Posted by admin on October 16th, 2008 — Posted in Biz Opps, Hall Of Websters, The Marketing Way
Today is the last day of my regular office life. I recently found out about a program that uses referrals to make commissions on everyday products. My friend has started an at home business using affiliate marketing programs, and it is working out for her just perfectly. I am so happy to have found this opportunity, for I was getting very tired of the same old routine at work. I can not wait to get working on this new opportunity. The best part is, I get to be home with my family, while saving money on gas at the same time.
Many of my friends have asked me what I do for a living, and I suspect that they are jealous. I can not say that I blame them, for I have a pretty good situation. I work at something dealing with affiliate marketing programs. This basically mean that I get people to purchase services or products from websites, then receive payment for that referral. It is really all about getting people to buy the products that they already need through the vendors that I control. It is such a simple program, and I think that any of my friends could handle it with little effort.
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Posted by admin on June 17th, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
If you are a business man seeking to improve your business you have probably thought of marketing your products through the internet. But you perhaps have been struggling to market your business on the web. You have perhaps often wondered how some internet marketers earn a productive income every month but you are still scratching your head to start from scratches.
Internet marketing is amazing not just because of its ability to reach the biggest consumer base or because it can target special groups of consumers effectively but also because it has the capability to gather and process information about people. With the right online tools you can track everything about a visitor when they visit your site. You can learn where they went on your site, what pages they viewed and even what websites they recently visited. By studying and understanding the surfing habits of your visitors you can make adjustments at little to no cost.
For many people, internet marketing is like dieting. Everyone claims to have the solution to losing weight quickly. You try one diet after another and maybe you lose some weight. But as soon as you go off the diet, you gain the weight back again. This is the same way as the Internet. You have probably heard a lot of pitches about how to increase your web traffic. Maybe the strategy you used worked for a little while but eventually it became just too much trouble and the results were disappointing.
By creating and implementing a balanced internet marketing strategy using both short term and long term strategies you will drive a steady stream of traffic to your site. Do not forget though that when going for online advertising information is very important. This knowledge is what makes internet marketing so powerful and effective where advertising is concerned. Words are perhaps the most potent marketing tool you have. The right words will turn your visitors into customers. The wrong words will cause them to click away and never return.
Thus, your every word, sentence and headline should have one purpose - that is to lead your potential customer to your order page. Tell your visitors exactly what your product will do for them. Tell them of the benefits and how and why it will be beneficial to them. The bottom line is write to persuade and encourage your visitors to buy your products or avail of your services.
With the size of the internet market and the number of people it reaches, internet marketing is perhaps a sure way to success but you have to use the online tools that make this medium the most effective advertising medium today.
For comments and suggestions kindly visit Web Placements: Internet Marketing
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Posted by admin on June 3rd, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
In the world of online busines something has gone wrong. Something has gone badly wrong. In the pursuit of wealth and success business ethics have not so much fallen by the wayside as been torn up, stomped on and burned to ash. Where some loose form of rule may have applied before there now only exists chaos, greed and hype.
Where are these businesses that lack ethics?
Look around you. Every automatically generated content or directory site that pops up is search engine spam. You can call them doorway sites or any other cute name you want but the end result is the same - spam. These sites are run by the quick buck guys and gals. Sure they make quick money. They also clog up the search engines and make it far more difficult for legitimate marketers to make an honest buck. These people have zero respect for the industry they’re in and calling what they do “business” is at very best a joke.
What about scraper sites that steal content from other websites? Is using somebody elses content on your website without even linking back to the original site ok? Is the online theft of other peoples content now legal? In the offline world there’s a name for this practice - it’s called plagiarism. Plagiarism can get you kicked out of school, thrown out of college, cost you your job or land you in court - in the real world. In the online world you get a pat on the back from your fellow cronies for coming up with yet another way to steal other peoples content for your use.
What about the guys selling yet another overpriced, overhyped infoproduct that is the, alleged, solution to all your traffic, content or financial woes? Selling a product for a fair price is good. Selling the same product for a vastly inflated price is well…. criminal. In the offline world companies are forced to offer the best possible bargain to consumers to stay in the game. Online the prices are created at a whim because online marketers know a sucker is born every minute and their product WILL sell - regardless of how good or bad it is.
What about the online clubs and services where you pay anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month for access to their features or facilities? 90% of this information can be gathered online for free but several of these marketing gurus stick the words “secret”, “hidden” or “never seen before” all over their sales letter and again the suckers flock in to be parted from their hard earned dollar.
This is the point of this article. What the current crop of online marketers are forgetting is that the vast majority of people have to work for a living. Every time they release yet another hyped up, over priced product that promises the world they’re delivering false hopes into the hands of hopeful blue collar workers. Just because you’re parting these people from their hard earned cash from a distance doesn’t make it right to overcharge them. The only difference is that in the real world you’d have to face these same customers stomping back to your shop looking for a refund and possibly a fight. Anybody who has ever worked in real world sales can identify with this.
Running an online business does not mean that you can pull any trick, stunt or marketing ploy you want and then hide behind an email address.
Running an online business does not mean that you can do no wrong.
Running an online business means that you are parting hard working people from hard earned cash.
Ethics still matter.
People still matter.
Some marketers should seriouly consider this the next time they look at the bottomline of their next marketing adventure.
This article was provided courtesy of Affiliate-Advocate.com where you’ll find tons of information on online affiliate marketing
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Posted by admin on May 22nd, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
The Pitchers: Sales
Let’s say you have a new baseball team in town and it’s almost time for the first game of the season. Your sales force is ready to sell a variety of package deals for the season. However, there’s a major stumbling block as they prepare to approach potential buyers. No one knows about the package deals or even the date of the first game.
No one tipped the local sports writer or the local TV news of the upcoming grand opening game. What happened to the marketing department? There’s no marketing research, no publicity, and no idea where to begin targeting sales. Sales will flop and will make the sales department look bad, but it’s marketing’s fault since they didn’t do their job.
The Batters: Marketing
Let’s switch and see things from the marketing team’s view. They do a grand job of posting banners of the first game in town. Marketing has pulled together piles of reports with data on the audience, their baseball attending habits, and game spending habits. Many people arrive for the game opener, buy a ticket for the game, and it’s successful.
Or is it really? The sales team is invisible. There is no one to build a relationship with the fans. No one has sold them packages for attending more than just the opener. Sales could go far beyond than one game. They could even help build relationships that go beyond the season. Marketing did a great job, but with poor sales the team may not make it and everyone loses. Where was sales when marketing promoted the event?
Who gets the credit? Who gets the blame? In the war for profitable bottom line, turf issues should be put aside.
Who’s on First?
Marketing and sales play for the same team in different positions. Marketing leads to sales by creating programs focused on direct marketing principles that are tied to the sales team’s success. Marketing puts together a multi-step game plan to ensure each interaction with prospective fans lead to more and deeper interactions. Using shared business goals as a driver, the two work to meet those goals.
Marketing and sales should constantly communicate with each other to ensure effective timing, clear understanding of the company’s message, and smoother handoffs. Sales can determine the target market by evaluating current and past sales. The results help marketing professionals sharpen their pitch so they can hook the right people.
Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl’s notes, eNewsletter Journal, and The Remediator Security Digest. She is also a PC Today columnist and a tour guide at InformIT. She is geared to tackle your editing, writing, content, and process needs. The native Texan resides in Plano, Texas, a heartbeat north of Dallas, and doesn’t wear a 10-gallon hat or cowboy boots.
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Posted by admin on May 20th, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
E-mail, a wonderful communication tool is also the greatest
challenge to manage. Hundreds of mails pouring in from friends,
forums, business associates, customers and subscribed newsletters
and spam mail with enticing subject headers.
Just imagine reading even 50 mails a day. It would take two
and half hours even if you just spend 3 minutes on an average
per mail. Replying to five to six important mails a day would
take another hour at 10 minutes a mail.
Spending up to 4 hours a day on mails may leave you with little
time to do more important work. So how do you manage the
clutter of mails?
Creating mail folders
The first thing on setting up a new mail account is to create
folders for storing important mails. You can create folders
such as personal mails, business mails, priority response,
newsletters etc. This will help you sort the important, urgent
and casual mails and prioritize your email activities.
Spam and bulk mails
Most mail programs have very strong spam filters and they are
improving by the day. This automatically filters your mail to
bulk folders based on key words and whether the mail address is
in your address book among various other criteria. As a rule
never read any bulk mail however enticing the subject heading
may be. Just scan the headings to check whether any recognizable
mail has been sent to the bulk mail folder and delete the rest
ruthlessly. If you get into even opening a few mails your
mail time management takes a toss for the worst.
Set up temporary mail boxes
Many users have temporary needs for receiving huge amount of
mails. This could be due to inviting applications for a
position, submitting to search engines and running a promo,
ad campaign or site submissions to search engines etc. Set up
a temporary mail address and delete the mailbox once the purpose
is achieved. Most mail services now offer this service as
regular feature.
Passwords
Forgetting the login and passwords are a major time waster for
all mail users. Keep a separate folder for passwords and site
sign ups so that you need not request the passwords every time
you need to login to a site.
Email Access
Don’t open your emails too frequently or use it as a time filler. There is phenomenon called entrainment, which to explain in simple terms is a feeling of speed and fast paced action provided by emails and net surfing and is a major source of addiction. This also gives you a feeling of having done a lot of work. Have a predefined time schedule for checking and replying to mails.
Unsubscribe
When you feel a service or newsletter is no longer required simply
unsubscribe. You may subscribe again when the need is felt.
Finally, email is a very valuable tool. Not managed well you could have thousands of mails sitting in your mail box creating huge confusion and loss of valuable time. How well you manage it will decide how effective you will be in your communication and productivity.
R.G. Srinivasan is is a certified trainer and a management consultant. Check out his webpages at http://www.home-businessresources.blogspot.com
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Posted by admin on May 12th, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
To be noticed or successful in the World Wide Web one needs to apply sound business sense and practices. When a surfer uses a search engine to find information he will get what he needs within the first 7-10 results displayed. This means that sites that are ranked higher than 10 are hardly ever noticed. Most of the traffic is enjoyed by those who rank within the “top ten.”
Here are a few pointers that may get you a ranking within 1-10:
1. Use relevant target key words for your pages. Ensure that the key words are more than two words long. Put yourself in the shoes of the surfer and list what the likely search terms will be which are relevant to the content.
2. Use keywords frequently through the page but with relevance. Higher placements are recommended. Ensure that target keywords are placed in the HTML title tag. Include target words in the titles. Write titles that capture interest and attention. These are what appear in search engine listings and only if they convey the content of the pages clearly will a user access the web page.
3. Every page must have a title tag, Meta keywords tag, and Meta description tag.
4. Use text navigation with great thought. It is advantageous to use keyword phrases as links. If text navigation is not possible then try and include footer on every page.
5. Avoid search engine stumbling blocks like image maps or frames. Construct your pages such that any search engine, old or new can read the pages. Create static pages and avoid symbols in the URLs.
6. Link analysis is used by important search engines in ranking algorithms. So, it is crucial to build solid links. Ensure that the links are relevant to your web content. Think quality not quantity. The secret is in approaching sites that are non-competitive and are ranked high by search engines.
7. Avoid spamming. It can get you banned. Fight the battle for supremacy by ethical means. Just ensure that your content is relevant and interesting, layout simple, and titles attractive and teasing.
8. To maximize efficiency submit more than one page manually. Make sure the pages are good representations of your site and its content.
9. Avoid automated programs for submission of pages. Submit manually and pay attention to any problems reported.
10. Prepare your goals with thought and care. Use a designer who is aware of online architectural design principles. Synchronize content, design, and navigation. Make it user and search engine friendly.
11. If you are in a hurry to get your website ranked then consider the option of using search engine marketing programs like PPC. In this case traffic is generated within days.
12. Use a link analysis report which will consider your competitors plan of action and prepare a recommendation report for you that is exclusive to your business module.
Search engine placement is the corner stone to success. It will not just ensure a good ranking but substantial increase in traffic and optimal business returns. As an astute business person or avid cyber techie you need to view the site in a rounded way and consider not just aspects of content and design but marketing strategies and cost effectiveness.
Chris Young is a freelance writer for www.1888PressRelease.com , the premier website to Submit Free Press Release for any announcements including launching of new product or services, new website, announcing new hires, sponsoring a special event or seminar and more. He also freelances for Articles site www.1888Articles.com
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Posted by admin on May 8th, 2008 — Posted in Hall Of Websters, The Marketing Way, Ultimate Consumer
Salehoo: Wholesale Candy Pixie Stix
In our modern society today, computers and machines have integrated into our lives as one. Practically everything requires some level of technology to function or operate. If I am being asked, “Can we human beings live in a world without computers?”, my answer will be “Yes, but it will be a miserable one.” What does that mean for you? Absolutely nothing I mean how do you tell by verifying someone and making them accept payments through secure methods that they are not dodgy? And if and when you do get ripped off by these suppliers there will be no help or support from the list owners because they can’t do anything if a supplier runs off with your money and you can be rest assured that they certainly will not reimburse you a penny you paid to the supplier so what’s the point of paying for a list? I bet you know many people that view Ebay as a good place to make some residual income and where do you think they will try and locate stock from? That’s right the same premium list you are using to buy yours from and the next thing you know is that half of your category on Ebay is filled with sellers offering the same stuff you are trying to shift.
Asset management is the most important consideration when locating warehousing to store your items This way your time can be better spent on making sales and bringing in revenue to your wholesale business. An entrepreneur will always be willing to buy products on wholesale prices as it would substantially increase his profit margin
Salehoo Socks Wholesale American Made:
Now that I have told you the problem that everyone that is looking for wholesale distributors faces, I am going to give you my solution. I have been a business owner most of my life. I have owned several retail businesses, and the hardest part was finding good wholesale distributors for the items that I was looking for. I spent hundreds of hours searching the internet and calling salesmen and going to wholesale distributors in Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, and Memphis. I have never made to the wholesale distributor shows in Las Vegas, although I am told that the best one is there.
He’s selling it on eBay and this one product alone is making him $400 a week profit after the eBay selling fees. This is why if you find a huge website full of products for resell chances are it is a middleman buying the products in bulk marking up the price a little bit offering a drop shipping service to you and getting you to do all the hard work for less money. See Salehoo.
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Posted by admin on May 3rd, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
The Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Home page is a complete phenomenon in its own right. The fact that people would visit a site purely to see a new way of advertising is an advertiser’s dream. A comparison could only be for people for people watch the television purely to see the commercials. This phenomenon can also be seen in shopping channels where people watch the channels purely to buy goods.
So where do things go from here, should we all be advertising on direct clones of Alex Tew’s site, or should the concept be evolving rather than us seeing direct clones? There are now even sites where you can purchase an off the shelf pixel page to produce your own pixel page.
There are thousands of possibilities out there to capture the imagination of the public and media. As with everything in life there are key points in history, something that starts the ball rolling and forces the rest of the world to think differently. One possibility is that pixel advertising could move into mainstream advertising, electronic billboard adverts could become affordable for the smaller company rather than just the nationals. If the billboard was split into multiple companies logos and then each company was featured for a few second a day on the full screen. There are thousands of opportunities to take advantage of this new medium from the straightforward to the more bizarre.
Will we see people tattooed with pixel squares and inviting people to advertise on their bodies?
Will we see competition sites with prizes hidden under blank pixels, and claimed by the person who purchases that winning pixel?
Will we see buildings where each brick has a sponsor, so the building pays for itself?
Will we see farmers’ fields in key locations cut into squares and dyed with a company logo?
Will we see the creation of the longest web banner in the world?
The possibilities are endless.
Tara Roskell and Rakesh Patel are attempting to create the longest web banner in the world http://www.longestwebbanner.com a unique new way to advertise a business or personal message. In our first week alone we had over 1200 hits.
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Posted by admin on April 18th, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
Google has build the strongest business model available on the net…for the pleasure and profit of thousands of Internet Marketers. But do we really understand the issues related to Adsense marketing?
There is a terrible trend in the Adsense world these last months :
- Some marketers just want to make you believe that you can throw hundreds of poorly computer generated sites on your erver to make 1000’s of $. They sell terrific packages for a low price…(I’ve seen that one of these package : 150 sites for $97 is amongst the bestseller on clickbank). You then find these sites on ebay, and finally you’ve just bought useless sites shared by at least 1000 of “webmasters”)
- This makes this market an attractive market for every one : with all the tools on the market you can easily produce your own sites and resell them. There’s nothing wrong with that, as we are all here to make some profit from our activities.
We all know that Google is getting smarter, BUT in the same time we just add some easy food to Google : are they really getting smarter, or are we just giving Google easy stuff to de-index?!
Of course there’s a myth about Google willingness to ban sites for duplicate content : dup content is not good…but it’s not really bad too. What Google want is to produce relevant search results. How do you want to be seen as an expert in your field, from the SE point of view and Visitors point of view, if no one publishes your articles? How will Google estimate the popularity of a site without backlinks. Articles are a way to do that, and one of the most important in the Adsense business models.
What if there was just 1 site (could be 10) in each topic : no advertisement. Google needs a lot of sites, with a lot of traffic to catch advertisers and motivate publishers.
Nevertheless, search engines and visitors are expecting high quality as their Internet experience grow, and this trend is not seriously dealt by marketers (even John Reese said that crappy sites are more converting that good ones!).
Finally, if we mix these issues and these trends, we see that Search Engine will select the sites that really enhance the visitor’s experience. Those with an added value : this added value can be build and should be thought and build from the beginning of an Adsense project :
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Market selection : niche selection based on SE researches, competitors (yes, for Adsense, competition brings adverstiser and high bid…), typical consumer behaviour (is this a market where people are looking for free information, are zapping, are they looking for general, specific…), mulitple sources for the content.
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Business model selection : we’re talking about Adsense, but in fact, if you jut target Adsense, you loose a lot of your market potential. Some visitors are just looking for free information, some are looking for specific information, some are looking for products / services / ezines…Your site should include some of these business models (then you have to test to better fine tune your model) : contextual advertisement with Adsense, Affiliate with Clickbank, Amazon, CJ, Linkshare…, Ezine (add a subscription form offering a free report, and you will be amazed by the return, and by the cash potential), or your own product!
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Keyword selection : this is critical and a key success factor. Those keywords have to be high paying keywords (not necesseraly the highes bid on the net). You won’t get them with the free tools that will make a poor mix between keywords / phrases (Overture give “credit card visa” when we look for Credit Card keyword : for this keyword advertiser pay $6 ; BUT for “visa credit card” advertisers pay $20…this exercise must be done with every keyword). You have to choose 100 to 300 topic related keywords to cover a part of the market. These keywords should be also lateral keyword…
This is the most important task, and the worst in all the pre made Adsense sites you can buy in packages : they are all made with Overture keywords (because it’s free and you can have 100’s of them)
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Content selection : can you fill your site with articles, news from different sources ; can you write your own articles, can you add somePLR articles. This is less critical if your site is well designed
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Site creation : this is where you can use automation tools! But then again, you have to design / use a good template to enjoy your visitors
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SEO : you may have the right keywords, with the right content, you have to be sure that your keywords will be found by SE where they want them to be (headers, beginning of the page, bold, within H tags, within alt images, closing of the page, within the body with a given density : 3 to 10%)
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Promotion : you have designed and build the perfect Adsense site but you don’t have any traffic, so no $. This is also the weak point of Adsense packages (if you can find another webmaster willing to link to your newly bought 150 Adsense sites, let me know, I will interview him). Build some links with related sites, write some articles to promote your sites, start a blog, submit it to Directories (not SE), make some PPC (miva, overture) to play the arbitrage level…
So, do you Adsense?
JP Schoeffel is the owner and editor of the Ethical Marketer’s Club http://www.ethiccash.com a free Internet Marketing Club. He has also developped a successful adsense business : http://www.adsense-insight.com , where you can get the essence of Adsense Marketing
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Posted by admin on April 6th, 2008 — Posted in The Marketing Way
How is your web site promotion going? Getting frustrated? I felt muddled too, until I discovered what few new web marketers know about organic marketing.
Organic marketing is just as it sounds”natural”. In essence, you build a network of connections to your site using natural and simplistic methods. The best part is…it costs you nothing but your time.
Many individuals are still under the impression that to promote their web site, they either have to pay for each click they get on Google or they have to hire a web-site promotion firm at $1000+ per campaign in order to get exposure.
Take it from me, I started into the web marketing business with NO marketing knowledge. I taught myself. How did I do it? The answer is simple: START ASKING QUESTIONS!
Once I started asking questions and finding the answers, the pieces began fitting together. I soon discovered that there are as many options to marketing my web site as there are places to purchase a carI don’t have to go to just one purchaser or have one strategy.
I want to share my knowledge with all of you who are feeling discouraged. In my last article called, Alleviate Your Internet Marketing Stress, I provided an overview of organic marketing and some of the basics. Read that first to gain a broad understanding of the concept.
In this article, I want to give you an overview of steps to marketing your website using this approach.
First, start with an analysis of your site and your keywords. Your keywords will ultimately determine how relevant your web site is to interested customers. Use the keyword analysis tool called www.wordtracker.com to come up with a list of keywords you think people will type in when they search for your site.
Second, check your site to make sure those same keywords are located near the top of the page. That way the search engine spiders “bots” will be able to read them and immediately determine your relevance. Make sure your keyword density (# of keywords vs. total words) is appropriate, i.e, don’t go overboard!
Third, create readable pages. Readable pages mean that your website pages can be easily read by the search engine robots or “bots”. There is a complete checklist to making sure your pages are “readable”. Get a checklist off of the Internet and go through it. Some examples of items to consider are: make sure you’re not using frames, examine your title tags and description tag, ensure the navigation system on your site is not created using JavaScript, etc.
Fourth, register with search engines. Search engines represent the single most important source of new visitors to your web site. Your goal should be to get your sites submitted to (at least) the following engines: Google, yahoo.com, Teoma/Ask Jeeves, Open Directory project and MSN.com. These are the best places to start. Get onto each of their sites, and find out how to submit your site…and then do it.
Last, link to other sites and encourage them to link to yours. Establishing links to your site is one of the best ways to give the impression of a useful site. If you’re site is a popular place to be for visitors to be, it will directly affect how high you rank in the search engines. There are strategies for doing this and you need to find out how to boost your position using link popularity. Again, get a list of how you do this off of the Internet. Some elements that may be part of your strategy could include: avoiding links with no value, connecting to a group of websites related to a particular subject, etc.
If you have particular questions about how this any of this is done, feel free to email me at my website below. In my next articles, I will be focusing more on the exact “how tos”. In the mean time, don’t give up. This type of marketing takes time. Get educated and you find yourself soon marketing like a pro!
Copyright 2005 Glen Snethun
Glen Snethun is a full-time Internet businessman: stock trader, author and coach. Glen dedicates his time to showing others how to create multiple streams of income using the Internet. Get ideas from Glen at http://www.glensnethun.org.
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