Improve Your Internet Marketing

A funny thing happened to me the other day. I got an invoice from 1and1, the ISP I first started using for my online business. Payment had been set to automatically charge my credit card, but I had recently replaced that credit card, and so the invoice wasn’t paid automatically. It seems that I had domains that were about to expire and up for renewal.

I was going to ignore the invoice and let the domains expire, thinking that if I hadn’t done anything with them yet, I probably wasn’t going to. I glimpsed through the list and decided to log in to my account and look through the domains I had registered there.

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Niche research is one of the most important skills you can master as an Internet marketer. Whether you’re creating your own products, marketing as an affiliate, or simply creating content sites for ad revenue, narrow, targeted niches are your best bet.

Would you rather be a small fish in a giant lake, or a big fish in a small pond? While your personal philosophy might argue otherwise, when it comes to Internet marketing, you want to be the latter - unless you have an unlimited advertising and product development budget!

Below are a list of must have niche market research sites that will give you a slew of ideas on niches you might want to enter. [Read more →]

Keyword research is one of the fundamentals of Internet marketing - whether you are selling as an affiliate, using Pay Per Click (especially using programs like SpeedPPC), or building eCommerce sites. Focusing on the “wrong” keywords can doom the best of products or marketing strategies.

Here’s a quick way to help determine the “profitability” of your keywords.

One of the ‘tried & true’ methods for testing keyword profitability is to ’spy’ on PPC ads. The rational is that anyone advertising on a given keyword consistently is probably making money. After all, no one is going to pay indefinitely for PPC ads on a keyword that isn’t making them money, right? [Read more →]

One of the best avenues to building an Internet Marketing business is with “your own” products. But how do you go about creating your own product?

There are 3 basic methods: creating something from scratch, modifying an existing product such as PLR (Private Label Rights) or public domain, or building on top of something, such as Open Source code.

Modifying an existing product or building on top of something is usually quicker than creating something from scratch. Through outsourcing, you can create your own products quickly and relatively inexpensively.

I did this with an Open Source program for creating Camtasia-like screen capture videos. I spent a few hundred dollars at Rentacoder to take the Open Source version, change the GUI or interface, add some features, and create a Website around it. [Read more →]

Many Internet Marketers put the “cart before the horse”, jumping into a niche, even creating a product before they know whether people will buy.

Here’s a really simple, quick, and easy way to test: run a brief Adwords campaign.

Create just a single ad targeted to the niche you’re considering, mention a product, and INCLUDE A PRICE. If you get clicks on the ad, you’ve got a winner. No clicks? You just saved yourself a whole lot of time, money, and frustration.

You’re not trying to sell yet, and in fact anything past the click doesn’t matter - yet. You just want to see if there is QUALIFIED interest. If you display a price and people click, you know there is qualified interest.

All the rest is just testing & optimizing. [Read more →]

If you’re selling something directly, be it your own info-product, membership, or service, your sales page is arguably the most important thing there is. A great product is worthless if no one buys it. Traffic? Useless if it doesn’t convert.

Creating a good sales page can be difficult, tedious, even costly, and we’re usually all too eager to get it uploaded and working. But certainly we understand it’s importance. So you have your graphics done professionally, and eventually you’re happy with your sales copy.

Most Internet Marketers - myself included! - are guilty of leaving it there. After all, good is good, right? [Read more →]

What could be better than free & easy traffic and backlinks?

Press releases can be extremely effective marketing tools, and should be part of every Internet marketers toolchest. But press release distribution can be costly; the top distribution level for PRWeb runs $360+. PRNewswire is even pricier.

The good news is there are some very effective FREE press release services. Most of these offer paid services as well, but their free distribution can be very effective. Some of these sites even offer tips and templates for writing effective releases.

Here is a list of nearly 20 free press release distribution services, taken from our newly-released “Ultimate IM Toolchest” (the first part of our upcoming ”Internet Marketing Almanac“): 

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