Internet Marketing Guide

Affiliate Marketing An Easy Way to Success

Affiliate marketing is when you sign up to promote other peoples products (or services) for a share of the sale in the form of commissions. As an affiliate marketer, you usually dont need any special training or start-up funding.

Your tasks as an affiliate marketer will be to drum up traffic to the product owners pitch page, allowing them to convert the prospect into a buyer. The more targeted you are with your traffic promotions, the higher your conversion rate will be.

There are many things you can promote as an affiliate. On Amazon, for instance, you can promote anything tangible (and a few digital download to boot). If you want to be in the paintball niche, you can include links using your Amazon associate (affiliate) ID to sell specific paintball guns, paintballs, and attire.

You can go to sites like ClickBank or PayDotCom and get a unique affiliate ID to promote an endless supply of information products. They house everything from acne to organic gardening.

You can even become an affiliate promoting actions. There are many Internet marketers who focus their business on getting a steady stream of traffic to take an action, such as filling out a survey online.

With affiliate marketing, you dont have to worry about developing ideas and creating products. You dont have to deal with customer service follow-ups or continually process more products for the marketplace.

Your job is often made easier by product owners who care so much about their own success, that they provide a toolbox to help you with yours! The toolbox usually includes readymade emails, web reviews, and banner ads you can use with your own link embedded in them for instant plug-n-play success.

Most Internet marketers will eventually blur the lines of product owner and affiliate marketer. Product owners continually use their list of buyers to promote affiliate items, and affiliates often build such a good reputation in a niche that theyre urged to come out with a product of their own.

How much can an affiliate marketer earn? There are no limits. You can market multiple niches and work as much or as little as you want to generate targeted traffic through your links. Super affiliates earn six figures or more, but even a beginner affiliate can earn enough to pay the bills each month with some change to spare!

Affiliate Marketing An Easy Way To Success

An Introduction to Video Marketing

Video is a spectacular way to market on the Internet, especially now that so many Internet users have broadband access. More users are able to view and download video. Video sharing websites are more popular than ever.

YouTube is one of the most visited websites in the world, and other video sharing sites are growing in popularity, too including niche specific sites, like those for Internet marketing. As a result of the gain in popularity of video sharing sites, more marketers are turning to video as a way to promote their products and services.

Almost any type of product or service can be promoted through video, but its important to do it properly. People generally dont visit video sites to view commercials. There might be exceptions for people who want to watch classic commercials, funny commercials, or extremely popular commercials.

But for the most part, people dont want to watch commercials. They come to be entertained or to learn something. If you want your videos to be viewed a lot, you need to either be extremely funny, exciting, controversial or educational.

If your free videos offer a ton of quality content, they have a good chance of going viral and making you a lot of money. Video is so powerful - not only because of the sheer number of people who view video sharing sites every day, but because it can be much more persuasive than the written word.

Some people respond better to writing, but others respond better to video. Video can really help you to get your point across to people who dont read well, or people who really hate to read.
Many marketers feel they dont look good on camera, or dont have the budget to produce quality videos.

Thats one big reason behind the popularity of Camtasia. Camtasia is a great program that allows you to make videos by taking video screenshots of your computer. You can select a portion of your screen to be shown, and then you can make your video by simply moving from through your online presentation.

You can also use a microphone to record your voice explaining the process as you go through it.
Camtasia is very easy to use, making it extremely popular for people who arent very good with technical things.

Most people are able to make their first video with Camtasia within an hour of opening the software! This makes it perfect for almost any marketer. If youre promoting an eBook about Squidoo, then your video could be a short tutorial about one aspect of how to use the site like adding images to a Squidoo lens or setting up your own Group own Squidoo.

You can do this with nearly any kind of product. If your product is a dog training DVD, you can post a couple of samples. Show how to teach a dog to sit, and another showing how to teach a dog to heel.

If your product is about how to make money with eBooks, you could have a couple of sample videos on how to get affiliates, or how to get more traffic to your minisite, making sure you show proof of your results within the video production.

Even if you dont want to post your videos to the video sharing sites, you can post them on your own site or blog. You can even put video on your sales page for higher conversions. Video can be an important selling tool, but its also effective as the primary media you use to create your product, too.

An Introduction To Video Marketing

Bookmarking to Build Links

Social bookmarking is extremely popular with marketers in every niche. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati allow users to add links to sites they like and other visitors can grab those links and add it to their own lists, making your URLs go viral.

Social bookmarking sites can be great for getting traffic to your own domains. You can bookmark your sites yourself and then hope others will share the links and in some cases vote your entries up, like Digg users will do.

If enough people vote for a particular story, it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site. A front-page listing can mean thousands of visitors a day. But because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get a lot of traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, then you have to make sure that the links you submit are newsworthy not just your sales pitch page.

Use the news to work your site into the bookmarking bevy of links. For instance lets say youre in the gardening niche and you have a site on growing tulips. A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But lets say you read an article about a the discovery by a group of scientists that says people who grow tulips in their yards are 60% less likely to develop lung cancer, then youd have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of users in both the gardening and health demographic share your links with others.

If your sites tend to be less newsworthy and more general, then you shouldnt worry about how many people vote for a story or share your links. Just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to gain backlinks to your sites.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page of each of your sites first. Be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, since that can appear spammy - remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you dont necessarily own yourself.

The key to social bookmarking is to become part of the community who shares interesting information. Create a good profile that tells a little about you. Add a picture, and if the site offers it, start building a friends list.

Be careful about how many links you add per day. You shouldnt go crazy and add 100 links the day you sign up to a social bookmarking site. Keep it to ten or less per day and you should be fine.

After youve been a user for several weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day. Just make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that made it onto the first page. Bookmark a story at FoxNews.com every once in a while, or a funny YouTube video. This helps make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

Bookmarking To Build Links

Branding Your Name on the ‘Net

Branding your name (or your pen name) is very important on the Internet, no matter what niche youre in. You need to establish yourself as an authority in your market, because people trust authority figures.

They trust their recommendations, they trust that their products will be of good quality, and they trust that they have integrity. It also lends credence to the buyer that youre a real person not just some nameless, faceless entity trying to sell them something on a static, automated website.

You should put your name on everything you create. Whether its a membership site, an eBook, or something as small as a PLR article pack for sale - you should put your name on it. Getting your name out there is so essential to your ongoing success.

Think about all of the marketing gurus youve heard of. Some of them you may not have heard of yet, especially if youre new, but chances are youve heard of at least a few of these. Have you heard of John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Dan Kennedy, Joe Vitale, Willie Crawford, or the late Gary Halbert?

If youve been in marketing long at all youve surely heard of at least one of these people. People know and remember the names of these people because they put their names on everything they put out.

Their names are all over the marketing forums, their eCovers, their headers, and everything else they do. They work very hard to brand their names, because their names become the brands. People buy their products simply because their name is on it.

Buyers think that the product must be good, because the person is so well-known. You should do the same thing with your name. Always use the same name on everything you do within a particular niche.

You may not want to use your real name for whatever reason, but your name needs to be a real name. A nickname usually wont cut it in most markets, but sometimes it works like in the case of Travis The Bum Marketer or the Rich Jerk.

If youve signed up for forums under a nickname, ask the moderators if they can change your name to your real name or pen name. You might not want to tell the moderators its a pen name. Thats up to you.

Keep getting your name out there any way you can. Host teleseminars, JV with well-known people if possible, and offer to help create content for well-known people in your niche in exchange for a Bio Box that hosts your name and link to your website.

Offer to be an interview subject for someone. Be a guest author for popular websites and blogs in your niche, and create 100% original content for them. Never stop branding your name. Even when youre as famous as Donald Trump, the king of name branding, dont stop.

Donald still puts his name on everything he does. His name appears in huge, bold letters on his books. He names buildings after himself. Think of Trump Tower, Trump Taj Mahal, and Trump Plaza. His name is all over everything.

Not only is it a matter of pride, but it keeps his name everywhere. You may never be as famous as the Donald, or even as famous as John Reese, but you might become known as the king or queen of your own little niche or for a particular slant that grows in popularity.

Branding Your Name On The ‘Net

Building an eBook Empire

While there are many ways to build a business online, building your own eBook empire is one method that creates long-term residual income thats truly an automated set and forget system. Of course eBooks provide many perks up front.

You dont have to stock any inventory. You can keep overhead costs low (no publisher and agent cuts like there are with print books). You have an endless supply that can be purchased at any time of the day or year.

But they also offer many benefits that arent so obvious. While a tangible book in Barnes and Noble might sell for $14.95, an eBook on the same subject could sell at anywhere from $49-99 or more online as a digital download.

You dont have to be a professional writer to launch your own eBook empire. The writing is very different for an online audience more like you do every day via email than what you learned in a college-level English class.

Tiffany Dow, author of Building an eBook Empire, used to ghostwrite for dozens of top Internet marketers on a freelance site. Then she discovered how profitable her eBooks were and decided to learn the entire process of launching those eBooks herself.

Needless to say, she quit ghostwriting and now goes head to head with the very people who used to pay her $1,000 to write a 50-page eBook and make that money back in a period of two days. You can find quality freelancers to create your products for you at a fraction of the price, and turn around and launch it with your name on it and its not only legal its standard protocol in this industry!

So what does it means to launch an empire of eBooks? You start with one, and then branch out branding yourself as the go-to person for that demographics needs. You dont write one definitive guide to wedding planning.

You write one about picking the perfect wedding gown, another on wedding flowers, one on honeymoons, and so on. Each smaller, niche idea that you drill down into gives you more selling opportunities.

Theres a step-by-step process for developing an eBook which begins with finding your niche and ends with the launch of your powerhouse affiliate program. You want to have an army of virtual salespeople out there pulling in profits for you while you continue adding another building block to your empire with a follow-up product idea.

You can use many free and low-cost tools to launch your first and subsequent eBooks online. It isnt a business opportunity that requires a large investment of money, but you do need to commit some time to ensure its properly launched in a way that bolsters your reputation in the community.

Building An EBook Empire

Building Your Income with Blogs

Blogs are a fantastic way to make money. They perform well in search engines, theyre easy to promote, and they can offer very sticky content. If you blog often, and youre good at what you do, you could develop a pretty large following of readers who subscribe to your RSS feed and read your content on a daily basis.

One of the biggest keys to success with blogs is posting in them regularly. If you dont post regularly, you probably wont get much traffic, and people wont return. Posting frequently also keeps your content fresh, and search engines love fresh content.

The more often you post, the more often the spiders will visit your site. And every time you post, you can ping your site at the various ping locations. This can also bring in more traffic.
Another major key to blog success is creating sticky content. This means you have to write posts that people will actually be interested in reading.

Readers probably dont care what you had for dinner, unless youre John Chow or youre running a food blog. They want to read about stuff related to your niche. If youre running a blog about golfing, at least 75% of your posts should be related to golf. Preferably 100%.

You should talk about golf courses youve recently played on, tournaments youve watched, and clubs youve tried. You might occasionally post about family matters, or your dog, or your favorite restaurant as a way to connect on a more personal level with your readers, but most of your posts should be on target with your niche.

Blogs are great for people who sell services. If youre a graphics designer or writer, having a blog is a good way to keep in touch with your clients. You can offer updates on your schedule and availability, current prices and special offers, and when youll be taking some time off.

You can also post samples of your latest work. If you have a number of clients subscribe to your RSS feed, youll be able to keep in contact with them so theyll order from you more often.
People also tend to follow blogs more carefully than websites.

Dont start a blog with the intention of letting it sit dormant and earn money. It probably wont work. If youre going to start a blog, you need to be prepared to commit yourself to growing the blog, posting often, keeping it updated, and not giving up on it.

They offer multiple selling opportunities from text links woven throughout the content to image ads like banners you strategically place in between blog posts. The sidebar can also be utilized as affiliate or direct sales revenue space.

Make sure you take the time to transfer your blog over to your own domain instead of hosting it within the blogging community. This makes it more professional to the person who lands on your website and lends credibility to your efforts as the go-to person in your niche.

Building Your Income With Blogs

Cash-Generating Keyword Research

Your keyword choices are critical to your success in nearly any online business model. Whether youre pursuing PPC, blogging, VRE and AdSense, or any number of Internet marketing opportunities, the keywords you choose can make or break your success.

Keywords are important for several reasons. First of all, theres traffic. If you choose the wrong keywords to target, youre probably not going to get nearly as much traffic as youd like. Whether youre using PPC or search engines to get your traffic, your keywords are going to affect your ranking and link performance.

Another reason why keywords are so vital is the fact that you need targeted traffic. Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via the keyword books is probably going to be worthless compared to 500 visitors who come via the keyword phrase, Harry Potter books, if thats what youre selling.

Someone who is searching for books is probably just browsing. They may not even be interested in buying anything they could be interested in selling books, book bans, book publishers, and more.

But someone who is searching for Harry Potter books is probably ready to buy something right then and there. So its not enough to just get a lot of traffic - you need a lot of traffic thats willing to take the action you want them to take.

Whether youre looking to sell eBooks, promote affiliate products, get leads for a CPA offer, or just get sign-ups to your list, you want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the future.

Once youve chosen a niche youd like to pursue, you need to research the keywords youll use. If youre writing articles, youll need to choose keywords to use in the titles and text. If youre building niche websites, youll need to use keywords in the domain name. If youre buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose will likely be one of the biggest factors determining whether or not your campaign is profitable.

WordTracker is a very good tool for researching keywords. If you cant afford to get a paid membership there (even for a day), they have a very good free keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Google has their own keyword tool, but they dont show you numbers. They only give you a general idea of the searches a keyword gets, as indicated by a colored bar: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

First youll want to enter a base keyword for your niche. Lets say youre targeting the golf niche. You might enter golf into the keyword tool of your choice. Then the keyword tool will show you a number of related keywords.

You might come up with golf clubs, golf tips, golf swing, golf bags, golf carts, and golf courses. This is a short list of more broad terms. But youll want to generate a warehouse of keywords that you can use over the coming months and years, so grab them all!

Cash-Generating Keyword Research

Cloaking Your Links to Protect Your Commission

Link cloaking is a very important part of affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, link cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen. Its not totally foolproof. Smart individuals who are well-educated about the matter can still figure out how to keep you from getting your commission.

Most people wont go that far, so cloaking your links will prevent most commission loss. How do people steal affiliate commissions? Have you ever hovered over a link and noticed that the link was an obvious affiliate link?

Some people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for the sale. Some people falsely believe that if they buy from an affiliate link, theyll have to pay more for a commission mark-up.

Some people actually do it for a different reason. If youre promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get whats usually a 50% or more discount on the product.

This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the person doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather than just making sure you dont get it. Most people dont do that, of course.

Most people are pretty honest, and dont mind giving you a little affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to them. But its enough of a concern that you should take steps to prevent it.

You can easily set up your own link cloaking system. What you would do is set up a directory on one of your domains. Most marketers use the domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com. They typically have a subdirectory called /recommends/.

Then in that directory, they create a new subdirectory for each product. It would look something like this: http://www.bobsmith.com/recommends/awesomeproductname. In that directory, they place a very simple PHP redirect called index.php.

Whenever they send someone to the above link, the script will redirect to your affiliate link. All you have to do is create a file in Notepad or your favorite HTML editor and name is index.php. Then paste the following information into the file and upload it to your directory:

< ?php
header("location:http://affiliates.programhere.com/5555");
?>

There are a number of link cloaking scripts available. Most of them are relatively easy to install and use. Theres a big benefit to using a script rather than doing it yourself. Using your simple redirect, there isnt an easy way to check how much traffic youve sent to your link.

Most link cloaking scripts allow you to add new links very easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link. If you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic youve sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or through your web servers stats, which may be clunky to use or hard to understand.

Another way you can do it is to use a link cloaking tool, such as Go Try This. This lets you enter the raw affiliate link and name your link whatever you want as an extension of your domain. Then you can log in and check stats to see how the top 10 links are performing using a diagram and bar graph.

Cloaking Your Links To Protect Your Commission

Creating a Minisite

The word minisite can refer to a number of different things. Some people call small niche article sites minisites, but that isnt the general use of the word. In Internet marketing, the word minisite is generally used to refer to very small websites that are set up to sell a product - usually an eBook or other digital download.

Most minisites are only 1-5 pages. Some of them are only a single sales pitch page, plus perhaps a thank you page for after the customer orders. Others have a contact page, a terms of service page, a frequently asked questions page, or other general pages.

For the purpose of this tutorial, well just work on creating a single page minisite, and well cover only the design - not the sales copy. Most minisites have several key parts. They usually have a header and footer, although some have only a header, or may have neither.

They also have a sales letter of some sort, which is used to sell the product. Finally, they have an order button that is clicked when a customer wants to purchase the product. Some minisites also have an eCover, which is a computer-generated image that mimics what the product might look like if it was a physical product.

For example, if the product is an eBook, the eCover might look like a hardcover or paperback book cover (sometimes a spiral notebook, too). If the product is a membership site, the eCover might be a membership card. Software products usually have a 3D software box as their eCover.

The first step in creating a minisite should be creating your eCover, if you intend to use one. Most people create their eCovers with Photoshop, because most eCover action scripts only work with Photoshop. If you dont have Photoshop, you may need to create it from scratch, or have it made for you by a professional graphic designer.

After you have your cover design, youll need to create a header. Although some marketers dont use headers, most do. A well-designed header can draw attention to your headline, and it can make your site look more professional.

The header should contain your products name and a tag line like a one-sentence blurb that tells what your sites about. It should also contain a photo thats related to your niche, and it might also contain a small version of your ecover all tied into a theme for your demographic.

Lets say youre creating a minisite to sell your dog-training eBook. Your header would potentially contain a picture of a woman pointing at a dog, and the dog sitting down. Then the text on the header might say something like the following: Dog Training 101: The Ultimate Guide to Training Your Puppy or Adult Dog!

Dont make your header too large. If the header is so large visitors cant see the headline without scrolling, its too big! It should attract attention to the headline, not hide it. Headers are generally between 700 and 800 pixels wide and 100-200 pixels in height.

The footer is usually the same width, but about half the height of the header. It may only contain the product name or logo, but may also contain an image or copyright notice. Finally, you need an order button that draws a lot of attention. Your button might contain your eCover, plus a brightly colored button and a call-to-action, such as Click Here for Instant Access!

If you have the money to invest, you might consider ordering a minisite package from a professional designer. For about $300, youll get the header, footer, eCovers, and sometimes extra banners that you can use for off-site promotions.

Creating A Minisite

Defining What It Means to Be an Internet Marketer

Theres no PhD you can strive for to be in the Internet marketing industry. You have to learn as you go on your own soaking up information along the way. The first thing you need to know is what it means to be an Internet marketer, because it isnt always clear to everyone.

Lets start with what Internet marketing is not. Its not being a con artist. Its not being a spam king. It doesnt just mean selling on eBay or having your own website and products.

In reality, Internet marketers can pick and choose from a whole host of options available to help them make money. Your opportunities are virtually endless, and include one or more of the following:

Selling digital downloads (information products like eBooks)
Promoting other peoples products for a commission (affiliate marketing)
Selling on eBay or other auction sites
Running a membership site
Selling your online services (writing, graphics, etc.)
Owning a website that sells dropshipped or wholesale items

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Being a newcomer to Internet marketing, you might be worried that you dont have anything to sell. Thats okay most people dont start out with anything, and you never have t stock a tangible inventory if you dont want to.

Internet marketing creates no gender or age boundaries for you. There are teenagers who have launched multi-million dollar companies as budding Internet marketers whose ideas sprung to life and catapulted them to instant success.

You dont have to do anything unethical or shady to succeed at Internet marketing, and in fact, launching a respectable business with a solid reputation is the secret ingredient that will allow you to hatch an empire on the net to fulfill all of your dreams and those of your family.

Defining What It Means To Be An Internet Marketer