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Internet Marketers, Follow Only Successful Online Experts

published Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 11:27 pm by Al Smith

Follow The Experts Who Do What They Teach
Copyright 2010 by Willie Crawford

As I’m sure that you realize, not all online marketing experts are the same. Some are only interested in your money, and they know that the quickest and easiest wayto get it is to sell you “the dream.”

Many so-called experts have never done what they teach. They come online, survey the landscape, and decide that teaching is easier than doing. So they hire a ghostwriter to write an ebook, or worse, they write an ebook filled with their theories. Then they roll this ebook out with lots of fan fare, selling it to unsuspecting newbies.

Buyers of the above ebook, read maybe half way through it, spot another shiny object, and are off to try what sounds like a faster, easier way.

So how do you avoid falling into this and a dozen other traps?

There are two ways that I’ll recommend.

1) Use tools such as the search engines to investigate the marketer or company before spending a penny with them. The internet is very inter-connected AND transparent. It’s nearly impossible to have a serious online presence and not be very visible in the search engines. For example, if you were to “google” my name, you would find over 2 million returns, and most of them would be me!

If I googled someone, or a company’s name, and couldn’t find it, I’d definitely ask why. I’d also probably start running in the opposite direction as fast as possible, with one hand on my wallet.

2) Follow the experts who actually do what they teach. Ifyou can’t see that they do what they teach, there is a good chance that they don’t, and the reason may be that they are not sure that it will work. As you look to see that theyare actually doing what they teach, also put it through the common sense test.

As an example, many of my friends and mentors teach that your business cannot grow beyond a certain point withyou trying to do everything in your business. When you first read that, you may ask yourself if this is just a sales ploy. So you observe top online marketers and notice that they have copywriters, programmers, operation managers, affiliate managers, webmasters, graphic artists, ghostwriters, email managers, virtual assistants, etc., working for them.

Then you shift to the offline world and notice that in the most successful restaurants, the owner is not in the back washing dishes, cooking, or supervising waiters. He is not on the cash register or waiting on tables. Instead he maybe wandering the floor and “hob knobbing” with customers, making them feel important. He may be just observing his business, looking for areas that can be improved and places where employees may need more training.

I’m sure that you’re beginning to get my point now. You often wonder if a marketer recommends that you do something because it will make him a profit, or if he really believes what he is recommending. Observing that he is actually doing it himself… that he believes in what he teaches enough to use it in his business, is very powerful.

As a personal example, I preach that you should outsource as much as possible, and focus on growing and managing your business. I know how to do many of the day-to-day tasks of running an online enterprise. After 14 years I’ve tried doing many of them, and become very good at some of them. However, I personally outsource most jobs related to graphics,copywriting, webmastering, programming, building mini-nets, keyword research, and customer service.

I have full-time people working exclusively for me, who handle most of these tasks. It took a while, but I finally realized that these people don’t cost me money, they make me money.

I do what my good friend Maria Gudelis calls engaging in talent arbitrage.

Maria has a very in-depth, yet inexpensive, course on being an offline consultant. I’ve gone completely through that course a dozen times, and have it memorized, AND do what she teaches. One of the things that she teaches is that you land offline consulting clients, and define what they need, etc., but that you don’t do most of the work. You pass it off to outsourced talent as soon as possible, but you pocket most of the fees collected at the same time. I follow Maria because I can see that she does what she teaches.

By the way, I encourage you to check out Maria’s coursein being an offline consultant. You’ll find it at: http://timic.org/Maria

I mentioned earlier that you should check out the person that you’re following. Another way that I do that is by looking at whether or not what they teach agrees with what other verified experts teach. One of my favorite experts is Dan Kennedy, and Maria’s teachings totally agree with what Dan teaches as far as how to leverage your business, and which segment of the market you should go after. Incidentally, you should go after segments of the market that HAVE money and are willing to spend it on you and your products or services.

I’ll wrap up this article, but share more of my thoughts and observations soon. In the meantime, develop the habit of really noticing whether your favorite guru actually does what he teaches. That could make a huge difference in your bottomline.

———————

Willie Crawford is founder of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle, a membership site where some of the world’s sharpest marketing minds gather to network, brainstorm, and jointly grow their businesses. Join The Internet Marketing Inner Circle today for $1. Complete details at: http://timic.org

Tags: improve your income online, Internet marketing, Willie Crawford
Posted in Affiliate Marketing, General | No Comments »

Affiliate Marketing, Is It Still A Viable Business Model?

published Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 9:35 pm by Al Smith

Affiliate Marketing By Linda Ryckman

One of the ways to make money online is affiliate marketing. This is a marketing practice in which a business rewards you for each visitor or customer you bring to their site through your marketing efforts.

You can be rewarded for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. This reward can be cash – set amount for each referral or a percentage amount.

There are also sites that offer gifts or points towards gifts for referring customers to their site.

Affiliate marketing is one of the largest growth industries on the Internet, it is estimated that in 2006 affiliates worldwide earned approximately US$6.5 billion from a variety of sources.

Affiliate marketing has become a big business on the internet today, and you can make money online with this method. Affiliate marketing is just using one website to drive traffic to another.

This form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers, can play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

The concept of revenue sharing-paying commission for referred business has been around for a very long time and predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce has been a mainstay on the Internet for many years.

Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.

Many merchants favor affiliate marketing in most cases it uses a “pay for performance” model, which means that the merchant does not incur any marketing expense.

Many businesses owe much of their success to this marketing technique, and one notable example being Amazon.com.

There are an increased number of Internet businesses and an increased number of people that trust the current technology enough to shop and do business online.

This allows many more opportunities for affiliate marketing and to generate a considerable amount of profit.

There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programs for a target website:
1. Affiliate program directories
2. Large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers
3. The target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled “affiliate program”, “affiliates”, “referral program”, or “webmasters”-usually in the footer or “About” section of the website.)

Affiliates marketers starting using the pay per click advertising earlier on in their development.

In 2000 Google launched its pay per click service, this alone is responsible for the widespread use and acceptance of pay per click as an advertising channel. An increasing number of merchants engage in pay per click advertising.

There are a number of e-learning sites where you can get a lot of information on working with affiliate marketing.

http://www.achieveworkfromhome.blogspot.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Linda_Ryckman

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate programs, Internet marketing, Pay per click
Posted in Affiliate Marketing | No Comments »

Affiliate Marketing – Increase Your Income Online

published Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 11:14 pm by Al Smith

How To Continually Grow Your Affiliate Checks

The promise of earning profits without really doing much of anything has enticed a lot of people towards affiliate marketing. But does affiliate marketing really work this way?

As an affiliate, all that is required of you is to simply place the merchant’s ad on your website. Then after that, you virtually do nothing but wait for anyone to click on the merchant’s ad and later collect your profits.

Easy, right? Well, not quite often.

Many affiliates earn almost nothing from their affiliate programs simply because they do nothing.

Remember that affiliate marketing is but another form of marketing, and you’ll definitely need to market your merchant’s product for you to earn something.

Successful affiliates in any affiliate program simply don’t sit there and wait for money to come. Why? Because there is no money in simply sitting and waiting. If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing and if you want to continually grow your affiliate checks, you’ve got to do something.

Think of ways on how to promote your merchant’s business and products better. Think of ways on how to induce other people to click on the link or ad provided to you by your merchant. Think of ways on how to make your affiliate sales increase!

So if you’re new in affiliate marketing and you try to follow the easy go lucky pit that most unsuccessful affiliate marketers follow, then you’re definitely on the wrong track. But we’re not advising you to stop right there.

No. Rather, we want you to take some steps to make your affiliate program work better and gain more commissions for you. How?

Here are a few guidelines that may help you to continually grow your affiliate checks:

* Become an expert on your affiliate product.

You can promote your merchant’s product better if you know a lot of things about it. To become an expert, the best thing you can do is purchase your merchant’s product yourself. This way, you can tell your customers about your first-hand experience using the product.

You can even write a testimonial or a personal endorsement ad about it. But if any condition does not permit you to purchase the product, you can at least make a thorough research about it.

* Host your own website.

Or at least have a domain name that is short and easy to remember. You certainly wouldn’t expect a visitor to remember a very long and incomprehensible URL.

And if that’s so, you also wouldn’t expect him to visit your website any time soon. That means less traffic for your page and the less chance for your affiliate ads and links to be clicked.

It is also a good idea to create a private website and offer access to it to anybody who clicks on any of your affiliate ads. Visitors usually get interested with these private websites.

Private websites also gives you a venue to promote your back-end affiliate products.

* Write your own affiliate ads.

Many merchants usually wouldn’t mind if you write and design your own ads for their products, for as long as you ask permission from them and present them your ad before posting it on your site.

This gives you a greater advantage over a lot of other affiliates who must be advertising the same affiliate products.

* Participate in chat rooms, discussion boards, and forums related to your product.

If you use to ignore them before, then it is time for you to start focusing your attention on them. You can start your own chat or join an existing chat related to your product.

You don’t have to promote your affiliate product at once, but find the chance to advertise and promote it as you go along. The same would be true for message boards, discussion boards and forums.

* Create a free ezine or newsletter.

Ezines and newsletters are periodical publications whose aim is to inform a group of people about a certain subject. In your ezines and newsletters, you don’t always have to promote your merchant’s product for this may greatly annoy your subscribers.

Rather, find a way to insert your affiliate ads and links on some portions of the letter. Also, don’t forget to promote your ezine or newsletter on your website.

These are but a few guidelines on how you can increase your affiliate sales and continually grow your affiliate checks. Sure there can be a lot of other tips that out there, and if you think they would work, we won’t discourage you from following them.

What’s important is that you be able to find a way to: attract more traffic to your site, induce your visitors to click on the ads on your site, and be able to promote your merchant’s products even outside the boundary of your website.

If you can do these, there’s no reason for you to fail in affiliate marketing. Keep working on it, keep improving on it, and adjust as you go. Here’s to your success!

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, affiliate products, affiliate program, how to make money online
Posted in Affiliate Marketing | No Comments »

Link Building Strategies, Web 2.0 Social Networking And Bookmarking

published Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 3:31 am by Al Smith

Link Building Strategies – Web 2.0 Concepts And Link Building

Web 2.0 has really set the Internet on fire over the past few years, and it is still going as strong as ever, if not stronger. Furthermore, Web 2.0 concepts can easily be used for link building.

There are two aspects of Web 2.0 concepts that are important to you, in terms of building links. The first is Social Networking, and the second is Social Bookmarking. There is a third concept as well, and that is sharing videos, which will we will cover at the end.

Not all of these sites will aid you in your link building, however, and it is important that you are aware of that. For example, adding your link to a social networking site that is very specialized, and doesn’t have a great deal of traffic – or a very high page rank – won’t do you much good.

However, creating a page on a social networking site such as MySpace, at http://www.myspace.com may help you. MySpace gets millions – if not billions – of hits each and everyday. MySpace has a page rank of eight, which is extremely good.

At the same time, however, since search engines are looking at the relevancy of the content between two sites that are linked to determine how important the link is, as well as how important the linking site is, making MySpace work for you, in terms of link building, is tricky. The idea is to set up a profile page that is extremely related, in content, to the website you will be linking to.

Something else to be aware of is that while the MySpace homepage may be ranked at 8, the profile pages that people set up on the site are unranked – meaning that they have no rank at all, good or bad. Could this mean that the search engines are no longer giving any weight to links on such pages? That is always a possibility.

But this doesn’t mean that setting up a profile on MySpace is a waste of time in terms of other types of promotions. There are many features of MySpace that can be used to garner traffic to your site, even if it doesn’t do much to help your page ranks when linking from the profile to your site.

Another concept of Web 2.0 that you can use in your link building is social bookmarking. There are many social bookmarking sites, and it is free to add your social bookmarks. One of the most popular social bookmarking sites is del.icio.us, at http://www.del.icio.us.com.

This site has a page rank of eight as well, however like the MySpace profile pages; the search result pages are unranked. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t aid in link building, however.

Social bookmarking is very fast and easy, once you are set up to do it. The fastest way to get your links on the major social bookmarking sites is to use a service such as Only Wire, at http://www.onlywire.com.

Signing up with Only Wire is free, and only takes a few minutes. However, once you are signed up, you will need to use their setup page, and visit each of the social bookmarking sites that they send your links to.

At each of these sites, you must register, and obtain a username and password, which is then put into the boxes on the setup page at Only Wire. This takes approximately an hour of your time.

Once that is done, follow the directions on the Only Wire website to move the Only Wire icon to the toolbar of your web browser. This is vital, because this is what makes social bookmarking so fast and easy.

Now, once everything is done, open up a web browser window, go to Only Wire, and log in. Open up a new browser window or tab, and go to your website. You will need to go through your entire site.

On each page, click the icon in your toolbar. You will be taken to a page that allows you to add keywords for that page. Fill in the boxes really fast, and hit the submit key, and you are taken back to the page you were on, on your website.

Repeat this process for each page of your site, and each time you add a new page of content, make sure that you bookmark it.

Videos are the third Web 2.0 concept that is useful to your link building. Sites like YouTube.com, at http://www.youtube.com, which has a page rank of eight, and Google Video, at http://video.google.com, which has a page rank of nine, are considered authority sites.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that Google would rate the sites that it owns as authority sites? Of course it does!

On each of these sites, you can set up a profile page, which includes a link to your website. When you submit videos to these sites, make sure you use your keywords in the title of the video, as well as in the file name, and submit it to the social bookmarking sites as well.

Note that as with MySpace and social bookmarking sites, the profile pages are unranked. Opinions vary, and nobody really knows for sure whether or not these unranked pages are playing a role in link popularity.

However, one thing is known. It doesn’t hurt you to do it, and there are numerous other marketing benefits to be gained by using Web 2.0 concepts – so it is not a waste of time. Web 2.0 concepts are definitely something that you should participate in, whether you are building links or not.

Basic Affiliate Marketing Strategy Tips

published Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 2:16 am by Al Smith

Basics of An Affiliate Marketing Business

Basic Internet marketing includes owning a website, creating blogs, ezines, email marketing, using proper keyword phrase, etc. to sell your products online.

1. Have your own website -
Having your own website is a basic step in Affiliate Marketing. Creating your own website is not necessary at first, but it sure helps these days. There are a number of different sites available free online that you could use to create your website. It may be as simple as setting up a free Blogger or WordPress account. You can set up free pages on My Space, Hub Pages, Wiki Dot, or Wet paint, etc.

Or, you could hire a professional to design your site if you could afford to pay a price. But it will be necessary for you to learn HTML at some point so that you could make changes on your site whenever there is a need.

Sooner or later, you will find that you need a good web hosting service for your growing sites. I use Hostgator for all of RGG Publishing sites.

2. Create a blog -
Blogs are one of the most recent and most popular means of Internet marketing today. You could write about your product or services on your blog. You could make use of streaming videos or audios to demonstrate your product online. Blogs set up on Blogger or WordPress are free. You get to advertise about your product without paying a penny and you could also give a back link to your website, which is allowed by most of the blog websites.

3. Advertise -
There are two types of Internet advertising – free and paid advertising. You could make use of both depending upon your budget. Paid advertising mostly includes pay per click advertising, classified ads in ezines, banner ads, purchasing hits to your website, etc. free advertising includes forums, blogs, classified ads, link exchanges, article directories, etc. where you promote your products or service to your target customers and lead them to your site through a link to your webpage.

4. Ezines -
You publish your own email newsletter through an ezine, which is called electronic mail or email magazine. Ezines are filled with a lot of product information. This is one of the favorite venues used by Internet marketers for their online business.

There are free services that you can use for this but if you are serious about your business, you really need to get a paid service. I went the free route at first.

When I needed to change over to a paid service, many of the subscribers never opted in again. It is really costly if you nuke a list of thousands of subscribers. Better to go with the best on this one. Aweber Communications is the one I use and recommend.

Build up a mailing list of opt in subscribers to whom you send out your product promotions and sales and latest information about your products or services. Adding your website address in your newsletter gets you more traffic to your sales pages.

Email marketing on other website owners’ ezines can get you access to thousands of people about your online business for a reasonable price. You could advertise a landing page that offers valuable information or freebies in exchange for visitor’s name and email address. Placing a sign up form on every web page you create is also helpful in building your mailing list.

5. Keyword research -
Pick out the products you want to promote and then do your keyword research. Do your keyword research before you publish your website online so that you can choose a keyword rich domain name. Good keyword phrases will generate more targeted traffic to your site and therefore higher sales conversions.

A website carefully designed with good colors, chosen keywords, valuable content and good advertising will generate higher traffic and more sales.

High targeted traffic does lead to more sales and profits, but that will be covered in another article. For now, the basic fundamentals will get you going.

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