Internet Marketing 2012: Get Back To Sales Funnel Basics!

As mentioned in the last few posts here, Internet marketing continues to evolve, and a lot of the tools and resources being released right now focus on small areas of improvement for Internet marketing 2012. This can be really confusing & even misleading for those looking to start an online business, since very little is being said about setting up the sales funnels that make for long-term stability for your online businesses.

Contrary to what those selling certain tools will tell you, basics like an opt-in mailing list and your own affiliate program are crucial, for these are your ongoing sources of qualified leads to put your offers in front of. It’s easy enough to automate a lot of the back end once they’ve signed on to receive info from you – it’s getting them into your funnel that requires your ongoing focus.

If you followed the hosting suggestion and signed on at Hosting4Marketers.com then you have the tools you need already – hosting for your blogs, salespages and squeeze pages, unlimited pro autoresponders and your own affiliate program. If you have signed on there and haven’t yet seen the advantages to having all 3 services tied together in one system, take a look under the ‘Add A New Digital Product’ tab and look at the options, from automatically adding your buyers to any list and removing them from another to the products instantly showing up in your affiliate program for your affiliates to promote. A real time-saver for pros and the simplest setup for newbies, as opposed to having to jump through hoops on three different sites to get it all set up every time you add a product for sale or want to start a new opt-in list!

If you’re new to online sales funnels, the standard setup is a) A squeeze page offering a free download for those who opt in to your list; b) a confirmation page that explains they must click the link in the e-mail sent automatically to them, followed by an upgrade or other offer; c) The download page for the gift, which again presents another offer as well. From that point d) is invoked – your e-zine or e-course followup, a series of instructional & educational e-mails that also contain links to further products and/or services. This can be a pre-loaded series of e-mails or simply your daily or weekly e-zine written live and sent to all subscribers.

When combined with a few links within the free report, audio or e-book, your funnel now has 5 different ways to make money, while still providing good, solid information to your readers. If the free information in your gift and your e-mails is truly helpful, your audience is much more likely to take your advice and check out the other resources you recommend, making them much more likely to purchase products and services from you or through your links in the case of affiliate offers.

Your funnel will be effective just as it is for as long as your gift remains relevant – all you need to do in that area is review the material in your gift & the offers in your follow-up and replace any portion that becomes outdated. Your Internet marketing funnel is now complete, and it’s time to start setting up ongoing traffic sources to attract prospects to it and get your affiliates promoting it as well. Once those are in place you start setting up your next funnel, knowing this one can continue to earn for you as you prepare the next one to add to that revenue stream.

In the next post in this series we’ll take a look at some of the ongoing traffic sources you can set up to keep traffic heading into your online sales funnel to maximize your Internet marketing in 2012 – I’ll see you then!

The "Do It Yourself" Internet Marketing Resource Center

Surf22 Free Internet Marketing Course

To get the most from this course we always recommend you request a  free web site analysis first, this will give you something concrete to start with.

Choose from the links below to navigate the free course, or start with Step One:

1. Analyze the Competition
2. Designing Effective Websites with Marketing Punch
3. Search Engine Optimization
4. Get Your Business Moving With Stationery
5. Get Linked Up
6. Navigate the Newsgroups
7. How's Your Customer Service?
8. E-mail Newsletters
9. Affiliate Marketing for Profit
10. Purchasing Traffic

We invite you to explore the Free Internet Marketing Course to find out what type of information we offer. The steps are listed above so you can browse the topic of your choice but we strongly recommend you follow the steps in order when applying the information to your site. It is laid out to maximize the results from your efforts. 

Follow the ten steps in order, take the time to read the information and apply it to your e-commerce venture. Once you finish the Basic course be sure to collect your diploma! It is waiting for you at the end of Step Ten. Post it on your site with a link back here to show people how serious you are. We look forward to your comments. Happy Marketing!

How Well Your Website Can Communicate with Search Engines?

Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.

Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!

Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.

When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?

What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?

Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.

• Validated and Optimize Code
• Rich Content
• Unique URL of Each Webpage
• Plain URLs
• Proper Internal Linking
• Healthy Incoming Links
• Text Based Navigation
• Neat Table Structure
• Good Directory and File Structure
• Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
• Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
• Robots.txt

What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?

Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.

• Broken Links
• Invalid Code
• JavaScript
• Orphan Links, Images and Files
• Under-construction Page/es
• Pop ups
• Redirectors
• IP Tracking
• Dynamically Generated Pages
• Frames
• Same Background and Font Colors
• Multi Nested Table Structure

Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.

Best of luck 

About The Author

Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.

Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it’s all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses:

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they’re a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.

There’s a few good rules to follow when writing meta descriptions that take advantage of their use in pulling in search traffic:

1. Always describe your content honestly – if it’s not as “sexy” as you’d like, spice up your content, don’t bait and switch on searchers or they’ll have a poor brand association.
2. Character limits – currently Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165 and MSN up to 200+ (they’ll go to three vertical lines in some cases). Stick with the smallest – Google – and keep those descriptions at 160 characters (including spaces) or less.
3. Write with as much sizzle as you can while staying descriptive – the perfect meta description is like the perfect ad – compelling and informative.
4. Just like an ad, you can test meta description performance in the search results, but it takes careful attention. You’ll need to buy the keyword through PPC so you know how many impressions it received over a given timeframe and can track your CTR.
5. Unlike an ad, the motivation for natural search click is frequently very different than that of users clicking on the paid results. Don’t assume that a successful PPC ad will transition into a good meta description (or the reverse).
6. It’s extremely important to have your keywords in the meta tag – the bolding done by the engines can make a big difference in visibility and CTR.
7. You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple – when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.

So, we’ve now completed the triumvirate of on-page basics with title tags, meta descriptions and URLs. If you’ve got some valuable meta description writing techniques, please do share.

My Personal Opinion – 90% of the Rankings Equation Lies in These 4 Factors

I think that sometimes, we in the field of search marketing try to make the concept of ranking more difficult than it really is. True – there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank well for a particular keyword in standard organic results at the engines, you’re really only talking about a few big key components.

#1 – Keyword Usage & Content Relevance

While I don’t believe in keyword density (reference: nonsense), there’s no doubt that using your keywords intelligently and creating a page that is actually relevant to the query and searcher intent is critical to ranking well. My general best practice is to use the primary keyword phrase as follows:

• In the title tag once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (subjective, but necessary)
• Once in the H1 header tag of the page
• At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there’s a lot of text content)
• At least once in bold
• At least once in the alt tag of an image
• Once in the URL
• At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag
• Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself (this is a bit more complex – see this post for details)

For those who’ve done the nonsense words testing to see how the engines respond, you know that you can certainly get some extra value out of going wild and stuffing the keywords all over the page, but we’ve also seen that once you reach about this level of saturation I’ve described above, you’re getting about 95% of the value you can get, and even the tiniest amount of extra link juice can make a page like this outrank a “super-stuffed” page (usually).

#2 – Raw Link Juice

Some people call this PageRank or link weight or link power – basically it refers to the raw quantity of global link popularity ascribed to the page. You can grow this with internal links (from your own site) and external links (from other sites). A page with a phenomenal amount of global link power, even if the sources aren’t particularly relevant and the keywords are barely used, can still rank remarkably well in Google & Yahoo! (MSN & Ask are both a bit more keyword & subject focused from what we’ve seen).

Link juice operates on the basic principle that was used in the early PageRank formula – that pages on the web have some (low) inherent level of importance and that the link structure of the web could help to point out pages with greater and lesser value. Those pages that were linked to by many thousands of pages were very important and thus, when they linked to other pages, those pages must, by extension, also have great importance.

Carrying this theory back to your own pages, you can see how raw link juice will have a large impact on how the search engines score their rankings. Growing global link popularity requires both link building (so your site has enough link juice) and intelligent internal link structure (to ensure that you’re flowing that juice to the right places).

#3 – Anchor Text Weight

As the search engines evolved in the early 2000′s, they picked up on the usage of anchor text and found that by weighting the keywords and phrases pages used to link, they could get an even better idea of what pages would be about and which were most relevant to particular subjects. The anchor text of links is now a critical part of the ranking equation, and when seen in great quantity, it can overshadow many other ranking factors – you can see plenty of web pages that are weaker in all the other three factors I describe here ranking primarily because they’ve earned (or, oftentimes for commercial terms, bought) many hundreds or thousands of links with the precise anchor text of the phrase they’re targeting.

Note that anchor text comes from both internal and external links, so if you’re trying to optimize, it’s wise to think about how you’re linking to material from your own pages – using generic links or image links may cost you some of the ranking power you’d otherwise earn by having internal links with accurate, relevant anchor text. However, you can go overboard here, so be cautious – and note that 100,000 internal pages linking with anchor text doesn’t provide the same value as 100,000 external links with that text.

#4 – Domain Authority

This is the most complex of the factors I describe in this post. Basically, domain trust refers to a variety of signals about a site that the search engines use to determine legitimacy. Does the domain have a history in the engine? Do lots of people search for and use the domain? Does the domain have high quality links pointing to it from other trustworthy sources? Does the domain link out primarily to other trusted sites? Do analytics and registration information and temporal link growth fit with expected patterns?

To influence this variable positively, all you really need to do is operate your site in a manner consistent with the engines’ guidelines. If you want to earn a lot of trust early on in a domain’s life, get lots of sites that the engines already trust to link to you. And if you’re looking to spoil that trust, link out to bad neighborhoods, use manipulative link growth practices that don’t match up to queries or traffic patterns and play the churn & burn game.

As a wrap up, I’d love to hear your opinions on these four factors and whether you think there should be 5, 3 or 20 instead.

p.s. Remember that this post is my personal opinion only! Sure – I’m basing it on my experience, which is relatively robust, but I don’t doubt that others have there have very different conceptions of what comprises the bulk of the rankings equation, so please use your own judgment.

Useful Resources

• "301 Direct Mail Tips, Techniques, and Secrets" by Bill Myers is an excellent source of information, and it's very direct and to-the-point. Lots of great tips and ideas. Sometimes you can find copies on eBay.
• The Direct Contact Marketing Group (DCMG) offers list broker information and services.
• To learn how to design effective, professional business cards: read Business Card Breakthroughs.
• US citizens: The United States Postal Service website offers helpful information about postage rates, shipping fees, small business discounts, and a variety of online tools to help make your offline marketing campaigns faster and easier.
• Canadian citizens: The Canada Post website also offers a lot of excellent information for small business owners. Contact them to request a booklet that describes all the standards you'll need to know if you create your own brochures, postcards, self-mailers, etc.
• Entrepreneur.com offers some great articles on direct mail that are well worth the time to read. Articles on where and how to build a mailing list, tips on creating an effective message, and much more.
• For 'do-it-yourself' types: Geographics.com offers a wide variety of specialty paper, including postcard and notecard paper, for example, and 'pre-folded' brochures. You design your postcard, card, brochure, etc. using any software such as Microsoft Word, then simply run them off on your printer. Much of the stuff offered on this site is also available in local office supply stores.
• For professional printing services: if you have a little room in your budget, plus proven ad copy,ExtraValue.com is a good place to investigate. They produce quality postcards, business cards, "snapcards", and more at reasonable rates. Many beginners find this too costly an option at this point� but it's something to keep in mind for later.
• The Trade Show News Network is an extensive and searchable site of trade shows from across the world.
• VistaPrint offers all sorts of promotional and marketing materials for your business. The quality is decent and they offer 'do-it-youself' templates to make it easier to design professional-looking materials (if you have your own graphic artist, you can upload your own design too).Use these links for a 25% discount: USA | Canada

Tracking Your Offline Campaigns

It is absolutely necessary to track your offline marketing campaigns just like you do with your online campaigns. Never assume that you know what's going to work best, even if you're part of the market that you're targeting!

Use a promotion code.

Ask customers to supply you with the code when making a purchase. For example: let's say you sell something for $50. You can "split" a marketing campaign, where you offer half the prospects a $10 discount if they order by a certain date� while the other half receives an offer for a 20% discount (which is the same as $10 off in this case). Give each offer a unique promotion code. You'll then be able to see which variation 'sells' better.

• For postal-mailed orders: you can either ask for the promotion code on the order form, or simply list it as part of the return address, ie: YourCompany, Promotion #ABCD, 123 Something Street, Some State, USA, 12345.
• For phoned-in orders: again, ask for the promotion code� or list the phone number as something like: 1-555-555-1234, ext. 698. The "extension number", in this case, is the promotion code. When the customer calls, simply ask them for the extension.

Make sure the promotion code is prominently displayed on your marketing material. It helps to also tell a customer, for example, "There's a 4-letter code printed in red in the top right corner of the first page� can you please tell me what that is?"

Use a unique URL if you're redirecting people to your website.

You can create a separate URL for each marketing campaign. Keep your URLs short and simple. Remember, URLs on brochures, sales letters, postcards, etc. aren't clickable, so make them as easy as possible for prospects to type into their browsers. For example, instead of listing your URL as:      www.YourDomain.com/buy/index.html
� list it as:
      www.YourDomain.com/buy (these two URLs are the same thing)
You may want to create additional website addresses to cover common misspellings or typos too. Just redirect them to the correct page.

BEFORE YOU PRINT YOUR MATERIALS: double-check your materials, then check them again. Get someone else to do it too just in case you missed something. Check the address and phone number. Check the website address and type it into your browser exactly as shown. Make sure everything's right before you print and deliver your message!

Quick Offline Marketing Tips (Part 2)

Don't give up just because of a bad campaign.

It takes time, practice, experimentation, and self-education to develop good marketing material. You can always use the Internet to help you refine your ad copy at low cost, then attempt to duplicate your success offline.It's critical that you track the results of each campaign. You might find that two different brochures mailed to the same list produce vastly different response rates. Or you might find that the same brochure mailed to two different lists (one you rented, the other you personally compiled) produces significantly different results. You won't know for sure until you try it and monitor the results.

Follow up.

Most people don't buy right away. They could be too busy at the moment, don't have enough money when they get your brochure, perhaps they need time to do a bit more research, or maybe they just don't feel like they can trust you yet. Try out a variety of brochures, sales letters, postcards, etc. - different people respond to different things.

Offer an easy way to order.

Include an order form, for example. If your profit margins are high enough, consider including a business-reply envelope as well (make sure you do the calculations - the extra costs associated with including another envelope, especially if it's postage-paid, will detract from your bottom line. It makes it harder for your campaign to turn a profit.)

Offer an easy way to contact you.

Most people expect to see not just your website URL, but also a phone number and physical mailing address that they can use if they have questions. People are often afraid that they'll be "scammed", so anything you can do to add to your credibility will help.

Treat your customers well.

This shouldn't even need saying, yet think about how many times you've encountered bad service! Aside from being just the polite thing to do (everyone likes to be treated respectfully), there's a lot to be said about the lifetime value of a customer: someone who's purchased from you before is more likely to purchase from you again if they're happy with what they got.

Track your campaigns.

There's no reason for you to blindly guess at what's working - you can get hard proof what does work so that you can refine and refocus your time and effort to maximum benefit.

Quick Offline Marketing Tips (Part 1)

Use Your Car.

One of the simplest ways to promote your business is to place your URL on your car. Think about how much time you spend commuting to work, running chores, stuck in traffic, parked at the mall, or simply driving around. Why not put it to good use?Keep a few brochures and/or business cards in your car, just in case people stop you to ask more about your business (plus you might just come across a potential customer when you're driving around).

Use Postcards.

They're relatively cheap, quick to produce, visually appealing, and great for all sorts of purposes: an initial contact, limited-time offers, thank you cards, reminders, invitations to revisit your business, coupons, announcement of a 'grand opening'�

Calculate Your 'Break-Even' Point.

Before you decide to go ahead with a campaign, sit down and figure out your chances of success. For example, some of the costs you may need to include in your calculations are: printer cartridges, paper (including specialty paper), envelopes, postage, and your time (time you could be using for other productive purposes).Example: let's say it costs 50� to mail a standard-sized letter, $100 each for toner cartridges which lasts for 2000 envelopes plus an equal number of flyers. Here's the math:
2000 stamps @ 50� each = $1000 1 toner cartridges @ $100 each = $100 4 packages of quality paper = $50 2000 envelopes = $40 Total cost: $1190
The estimated "typical" response rate on direct mail is usually around 1%. 1% of 2000 sales letters is 20. Let's say your product sells for $100. That means you would have to make 12 sales just to break even. If your product sold for just $50, you'd need 24 sales� or if it sold for $200 you'd need just 6 sales. The more sales you need to break even, the higher the required response rate.
While thinking about this, remember to consider the lifetime value of your customer. If you sell a subscriptions to a specialty print newsletter, you might find that your customers typically keep their subscriptions for at least three years. That means you can take a bit of a loss upfront in anticipation of future profits.

Don't get too caught up in analysis.

� such as, "What day of the week is the best day to do mailings?" Obviously, offline marketing can be expensive, so put some time and effort into designing great ad copy, a compelling reason to buy, nice layout, etc� but then you'll just have to try it to assess the results. There is such a thing as "too much analysis" if it prevents you from taking action.

Time & Money Saving Tips

Offline marketing is generally much more expensive than an internet campaign: you have to consider the cost of paper, envelopes, ink, postage, plus more that can go into an offline campaign. When money is more important than time, here are a few things to help make the most of a limited budget.

If you can spare the time, build a list of prospects yourself.

You can certainly buy or rent a list of prospects -- but it'll cost you a pretty penny. Building your own list of prospects offers two main benefits: first, it cuts down on costs; and second, you can control the quality of your prospects.Don't underestimate the important of list quality! You must have a responsive list or you're just wasting your time and money, no matter how great your sales letter. For example, I really couldn't care less about collecting figurines. I don't care how good the sales copy is, I simply wouldn't ever buy a figurine - despite incentives such as limited-edition figurines, time-limited, exclusive discounts, or anything else. I'm just not responsive to that type of offer.
Granted, hand-picking prospects is painstaking work - but you have a much better chance of reaping the benefits (profits!), campaign after campaign. Another thing to keep in mind is that a list rental is only valid for one use. For example, let's say you rent a list for $1000. Most list owners or brokers will "seed" the list with a few of their own addresses. You don't know which ones they are� but if you use the list more than once, they'll know. That means if you want to mail to the list again (and you should; most people won't buy after only one contact), you have to shell out another thousand bucks.

Consider a 'do-it-yourself' plan.

Most people who are just getting started simply don't have a large budget. If you plan to personalize a piece of direct mail, learn to use the "mail merge" feature of your word processor (each word processor may have a different name for it). You just create a "form letter" and a "data source" (such as a spreadsheet, which contains all the information about your prospects), and then tell your word processor where to insert the various bits of information, such as names or addresses.Likewise, learning how to properly use a word processing and/or graphics program will allow you to create marketing materials yourself - saving you big bucks! I know consultants who claim you should never create marketing materials yourself because of the "home grown" look� but you know your product and your market best. There's no guarantee that your investment in a professional brochure (or sales letter, postcard, etc�) is going to pay off. If your "home-made" brochure works, then use it.
Keep in mind that if you have a professional print job done, you have to factor in the cost of those services to calculate your 'break-even' point. It adds to the expense of your campaign which could make it harder to turn a profit.
There are lots of professional-quality clipart and photo images available for sale, both online and in local stores. Sometimes, too, you can save money by taking big print jobs to a shop that offers "do-it-yourself" services, where you can do printing or photocopying at reduced rates, and often times much faster than you could do at home. Calculate how much it would cost you in paper, ink, etc. to do it at home versus taking it into a print shop.
Make sure you track the response rates and the net profit (or loss) after each mailing. It's the only way to know what's working well for your business.

Ask the post office about discounts.

It never hurts to take advantage of savings.

Consider joint ventures.

Slip your flyer in with mailings from a complementary business (you'll have to work out mutually agreeable terms, of course -- for example, you could split the costs of the postage). Offer special discounts to members of targeted organizations, associations, or companies in exchange for them running an ad in their newsletter or on their website. Barter, trade, or split costs with complementary businesses when you can -- it'll help save money and make it easier to turn a profit (or a bigger profit) with your offline campaign.For example, let's say you're a web designer. You could propose to your local Internet Service Provider that you split the costs of their next mailout. They include your flyer that offers discounted web design services to their clients. Likewise, you provide your clients with a coupon for discounted web hosting services from your ISP. Both sets of customers are getting extra value, and both you and your ISP have expanded your reach.

Remove undeliverables and 'bad prospects' from your list.

Chances are, you're going to get a certain percentage of bad addresses. Remove them from your mailing list, but keep track of them so that you don't waste money mailing to them again.Likewise, occasionally you may get someone who's really not a good prospect. The easy ones are the ones who contact you asking to be removed from your list (do it, and be glad! They just saved you money). Then there are the ones who you've mailed to multiple times with no response. Temporarily remove them, and re-assess in a year or two whether or not you want to try again.

Do boring, mindless tasks in front of the TV.

If you have to fold brochures, stuff envelopes, apply stamps, sign letters, etc. then you might as well put your TV-time to good use.

Target publications, tradeshows, conferences, etc. where a large number of your prospects gather.

This is much preferable to individually tracking down everyone who you want to see your message. Get the demographics of the people attending and, if you can, find out from other businesses their experiences with advertising or promoting their services through that medium.

Once your business grows to the point where your time is better spent elsewhere, then consider outsourcing at least some of these tasks, as appropriate.

Opportunities Available With Offline Marketing

Offline marketing has many advantages that cyberspace can't offer. Consider this:

You are not limited to a web page or online ad.

For instance, you can use different colors and textures of paper; you can send postcards, brochures, flyers, coupons... you can send gifts, samples, CDs... or use stickers or "scratch-and-win" boxes... There are all sorts of things you can do to try to attract a prospect's attention.

It's something tangible that your prospect can hold in his hands.

With things like brochures, postcards, magnets, and business cards, although they might initially be tossed aside, the recipient can 'rediscover' them lying on a counter, on the fridge, etc -- or he may hand it to someone else he knows.

You can reach a whole new segment of the population that would never see your ads online.

Some people don't use the Internet at all (or use it rarely, or only while at work)... while some of those who do, don't necessarily know how to search for specific information. Many people use the internet solely for entertainment purposes or for reading and answering email. You'll expand your reach by taking your message back into the "real world".

People can more easily focus on your message.

For example, a brightly colored postcard in someone's mailbox is more likely to stand out (and get read!) than an email that appears alongside dozens of others, most of which are spam.

You can contact your audience more directly.

Place an ad or get some publicity from a trade or niche magazine, or send a piece of mail directly to someone's home, and you'll reach your target audience. Market your website online and you'll have to learn how to get the right people to your website, which can easily be "lost" amongst billions of other web pages.

You can make your web business stand out from your competitor's.

Send a thank-you card or Christmas card through regular mail, for instance. Or send an unexpected gift, or a coupon for savings on a customer's next order. Many internet businesses rely solely on email as a form of communication, so anything received through regular postal mail helps to differentiate your business from the competition.

The Challenges of Online Marketing

Internet marketing has the advantage of being cheap when compared to offline marketing, but it's by no means perfect. Some of the problems include:

Email marketing, one of the most prevalent and popular ways to market online, is getting harder and harder every day.

In the "good old days" when the internet was still shiny and new, it wasn't uncommon to get response rates of 5-10% or even higher from an email campaign. These days, they tend to be much lower (1-2% if you're both good and lucky) - and much of that has to do with the growing spam problem. Filters throw your messages into the trash if they so much as think you're spam. The messages that do get through may get ignored or inadvertantly deleted, since people are so overwhelmed with junk email that they can't be bothered. It's getting much more difficult to make sure legitimate messages are actually seen, let alone read, by the intended recipient.

Anyone can put up a web page.

There's no easy way to differentiate legitimate businesses from the 'scammers'. Domainnames and web hosting are relatively cheap� and people are rightly becoming more cautious about who they're actually dealing with online.

It's difficult to get the right people to see your website.

With billions upon billions of web pages, it's hard to attract people to your little corner of the web - and then keep them there. Another website is just a 'click' away!

Some people are still cautious about making purchases online.

Certain groups of people may be accustomed to buying online, but many others are still uncomfortable buying over the internet (this is gradually changing). Internet fraud is always a hot topic and can scare people away from making purchases online.

These problems, coupled with the ever-changing nature of the Internet, means that it's to your advantage to at least try marketing to your audience offline. Many people still prefer to be contacted the 'old-fashioned' way!

How To Build A Profitable Niche Site Within 27 Minutes

Building niche a portfolio of profitable niche sites is a great way of developing a recurring income stream. A typical niche mini site may only earn you $60 per week but at that rate, four such sites will generate a yearly income of over $12,000. I'll let you figure out the earnings potential of 100 mini sites! The niche mini site strategy is very straightforward. First, find a niche market with profit potential that isn't already oversaturated with competitors. Identify a list of related keywords that people are searching on and then create keyword rich content pages that is optimised for each one of your keywords. Traditionally, once you have your content pages, you would normally upload them to your site and monetize them with affiliate links and pay par click programmes such as Google's Adsense. However, why not make it easy on yourself and gain an added search engine advantage... We now have access to an easy to use and versatile content management system that means that building a niche mini site can be done on the fly. Yes, that's right - The Blog! At its very simplest, a blog is just a structure for managing web content. It's the backbone, or skeleton, of a web site on which to hang the flesh. A blog is simply an easy way to enter and publish your content online. Blogs don't just have to be journals, rants, personal commentaries or diaries; blogs can take on a wide variety of forms and functions. In fact you can just about build any kind of web site with a blog. Just think about it - a blog can be used very effectively to build a niche site. In fact, because they are so easy to use, blogs are one of the most effective niche mini site building tools. More importantly, one of the most important reasons for choosing to use a blog is their attractiveness to the search engines and the effect that can have on attracting targeted traffic. According to a study released earlier this month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a full 27 percent of all online users now read blogs, a 58 percent increase from the early part of 2004. So, how can you take advantage of blogging technology to build a successful niche mini site? First, choose your niche, identify your primary keyword phrase and pick out about ten secondary keywords - the remaining keywords that you discover will be used later in the process. The next step is to compile some relevant content based on your primary keyword phrase, just as you would when building a regular site. Then set up an account at http://www.Blog4Cash.com and publish your primary keyword content to your main category. Your niche mini site is already up and running. Now create a new blog category for each of your 10 secondary keywords using each keyword as the name of a category. The next step is to compile content for each of the ten keywords and post that content in the appropriate category. You can then compile content for each of the remaining keywords and post that content in one of your ten categories. The more keywords you find the more content you can add to your blog. I try to aim for at least ten keywords /pages per category. Eventually you could have hundreds of pages. Each of those pages will have a link to your 10 Categories. And each of those links will use the anchor text of your most important keywords. As a result of all those internal keyword-rich links, your site will end up ranking very well in the search engines for your Category names. Your next step is to set up your traffic system. This is where using a blog to build sites gives you a real advantage. There are many special RSS/blog directories that are hungry for feeds. By submitting your new niche blog to these directories, you will begin getting traffic almost immediately. Quite often these feeds will result in a lot more traffic than all the major search engines combined. This is why it makes so much sense to build your niche site as a blog. You will enjoy much more traffic, and get it much faster than with a traditional HTML based site. Here is a list of some of the top specialist directories you should submit your niche site to: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55 As soon as you've submitted your site to the directories, it's time to get it indexed by Yahoo! by adding your RSS feed to your MyYahoo! page. If you don't have a MyYahoo! page, just go to http://www.yahoo.com. Now click on the MyYahoo! link at the top and set up your free account. Once you have your account set up, click on Add Content, then add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box. When you return to your MyYahoo! page, your first niche blog post should be shown. If you go look at your web stats for your site, you'll find that the Yahoo! spider has probably already made a visit. Your new site should be indexed in Yahoo! in just a couple of days. Every time you add another content page to your blog, you can alert the RSS/blog directories by "pinging" them. There is a wonderful site at http://www.pingomatic.com that makes this very easy. You just have to enter the URL of your blog and Pingomatic will send your ping to Yahoo and about 15 other large directories. That will bring the spiders back to your site almost immediately! I would recommend that you write and add a new keyword rich content page every day until you have between 40 to 60 pages. Blogs that are frequently updated tend to get the most traffic. After a couple of months, you'll have a 60 page niche site that will already be getting a lot of traffic. You will also discover that your regular updates will stimulate the major search engines to spider your site every day. And, if you've monetized your site with Google Adsense and relevant affiliate programs, you will also be making a healthy profit! Once you learned how easy and profitable it is to build your niche sites with a blog, you'll soon be building more and more money making niche sites! About the Author John is a prolific writer and is the author of several books including "Testing & Tracking" (http://www.Test-and-track.com). John enjoys significant earnings as a top affiliate across a broad section of niche markets. He also runs the very popular http://www.ClickForContent.com web site Tags: E-commerce and Internet Share: Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook | Google Bookmarks | Reddit | Technorati | Twitter | Windows Live | Yahoo! My Web

You Can Have Graphics And Good SEO!

You Can Have Graphics And Good SEO!

As webmasters and online internet marketers, we sometimes loose sight of what the real goal in marketing is – to sell products/services. It often happens that we end up writing most of our content to please the search engines. Let me tell you, search engines do not buy shoes! Where am I going with this?

Simple, let us talk about using more graphics on your site!

Graphics placed in webpage’s are frowned upon because search engine spiders cannot “read” graphics, therefore the thought being – graphics have no SEO value. To an extent that can be true but there are several ways in which a graphic can be represented with good keywords and keyword phrases. In addition, there are several techniques that can be utilized that will somewhat offset the negative effects of having graphics on your website.

1. Make sure to provide alternate text representations for every single graphic on your website including horizontal lines, bullets and background images. You can do this by manipulating the ALT tags. Make sure you use short descriptions for the graphics on your webpage. Many people abuse ALT tags and actually “stuff” 10 – 20 keywords and keyword phrases behind graphics. This is not only bad SEO technique, but it may get your website banned when it comes time to submit it to the search engines!

2. You can insert a small 8pt or so keyword rich description just below your main graphics. For example, if you have a picture of an ebook on your website, you can put a small sentence below the picture saying “Website Marketing Bible – Get Years of Internet Marketing Experience in One Ebook!” As you can see you get the keywords; Website, Marketing x2 and Internet.

To “offset” the negative effects a graphic can have you should implement some of the following techniques:

1. Many copywriters think that they must have all of their keywords written in the copy to be effective and end up with a full page of text. Remember people like a sense of things being “real”, they like to be part of something. That is the benefit of graphics. I often think of graphics to have the same effect of having an office with a window. It gives you a “break” from work. Well, graphics give the customer a “break” from the text.

What you can do is break up your copy and insert keywords in other areas of your website. This will please the search engines as well as give your readers a “break” from seeing a full page of text.

For example, you can delete maybe a whole paragraph of “filler” and just add the keywords from that paragraph to a sub-heading below the main heading of your page. You may want to move some of your keywords to table headers or page footers. Either way the search engine will find your keywords.

2. Add keywords to regular phrases! This is my favorite. Adding your keywords to regular phrases that may be table headers, footers, categories, departments etc can add up to huge keyword targeting. Here are two examples:

Instead of saying “Sign up for our newsletter”, you can say; Sign up for our affiliate-marketing newsletter.”

Instead of having the table header for your navigation say “Navigation”, you can change it to say “Marketing Navigation.”

As webmasters and online internet marketers, we sometimes loose sight of what the real goal in marketing is – to sell products and services.

We must remember that we are here to provide the best products and the best services to the best customers. Let us not drown them in sheets and sheets of text. Break up your text with images and give them a break!

A happy browser may become a happy customer! 

About the Author

Affiliate & Web Marketing Your Affiliate Resource!
An Entire Site Devoted to Affiliate Marketing Tips, Tricks and Expert Advice.
Learn From The Professionals and Get Professional Results!

Author: Robert Loyst
Website: RCLWebMarketing.com (http://www.rclwebmarketing.com)
I know it can be hard starting out with affiliate marketing. Sometimes it seems as though you are never going to make it work. Well, there is good news. RCLWebMarketing has created an online resource for you. If that is not enough - you can log on to the website and personally contact me any time for live one on one tutoring. 

Write Website Copy That Sells - Try a Little Flesh with Your Flash

Your website looks great: solid words, easy navigation, graphics just so, and maybe even a bit of flash with some multimedia.

But customers are not buying.

You wonder if it’s the writing. How can that be? You remembered the two key mantras for website content - “write for the search engines” and “write for the medium.” You used appropriate keywords to help search engines find you and traffic is up. Surely, customers enjoy reading your content because you laid it out with the internet in mind using short sentences, brief paragraphs, and bullets to list your key points. Customers might be reading, but they still are not buying.

Chances are your site copy has been optimized for technology not people.

Even on the internet, selling is still about connecting to people. So how do you press the flesh across broadband? Start where brick and mortar relationships do – trust. Why not become the trusted provider in your marketspace? You can use words to raise your credibility in at least 25 different ways.

Here are two of them:

1) write the way customers speak and
2) replace your pitch with a theme.

People instinctively trust strangers who speak like them. If you find this article useful, how would you tell someone? Are you really going to say, “I read an unusually amazing article that fundamentally increased my sagging sales”? Not likely. Weak copywriters, not people, use too many modifiers. “Amazing,” “fundamentally,” and “sagging” weaken trust. How’s your site for modifiers?

Give it the finger test.

You might not want fingerprints on your screen, so I suggest printing a copy of your homepage content. Now, put your baby finger on the first modifier you can find. Put your ring finger on the next adjective or adverb. Repeat until you run out of modifiers or fingers. If your page is a handful, you’ve got too many modifiers and your copy is hype heavy, not trustworthy. In addition to giving readers copy that matches how they speak, it helps to give them time to get to know you.

Customers need time before they trust.

They will get used to your site in tiny steps, so hold off selling; buy some time. Have a theme for your site, introducing your offer only after your customer feels comfortable. Themes are a subtle form of repetition because they continually reinforce a single concept. Repeated exposure to an idea usually makes it familiar and safe. Remember the first time you used instant messaging or the family car - not so scary now.

Let’s say your site is selling dental floss.

Instead of listing the benefits of DentaThread, you could tie the presentation together under the central idea “Some people have nothing to smile about.” The opening section could point out how the discomfort of gingivitis wipes the grin off a person’s face. Another segment would show how ugly cavities make someone too self- conscious to smile. Yet another piece would reveal how the high cost of root canal causes an individual to frown. In this way, three versions of one idea help the site grow on the visitor: one idea, three versions. Does your homepage have a theme? How many chances does your site give visitors to get comfortable with you?

In this article, I tried to use the language of my readers and hang it on a central idea, trust. Did it work? Did it help? If yes, I guess I proved my point. If no, I have 23 more ideas to go.

About the Author

Paul Matthews is The Rezon8or specializing in high resonance copy that sells…all click, no slick. For a FREE site copy analysis and a chance to win a FREE homepage makeover visit http://www.therezon8or.com 

Understanding Google Adsense

Google AdSense is certainly the most popular Pay Per Click or PPC program in our industry today. All you have to do is enroll your site under the Google AdSense program and add some code to your web site to display ads on your web pages. You earn each time a visitor to your site clicks on one of these ads.

Visitors don’t have to buy anything. After all, this is a pay per click program and not a pay per action or CPA program. They just have to click on the ads and nothing more ­ but the advertisers hope visitors do more than just click and look The advertisements on Adsense come from advertisers using Google’s Adwords program.

Ads are definitely not random, but instead are selected to be contextually relevant, meaning, that they are selected based on their relevancy to the subject of your site.

By providing high quality content and careful use of keywords, you provide an excellent base for individuals looking for information about specific products and services, and an excellent vehicle for advertisers targeting those individuals.

There are three determinative factors for the revenue of a site enrolled under the AdSense program.

1. The Cost Per Click or CPC of the ads appearing to your site.

2. The number of page impressions, or simply put, the amount of traffic that passes through your site. If you have a lot of page impressions, you have a better chance of getting a lot of clicks.

3. The Clickthrough Rate or CTR, which is the percentage of viewers who click on your Adsense ads. The higher your CTR, the more you should earn.

Getting more Impressions!

Here are some ways to increase traffic at your web site.

You can create more web pages adding with relevant and focused content.

You can create more internal links to your web pages by cross-linking topics.

List your web site under relevant categories in more directories.

Set up a directory of relevant sites on your website and accept relevant reciprocal links

Write relevant articles. Ensure that your site information in the resource box at the end of each article. Submit to article directory site.

Advertise with pay per click search engines.

Getting more Clicks!

Clickthrough rates are the percentage of viewers who click on your Adsense ads. You can increase Clickthroughs by increasing the relevance of Adsense ads on your site, and by tweaking the format and placement of your ads.

You cannot choose which ads Adsense shows on your site, but you can influence the relevance of the ads through your choice of content on each web page and across your web site.

If every page on your site focuses on the site topic, it is more likely that the Adsense ads will too. For example, if the focus of your web site is all about books, and the word “book” appears several times on every page, it is likely that your Adsense ads will relate to books.

The best placement for Google ads varies from page to page, depending on content. Some locations tend to be more successful than others. Wider ad formats tend to outperform their taller counterparts. Google has a "heat map" at http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html that shows how the placement of ads affects the clickthroughs. The colors of the ads also has an effect.

The best way to optimize your web site is to use the Adsense channels feature to track your ad formats and placements. It then becomes all about testing and tracking to see what performs best for you.

What is Effective CPM?

Effective CPM is a measure of your average earnings per thousand impressions. You can increase your Effective CPM by selecting topics that might attract higher bids from advertisers, and building pages and whole websites based on higher paying topics.

Even though Google does not release much information about the value of Adsense bids, you can get a good idea of top paying topics by looking at information tools on Adwords and other pay-per-click search engines. There are also many keyword research tools available, both free and paid, that can help you find high paying topics.

Succeeding with Adsense!

It is a really simple set of rules to help increase your Adsense income.

Build pages and websites with focused content for the best Effective CPM.

Place and format your Adsense ads to maximize clickthroughs.

Promote your sites. Drive targeted traffic to your web pages for maximum impressions.

About the Author

Brad Trupp is the Editor of 4hb.com.

Key points to Successful and Consistent Revenue Generation

1. Multiple Streams of Income

Is it better to have one large business or 100 small businesses?

Think about risk and opportunity - one business generating 10,000 per month or 100 mini-businesses each generating $100 per month. The total is the same -- $10,000 per month -- but the risks are different.

Imagine if something new and exciting comes along and supercedes your single large business and earnings drop 90%. Suddenly, you are making $1,000 and not $10,000.

Now if 5 of your 100 mini-businesses take the same drop but 5 more of your 100 mini-businesses double in revenue, you are still making $10,000 per month. Spreading out the risk and opportunities is a good thing.

Of course, if one of those mini-business turns into a $10,000 per month monster on its own then all the better yet.

2. Set a Goal

A difficult but achievable goal is 100 streams -- just create a new stream every second week and after 2 years, you will have 100 streams.

Some will make consistent revenue, some will have peaked, and some will have failed. Let the old streams pass on and create new ones.

3. Passive and Active Income

Passive is always good. Set it up. Turn it loose. Deposit the profits.

Active is good too but remember that you only have so much time each week to work on things.

One example is a business topic forum that I decided to start. It started and grew slowly. I then hired some paid posters and the pace picked up. Eventually I found I was spending an hour a day on moderator tasks.

Now forums are one of the harder things to monetize. Some people will occasionally click on a banner ad but the regular members ignore the ads -- a "been there, done it" mentality. So is one hour a day a good way to make one dollar a day? I think not!

That forum is now closed.

4. Regular Promotion.

While your businesses may be passive, promotion is not. Get into a regular routine of promoting yourself and your businesses.

There are thousands of ways to promote your web sites and businesses but that is another topic for another day.

5. Not just the Internet...

There are more ways to create revenue than selling things on the Internet.

You have a business -- likely a home-based business -- and have services you can offer -- for example: web site design, home office organization, or personal shopper.

Place an occasion ad in the newspaper. Get an ad in your telephone yellow pages. Advertise for free in locally targeted web sites like Craigslist or kijiji.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this will give you some focus to start you along the path to successful and consistent revenue generation.

About the Author

Brad Trupp is the Editor of 4hb.co