1.  Start with what’s hot.  Find affiliate program that matches the subject, then market.  Technorati.com/tag — tags popular for the day.  See what people are tagging; mention on your blog/site.

delicious/tag/(topic)  — related tags.

2.  Interest vs. pursuit:  type in search for keyword in DIGG, find storylines– that’s what people are interested in– take the tiltes of these stories; add them to blog posts, email subjects lines.

3.  Use keywords in your link tags  — website, blogs

4.  Google News.  News stories on a subject; use Google Alerts for that topic; write about it– articles, blog posts, etc.

5.  Body text need to match link tags– mean what you say!

6. Blog– put it “on your site”.  Go to rentacoder.com– $25.

7. Use rel= no follow to prevent loss of PR

8.  Write a blog post, hubpage, squidoo, or othe content sharing site that contains a link to an affiliate site using your affililiate ID in the link.  Commission Junction, ClickBank.  (_product_) Affilate- google search.

9.  Avoid linkfarms.

10.  Get pinged.  ping-o-matic.  Type in your blog, post, RSS url,

11.  Know if your keywords CONVERT (make money) before putting time into it.  Run ad campaigns using the keywords, use Google conversion tracker.

12.  Get bookmarked.  Go to delicious, bookmark your posts.

13.  Google Webmaster tools– use it!  Look for warnings on your site.  Stale cache problem (nothing changing on your SERP description).

14.  DIGG effect.  Digg works even if only one person Diggs you!  Don’t worry about making first page on DIGG.

15.  Don’t compete w/ the big guys.  Understand your market.  Longer tail keywords of the big market– means searcher in buying mode.  Nichewatch.com– where is all the competition ranking.

16.  Keyword research tool– some keywords are better in anchor text, some for content, some in H1 tags, etc.

17.  Use PR sites.  PRWeb.  Passes anchor text links.   Put anchor text in first 40 words– sploggers use …

18.  Shorten your title tags.

19.  Use Google AdWords to test ads, keywords, see how much traffic, how much click costs.  Use this approach in your meta tags.– description tag, abstract.  Make them condensed– not too long.

20.  Just go do this stuff!

MORE:

1.  Find high-viewed Google videos on a partcular topic that could be related to yours.  Copy and paste that video’s tags in Notepad; use the same tags on your promo YouTube video, and you’ll be listed as a “Related Video” and ride on some of the traffic generated by the big video.

2.  If you have less than 1,000 friends on MySpace, post a video on your bulletin board and set to autoplay when page loads.  When your friends open their page, it will count as a YouTube view and will drive your video ranking higher.

If you’ve been engaging in IM over the years, you are probably used to the hype and constant bombardment of internet marketing products from all the people whose list you signed up for.  It gets mind numbing sometimes.

Listen, I’m here to help inject some sanity.  You can say I’m a hardened IM– I’ve reached a point where I can ignore the hype of some re-hashed worthless launch, but can also recognized something with true utility.

Anyways, I am going to be posting a series of my IM Journal entries.  Yes, I use my Outlook Journal to write down my thoughts before I forget them, and to add clarity and direction to my efforts.  Hope you can learn from these.  You can think of them as the filtered, concentrated knowledge from pages and pages of IM info.  Here’s the first one.

—————————-

Date:  4/29/2008

The path to internet marketing success has two basic pillars:

• Keyword research
• Affiliate program research:  Amazon, eBay, etc.
• CPA research
• Website construction
• Blog construction
• AdSense set up
• E-Book creation
• Video Product creation
• Audio/ podcast Product creation
• Webinar creation

Major B Functions:

E-Book publishing for Amazon Kindle store
- Internet Riches for the Little Guy?
-Blogging

Ok, that’s the first entry in my IM journal.  I recommend you start one, too, because you will come across some “a-ha” moments that you’ll need to write down (don’t trust yourself to remember it, because you will be distracted by the next big IM launch and all those promo emails.  So…. get to work!

People, stop the insanity!  Stop buying ebook after ebook; course after course; jumping from one to another and GETTING NOWHERE.  NO, that new, over-hyped, gotta-have-it-at-all-cost product is NOT the system that is finally going to make you rich.  You are chasing yet another quick little fish while the other fish you had an opportunity to eat are getting away, and as a result you are still STARVING (not making any money).

People who tend to be more analytical, more impulsive, or lazy (want to get rich quick with little effort) are the ones who suffer from this affliction the most.   If you find yourself frustrated after months or even years of tinkering in internet marketing because you only made enough money to buy a nice shirt, time to rehabilitate yourself.

Here’s the GOLDEN RULE to internet marketing success:

You are much more likely to have success working on just one internet marketing campaign at a time, and engaging in no more than three (3) different internet marketing vehicles.

What I mean here is  once you start on a particular campaign, FINISH it before you start on the next one.  In this context, “finish” means to the point where you are making steady income from the campaign.

Limit yourself to no more than three (3)  internet marketing vehicles.  This is huge.  A vehicle, or ”specialty” takes a lot of time to master, especially with the constantly changing nature of the internet.  Examples of internet marketing strategies:

• PPC-ClickBank
• PPC-CPA Offers
• Blogging
• Social Media Marketing
• List Building and Marketing
• Membership Sites
• Website Flipping

Now, if your thing is affiliate marketing using Wordpress blogs, pick one niche (like Persian rugs) and focus on that.  That one niche is enough to keep you busy all day:  setting up your blog(s), adding content, adding to directories, tweeting about it, FaceBooking about it, forum posting, finding good affiliate programs for it, contacting other sites to link to you, setting up your PPC campaigns and tweaking them… and so on.

If you get tempted to start ANOTHER campaign at the same time, well, your chances of generating revenue just dropped 50%.   What winds up happening is both of these campaigns are done half-assed because you spread yourself too thin.  Your site’s content will suck because you won”t have time to write frequent, good content, and as a result your sites won’t make it to the first page of Google, and/or they won’t convert.

The only way around this is to leverage your time by OUTSOURCING the SEO.  There are content writers in India and the Philippines who can crank out content for you at reasonable prices, but you need to get over the urge of doing everything yourself.

Example 1. If your main strategy is selling ClickBank products, do ONE PRODUCT AT A TIME.  What I mean by this is, do everything you need to do to get your campaign producing a steady stream of income before you even think about starting a second one.  If you are driving traffic through PPC and direct linking, well, make sure your campaign is tweaked and making you money before you abandon it and jump to another product.  Otherwise you’ll be like a dog chasing its tail.

Example 2.  If you plan to create a comparison site for several Clickbank products and don’t plan to use PPC, then put all your energy in making the best site you can in terms of keyword targeting and search engine optimization.  Then, hit the off-site SEO hard.  Stay focused until you see the dollars rolling in.

A third guideline can be to limit yourself to no more than 2 or 3 niches; two preferably.  Remember, as you take on more niches, you are diluting yourself.  It’s like biting off more than you can chew, and you will LOSE.

Ok, here’s a simple task you can do as part of you rehabilitation.  When you are in the mood to take a stab making money online, write down your niche, campaign, and vehicle.  Turn off all other distractions (email, forums, blogs, web surfing) and implement the Golden Rule.  Examples below:

Niche:  Persian Rugs

Campaign: Persian Rug CPA Offers in CJ and PepperJam

Vehicle:  WordPress SEO optimized blog

————————-

Niche:  Weight Loss

Campaign:  ClickBank product FatLoss4 Idiots

Vehicle:  PPC

Remember, DO NOT change or start a new niche, campaign or vehicle until you FINISH what you started by seeing the MONEY rolling in.  Be disciplined!  Do whatever it takes to keep you focused.

Now, go for it.

Internet marketers are fully aware of the constantly evolving nature of the business and are therefore compelled to learn  (or at least check out) everything new that comes out, or risk missing out on a key discovery/technique that competitors will use to their advantage.  Before you have a chance to test out a new technique, another one comes along, and the cycle repeats.  So it’s very easy to find yourself spending 80% of your time studying internet marketing and 20% of your time actually DOING the actual internet marketing activities that MAKE YOU MONEY.  Most people justify this by telling themselves that the studying is an investment that will pay off later… but later may never come if you keep getting bombarded with an endless supply of material.

I am subscribed to several lists (which was pared down from a much bigger list) and therefore get notified of upcoming product launches; usually a course of some type or a software application.  And when one is about to get released, I receive a torrent of emails from the product creator’s JVs (joint venture partners; super affiliates) .  You see, if you buy the product through their link, they get a commission; usually 50% or more.  And these JVers know that they share a lot of the same people on their lists, but have no shame sending out the emails, offering something free if you access the product through their link.  It’s like a bunch of fishermen angling for a big prize.

Check this one out from StomperNet regarding Brad Callen’s Keyword Minute report (great stuff, by the way):

From:  StomperNet

Subject:  3 Money-Making Strategies in Under a Minute (free report)

Many of you reading this will already know Brad Callen – if not, chances are you thought we were the same guy.   (That happens a lot.)

Brad CALLEN is well-known as the maker of one of the BEST (and one of my favorite) SEO toolsets out there.  Particularly, SEO Elite and Keyword Elite have been incredibly useful in my businesses.

So he knows a thing or two when it comes to making money online, and that’s why I want you to check out this free report called “The Keyword Minute” [I removed their affiliate link].

In it, he takes 3 strategies that beginners and veterans alike often find confusing:

- Integration Marketing
- AdWords
- Article Marketing

…And boils them all down to strategies that you can use to immediately start making money today.  I’m telling you, at 36 pages, this is massive for a free report, but it’s amazing how thoroughly these THREE powerful tactics are explained.

And best of all, it’s step-by-step, so you can begin using what you learn before you even finish reading the report if you do them as you follow along.

This is definitely worth your time, so don’t miss it while you can get it for free.

Talk again soon,
Brad Fallon
CEO
StomperNet

The solution to this conundrum is to read fast; take the good stuff, and put it to use.  Set metered goals each week, and don’t jump to a new strategy until you complete each goal (build a website, create a product, set up a PPC campaign, etc.).  Otherwise, you’ll be the most knowledgeable yet poorest internet marketer on the planet!

P.S.  I’ll talk about Brad Callen’s three techniques in the next post; they are quite good.

Since using it, my opt-in rate has increased by over 100%! What’s ingenious about this “pop-under” is that it loads at the bottom border of the screen, so as not to annoy your visitor by blocking his view. He can continue to browse your site with the Ultimate Footer Ad at the bottom; finish reading your great content, and THEN decide to opt in.

The problem with a lot of the other pop under/ hover ads out there is that they drop in and block the visitor from reading, forcing him to look at the intrusive opt in box that just slid down from the top. Well, this is not a good strategy because it may annoy your visitor causing him to leave your site; plus, if the delay is too short it doesn’t give him enough time to evaluate your “worth”. If he doesn’t know you well enough, he is not going to opt in.

Ultimate footer ad solves this by loading at the bottom and not blocking the view, but having just enough motion in the visitor’s field of vision to get his attention.

UFA can also be used for CPA offers and links to some of your products. It comes with pre-made templates, and instructions on how to create your own– awesome if you know how to create graphics in Fireworks, Photoshop or other image editing software. At a one-time price of $47, Ultimate Footer Ads is a steal. Check it out!

For those not in the know, a Google slap is when Google dramatically raises the cost per click of all your keywords, essentially destroying your PPC campaign.  For example, let’s say you put up a website about golf, and embedded it with affiliate links to golf products.  You use one of the site’s pages as a landing page (where the visitor is taken to after he clicks the AdWords ad link).  You have great content, and the visitor clicks your affiliate link for a set of golf clubs and buys it.  Your commission is $30.00, but the cost of the click was $5.00 for the keyword “golf clubs” due to the Google slap, and 49 other people clicked it before that one person actually purchased something.  So your profit is $30 – $250 (50 x $5) = -$220.

Affiliate sites are easy to identify.  Most of them are there to generate referrals, so they are embedded with links coded with affiliate IDs.  So Google is targeting them and is making it difficult if not impossible for these site owners to continue doing business through PPC.  And, it doesn’t matter how good your campaign is set up:  the word is that the best laid out AdWords ads (great landing pages, highly researched keyword lists containing only the highly converting words, high page rank landing pages) are getting slapped with unsustainable keyword bids.

Google is making a statement that it is not interested in having a bunch of affiliate marketing sites dominate its pay per click network.  This is amazing, because I’m sure Google gets tens of millions of dollars a month in PPC fees from affiliate marketers.  But the Big G is looking out for its reputation and long term growth.  It believes that if the user experience is trashy, it will lose money in the long run as people abandon using it.

I have said for some time that PPC marketing in most cases is a big waste of money.  This event proves it further.  You have to be crazy to think you can outwit Google.

Even though I’m not a big PPC marketing fan, I’m still worried about this news.    If Google doesn’t like affiliate sites in its PPC network, then what about its organic listings?  If the same “penalty” is applied to all indexed sites, there’s a good chance that affiliate sites may drop off the face of the Google earth in search results.  If this happens, it could devastate affiliate marketing.  The only other option is to have a large email list of prospects, and market to them directly, sending them content embedded with your affiliate links.

My advice is to not rely on one internet marketing business model.  Diversify; consider returning to the basics and investing in a “niche” ecommerce website.

I am going through a course called Profit Loophole by an internet marketer named Dave Kelly.  Dave insists that this particular business model, when done correctly (per his experience) has long-term profit potential compared to other, popular internet marketing models.

Dave insists that there is a market of people who buy websites, dress them up a bit, and sell them at a higher price (just like house flipping).  Some of them even keep the website and try to monetize it with AdSense ads, affiliate offers, and their own products.  It all depends on the website’s niche and how much traffic it generates.

Here are the minimum requirements of a website that has the potential to be sold:

1) Indexed in Google, even if just 1 page indexed
2) Has a current Page Rank of at least 2 on the Google toolbar
3) Is a non hyphenated .com, .net, or .org domain
4) Has at least 1 link pointing to the site when using the link:domain.com operator in Google
5) The sites can be of any type, static HTML or Blog, it is not important as the potential buyer would not use your existing content.

But the two things that gives websites the most value are:

1) the amount of monthly hits to the site (traffic)
2) the amount of email subscribers to the site

So, if you can build up a website property that has these two features, chances are someone is willing to buy it from you.  Afterall, these are the two main reasons why Google purchased YouTube for over a billion dollars (YouTube as a business line does not make much money for Google to this day, and may even be losing money.  Google is still figuring out ways to monetize its traffic).

Just another avenue to throw into the mix.  Remember, don’t get caught in the internet marketing spiderweb.   You can try more than one model, but don’t spread yourself too thin; otherwise you’ll get nowhere.

Clickbank has an easy-to-follow process to create a Payment Link– the HTML code one puts on his sales page that takes the purchaser to Clickbank’s payment processing system– beats the heck of having to buy an expensive shopping cart system.

But the true power comes from CB’s affiliate link system:  all an affiliate has to do to sell a vendor’s product and get paid a commission is to create a link in this format:

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net,

where AFFILIATE is the CB nickname of the affiliate, and VENDOR is the CB nickname of the vendor.   Affiliates promote CB products (they can sell an unlimited amount) using their special link on websites, on forums, on internet bulletin boards and classifieds like Craigslist, and by emailing to friends– basically anywhere on the internet where you can include your affiliate link.

When a prospect clicks the affiliate’s link, he is taken to the vendor’s sales page and a “cookie” is placed on his computer– a script that tells Clickbank (if he buys is) that he was referred by that particular affiliate.  If he winds up buying the product, CB tracks the purchase and the affiliate gets a commission.  Commissions are set by the vendor and can range between 25-75% of the product price.  CB deducts 7.5% of the sale price + $1.00 per sale.

Let me tell you that there are some people who are making 5-figures each MONTH selling Clickbank products.  The name of the game is to get a lot of clicks to your affiliate links.   The most popular approaches are PPC, blogs, using Social Media like Facebook and Twitter, natural search, and email spamming (don’t do this!)

As with many opportunities to make money online, it has gotten a bit more challenging making a lot of money through Clickbank due to increased competition and a general decline in appeal of the long-copy sales page approach.  But since there are new people coming online evey day, the opportunity to make it big still persists.

• PPC – CPA arbitrage
• Information product
• Google AdSense
• MLM schemes
• Site swapping
• Continuity models
• Niche product eCommerce

As an internet marketer, you either sell your own product or somebody else’s (affiliate marketing).

But that’s the easy part.  The hard part is getting your product seen; i.e. driving web traffic to your site.  This is where it gets really messy.   At this point, two camps diverge:  (1) those who put up a quick site and force immediate traffic to it using paid search (PPC), forum posting, internet classifieds, and, for some of the aggressive ones, email spamming; and (2) those who focus on building a respectable, content-rich site  that grows over time and builds natural traffic and buzz slowly but surely.

Which one is best for you?  It depends on your personality.  Both approaches can work; there are people making a lot of money in each.  If you can’t wait for the money to start rolling in, can get a lot of things done back to back fast, are very good at doing internet research, and are willing to spend some upfront money in PPC costs, then perhaps the first option is for you.  You’ll spend your time doing keyword research, setting up, testing and tweaking PPC ads, visiting competitor sites, researching and participating in related blogs and forums,  and using various spy tools to see what others are doing with their PPC campaigns.

For me personally, I am more methodical.  I prefer to invest my time building up my website properties– adding useful content, building natural search traffic, and later monetizing by selling ad space and embedding the site with affiliate links.  I prefer WordPress and SiteBuildIt to build my websites because of their superb functionality and great customer support.   It’s all about how many indexed web pages you own on the world wide web.  As my sites grow in volume, they will get exposure and will build up incoming links, driving its pages to the top in the search engines.  This is stable, long term, free traffic.  Stable because I will continually add fresh content– Google prefers updated websites over unattended/ abandoned websites and will reward them with higher rankings.

But that is just me.  I am the turtle, not the hare.  Something to think about…

internet marketing

In 1996, I ran across a link on a website called The Internet Marketing Center.  I clicked it, and read a sales page (short by today’s standards) written by a young guy named Corey Rudl.  This site was selling a course on internet marketing; i.e., how to make money online.   I bought the thing (a complete course contained in two 3-ring binders) and that was the start of my internet marketing journey.

Corey Rudl was one of the first pioneers of internet marketing.  He created a digital product (eBook) called “Car Secrets Revealed” that contained specific information on how to avoid getting screwed purchasing a car and having your car repaired.  His model was a one page website (long sales copy) that asked for the visitor’s email.  If the visitor didn’t buy the ebook, Corey set up a system to automatically email the visitor about once a week, sending him free car tips and of course included the link to purchase the ebook in those emails.  This was the conception of the juggernaut known as niche marketing.  Thousands of internet entrepreneurs learned of the simple system and joined the fray, creating websites selling everything from dating tips to ways to improve bad breath.  And to this day, the model still works.

Corey was one of the first to make multiple millions in internet marketing, but tragically he died in 2002 while engaging in one his favorite activities, car racing.   I think Corey, if he were alive today, would be a lead innovator in internet marketing.  It was in his genes.

Fast forward to 2009, and internet marketing is exciting and lucrative as ever, but also not as easy to succeed in as before.

Next:  multiple business models spring up

Dan