Are you a headless newbie

I know I was when twelve month ago when I started looking into setting up an online business. Whichever way I turned people were willing to offer me advice, e-books, freebies, newsletters, amazing money making opportunities, advertising, search engine placement and much more. This was great but my head started spinning and my credit card started to melt and worst of all I wasnt making a cent.

I learnt a lot during this time and have started to see my commission cheques increase so here are my top 5 tips to help the newbie with the credit card rush to stop sit back and actually start earning some money.

1: Before you sign up for anything read the sales page fully and see what you are actually getting for your money. Many of these pages contain a lot of information and the tendacy is to skim them for the interesting parts ie: How much does it cost. This is exactly what they are desinged to do, so slow down and read everything fully. When I first started I signed up for several programs just because they seemed to offer a lot for not a lot of money, this was true but none of it was at all useful.

2: Join some relevant forums and ask questions about the affiliate programs you are interested in. People are only too happy to help and you will get some good honest feedback both good and bad.

3: When you decide on a program give it time and if it doesnt work straight away keep going. One of the biggest mistakes is to jump from program to program to find one that will work. As with any business it takes time to build and see results so stick with it and keep telling yourself what brought you to internet marketing.

4: Decide on a monthly budget and make sure you stick to it. With the ease of online credit card transactions you will often be tempted by amazing one time only offers, these are designed to get a snap decision from you.

5: Dont keep checking your emails for sign ups. Firstly you will be disappointed if you dont have any and secondly you will be sent lots of emails offering you the world. Its very easy when you are down to try something else and this often invloves your credit card.

Thats my top five but the biggest piece of advice I have been given lately is to take the odd day off and dont do anything, especially at times when you are down and nothing seems to be working. I did this recently and came back to five sign ups, the feeling was great and I went about my business with new vigour.

Copyright 2004 Marc Howlett

About The Author

Marc Howlett is a sales professional with several years experience. Currently working full time as a sales director for a large import wholesale company. I am also making a full time living working part tme online. For help and advice check out my website:

http://www.cash-attack.com

For personal advice contact me by email: marc@cash-attack.com

Link popularity is simply the total number of web pages that link to your web page. Link popularity is an extremely important factor that is used by most of the major search engines to rank web pages and web sites. In general, the major search engines consider link popularity a key factor in their algorithms to determine the relevancy of your web page to a particular keyword search query.

Good link popularity is important because it can increase the visitor traffic to your web page. The reputation of your web site i.e., votes of confidence from other web sites is a measure of the site

For some time now I have been an island marketer and the journey as been worth every moment. When I first discovered the Net, all I used to do was read my emails and surf.
Then I realized that the net had more than that to offer to me. There are opportunities being thrown all around at you from all angles as soon as you log on.
Schemers, scammers and legitimate marketers are all clamoring for your attention and money. Make $10,000 in 30 days claims, emails from relatives of dead African leaders, various affiliate programs and many more are all common anywhere you go.
I used to believe all the hype surrounding becoming wealthy off the Net, but time and experience all changed that. It is possible to make money on the internet, but you better be prepared for the long haul. It takes time to become an overnight success, well that is what I heard and it is so true.
I think some of the hype online is true indeed. I have heard of marketers making thousands of dollars in a few days without much effort. This is where so many people go astray. They believe that they can do the same starting today and have money lining their pockets by next week.
But the truth is the hype is only half true. What they fail to Tell you is that yes it can be accomplished, it just takes a lot of work and discipline to reach that level. Most marketers work for years before they achieve what the hypers are preaching.
But don

Everything you will ever need to know about internet marketing is plainly available to you everywhere you go on the internet. All you need to do is dissect, study, and emulate these methods and you invariably will become just as successful as the people who created them.

How do I know this Because I use this exact pratice to make money with my own online businesses and newsletters. Whenever I have a problem, I look to other successful internet marketers and see how they have overcome these same obstacles I am facing.

Some people will tell you must buy a certain ebook or internet marketing course to become successful. This is not true. Informational products do have their merits, but it is important to understand that a lot of them become out-dated immediately after publication.

The online marketplace changes very rapidly and the best, most successful internet marketers change with it. A good traffic-building tactic one day may be ineffective the next. If you hinge your entire business plan around this single idea you read in an ebook, and that idea ends up being outdated, then you will fail.

I am not trying to say that informational products are not useful. But I am saying you need to find a real time way of analyzing and implementing the information you do have. You cannot purchase internet business success, but you also cannot have it for free. You must work for it.

If you blindly purchase information and then try to implement it, you will not succeed.

Take list-based marketing for instance. Sending email to opt-in subscribers used to be one of the most effective, inexpensive ways to make quick sales. But in the wake of recent anti-spam legislation, this same method has become drastically less profitable. Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and other email client services have clamped down on business emails in general, blacklisting all email from some autoresponders and filtering out up to 70% of legitimate business emails in some cases.

Of course, you wouldnt know any of this from reading 99% of the marketing information available on the internet. Why Because these books became outdated the second congress passed the CAN-SPAM ACT. These books will still tell you that simply filling an autoresponder with messages and buying leads will make you a fortune. This is no longer true.

You can still make just as much money from list marketing now as you could before, but you just need to solve some marketing problems first. You cannot continue to use outdated information that could not possibly take into consideration the current marketing world.

So how do you deal with these problems The same way you need to deal with all eBusiness marketing problems. You operate in REAL TIME. You dissect, study, and emulate what successful webmasters, listowners, and netrepreneurs are doing to make money right now.

There are a number of different ways you can do this--but they all involve the same three steps: dissect, study, and emulate. In the remainder of this article, I will explain website reverse engineering, which is one of the real time methods I use to improve my marketing efforts.

You can start by taking a closer look at the websites you visit most often. Rather than looking at them as a customer or as a member, think about the process that went into making them. You did not find that website by accident. You are not looking at certain products for no reason. If the webmaster of this site is a professional, then it was engineered to drive you there and then to look at specific things. Undo this process to learn from it:

Dissect. Study. Emulate.

Look at the layout of the pages. Check the site map. Look at how things are arranaged. Are there popups Is there a newsletter Do they have a lot of outgoing links to websites they do not own Is this website actually mini-site of another bigger site

Figure out why this webmaster has things setup in the way you see them.

How does the webmaster really make the majority of her revenue Does this webmaster get a lot traffic If so, where does it come from hint: google and alexa have functions that allow you to back-track links and traffic. Does this webmaster use certain techniques to lure you in--and then close a sale Does the mainpage contain primarly free or purchasable items

How is this webmasters sales copy constructed Would this webmaster prefer you to purchase a product or sign up for a list

Dissect. Study. Emulate.

Answer all of these questions. You can do it for free and you will only get better the more you do it.

Now take some of the methods you understand best and are technically capable of implementing and then emulate them on your own website, personalizing them to fit in with your own scheme, of course.

If you do this regularly--if you use REAL TIME as your standard of evaluation--you cannot fail. I personally have used this method dozens of times to fix my website, and just recently I used it again to adjust my new internet income course. Both my website and my new course not only now address the current issues in the internet marketing world, but they also teach my subscribershow to do the same.

Copyright 2004 Isaiah Hull

About The Author

Isaiah Hull is the CEO of an internet business, a publisher of two business newsletters, PTL of several affiliate programs, and a business trainer for his affiliates. On 11/10/04, he released a brand-new free internet income course to address the major changes in internet marketing: http://www.workathomerightnow.net.

Huh You are selling a product I didnt know that! Why didnt you say so... So Top *ONE* Reason: You dont advertise.

Oh...this product They are giving it away free. Why should I pay for it if I am getting it for free... So Top *TWO* Reason: You are trying to sell a freely available product or service.

You have any other product I dont have much use for this. So Top *THREE* Reason: No demand for the product.

Getting the grip We will see how true they are.

***Top ONE Reason:***

The people and the world should know about your product or service. They have to visit your website to see your product. Then why are you waiting for Tell them that you have this great product that they can be benefited from.

Go for pay per click engines. Bid for the keywords. See how your website is getting hits. People think that PPCs are expensive. But no. If we bid reasonably with out getting in to a bidding war, pay per click engines are very reliable source for getting targeted traffic to your site.

http://www.goto.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/

Submit your website to Search engines. Optimize with good keywords and title tag before submitting. Buy a submitting software. You cant submit by going to every search engine site and filling the form. You have to learn how to automate your business. Otherwise you will end up wasting lot of your time. Choose the software that updates its search engine databse on regular basis.

http://cyberspacehq.com/products/AddWeb/home.shtm

http://www.webposition-gold.com/

http://www.promotion-expert.com/submitter/ds2.htm

Write ezine articles. Submit them to articles accepting web sites and publishers to reproduce them in their ezines. Ezine articles are a great way of getting traffic with out spending a penny. Go to http://www.ezinelocater.com and search for the ezine publishers that accepts articles. Select your target ezines and send the publishers your articles. Remember the golden rule - Dont flood them with articles. They might refuse your articles once for all. Nobody likes flooding of their inboxes with mail.

Start your own optin list. Anything like an ezine of your own or a free course that people might interested in. You can send promotional emails to your subscribers, a great way to promote your business.

Other methods of advertisings are:

Ad swaps

Free and paid ads in ezines

link exchanges

Classified ad submissions

Banner advertising

Participate in discussion forums,message boards

Offline methods

Really there is no end to this list. What ever you follow free or paid advertising methods, ALWAYS spend 70% of your time on advertising.

***Top TWO Reason:***

You are trying to sell a freely available service or product. When people are getting it free, why they bother to buy the same for money

Before start selling a product, look around you. For example, people are getting web site templates freely on the internet. If you keep website templates in a box and try to sell them, it wont be much profit for you.

You can question me. Quality! Paid templates are always be little bit more of quality products. I will answer that Anybody can improve the free templates to their needs.

How do you know that the product that you are going to sell is freely available on the net Simple. Add the word free to your product and search the term in search engines. Sites offering similar product freely will show up. For example, take above example. You can search for free website templates.

OK...Still want to sell a freely available product Then give it a Unique Selling position. Add some unique property to your product. Add bonuses. Offer free upgrades that they wont get with free products. Hope you can survive with these tips.

***Top THREE Reason:***

No demand product. Right now information products are number one selling products on the internet.

People are seeking information. Information about making money online, building a website fast, selling their product, how to cook and serve, how to repair electronics with out paying lot for repair services...

There is no end to the above list and there is no limit to the information seeking areas. All you have to do is just find out the hot market.

Here comes the affiliate programs. Great way of having your product with in few seconds. Having your own product is always better. But people making lot of money with affiliate programs too.

Select a good affiliate program that gives you 50% of commission. If you join in an affiliate program and if you see your affiliate ID at some thousand number, dont be scared. So many people selling the same product and how come you are gonna make money with competing so many people Most of the times people join in affiliate programs and forget about them. May be only few people work sincerely and stick to one or few programs. So dont bother if your affiliate id is some 18746.

So sell a product that has demand. It is not matter whether it is your own or affiliate product.

About The Author

Radhika Venkata - Subscribe to EbookBiz Magazine which is completely focused on ebook business and Internet Marketing. Receive FREE Ebooks with Resale rights every month!

http://www.ebooks-world.com/freetosell.shtml

Webmaster Resources: List Your product, ezine or web site free! http://www.webmasters-central.com/

Let me tell you a true story. A friend of my who likes to collect domain names was describing a few that he had acquired. While he has a wide range of domains in various categories, these particular domains were all related to web hosting.

Some of the domain names were similar to existing web hosting company names or derivatives of web hosting company names. Others simply had ‘hosting’, ‘host’, or a related term in the domain itself.

So my friend and I were talking and he said something like, “Yeah, it’s a shame – if only I had the time to develop some content for some of these domains then I might make some money form them”. It turns out that he had no content on any of the domains – just parked pages, or no content at all. When I investigated the domains, it turned out that there was a small but steady traffic stream that visited these domains. Some simply typed in the domain, others apparently found the domain through a search engine that had categorized the parked page.

So I suggested the following to him – why not use a service that will take the domain as is – with no content whatsoever – and suggest search options that generate revenue for each click He took my advice, grudgingly I might add, and guess what He made $50 the first month from just a few of his domains.

He was so excited that he asked what he might do to further increase his revenues from his domain names. I suggested that he use his parking pages these can be customized with some hosts to test banners from affiliate programs with the highest paying hosting companies. He placed only three banners at the top of his pages – with a brief description of the company’s product offerings taken straight from their web sites. This also proved to be a great success – and his revenue stream increased.

My friend has since invested some time and energy in monetizing his other domains. He has either pointed the domains to a pay per click search engine, or listed affiliate links on almost every domain. This has turned a lackluster domain speculation business into a profit generating pay per click and affiliate business that requires almost no effort to maintain. Needless to say, my friend has taken my out to lunch a couple of times since then.

If you have parked domains and what to try getting paid for search results on those pages, check out this service offered by Sedo there are others out there as well:

http://www.sedo.com/services/parking.php3

Good luck in transforming your parked domains into cold, hard cash!

About The Author

Derek Vaughan has been actively marketing on the Internet since 1995. Mr. Vaughan has marketed products at the Walt Disney Company as the online marketing manager of ecommerce for ESPN.com. Mr. Vaughan is also the founder of Cheap Hosting Directory - a web hosting review site. Mr. Vaughan holds degrees from both the Indiana University and Purdue University. He has also received a Master of Business Administration degree from the Owen School at Vanderbilt University. Cheap Hosting Directory - http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com - is a part of TechPad Agencys network of web hosting portals.

1. Pick 4 or more articles youve written that have a common theme and put them in an autoresponder series. Announce it on your site as an e-mail course on the go.
2. If you have a page for related links, create a related links file and put it on autoresponder. This can be a one-page e-mail containing 15-50 links that are of interest to your visitors. Put your own promotional texts or blurbs at the top, middle and bottom of the e-mail.
3. Create a fun or trivia quiz, put it up on your site and put the answers in an autoresponder that your visitors can request. This way, youll know the people who took your quiz.
4. Write reviews of books, music, e-books, sites, software or anything you can think of and put each review or related reviews in an autoresponder. If what you are reviewing have affiliate programs, use your affiliate links in the autoresponder.
5. Run a contest on your site or e-zine, then have your visitors or subscribers send their responses to your autoresponder. This way, you wont have to worry about manually sending them a confirmation receipt.
6. Create a frequently updated autoresponder and let your visitors and/or subscribers know about it. You can put in weekly tips or links to useful resources in the autoresponder and a reminder to the people who request it that you update it every week or on a regular basis e.g. tell them to request for the same autoresponder again a week from now. You can use this method instead of using autoresponders with limited follow up messages.
7. If youve written 20 or more articles and you have them on separate autoresponder accounts, create a master list for your articles. In this master list, list the titles of your articles, their autoresponder addresses and their short descriptions. You can then just promote this master list.
8. Put excerpts or free chapters of your e-book, book or paid e-mail courses in an autoresponder series, then include your follow up sales letters at the end.
9. If youre selling your own products, put your testimonials on autoresponder, along with the description of your products, an excerpt or a free chapter. This will increase your credibility.
10. Keep track of people who download your free e-book, e-report, or free software by putting their download links in an autoresponder. When you promote your free product, you can just promote the autoresponder address.
11. Put links to your hidden pages on autoresponder. A hidden page could be the affiliate page where you have all the graphics, text links, promotional articles that interested affiliates can use. Let people know they can have free access to your affiliate page by requesting the autoresponder. This way, you can have a list of people who are interested in becoming your affiliates.

About The Author

Copyright c Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ
Shery is the developer of creative, motivating and fun e-mail courses for writers. Sign up and take an e-mail course today -- free! -- at http://WritingBliss.com. She also authored the e-book that lets you create your own original and profitable E-mail Workshops, eCourses and Tutorials in only 3 days! Visit http://EmailWorkshopsHowTo.com for more info.

A common mistake *A LOT* of affiliates make is to focus too much Energy on building their second tier and not enough on selling Their business on the first tier.

I myself belive that two-tiered affiliate programs are overrated, If you have a website that PRE-sells effectively you stand to make Quite a bit more by concentrating your efforts on your first tier.

Simply put, if you plan to make a living online and build a serious Source of income from affiliate programs, you cannot rely on others To sell products for you.

When I got started I had this

Viral Traffic Building

When I started my website, one of the first things I did was place a few free eBooks up for download in order to have something for free.

Now, a couple of years down the track, 60% of my traffic is untrackable. I deduct that this has something to do with the thousands of eBooks which have been downloaded from my site.

I am the author of one of these eBooks, How to Autorun a CD and the others I used content from one of my old reports with reprint rights CD s.

I used the same eBook template for all the eBooks and inserted about five links at the top and bottom of each page which point directly to my main website.

One of those links points to my free eBook index which could be the reason this page is high on the "top entry" list but low in terms of search engine rankings.

The Brandable eBook

I have noticed around the Web that Internet Marketers were offering custom brandable versions of their eBooks in order to encourage distribution. The idea is that more webmasters would offer the eBook for download from their site if their URL could be branded within the pages.

Affiliate programs use this method of traffic generation along with webmasters like me who have content sites. What this means is that this technique can be used by any webmaster regardless of how big or small their site is.

How To Create a Brandable eBook

If you already know how to build simple HTML pages, all you need now is an eBook compiler also called HTML compiler with the capacity to brand the output file.

If you do not know how to build HTML pages but know how to edit them, then you might like the original eBook template that I use which is available free from: http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/free-ebook-template.shtml

Selecting the Correct Compiler

In terms of right and wrong, any ebook compiler which comes with branding software can be used. So right and wrong cannot be used to describe correctness. What I mean by correct compiler is plain and simple ease of use for me, but most importantly for the end user.

You see, we need to make it as easy as possible for the end user otherwise they will put the whole project in the "too hard" basket.

I own several eBook compilers costing me from $30 to almost $100 and I find the cheapest one which is "Activ E-Book" to be the best one to use for the creation of custom brandable eBooks.

Activ E-Book creates rebrandable eBooks which means that the file can be re-branded over and over. This makes it really easy for the end user because if they make a mistake, they can start start again with the same file.

With some other HTML compilers, if you overwrite the master file, it cannot be rebranded. This could cause problems for the end user because if they make a mistake they will need to go and download the master file again. You can get around this by creating a readme file which explains not to overwrite the file but to save the file under another name. Now this could be getting into the "too hard" area for both the end user and the original author.

Offer Brandable eBook Downloads

I have started to convert my ebook downloads to brandable ebooks. I give both the master file and the branding software away for free. My stats indicate that there is no shortage of takers for my custom brandable edition of How To Autorun A CD. Now these webmasters have something to offer from their site like I did at the start without any expense of time and money.

Pitfalls To Avoid

My early eBooks had a resources page where I placed ads which pointed to my affiliate links. After some time I realized that this would not encourage other webmasters to offer the eBooks at their site.

The Solution The resources page contains only links to other free eBook downloads. Also, I now have one sponsor ad which can also be branded with the users ClickBank Nickname. So if you want to go "viral", do not riddle your brandable eBooks with affiliate links because not many webmasters will offer them at their site.

Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic

About The Author

Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles with all sorts of tips for work at home webmasters. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com

Accusations of spam can be so harmful to your business that every effort should be made to prevent it.

However, simply requesting a surfer to enter an e-mail address into an online form on your website is not a guarantee of not being accused of spam.

Here’s what could happen

One of your competitors could visit your website and enter the name of a well-known anti-spammer. When your autoresponder sends out the latest copy of your newsletter or mini-course to this person, he will become very angry.

It is no good protesting your innocence. Since he didn’t ask to subscribe to your newsletter, he will claim that you are spamming him. While you are arguing your case with your Web host, your competitor will be taking your profits!

Here’s how Double Opt-In works

When a subscriber signs up for your newsletter online, he or she receives a confirmation e-mail to which they must respond if they are to be added to your list.

The confirmation usually involves simply clicking a link or hitting the reply-to button.

Taking these precautions can prevent a lot of trouble and ensure that your opt-in subscribers really want your information.

© 2003 John Lynch

For Free courses on how to succeed in Internet Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Online Auctions go to: http://www.merchant-account-service.com/free_courses_online.html

About The Author

For Free courses on how to succeed in Internet Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Online Auctions go to: http://www.merchant-account-service.com/free_courses_online.html