramid scheme.

The key to success with MLM and network-marketing businesses is to not only recruit people, but lead them and teach them how they too can recruit people. By creating a successful team where every member below you can replicate the exact system that you are using and build their own downlines you will do very well in network marketing.

There are literally thousands of MLM companies so how do you know which ones you should join? Well here's my checklist of criteria that I consider before deciding which ones I should join:

1. Does the company have a good product?

I discussed this above, but to repeat this is important because not only should it ensure that it can't be accused of being a pyramid scheme, but it should offer a top-quality product to entice people to buy it and want to sign up in the first place.

2. Has it already established itself?

I generally only consider companies that have been operating and paying out for at least a year. Of course this doesn't guarantee that the company will be around for several years, but at least you know that it's not a fly-by-night outfit.

3. Does it have a good reputation amongst other distributors / recruiters?

Forums are a great place to find out what other people's experiences are of the company in question. If you see a lot of positive feedback on various forums all saying good things then you've probably got a winner.

4. Does it have a good compensation plan?

When it comes down to it, this is ultimately what most of us are primarily interested in. If you are going to spend your precious time promoting a company you want to know that the potential financial rewards are worth it.

5. Does it have spillover?

Spillover is simply where when you recruit excess people, these referrals get put under your downline members. For example if you have a 5x5 matrix and you recruit 6 personal referrals, then that 6th person will be put under one of your 5 initial sign-ups. This helps build their downline and helps keep them enlisted in the company because they benefit from your efforts as well as their own.

6. Does it still have plenty of potential for growth, or is it already oversaturated?

This is something worth considering because obviously if you have two similar companies selling identical products, with one having 10,000 members and one having 1,000,000 members, then you would want to join the first company because there are so many more potential people you can reach.

7. Is the product priced at a level most people can afford?

If you want to build a large downline then this is an important factor, even if promoting high-ticket products, because if the product doesn't offer value for money then you will have great difficulty getting people to buy the product regardless of the price.

8. Who's the owner of the network marketing company and are they reputable?

This information can be quite hard to find out, but you will often find the answer on forums discussing the company in question, where some diligent person will have already conducted their own research, and shared their findings with other readers of the forum.

All of these factors mentioned above should be seriously taken into consideration when deciidng whether or not to join a particular MLM company.

Okay by now you're probably wondering what companies I'm personally involved in, because the likelihood is that the companies I've chosen satisfy most, if not all, of these criteria.

Well at the moment I'm promoting two network-marketing companies, and I'm very excited about both of them, particularly the latter

Keyword Research

2008-07-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

After you have identified a list of potential niches (see the Finding Niches section) you need to do some keyword research to see whether or not they could be profitable or not. You will want to find keywords that have a lot of demand, ie many searches every month, and have low supply, ie few sites come up when you search for that keyword.

The first place I would recommend you visit is the Yahoo search marketing site. This will give you a few useful tools that will allow you to enter a keyword and find out how many times that word was searched for in the previous month on Yahoo, plus a number of alternative keywords you could use. Note you would expect the number of Google searches to be at least double those of Yahoo. You can also check to see what price advertisers are paying to get top placements in their sponsored search section, their equivalent of Google Adwords.

This is a good foundation and will tell you how many people, if any, are actually searching for any given keyword. However, you now need to see if this keyword has many competing sites, to find out how easy it will be to get good rankings. You can do this yourself manually by going to either Yahoo or Google and typing in the keyword. It will then come back to you with the number of results. Dividing this figure by the number of searches will give you an indication of how much competition there is. You want to find keywords where this figure is as low as possible.

One other thing, you should now look at the first page of results you see on Google when you enter a keyword. If most of them have a pagerank (this is a measure of how many links from other sites a site has - to check this download the free Google toolbar) of 5 or above, then it's probably not best to target this keyword, as they're clearly an established site with numerous incoming links. This is discussed in depth elsewhere on this site.

This is a very laborious task, and as time is a very precious commodity, I would recommend using one of the numerous keyword tools on the market. There are a number of free ones like goodkeywords, but the one I use for all my sites, and can thoroughly recommend is KeywordsAnalyzer.

This is an extremely powerful piece of software. It basically does all the things mentioned above in a fraction of the time, and offers so many other advanced features. Just enter any keyword, and it will instantly give you all the information you need such as number of searches per month, number of competing websites, and the ratio of supply/demand. Plus if you are interested in advertising with say Google Adwords or Yahoo's network, it will tell you instantly how many ad campaigns are currently running for that particular keyword, plus what the current highest bids are, so you know what you will have to pay to get top advertising spots. This is also useful information if you are carrying Google Adsense on your site, as you will get a nice percentage of this bid price.

There are so many other features that I could mention. For example you could enter a simple keyword, and the software will within just a few minutes come back with literally thousands of related keywords you could use, and their relative competition. My best advice would be to click here to visit the KeywordsAnalyzer website, read the sales letter, and watch the short demonstration video. This will demonstrate how powerful this software really is.

The first place I would recommend you visit is the Yahoo search marketing site. This will give you a few useful tools that will allow you to enter a keyword and find out how many times that word was searched for in the previous month on Yahoo, plus a number of alternative keywords you could use. Note you would expect the number of Google searches to be at least double those of Yahoo. You can also check to see what price advertisers are paying to get top placements in their sponsored search section, their equivalent of Google Adwords.

This is a good foundation and will tell you how many people, if any, are actually searching for any given keyword. However, you now need to see if this keyword has many competing sites, to find out how easy it will be to get good rankings. You can do this yourself manually by going to either Yahoo or Google and typing in the keyword. It will then come back to you with the number of results. Dividing this figure by the number of searches will give you an indication of how much competition there is. You want to find keywords where this figure is as low as possible.

One other thing, you should now look at the first page of results you see on Google when you enter a keyword. If most of them have a pagerank (this is a measure of how many links from other sites a site has - to check this download the free Google toolbar) of 5 or above, then it's probably not best to target this keyword, as they're clearly an established site with numerous incoming links. This is discussed in depth elsewhere on this site.

This is a very laborious task, and as time is a very precious commodity, I would recommend using one of the numerous keyword tools on the market. There are a number of free ones like goodkeywords, but the one I use for all my sites, and can thoroughly recommend is KeywordsAnalyzer.

This is an extremely powerful piece of software. It basically does all the things mentioned above in a fraction of the time, and offers so many other advanced features. Just enter any keyword, and it will instantly give you all the information you need such as number of searches per month, number of competing websites, and the ratio of supply/demand. Plus if you are interested in advertising with say Google Adwords or Yahoo's network, it will tell you instantly how many ad campaigns are currently running for that particular keyword, plus what the current highest bids are, so you know what you will have to pay to get top advertising spots. This is also useful information if you are carrying Google Adsense on your site, as you will get a nice percentage of this bid price.

There are so many other features that I could mention. For example you could enter a simple keyword, and the software will within just a few minutes come back with literally thousands of related keywords you could use, and their relative competition. My best advice would be to click here to visit the KeywordsAnalyzer website, read the sales letter, and watch the short demonstration video. This will demonstrate how powerful this software is really.

Finding Niches

2008-07-25T20:26:00.000-07:00

With so much competition for the popular highly-searched subjects like mortgages, gambling, health etc, it's becoming increasingly important to identify a niche market to target your site to. The top-ranked sites in these areas have, in a lot of cases, been around for many years, and will likely have many thousands of visitors and incoming links so the chances of you getting anywhere near the top few pages of the search engines to compete with them are very slim.

Therefore you need to find a popular niche that has a reasonable number of searches every month, and that doesn't have too many well-established competing sites. Therefore you know that you have a good chance of getting near the top of the search engines with a well-optimised site, and lots of incoming links (see the Search Engine Optimization section for more information on this subject).

So how do you find these niches? Well there are several approaches. Firstly I would recommend sitting down in front of a blank page and just having a brainstorming session. Start off my writing down as many words and related words as you can relating to subjects you know quite a lot about, such as interests, hobbies, skills, etc. If some of these words that you have identified are too generic, then break them down into sub-categories to identify more specific niches.

Keep these words handy for when you do keyword research later. Next you want to identify hot topics that other people are talking about. A good way to do this is to look at the types of subjects that people are writing about on blogs, forums and chatrooms. Another good way to find hot topics is by going to the large article directories such as goarticles or ezinearticles, and find the most popular articles and what subjects they are based on.

Another good way to find potential niches is by going to Amazon and going to the "books" section and click on "bestsellers" to see what kind of books people are currently buying. Then visit the magazine section and again see which subjects the top-selling magazine-subscriptions are based on. Ebay is another good research tool, simply look for the top-selling products, and maybe think about writing sites reviewing these products.

You can also look for ideas in the offline world as well. Go to your local newsagents and look at all the different magazines on display, and make a note of any potential niches you could exploit. Also visit your local library (yes they do still exist even in this internet age) for inspiration. You'll be amazed at how many ideas you can pick up. Most libraries even have free internet access so you can do keyword research at the same time as you identify potential niches.

Finally, if all else fails just look around you. There are literally thousands of potential niches. For example, computers, mouse mats, speakers, paper clips, posters, radios, etc, and their related sub-niches, such as customised computers, film posters, etc. Just be creative.

By now you should have a nice list of potential niches. Now it's time to do some keyword research to identify if these niches have limited competition and could therefore be profitable. Please visit the Keyword Research section for more information.

Domain Name

2008-07-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Once you've established the theme of your site, you need to choose your domain name, and check whether it is available. This is a very important decision and shouldn't be taken lightly, as a bad domain name can have a negative effect on the future profitability of your site.

There are many factors you need to consider when you choose a domain name, which I have listed below:

1. Keep it as simple, and as short as possible.

This almost goes without saying as it's clearly easier to remember one or two word domain names than a mixture of numbers and letters. If you do use one or two words make sure they are words that are easily spelt, otherwise again people are likely to visit another site other than yours.

2. Try and include your main keyword(s) in your domain name.

This will increase your search engine ranking for that keyword or keywords. A really perfect domain name would be one that includes your main keyword(s), and perfectly describes the content of your site.

3. Avoid hyphens if you can.

Some people will disagree with me here, but I would recommend not having any hyphens in your name. This is because again by doing so, you're only increasing the chances that people will enter the address of your site incorrectly when they enter it into the browser. However I wouldn't rule them out completely as there may be an excellent domain name available that uses a hyphen to connect your two main keywords for example.

4. Do not include trademarks in your domain name.

The last thing you need is to go to the time and effort of building and promoting your site, only to get into trouble later on when the company who's trademark you are using finds out about your site, and demands that you change the name, or even takes legal action against you. This is very important to remember.

5. If you can get a dot-com.

When people refer to internet companies they still refer to them as dot-com's, and it is, in my opinion, still the most respected suffix to have. I know I personally will give more credence, when surfing the net, to sites that end in .com than others such as .info or .org for example.

6. If you have a branded off-line company use that name.

This can be extremely powerful if you already have an established business, and you are serious about building a major presence on the internet. Alternatively you could of course make up a catchy one-word name for your business, and follow many of the internet giants such as Google, Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, etc, who have done this successfully

Creating Ebooks

2008-07-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

Writing and selling ebooks is an extremely lucrative business right now. Whatever subject you are interested in, however small, you can be sure that someone is out there making some decent money from an ebook or information product based on this subject. They are so beneficial for both sellers and buyers.

Sellers benefit enormously because the expenses are next to nothing. You don't need to buy products from a wholesaler or supplier, you just need the one product which can be sold repeatedly over and over again. There are no delivery costs either, as the ebooks are usually downloaded easily via an exe or pdf file (recommended) from a download page or an email attachment.

The buyers benefit because most people online are looking for information on any number of subjects, howver big or small. They don't want to spend hours trawling the search engines looking for all the information they need. Instead they are quite prepared to spend good money for an ebook which contains all the information they are looking for all in one downloadable ebook. This ebook can then be read on the buyer's computer, or in most cases can be printed out.

The most time-consuming part is obviously writing the ebook to begin with. You can hire a writer to do this for you (elance is a good place to look), but I would recommend writing it yourself to make sure it's done properly. Ideally you want to create an ebook on a subject that you have a lot of knowledge in, but this isn't essential. You could simply pick a popular subject that you know absolutely nothing about, but you know from reading forums, and looking at keyword research results, etc that you've found a very hot topic.

In this case you could simply find as much information as you possibly can from libraries, bookshops, the internet, etc and include as much information as you can and include it in your ebook. Another good way of obtaining good information is by interviewing experts in that particular subject area. This will also add weight to your ebook when it comes to promoting it.

Your ebook should not be too short, or excessively long and filled with filler content. Most ebooks range from 40-250 pages, so anything within this range is fine. If you have written it in Word or any other word processing package, then you will need to transfer it to a suitable pdf file, so it can be downloaded, usually via Adobe, by your customers. The best way I've found is to write the ebook using OpenOffice, a free alternative to Word. Once written, you can simply click on "export as pdf" from the file menu, and you instantly have a professional looking pdf format ebook.

Once you have finished compiling your ebook, it's time to create your sales page or sales letter. Please visit the sales letter page for more information

Blogs

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If you are relatively new to the internet or know nothing about building your own site, then a blog is an excellent place to start. A blog (short for web log) is basically a site on the internet where you can post your thoughts or opinions on literally any conceivable topic. They mostly come in the form of a diary or journal, and are becoming increasingly popular with both individuals and businesses.

The best thing of all is that these blogs are completely free in some cases, and you can be up and running with your blog within about ten minutes. I've personally got several blogs running on Blogger, the largest blog site on the net, using their free service, which I can personally recommend. It takes just a few minutes to enter your details, choose a title for your blog, choose a template, and that's it, you're ready to make your first post. You don't need to worry about web hosting either as the blog is hosted on Blogger's own server.

If this is going to be your only site to start off with, then you need to know how to make money from it. There's a few ways of monetising your blog.

Firstly you can talk about specific products (make sure they are related to the theme of your blog) and at the end of your review include your affiliate links to these products. When one of your readers buys this product after clicking on your link, you will earn a commission (see affiliate programs for more details). Don't overdo it with your affiliate links though if you're hosting your blog on someone else's server, such as Blogger, otherwise it will classed as spam, and you may get your blog removed.

Secondly if you don't have any products to sell or promote, then the best way of earning money is to include some adverts in your blog. There are several of these companies offering this service, but the biggest and most popular is Google Adsense. Google will pay you for displaying it's advertisers' ads on your site, and every time someone clicks on that ad, you will get a sizeable percentage (no-one knows for sure but thought to be around 50%) of what the advertiser paid Google for that ad. Just make sure you don't under any circumstances click on your own ads or get friends or family to click on your ads, as this is a sure-fire way of getting banned from the Adsense program, possibly for life.

To get lots of people to visit your blog site and click on your links, then you obviously need traffic. The best way of attracting people is by adding fresh content on a regular basis, every day if you have time. After you make a new post to your blog, you should also submit it to various sites who pick up freshly updated blogs. An excellent site that I can recommend for this is Pingomatic.

You should also submit your blog to as many directories as possible, and get links from as many different sources as you can. These subjects are discussed in depth elsewhere on this site.

If you are planning on having a main site as well as a blog, or maybe you want to include this blog as part of another site, and host it yourself, then I recommend you take a look at the free service offered from Wordpress, that will allow you to do this. This gives you complete control over your blog as it's hosted on your own server/hosting account.

Affiliate Programs

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If you have a quality product to sell, and you don't want to wait the several months it can sometimes take to get good search engine rankings, and you don't have a lot of money to spend on advertising, then using affiliates is a great way to go. By creating an affiliate program you can leave your affiliates to pay for any

advertising, and let them use their own websites to promote your products, some of which will already be established with high search engine rankings and high visitor numbers.

To entice your affiliates to promote your product you need to offer a good commission for each sale they make. It depends on your costs, and the price of your product, but I recommend offering at least 40%, although I think a 50% rate and an equal share of any sales revenue is best. Some affiliate programs on Clickbank offer as high as 75%. Incidentally I can thoroughly recommend using Clickbank for your affiliate program if your product is an information product. They will list your product for you, making it easy for affiliates to find your product, and they will handle all your transactions, track sales, and handle any affiliate payments themselves.

To be successful, however, you need to do more than just start an affiliate program and let them get on with it. You need to educate them on what the best methods of selling your product are. Give them various marketing tools such as text links, different sized banner ads, a long list of relevant search terms/keywords they could use in PPC campaigns, and sample emails. Remember they're effectively working for you, so treat them well, and give them as much information and helpful advice as you can. The more successful they are, the more money you will make.

There are so many affiliate programs out there, so you need to make yours stand out by offering these effective marketing tools, and a high enough commission to make it worth their while. To go one step further and attract even more affiliates you could adopt a two-tier affiliate program. This is where your affiliate earns a commission for any sales they make, plus if they themselves recruit any affiliates underneath them then they can earn a small commission on any sales they make as well.

For example, say you had a two-tier affiliate program that offered 50% to 1st level affiliates and 10% to 2nd level affiliates, and your product was $100. Affiliate X makes a sale to Customer X, and is credited 50% and therefore $50. If Customer X went on and made a sale he would get $50, and Affiliate X would also get 10% or $10.

As you can see this can be very powerful, and very attractive to potential affiliates. Although you may lose a small percentage of your sales price for every sub-affiliate sale, you will still earn far more in the long term with this two-tier affiliate program. It can be trickier to set up than a single level affiliate program, but the rewards are definitely worth it.

Planning / Site Theme

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Planning and deciding on the theme of your site is absolutely essential, and will ultimately determine how successful you will be online. For example, a small niche site with little competition, that you could easily achieve top rankings for, is likely to earn you more money than a site in a highly competitive, over-saturated market, where you will be competing with thousands of long-established and successful sites.
The sub-categories below will all help you in planning and preparing your site, and deciding it's theme and revenue model:

Affiliate Programs
Blogs
Creating Ebooks
Domain Name
Finding Niches
Keyword Research
MLM / Downline Programs
Private Label Rights
Resale Rights
Sales Letter
Selling On Ebay
Selling Your Own Product

LEARN HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE

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LEARN HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH THIS FREE INTERNET MARKETING RESOURCE GUIDE...

I have designed this website as a resource guide for anyone looking to set up their own website, and make some money online. More and more people are entering the world of internet marketing, and for good reason. There is a lot of money to be made. However if you are going to be successful marketing online, it's important to arm yourself with as much information, and as many resources as possible, because there is an awful lot to learn, particularly for people new to this area.

Over the last few years I've read hundreds of ebooks, listened to many interviews, scanned the internet marketing forums on a daily basis, and have compiled many notebooks filled with ideas, tips, and useful resources. Hopefully this information, contained within this website and in my mailings to subscribers (you can sign up below), will benefit both newcomers to internet marketing, and more experienced marketers.

The internet marketing world is constantly evolving, and I am consistently learning new tricks and implementing new ideas for my various sites, so this site will be regularly updated with these new ideas, marketing tactics, new products, software, etc. Each section is essentially a guide containing general tips and useful resources, including specific software and ebooks, where appropriate, that I have used and can personally recommend. Note I only mention those products that I have used myself, and can independently and unbiasedly review.

Internet Marketing

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Internet Marketing Resource Guide

Internet marketing is one of the hottest subjects on the internet, with almost endless websites devoted to the subject. More and more people are realising that there is a lot of money to be made online through legitimate businesses, such as selling on Ebay, promoting affiliate products, and developing and selling your own products.

The major attraction of internet marketing is that there are almost no barriers to entry. You don't need any substantial capital to set yourself up, as you would in the offline world. For example, you can immediately start selling unwanted household items on Ebay, or you could sign up as an affiliate for a company and start promoting their products on the numerous sources of free ads, such as free classified ads sites, safelists and traffic exchanges, and earn a commission for each sale.

Most of the resources that you need to start making money online can be found cheaply, or indeed free in some cases. I recommend creating your own website if you want to increase your earning potential, but again this can be done cheaply if you are on a limited budget. Registering a domain name can cost less than $10, and the cost of web hosting varies, and although I recommend finding a quality web host, it is possible to find free web hosts that will host your site.

To build your site, there are various free tools that will simplify the whole process by using simple, easy to understand editors, so this needn't be daunting either. A good way to get started is simply by creating your own blog, using a service like Blogger, for example, who will host your site on their server for free.

As you can see it's obvious why internet marketing is now so popular, and will only continue to grow in the future. However, if you want to be successful marketing online there is a steep learning curve, and a lot of people simply give up after a few weeks because they haven't made any money. It takes time to learn how to be successful. Experienced marketers have endless resources they can draw on, that will most likely have come from years of testing and researching.

In the early stages of your internet marketing career there is a lot to learn, and you should absorb as much information as possible. Look for the more renowned internet marketers, and subscribe to their newsletters for ideas and tips. Also be sure to check out the Warrior Forum, which is frequented by some of very best online marketers, who you can learn so much from. There are also numerous ebooks and websites devoted to the various aspects of internet marketing.

There will come a time though when you have to take action. A lot of new potential marketers end up spending hundreds, if not thousands, on ebook after ebook, trying to learn as much as they possibly can, without actually devoting much time to doing it themselves, and learning as they go along. Don't get caught in this trap. It's very easy to do. I know because I did it myself to some extent when I first started out.

If you don't make any sales straight away, don't panic. Just keep trying out different things and learning from your mistakes. No-one makes lots of money instantly with no experience. It takes time. One thing I would recommend highly is having an opt-in form on your front page, where visitors to your site can choose to receive emails from you. This way even if you are not making any sales at the present time, at least you are building up your mailing list, which many successful marketers claim is their most valuable asset. This will enable you to market your product to the same prospects in future emails, increasing the chances of making a sale.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses