Internet Marketing

I have to laugh. I run into people all the time who ask me, first thing, how do I advertise on the Internet for free and make a million dollars?

Okay, maybe the question isn’t quite that stupid, but it’s pretty close. In the real world, they wouldn’t even consider asking a question like that when a quarter page ad in a small circulation newspaper can cost $500.

Where do these people get off? Well, in this article, we’re going to destroy some myths of Internet advertising. You may not like what you are about to read, but at least you will know it’s the truth. Then you can decide if advertising on the Internet is something you want to do.

Let’s destroy the first myth of Internet advertising. You can’t advertise for free and make money. That is simply not true. One of the most effective forms of advertising online is article writing and submitting to directories.

The only cost is your web site and hosting. And, if you simply get a blog at blogger.com, then you don’t even have any costs there. Article submissions won’t make you a fortune overnight, but if you keep at it consistently, you will begin to see a steady stream of income.

Let’s destroy another Internet advertising myth. You get what you pay for. Not all the time. I’ll give you a perfect example of a form of Internet advertising that not only doesn’t give you what you pay for it, but can also get you into a boat load of trouble in the process.

I am talking about buying leads. Many lead purchasing sites will charge you about 25 cents to a dollar per lead. So if you are buying 5000 leads, you can be paying anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for those leads. If you get them cheaper, they’re probably the bottom of the barrel.

In either case, most purchased leads are harvested anyway. The people you’ll be emailing will most likely report you as a spammer and you’ll end up with your ISP shutting you down. The sales you will make, if any at all, won’t make up for the fact that you’ll be put out of business and your reputation will be shot to heck.

Let’s destroy another myth. You can make a lot of money using just one form of Internet advertising. While it is true that some forms are better than others, there is not one form that is going to put you into six figures. It takes a multiple of effective forms of advertising to see any real success on the Internet.

That’s why you see so many books on the subject of generating traffic. One that I recently bought had so many methods in it that my head as spinning after reading it. The site resource section alone had to be 20 pages long. You can’t even begin to imagine how many effective sources of advertising there are out there.

Finally, you can’t know it all. The Internet is changing all the time. Methods that worked yesterday may stop working next month and new methods may be just around the corner, especially with the rising popularity of multimedia. So, if you want to run an effective Internet advertising campaign, you have to stay informed and keep an eye on what is out there, today, tomorrow and beyond.

Hey, if this was easy, EVERYBODY would be making a fortune online.

Filed under: Internet Advertising by Craig

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to many people in my years online and several times I’ve brought up the topic of running your own membership site.

Whenever I would suggest the idea, the response I would get would basically border on the “What are you crazy? Why would I want to do all that work?” Well, I can’t lie. Creating and running a membership site is a lot of hard work. But after reading this article, you may want to reconsider your opinion on creating your own membership site if you are dead set against it. The benefits certainly outweigh the problems.

Probably the biggest advantage of creating and running your own membership site is that once you have a member, if you treat him or right, you may have a member for life. What you have now done, is you have done the work one time, essentially made one sale, the initial sign up, and ultimately get a residual income for as long as this person remains a member.

Imagine that you have a membership site with 100 paid members at $10 per member. That’s $1,000 income each month without having to do anything other than just maintain the site.

Another advantage of having a membership site is online presence. With selling a digital product, most people will buy your product and then pretty much forget about you. But with a membership site, this is an area that people have to go to each day in order to get the benefits of their membership.

This builds up an online presence. Gradually, your site will climb up the search engines and you’ll start getting members without having to do much promotion. Even just article marketing should slowly get people to your site.

This is not to say that running a membership site isn’t going to have its problems, because it will. Unfortunately, there is no perfection on the Internet and membership sites are no different. One of the problems you’re going to have, and actually the biggest problem, is that as your membership grows, which is what you want, you are going to have more people to support.

Eventually, the number of emails you’re going to receive in a day are going to be more than you can handle if the site is successful. This will ultimately require you to either install a help desk or get some outside help through outsourcing.

Another problem you’re going to have is bandwidth and disk space. As your membership grows, you may reach a point where your current hosting service can’t handle the traffic. You may have a monthly cap on bandwidth and limited disk space. This may require you to either upgrade your package or go to a completely different hosting company. As you grow, your problems will grow.

Naturally, there is going to be a trade off with anything that you do. Ultimately, you have to decide if the extra work and customer support is worth the extra income that comes with it. This is not something I can decide for you. All I can do is give you an overall picture of what you can expect from running your own membership site.

The rest, as they say, is up to you.

Filed under: Make Money Online by Craig

One of these days, my words will sink into people’s heads. Until that day comes, I’ll be constantly trying to explain to people that there is no such thing as the best Internet advertising method.

Why? Well, it’s basically because everybody’s business is different. What works for one person may not work for another person simply because of the target market and the niche. In this article, I’m going to try to simply explain why this is so by pointing out some examples. Hopefully, those examples will make things crystal clear so that you no longer have to ask what the best Internet advertising methods are.

Let’s take the niche of Internet Marketing itself, since it is so popular. Now, normally, I would say to run off to Google and use pay per click advertising to promote your business, since pay per click is about the most targeted form of advertising you can get. But in this case, it is not the best, and I will explain why.

Internet marketing is a very competitive niche. If you were to go to Google and look up how many competing sites there are for the phrase “Internet Marketing” you would find hundreds of millions of sites. I kid you not. Internet marketing may very well be one of the most competitive niches in the world. As a result, if you were to use Google pay per click to promote an Internet marketing product, you’d have so much competition that your cost per click costs would be sky high. As a result, unless you have a product that converted like crazy or one that had a high price tag, your chances of losing money with this form of advertising, as good as it is, would be very great.

Now, let’s take that same Google pay per click example and apply it to the niche of “custom baseball hats” which has very little competition at all. If you were to use pay per click advertising for this small niche, you may very well end up making a decent amount of money. Now, let’s go in the opposite direction.

If you were to use FFA Hosting, which is where you send emails out to people posting business opportunity ads, you would get very little results from this form of advertising for custom baseball hats. However, if you were to use that same form of advertising for Internet marketing, you would probably do very well because these are people who are looking for business opportunities.

Here’s my point to all this. There are some forms of advertising that are always good and then there are some forms of advertising that are always bad. But somewhere in the middle is that gray area where the advertising method itself is only as good as the product you are trying to promote.

So, do your homework. Find out what forms of advertising perform best for certain niches. The information is out there. You simply have to find it. What you’ll ultimately find out is that one person’s dog is another person’s diamond.

Filed under: Web Marketing by Craig

Everybody and their grandmother wants to get into niche marketing. They think that it’s the instant road to riches. Well, while niche marketing can indeed be very profitable, it’s not a push a button get rich quick thing. A lot of hard work, mostly in the area of research, is required in order to make niche marketing profitable. In this article, I’m going to cover some basics for developing a niche marketing strategy that hopefully will get you on your way and moving in the right direction.

The first thing you have to do is find a niche. And that is easier said than done. There are many niches on the Internet. Just go to any search engine and type in just about any keyword or keyword phrase. In many cases, you will find millions of sites for that keyword phrase, unless of course you type in underwater pole vaulting. Then I don’t think you’ll have much luck. So picking a niche, or finding a profitable niche, one with little competition, is probably the hardest part of this strategy. But once you have found one, it gets easier.

See, the next step, after you have found that niche, is to figure out how you can exploit it. For example, let’s for argument sake say that you decide you want to get into the niche of “movies on DVDs”. Now, there are a number of ways you can tackle a niche like this. You can sign up with an affiliate program like Amazon.com and sell DVDs through your website using your Amazon affiliate account. Amazon doesn’t pay a fortune on sales, but selling DVDs isn’t a hard sell so you will make some money. Of course if selling DVDs isn’t your thing, maybe you could go into reviewing DVDs and sell an ebook on the subject of old movies on DVD. The possibilities are endless.

After you have decided on a course of action to take as far as capitalizing on that niche, the next step is to decide how you’re going to attack promotion. The bottom line to all marketing is advertising. You can have the greatest site in the world, but if you don’t have a promotional strategy, nobody is going to know that your site even exists.

In order to determine what advertising methods to do, that is going to require research as well. Unless this is a niche that is void of all promotion, which is highly unlikely, there will be others online who are promoting it. See what they’re doing. Some will use Adwords and then others may use article marketing and other avenues. Take a look at the kind of sites they’re putting up. Are they review sites or are they just sending people directly to sales pages?

Researching how you’re going to go after your niche market is the most important part of the whole process. Without a strategy, and without the data to back up pursuing that strategy, you are simply shooting in the dark.

And very few people hit anything in the dark.

Filed under: Web Marketing by Craig

I understand that scams are not funny. As a matter of fact, they are serious problems as millions of people are taken in by them everyday. But when I see these Nigerian scams come into my email, I really have to chuckle.

How can anybody in their right mind believe any of this for one second? Well, obviously people do fall for these things. So, it is the hopes of this author that after reading this article you will completely understand what the Nigerian scam is all about, know how to recognize it, and avoid it at all costs. If I’ve managed to accomplish that, then I have done my job.

The reason this particular scam is called the Nigerian scam is because it originates from Nigeria. This is unfortunate for the poor honest people from Nigeria who are trying to make an honest living online.

This scam has made it so that these people can’t get PayPal or Clickbank accounts, which makes it very hard for them to create their own products and collect payments. This seriously limits their ability to make a living on the Internet. My heart goes out to them and hopefully someday this matter will be resolved. In the meantime, we still have the Nigerian scam to deal with. So what exactly is it?

The Nigerian scam will take on several forms, but the underlying gist of the scam is that somebody has written to you explaining that somebody in their family, either an uncle or brother or sister, has just died and they have inherited all this money. The sum of the money is rather large, usually in the millions of dollars.

As you read on, they give some rather vague explanation that they need your help to get this money. Now this is the part where most people should think to themselves, why? Anyway, they go on to explain that if you will help them to get this inheritance they will give you a portion of the money, usually a rather large portion. All they need you to do is give them your bank account details where they can deposit the funds.

The ultimate goal of these people is to get your bank account information so that they can forge letters of credit removing money from your account. These people are very good, and many of them make off with a decent amount of money, depending on how much you have in your account. What baffles me beyond belief is that in spite of how ridiculous these emails sound, people actually send replies giving their bank account information.

As I said, there are many variations of these, some coming from so called attorneys representing the estate. If you see any emails like this, especially if they claim that you can be getting a large sum of money in the millions of dollars range, it is nothing more than an attempt to get your bank information in order to take money out of your account.

In a word, be careful.

Filed under: Make Money Online by Craig

In this first of a series of articles on web site design, we’re going to start off with a topic that is probably one of the most important aspects of web site design itself, that of navigation.

Many a web site has gone to the proverbial Internet graveyard because of poor or non existent navigation, and that is no way to run a business. This article will give you some basic tips on navigation that will make your site one that people will enjoy coming to and not get lost at in the process.

The first thing you need to know, is just what navigation is. Navigation is the term used to describe how a visitor gets from one page of your site to another. Now, if you have a one page web site, this doesn’t usually apply unless you have anchor links on the page that take people to various parts of that page. Normally though, navigation applies to sites with multiple pages. The more pages you have, the more tricky navigation becomes.

Navigation needs to be looked at the way you would look at the table of contents in a book. If you were to go to any table of contents, you’d see a page number next to each chapter name. That way, you could easily jump to that chapter in order to read it. This is especially useful with technical books where you may only need the details for a specific procedure.

Well, web design is no different. Let’s say you had a site on health products and you decided that you wanted to have a main page to greet people, a page with the products you promote, another page with articles that address health related issues and finally a page for people to contact you at if they were to have any questions. Now, this is a very simple web site, but it still can easily illustrate the point.

The navigation should be simple and clear. The most common forms of navigation are either menus that go across the top of the web page or menus that go down either the right or left side. Left is usually more common that right. As to top and side, it’s pretty much split down the middle. The key, however, is that you want the navigation links to be uniform throughout the site.

In other words, if you decide to go with left side navigation links for the main page, then, in the case of our example web site, you would also want the links to go down the left side for the products page, articles page and contact page. Each page should have the exact same layout and look exactly the same except for the content on the page.

The easiest way to do this is simply to create a main template that includes all your navigation and use that template for every page on your site. That way, there is no way that you can foul this up as you are simply taking the same HTML shell code and using it for each page. All you need to do is change the content.

Also, make sure that the links to each page are large enough to be seen and attractive looking. You want your navigation to look as interesting as the rest of your site.

While this is a very simple and basic example, it should be more than sufficient to provide you with a web site that people will feel comfortable coming to and not get lost at in the process.

Filed under: SEO by Craig

In this installment of marketing blunders, we’re going to cover another one that is way up at the top of the list, advertising.

You can’t imagine how many people go about their advertising all wrong, either with the methods that they use or the ads that they write. This is a major reason why 95% of all Internet marketers fail to make any real income at all. This article is going to point out some of the major blunders people make with advertising. Hopefully, reading this will prevent you from making these same mistakes.

The first thing I want to cover is advertising methods. There are many ways to advertise on the Internet. Unfortunately many of them are horrible. At the top of that list are the ad blasting companies. These companies want you to believe that these one line ads that get sent out with this crappy software actually get read by other people.

Trust me, they don’t. I’m not even sure all these blasters work. Certainly there is supporting evidence that My Mega Promoter’s Ad Blaster, which is the original, does nothing at all.

A notch up from the blasters, but not much better, are auto surfs. You’ve probably tried these. You basically give the site your URL and they show it to all the users of the surf. Trouble is, since it’s on autopilot, most people aren’t even at their computers while these ads are going by.

This has to be the most useless form of advertising ever developed next to the ad blasters. At least if somebody has their eyes open with these there is a snow ball’s prayer that somebody might see your ad.

Let’s move away from advertising methods for a while and touch on the subject of actual ads. Most people, sad as it is to say, can’t write an ad to save their lives. That doesn’t mean they can’t learn. It just means that they don’t bother to learn. So instead, we get these three line ads that wouldn’t get our mothers to buy our product.

Worse than that, some people don’t even use any imagination at all and simply copy and paste the ads that come with the program. If everybody is using these ads, how effective do you think they are going to be?

Another problem that people have with advertising is budgeting their promotions. They have absolutely no game plan when it comes to how much money they’re going to spend in a given month. They simply take out one ad after another, not even researching if the advertising service is any good, and then suddenly they wake up and find that they’re out of money.

Then, if they find anything that is of value, they have no more money to even put into their ads. Not making an advertising budget has killed more advertising campaigns than you can possibly imagine.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s more I could cover, but if you simply correct these few things, you’ll be surprised at what a difference it will make in your results.

Filed under: Web Marketing by Craig

In this first installment of our series of marketing blunders, we’re going to start out with one of the biggest marketing blunders that marketers can make.

This one starts right out of the gate when they choose their web hosting. These blunders go from bad to worse. This article is going to cover some of the more common ones as well as the most serious.

The first marketing blunder a new marketer makes when it comes to web hosting is that they go for the cheap, or worse, free. Let me tell you what you get with free web hosting so that you know never to even bother with it. For one thing, with free web hosting, you don’t get your own domain.

You get something like www.somestupidsite.com/members/webarea/yourarea/index.html. This is NO way to establish a web presence. Nobody is going to know you from Adam. You will never see a big name marketer or web site using free hosting.

Another reason that free hosting is the pits is because you are literally at their mercy. You’re not paying anything so they can make you put up with anything that they want, not the least of which is horrible banner ads, annoying pop ups and whatever else they want to load onto your site.

Anybody who goes to your site is first going to see what your hosting company wants to show them before they ever get to see YOUR offer. Most people will automatically think “new person” and be off and running. You’ll have no credibility with free web hosting.

Another problem with free web hosting is that you get literally no bandwidth and no disk space. If your business ever gets to the point where you’re actually bringing visitors to it, you’ll most likely get shut down because you’ve exceeded your bandwidth.

As for disk space, there is none. A good free hosting service might give you 10 meg. These days, that’s not even enough to put one good download on it. You simply can’t run a business under those conditions.

The worst part about free web hosting, however, is that they can take your site away from you at any time. They don’t even have to have a reason. After all, they’re not getting any money from you.

And if you should get any spam complaints at all, unlike a paid hosting service that will either at least give you a warning or simply ignore them if they are isolated incidents, a free hosting company will simply shut you down, no questions asked and no chance to give them your side of the story.

Even with paid web hosting, in many cases you get what you pay for. If you go with a no name hosting company charging you $2 a month, don’t expect to get any kind of reliable service. We haven’t even talked about the issue of uptime, but with free and cheap hosting, you can’t expect uptime to be very good. I know some web hosting companies that charge a good amount of money that don’t have good uptime stats. With a free or cheap service, you have no chance.

If you want to do business online, get a hosting company with a good reputation and good service. You may pay a little more, but in the end, isn’t your business worth it?

Filed under: Web Marketing by Craig

In our final installment of relationship selling, we’re going to cover the final piece of the overall puzzle, targeting.

Please understand that these few articles are not all there is to relationship selling. Books have been written on the subject. There’s a whole thing about personality types and how to deal with them. But for our purposes, targeting will round out our discussion. Hopefully, after reading this article, you will know just how to target a prospect and how to know when to cut your loses.

That last line may sound a little strange to you, so let me clarify. Not everybody is a prospect. Think about it. If you are selling a cure for baldness in men, are women going to be in your target market? What if you were selling hot rod autos? It is quite unlikely that a person in their 70s is going to be interested in driving a hot rod. Okay, not everybody is a prospect when buying products.

And not everybody is a prospect when selling an income opportunity. Not everybody wants to make money on the Internet. And even for some who do, not all of them want to make it a full time career. Some want to just make a few bucks on the side.

So, if you’re pitching a program that is going to make somebody a six figure income, not everybody is going to be interested. Conversely, if you’re pitching a program that is specifically designed to just make a few extra bucks each month, the people who are looking for residual income that they can retire off of will not be interested in what you have to offer.

So the question becomes, how do you know if somebody is a prospect or not? This answer may come off as being a wise one, but it’s not. It’s the way you do it. How? You ask them. That’s right, you ask them. The rub is HOW you go about doing that. You don’t come out and say, “Are you a prospect?” For one thing, they’re going to look at you like you had two heads. No, you have to be a little more subtle than that.

I’m a very straight forward person. What I do is simply ask somebody what it is that they’re looking for. I ask them what they want out of an online business. I ask them what they want to earn. I ask them to tell me about their interests and their skills. I get as much information about them as I can. I really show my interest in THEM.

Finally, after they have answered all my questions, I evaluate the answers and make a determination, based on those answers, as to whether or not I think the person is a prospect. Am I always right?

Well, in the cases of the ones where I think they are and it turns out they do nothing, it’s easy to know the answer to that. But for the ones I let go, there is no way to tell. You just have to make your best educated guess based on the evidence. Just don’t try to recruit everybody because some people will be very obvious as to where they fall in the equation.

Is this an exact science? No, it’s not. But if you go about the process in just this manner and make an educated guess, you’re going to be right more times than you’re going to be wrong.

Filed under: Creative Strategies by Craig

In this installment of relationship selling, we’re going to cover the topic of gaining your prospect’s trust.

This may be the most difficult part of this process because of the climate of Internet marketing today. In this article, we’re going to discuss some ways that we can gain that trust and then once we do, how to keep it. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll be able to gain the trust of even the most jaded person on the planet.

A little background on why gaining trust is so important and so difficult. The Internet has been a playground for one scam after another. The number of people who have been ripped off by these scams total in the millions. As a result, most marketers are very leery about trusting anybody online when it comes to getting involved in an Internet business. That is why gaining trust is so hard. So, the question is, how do we do it?

The process starts with the prospect, believe it or not. Why? Most prospects will come right out and tell you, “Look, I’ve been burned many times already. Why should I believe YOU?” So there you have it. You’re already on the defensive. Now, there are a number of ways to handle this depending on your level of success.

If you are very successful, then you probably have a number of testimonials to back up what you say, not that testimonials are enough for everybody. Some will think they are faked. This is where you have to refer them to real people who they can talk to.

If you frequent forums, and have a reputation at these forums, suggest to the prospect that they visit the forum and ask around about you. Let the prospect find out on his own that you are a trustworthy person. It will actually be better for you if some people have something negative to say. It makes you sound more human.

Another thing you can do is ask the person how you can prove your honesty to them. This puts the onus back on them and in a way puts them on the defensive without making them feel defensive. They’re going to ask you for something. It could be something reasonable or something totally off the wall. If it’s reasonable and you can do it easily, then do it.

It may not totally gain their trust but it will be a step in the right direction. If it’s something that is not reasonable, make a counter offer. Explain to them that what they are asking for is just not possible. Make them a counter offer and see what they say.

The truth is, most people when you ask them what you can do for them, will take that as it is and simply tell you that they just want to know that they can trust your help. Assure them that they can. Most people will accept that.

Once you’ve have gotten their trust, the next step is keeping it. To do this, you simply give them all the content and assistance that you promised. Explain to them that any time they have a question that they can contact you. Be there for them. Truly give them the help they’re expecting.

You’ll be surprised at the reputation you’ll build.

Filed under: Creative Strategies by Craig