Internet Marketing Guide

Digital Download Dollars

Whether youre an affiliate marketer or a product owner, you get to choose how much you get paid to promote something. As a product owner, obviously you set the price. As an affiliate, you seek out products that have a good commission.

Digital downloads usually have a much better payout than tangible goods. Of course, if youre promoting a high-ticket tangible item, you might make more but it could be harder to sell to the general public, too.

A digital download is a text, audio, or video file that buyers can download instantly onto their hard drive and access immediately. Instead of waiting until tomorrow afternoon to run to Barnes and Noble, they log in at 3 oclock in the morning when they cant sleep and download a book on the topic they want.

A tangible book that costs $14.95 in a local bookstore can sell for $49 and up on the Internet as a digital download. As an affiliate, your commission will probably be higher, too.

If you promote a tangible book on Amazon that costs $14.95, and you get 7% of that, youre only earning a little over a dollar. But that $49 digital download an eBook about the same topic offers you 50% commission, giving you $24.50 per sale!

Its not hard to see which one pays better. As a product owner, you can create eBooks to compete with tangibles. Youll charge a lot more, but youll be able to pay your affiliates a lot for their efforts, too.

If youre not a writer and prefer a different type of product creation for your digital download, you can choose to create a series of MP3 files audio tutorials that teach your topic to a paying audience. The public loves information they can digest on the go using their iPod or other electronic gadget.

You can also use a tool like Camtasia and create video productions as your product creation tool of choice. Some people prefer to watch a lesson rather than read it. With both audio and video digital downloads, your price point can go beyond the borders of what text info products can pull in.

Combine all three media elements and you may be poised to market a high-ticket digital download that takes in upwards of $1,500 for a single sale something affiliate marketers will jump all over.

Digital Download Dollars

Do You Have a Marketer’s Mindset?

Before you get started in this industry, you have to analyze your own mindset to see if you have what it takes to be an online entrepreneur from conception to fully-functional success operation. Its not enough to say you want to make money or be your own boss.

Everyone wants those things, but not everyone can achieve those goals. It takes a special person. You dont have to be a workaholic or be willing to engage in questionable marketing tactics. You just need to have a few characteristics that are common to most successful Internet marketers.

This industry requires deep commitment. If youre the type to change jobs with your moods, then stick to a 9-5 gig. Youre building a business and it takes time, effort, and tweaking to make it work.

Perseverance and a positive attitude can make or break an entrepreneur. Youre going to have down times. Every marketer does. Something will go wrong whether its a freelancer who didnt deliver on time and threw off your launch date or a JV partnership that fell through. If you panic and shut down, youll tarnish your reputation as a true professional.

The great Internet marketers dont fly by the seat of their pants. They believe in being meticulous planners. They make schedules and plans for their day, week, month, year, and even further down the road.

They plan every step of a launch before the product development even begins. They plan every single detail they can think of. The more meticulous you are with your plans, the fewer things there are that might go wrong.

To become an authority in your niche, you need to exude confidence. Even if youre worried, anxious, or unsure of yourself, what you project must be that you have it all together you cant be paralyzed by fear.

Are you willing to be a student for life? No successful marketer gets to the top and stops learning this industry. That only means youll eventually become the prey of another hungry marketer whos stayed on the ball with up-to-the-minute solutions and practices in your niche so that they can become king of the mountain when you let your guard down.

You have to know how to get from point A to point B on your journey to achieving financial independence. Do you know what youll say when your in-laws or spouse questions your career? If youre a fearless marketer, the inquisition wont bother you a bit.

If you arent sure how to develop a blueprint for your success, dont know how to set and achieve goals, or have a mindset thats not in sync with that of victory, then work on those things before you quit your day job and set off on this voyage. You want to be mentally prepared for the ups and downs along the way.

Do You Have A Marketer’s Mindset?

Do You Have to Have Money to Make Money?

The short answer is, No. You can effectively launch an Internet marketing career without a single dime. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection, which does cost money, but were assuming you have those two components already.

Many a marketer has gotten his or her start as an affiliate marketer. Aside from shuffling around in your attic to find something you can sell for a profit on eBay, affiliate marketing is your best bet for a zero-dollar start-up business in the Internet marketing industry.

All you need is a free ID that you can get on PayDotCom, Amazon, Commission Junction, LinkShare, or ClickBank (to name a few), and the ability to learn about free traffic sites and you can begin generating an affiliate income without investing a penny of your own money.

That said, its best if you save a few dollars here and there to invest in some tools that are going to make your Internet marketing efforts a whole lot easier. For instance, you could sit around and brainstorm for five days to get a list of keywords or, pay for a one-day subscription to WordTracker and harvest thousands of keywords in less than an hour.

You could also use nothing but web 2.0 social sites that are free, such as MySpace or Squidoo, to host your content and affiliate links. Or, you could pony up the $9.95 one-time fee for a domain name and $6.95 a month for hosting and have your own business presence on the net.

You can also spend days and weeks searching for information about how to do a task that will help you make money as an Internet marketer such as how to master pay per click advertising.

Or, you can invest in a step-by-step guide t shorten your learning curve. What most marketers suggest is to take a look at your budget and see what you have to invest. If you have to start out with nothing, go for it but set aside a few of your profits to pour back into your online efforts.

Everything youll invest in is built to ease your workload and hasten the procedures, so your income will increase faster and with less input from you as you learn to wield these tools in your favor.

Do You Have To Have Money To Make Money?

Drilling Down a Niche

Finding profitable niches can be difficult. Finding one that isnt extremely saturated can be intimidating when youre just starting out as an Internet marketer. The key to finding niches that are both profitable and have little competition is drilling down a top-level niche to find profitable sub-niches with fewer competitors.

For example, lets say youre interested in creating a site that has to do with beauty. You can drill the beauty category down into several different sub-categories. You could choose hair care, skin care, fitness, organic beauty, cosmetics, or any number of niches related to beauty.

But these categories are still too broad to be profitable with small numbers of visitors. You need to drill down further. Lets say you decide to tackle the skin care demographic. Sub-categories of skin care might include eczema, acne, blackheads, wrinkles, age spots, psoriasis, and dry skin.

Now you have a list of smaller niches that you can begin to narrow down. Acne might still be too broad. You can drill down even more by targeting teenage acne, infant acne, and adult acne.

While you want to find niches that are narrow enough for you to dominate, you dont want to choose niches that have too little traffic available. Dont be afraid to spy on your competitors.

Go to your favorite search engine, like Google, and search for things like how to get rid of acne. This is obviously a niche desperately seeking a solution. If you drill down too much, like targeting blackheads, you might find its an annoyance, but maybe not something people are desperate enough to spend money solving.

You should verify that your idea gets a decent level of search volume by using a keyword tool like WordTracker or Google Keyword External. When you look for the niche on Google, see if there are plenty of AdWords ads on the right sidebar of the screen.

If so, this means people are making money in this niche. Any time you can come up with an original slant on an idea thats already churning profits online, youre poised for instant success.

If you rally want to get into the eBay niche, dont go after a broad, eBay for beginners niche. Target something unique such as eBay Businesses for Baby Boomers. Pick a specific target audience and then cater to their needs instead of approaching the mass public with a broad idea.

Drilling Down A Niche

Forum Marketing at Its Best

Forum marketing is an excellent way to market products for free. But there are a few tricks to marketing on forums without getting banned. You have to be careful not to do any blatant advertising or youll probably get banned very quickly.

The first thing you should do when youre new to a forum is create an interesting profile. Add an avatar thats a picture of yourself, or a picture related to the niche. If youre in the dog training niche, you might put a picture of a dog - preferably your own. In the golf niche, it could be a picture of your favorite golf pro. You get the idea.

Next, start making posts that answer questions. You should never mention your website or product at this point. Being a member of a forum, youll be there to give people helpful answers to their questions and post an occasional thread of your own to spark a discussion or provide helpful tips.

The point of this phase is to start establishing yourself as an expert in the niche. By giving people valuable answers, youll be seen as the go-to person in your niche. As forum members start to recognize your contributions, theyll start looking for your posts, hanging on your every word!

Check the rules of the forum to make sure they allow links in signatures. If they do, you can add a link to your site. You might prefer to link to a squeeze page, so you can start building a list of forum visitors that you can market to later.

Dont do anything to draw attention to your signature - such as continually telling people, I have more information on the site in my sig file. Just keep posting as you have been, giving out helpful information.

After youve built up a very good reputation at the forum, people may start searching for you on their own. Make sure the name you use on the forums is featured in the text of every project you promote, because you need to make it easy for people to find your products if they start looking for them on Google.

You might even be able to JV with the forum owner after youve become rather well-known around the forum. You could offer a standard JV, or you could just ask the forum owner to be your affiliate. You might offer them a special deal, with a higher percentage of commission than normal affiliates or a discount reserved just for their members.

Respect the forum boundaries. Dont private message people and ask them to check out your site unless you already have some sort of previous relationship with them. The only time you should ever draw special attention to a project of yours is if someone makes a post that specifically asks for recommendations about products.

For example, if someone asks, Does anyone know of any good books that can help me housebreak my puppy? You could probably get away with posting, Actually, I wrote a book about how to housebreak a puppy in just four days. If youre interested, you can find the link in my sig. If its an invitation to provide a product link, its probably okay but otherwise, let the forum traffic funnel in on its own.

Forum Marketing At Its Best

Getting Indexed Fast in Google

A lot of people seem to think it takes weeks (or even months) to get indexed in Google, but thats just not true. Almost anyone can get his or her site crawled and indexed in two weeks or less - sometimes you can even be listed in the Google index in as little as a few hours!

There are several ways to get indexed quickly. All of them involve getting links to your site on other sites that have high PageRank, or sites that are updated often and get crawled frequently by search engine spiders.

You dont have to pay to do this. There are plenty of ways to get these types of links to your site without paying a penny. One of the easiest ways to get indexed quickly is to ping your site. You dont have to own a blog to ping your site at places like pingoat.com or Pingomatic.com.

Just add your sites name and URL, and leave the RSS feed link blank. (Its not necessary.) Sometimes this technique alone can get you indexed in a day or two. Next, you should submit your link to various social bookmarking sites.

These sites get crawled several times a day, so they can be a very good way to get your own site crawled and indexed quickly. You should get an account at all of the major bookmarking sites. Dont miss StumbleUpon, Digg, Furl, del.ico.us, and Slashdot.

Press releases can be very helpful in getting your site crawled and indexed quickly. Most of the more popular press release sites have good PageRank, get crawled often, and can even get your press release posted on a number of different sites that borrow news from the PR directories. Sometimes it can be worth submitting a press release simply for the ease and speed of being indexed.

Article marketing is another way to get indexed fast. Submitting an article or two can also help you get backlinks, better PageRank, and targeted traffic to your site. A lot of article directories have very good PageRank, so it definitely has benefits other than just quick indexing.

Blog commenting can be a very good way to get indexed quickly. Youll need to find blogs that dont have the nofollow tag, because blogs that have nofollow wont let search engines crawl the links anyway.

This is debated by SEO experts some saying the nofollow tag doesnt even matter, since some search engine spiders ignore them anyway. Others claim you might get a small amount of traffic from the blogs themselves, but nofollow blogs will do nothing to help you get indexed faster.

You should also make sure you do all you can to maximize the ability of spiders to crawl your site. You should have links that are easy to find and follow, use text links instead of only image links, dont use Flash or image maps unless you also have text links for spiders to follow, and make sure you keep your site as clean as possible. Having too many links on your main page can confuse spiders, and your site may not be indexed properly.

Forums often get crawled on a regular (daily) rotation since the content is updated often. Popular forums have had posts on their site show up on Google just minutes after theyre posted! Its very common for posts on very popular forums to be in Google in under 24 hours. Posting a small link in your signature on some of these forums can help you get your site indexed quickly.

Finally, you can exchange links with other webmasters in your niche. Not only is this a great way to build backlinks, but if their sites get crawled often, youll be adding to the chance that your site will be crawled and indexed quickly, too. Link exchanges wont penalize your site, either unless you amass too many, too soon so stick with organic growth (a few a day) and it wont put up any red flags for the search engines.

Getting Indexed Fast In Google

Giving More Value with One Time Offers

One time offers are a great way to increase the money you make from each offer. You can get people to agree to purchase a product from you at a lower price thats only available right that second, making the sale a bit easier.

This is a good way to increase the amount of your sale since theyre already in buying mode. A One Time Offer is shown right after the customer clicks the Buy button. But before they checkout, the OTO is presented for them to consider.

One time offers are a very good way to give customers more value. Its less expensive than the product would normally be, giving your customers the opportunity to grab another great deal from you while they already have their credit card out.

Another great way to offer additional value is to trade OTOs with other marketers. For example, if you have a product that complements another marketers product (and vice versa), then each of you would present the others products to your customers as the OTOs, either sharing the revenue or giving the owner 100% in exchange for a reciprocal arrangement.

If you cant find someone who will JV with you on an OTO offer, you can try to find someone with an affiliate program who will allow you to offer their product as an OTO at a discount. Simply tell them you expect a good volume of sales and youd like to offer their product at a slight discount.

You probably wont be able to land a deal like this unless you can prove you can do a large volume of business, because it would mean setting up a special sales page (or at least setting up a coupon code that could be easily tracked with your affiliate ID).

The best OTOs are usually very difficult to say no to. They offer exceptional value at a very special price. There are three separate types of one time offers. One is usually an upgrade to the first product, such as a more comprehensive version of it.

The second could be a coaching program that takes the ideas of the product and offers them in a one-on-one coaching system. And the third could be a turnkey solution that goes along with the product you sold. For example, if youve sold an eBook about making money with AdSense, you could offer a package of AdSense templates as the OTO.

Membership sites can also have OTOs. When someone joins your membership site, you could offer them an upgrade to a higher access level. Lets say you have two access levels silver and gold.

The silver level typically costs $50 per month, and the gold level costs $100 per month. You could offer anyone who joins at the silver level an upgrade to gold for only $25 more, at $75 per month - a $25 savings off of the normal gold level price. You can also offer one-on-one coaching as an OTO for membership sites. Since memberships are already a monthly fee, coaching is a perfect complement to many membership sites.

Make sure you test your one time offers just like you test any part of your sales copy or site performance. Replace the offers and see which ones convert better and then tweak that offer until it performs as well as it can.

Giving More Value With One Time Offers

Have a Plan for Your Backend Sales

Every good marketer knows how important it is to increase the lifetime value of the customer. Its much cheaper to make a sale to a previous customer than it is to get a new one onboard. The cost of acquiring new customers can be high, but getting more money out of existing customers wont cost you a penny.

Building a backend to your business isnt hard but without one, youre limiting your financial potential. A backend is how you continue selling to an existing customer. Lets say you sell an eBook on how to make money blogging.

Your eBook could discuss what a blog is, how to set one up, and how to make money from it. Your backend sales could come from affiliate items (if you dont feel like taking the product creation route again) or a new eBook, membership site, or video/audio package you sell.

Whenever you first start selling online, always think of complementary topics you can tack on as a backend. For our example, your backend sales could be about social networking on other web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, MySpace, or bookmarking sites.

After theyve begun seeing success, your backend sales could focus on more paid methods of marketing, such as AdWords. You progress your offers with your audience like stepping stones, moving from the first logical starting point to a more advanced stage.

Plop your offers right into your autoresponder system and itll automatically cater to the needs of your subscribers the longer they stay on your list. Another common way to add a backend onto a product is to offer personal coaching.

Personal coaching can be expensive, sometimes costing thousands of dollars per month. A lot of marketers offer this as a backend strategy, giving them the potential to significantly increase the return on their investment (ROI) of acquiring the prospect.

If you take care to create backend offers that add value to their needs and which are of top quality, theyll continue buying from you. If you promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in, theyll lose trust in you.

Your backend sales strategy isnt all done just through your autoresponders. You can put links to backend products on your thank you pages. And dont forget that each product can act as a backend item for another one. So you might start with an eBook about MySpace and then use a blogging eBook as your backend item for the customer.

Just make sure you dont set yourself up for limited profits by using a single product without implementing a backend strategy that will work to increase your ROI over and over again. Youre building a business, not dabbling in a few hit or miss sales.

Have A Plan For Your Backend Sales

How Do You Know Who to Trust?

In the world of Internet marketing, there are a lot of unethical money-hungry scam artists preying on those who are ignorant about the industry. They know youre new, and they know you wont realize youve been suckered until its too late.

So how does a newcomer to Internet marketing safeguard his or her pockets from the greedy, self-indulgent scams of an unscrupulous marketer? First, you want to do a bit of background research.

If you land on a page where someone has recommended a course or tool that you feel will help accelerate your Internet marketing earnings, dont buy on impulse. You might regret it later and have to ask for a refund, or suck up the cost if no guarantee is offered.

Google can be your friend here. Type that marketers name into the search engines and see if there are any scam details. But beware! One of the most common affiliate pre-pitches is to promote a product by using the scam approach initially and then building the product up with the detailed review.

You may see about 5 pages worth of links if you type in [marketers name] and scam, but that doesnt necessarily mean theyre real scam accounts. Always read the pages with care.

You also need to know that practically every marketer has a disgruntled customer. Some people get angry if their download link doesnt work and they dont get a response within 30 minutes. Others intentionally try to sabotage the competition by posting poor reviews online.

You should be able to find as much positive information (in the form of praise) as you do bad reviews. If not, it might be best to steer clear of that marketer since no one credible can endorse him (or her).

Never rely on their own claims (even screenshots of earnings can be manipulated). And if you find them in a forum, dont think that just because they have the highest post count, it means theyre the best marketer.

Get personal recommendations from other marketers. If you want to find out who has the best affiliate marketing guide, ask in a forum and find out. Or, take the recommendation of a marketer you already trust, because if they provide you with a poor product recommendation, it tarnishes their own reputation, too.

How Do You Know Who To Trust?

Is the AdSense Effort Worth Your Time?

AdSense can be a fantastic moneymaker. There are many people who make thousands of dollars per month through AdSense alone. Hearing this may get you excited, and you may already have dollar signs in your eyes. But dont get your hopes up just yet.

Although youve probably heard about people who bring in five or six figures per month with AdSense, you need to keep one very important thing in mind. In order to make that kind of money with AdSense, you need to have a ton of traffic.

In fact, most people who make more than $100 per month with AdSense either have a very large website with thousands of visitors per day, or they have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller websites.

For most people, AdSense may not be worth the effort to create sites only for promoting it. AdSense only pays a few cents for each click, depending on the keyword you target (some pay a lot more) and those few cents are a lot smaller than they were just a few years ago.

A few years ago, some people were getting several dollars per click for many keywords. These days, $1 clicks are relatively rare in most niches. Most clicks seem to be under $0.50 now, and smaller niches may experience clicks of only around $0.10 (or even less.)

In order to make $10 per day, at $0.10 per click you would need 100 clicks. If your click through ratio were 5%, you would need 2,000 visitors to your site every single day just to earn $10 per day.

For sites with very little traffic, you would have to have a really fantastic click through ratio in order to earn decent money with AdSense or, choose highly competitive keywords that pay a lot, but are harder to rank high for in the search engines.

Some sites just naturally have traffic that doesnt buy much as far as paid information, but they like to click through links to access free information. Webmasters who have sites that target the freebie seeking demographic should test AdSense links to see which type performs best.

If youre running a site that has an extremely general audience, AdSense might also be a good alternative. AdSense is usually pretty good at delivering targeted ads. You can create thousands of content pages with AdSense links, place the code in your blogs, and watch your monthly earnings rise as you create more fodder for your readers.

If your only goal is to make money without becoming a product owner, then create a content-laden site that weaves affiliate links into the text and provides ample opportunities for clicks to AdSense links so that you can profit from the information youre delivering.

Is The AdSense Effort Worth Your Time?