Great IM Checklist!

Though the article below is titled "Affiliate Marketing", after reading it I felt it applied even more so to the whole IM field in general.

There's a great to-do checklist that should be part of every Internet marketers schedule for all of their 'money' sites. Read the article and let me know what you think.

Have any tips to add, either to the list or just in general? How about your own success stories? Not just from using this checklist, but your own experiences? We'd love to hear them!

Online Affiliate Marketing

by J.R Ratte

This is an article for people making money on the internet, who look to make money on the internet or wants to leverage the capabilities of the world wide web to finally leave their day occupation.  If you can send en e-mail, sign-up for websites and know how to copy and paste, there is no cause why you are not able to earn money on the the web.  There are a wide array of ways to do it for completely free!

Here are a few "musts" that should be on your "to-do" list:

1-) Article Marketing: This is an art in itself, yet it is so unproblematic.  come up with something you can write about for ever and write about it!  Tell people about what you know and hopefully answer some questions they might have.  I wouldn't see article marketing without a webpage, which means more time and more money.  Popular directories like Go Articles are congregated by tens of thousands of publishers, seeking related content for their websites.  You are mostly allowed 2-3 links within each submitted article and there is no limits to how many articles you can submit.

2-)Press Releases: This is like a short article that is similar to a average article but has a lot more emphasis.  A press release is like, a presidential election in applied science.  Those get indexed extremely promptly.  There's quite a few services that will do it for free.  There are also paid version like PRweb but it comes with a exhorbitant price.  Either way, the chances of your press release getting picked up by mainstream media is slim to none, but PRweb makes it at least slim, but it is the highest ranked directory for press releases on the internet.

3-)Social Bookmarking: Sites like digg and delicious are social bookmarks.  This is like the bookmarks you save in your web browser, but this way everyone can look at the sites you look at and yes, the search engines do look at those bookmarks.  Perhaps, not all will be given a value by Google's crawlers but sure is a good place to get free backlinks.

4-)SEO/SEM: Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing.  Google controls 60% of the total planetary onlinetraffic, therefore, it is the search engine that is most widely used by affiliates.  SEO is about getting a high ranking in search engines' first page, by nature.  Top three in organic searches are the most clicked.  People have grown an immunity against sponsored ads, however, people still click more on the sponsored ads than they do on "organic results".  Organic means that the are the top search results, that are not paid advertisements.  It's free buying fraffic!  Getting ranked above the fold on Google and other search engines riquires a serious dose of quality backlinking and keyword choice but also has its serious dose of rewards.

5-)Directory Listing: There are over 4,000 online directories.  Not all will accept you, even if you submit it all by hand.  The most looked at directory is DMOZ, but rough luck getting into that one if you only have a 1 page website with 500 words of content.  There's some good tools to get your site across.  This is something that software systems will do a whole lot better than a single individual would.

6-)Auto Responders: This is famously spread all over, got the list, got the cash.  Auto responders will substantially help you build a list of targeted buyers that you can send information with your afiliate links, in hopes of getting a commission on sales.  There are many tactics used to build a list.  Some are free, some are paid.  Most serious webmasters will use aweber.com because of its fantastic repuation.  You could use a regular hotmail account, but that doesn't look too professional and you will need to heavy duty programming to automate the process.

7-)PPC: Pay Per Click, is a form of paid advertising.  The way it works online is advertisers pay a site like Google for them to expose their advertisements in search results.  When an individual clicks on an advertisement, the one paying for that ad to be there, gets billed for that click by Google!  If the ad is clicked while a surfer is on a website, the one paying for advertisement spots pays Google for that guest and the site proprietor who displayed the advertisement get money for his publicity!  PPC advertising is big occupation, if displaying Google ads on your website with high traffic, you can easily earn a decent living if you are in a niche where advertisers pay $5 per click.  Or if you learn how to do it properly, you could be the one advertising per click and lets be frank here, you don't need to pay $5 per click.

8-)Website creation: If you want to earn a living online, you better learn to make a website or you probably won't go far.  A blogger blog isn't too professional, but getting its own domain name is a good start and is cheap; a domain costs $10 for one year.  Also, a blogger.com blog won't cost you any monthly fees for hosting and since it is owned by Google,you are alreay ahead of the game.  Then there is WordPress.  It is versatile, easy to use and doesn't cost anything, anyoneeveryone can do something nice with WordPress but it will cost you around $5-$10 per month for a hosting account and you will need to learn some easy technical things, so we suggest getting a free ebook on getting set up with WordPress.  No sense paying for it because you can find it for free.

9-)Domain Names: A must have for all affiliates.  Your domain SHOULD end with .com and have your keywords in it; as a genral rule of thumb; .org, .net, .info, .biz, us are also good choices but .com should be precedence and many will tell you, "no matter how bad it looks".  Fact is, if someone just hears a name like Sunlight Laundry detergents, they will type in "www.sunlight.com" into their web browser.

10-)Product to Sell: There's a lot of things an afiliate can market for a commission.  Clickbank is a great place especially if you sell virtual products like e-books; programs that can just be easily downloaded without having to wait for delivery.  Another good place is AssociatePrograms where there is a enormous variety of any sorts of products, both physical and virtual.  Ever wants to make a travel related website?  Perhaps exotic cars?  Whatever you wish to advertise, you are likely to find it there.

Ok, now this all looks simple but if you want to make money from home, you will need to accelerate the process and the best way to do it is buying tools or sevices to help you out a great deal in getting ranked higher and effectively.  An online business remains a business.  You can make a few estra bucks filling out paid surveys but that's not where THE riches is.  The amount of time you spend waiting on new surveys, you could easily spend time building a profitable campaign with online affiliate marketing.  Many online marketing Gurus will NOT tell you the services they use to earn them so much money, or will only suggest services from their JV partners.

Software is to affiliate as what an impact gun is to an auto-mechanic.  An online marketer needs a tool box to be successful; that's because your competition has all the tools that put you back so far behind.  In 2010, we are at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing tools.  They are now a fraction of what they were a few years ago and the gurus are practically giving their new cutting edge software they use to make them filthy rich!

For the one stop shop for affiliate marketing tools, the tools box your competition has, visit:

Elite-Affiliate-Marketing-Tools.com

Want to find out more about (http://www.elite-affiliate-marketing-tools.com) Affiliate Marketing Tools, then visit the Elite Tool WebStore to choose the best (http://www.elite-affilate-marketing-tools.com/elite-tool-store) Affiliate Software for your needs. 

How To Find Internet Marketing Success On Ebay

A good article on using Ebay in your internet marketing efforts, reprinted with permission.

How To Find Internet Marketing Success On Ebay

by Carier Beyonces

Maybe you need extra money, instead of getting a loan try unloading old things you really don't need on Ebay's market place. An Ebay business is one of the easiest methods to make money on the net. You really don't have to go very far to find a successful online marketer who cut their marketing teeth on Ebay before expanding into their own lucrative net businesses. Selling on Ebay most likely cannot be beat if having an online business is something you've been dreaming about. This is a very easy and nearly painless way to find out if online marketing is really for you. What follows next are some helpful Ebay marketing tips meant to help your start and experience be smoother and more rewarding.

Make sure your e-bay listings are written well. The last thing you want to have is a listing that is poorly written. A listing that is full of spelling errors will turn off your potential buyers faster than you can blink. Your listing should also be free of grammatical errors. You also want to make sure that, in addition to having perfect spelling and grammar, your listing is easy and fun to read. Write up your items in a way that will encourage people to keep reading until they are motivated to place a bid or, better yet, click on the "Buy It Now" button. If you aren't comfortable with writing, it may be worth it for you to hire someone who can help you create great listings.

Diversify your product line. When you're just starting out, there's really no reason why you shouldn't do ok just offering old things you no longer want or need. But you should expand a bit once you're comfortable with the marketing and selling process. You'll be able to realize greater success after you begin to offer more products and diversify. Having a range of products will help you with the cumulative profit effect, but they'll maintain a constant level of profit when sales slow in some area.

Whenever you make sales, be sure to ship the item out quickly. In fact, if you can do it, send out your products as soon as the sale goes through. This can be difficult if you are selling many items, as you can only go to the post office so many times in a day. You should still make sure that you have a system in place that allows you to ship items within a day of the sale. This could mean going to the post office at least once a day, but it is worth it to keep your buyers happy and to build your feedback score.

There's no reason for it to be hard to make money online. Quite a few successful online marketers got their start from Ebay selling. It's a safe place for you to explore marketing and selling to see if you like doing it. You can easily develop it into a fulltime occupation if you can sell on Ebay and you enjoy doing it.

Ebay is a great online market, just yesterday, my (http://hostgatordeals0.blogetery.com/2010/05/20/hostgator-coupons-can-anyone-really-succeed-with-multi-level-marketing/) Hostgator business received floods of incomes on it. To find out on the (http://delicious.com/url/e8cd8109d3a4260d077020a520fac5f8) Hostgator site. 

Article Marketing Revisited

Unless you're completely new to Internet marketing or have been hiding under a rock for a few years, you know that article marketing is one of the "mainstays" for building backlinks and getting traffic to your website. That said, it's easy to take for granted that everyone understands this or has the prerequisite experience.

Below is an article I came across recently that talks about some of the basics of article marketing - both from an article writing perspective, as well as in using the various article directories for content for your own web sites.

Whether you're an old hand at it, or relatively new to the game, this article might be a good refresher or boost to your understanding and efforts. I'd be interested to know what you think, but even more so, let me know what your experience level is.

Are you an article marketing "old-hand"? Do the folks at Ezinearticles know you by first name and ask your opinion before doing anything? Of are you someone who is just starting out and entering that wonderful world of online marketing and money-making?

Either way, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you think about the article below - used, or course, with full explicit permission from the author.

Experience That You Need For Article Marketing?

by Huan Perez

When you are endeavoring to generate money with written material, the beauty of it is that you do not actually need previous work associated experience and that you can learn as you go. With that being said, there are particular skills you will wish to learn rapidly to help make your site prosperous. You cannot go in not knowing anything, not acquiring anything, and still expect to make a good revenue (or any revenue at all).

One skill you need to acquire is the ability of picking the right written articles that will help make your websites a success. There are many types of written content, from free written content to high dollar content, and each comes with its own advantages, and disadvantages (although expensive content is more probably going to give you a successful site in the end).

The next skill that you need to learn is how to pick the right keywords so that you can take hold of visitors and increase your rankings so that you are on the 1st or 2nd page in the searches. If you want to make it to the first 2 pages you have to know that picking the highly competitive keywords the big wigs are employing is not going to assist you.

Third, you will need to know how to optimize your websites for assorted search engines. Having SEO skills will help you employ your keywords the right way to make sure that you are going to build a successful site within your preferred niche.

You are going to have to know how to market your Internet site through adverts and text links if you are going to build a large website that will be the center of your new Internet marketing career. Some people choose to generate smaller 2 to 5 page niche websites, and if that is the situation, you will not want to promote all of your websites this way as you will use up all of your marketing finances.

If you can capture some of these abilities and attack them aggressively during your initial few small web sites or the first few months of a larger site, then you will finally become adept. Being that you are going to be confident to learn these skills on your own with hands on experience, the only requirement you are going to have to fill is to read up on how to get up and running. Although you would be wise to maybe obtain an Internet marketing e-book or two and make sure that you have the funds available to begin a small website.

Limited time only! Get unheard of deals on Experience for article marketing before supplies run out. Visit (http://bestweb-templates.com/webtemplatesblog/2009/11/what-experience-do-you-need-for-article-marketing/) Experience for article marketing today!

Again, feel free to post your thoughts or remarks. And in fact, while you are at it, let me know what sorts of questions you might have, about aricle marketing or any other aspect of internet marketing. Are you struggling to make your first dollars online? Maybe you've found out how to be successful in your endeavors and would be willing to share some of your experience here.

Regardless, give me an idea of where you are at, your experience level, whether or not you are having success, and what you had to do to achieve it. I would appreciate it, as I'm sure the other readers would. And I can virtually guarantee you, the things you don't think much about or take for granted, will absolutely be very helpful for someone else.

Adsense and Adwords - For Those Who Don't Already Know

If you've been in the Internet Marketing business as long as I have, you can get pretty jaded. Not just in terms of having seen everything under the sun, but also in terms of where other people are at.

Pay Per Click marketing, or PPC, is one of the older and more common business models. Unless of course you haven't done any PPC! In which case, it's altogether new.

And for those to whom Search engine Marketing is new, the term "Google Adwords", or simply "Adwords" may not have a whole lot of meaning. If you haven't been exposed to it, how would you know what it is?

The same can be said for "Google Adsense", or "Adsense". In fact, I'd say it's even more common - or uncommon as the case may be - for folks to not have heard of Adsense.

And do in recognition of my 'jaded-ness', I decided to reprint the article below. Hopefully this will help is you're one of the people for whom PPC and contextual advertising aren't already old hat.


What Do Adwords And Adsense Mean

by Randy Roedl

As a online marketer you'll come across some of the terms Adwords and Adsense at some stage. As a new online marketer you'll be finding out several things and these words will probably not be familiar to you.

In point of fact it can even get quite confusing when there seems so much to find out that you may push these aside and put them in the 'learn later' folder.

Adwords and Adsense are both terms you'll see a lot of and given time you'll perhaps apply both of them.

So what are Adwords and Adsense?

Let's begin with Adwords.

Adwords is the term used for advertising on Google. If you search for a word on Google you will get probably thousands of results come up with the first page displaying perhaps the first ten results. These results appear on the left side of the page.

You will also discover on the right side of the page there is a list that appears. This list is the Adwords ads that marketers pay to have displayed on the Google search engine.

These ads are also displayed within websites. You can choose whether to have your advertisement displayed on other people's websites or only on the search engine results page.

The advertiser is charged each time someone clicks on his/her advertisement.

So if you are promoting your website or product, or an affiliate product, you may want to use Adwords advertising to reach customers for that website or product.

The price of advertising with Adwords depends on the keywords you use for your ad. You place a bid on your keywords and your ad is then presented in order by the highest bidder for that keyword. So if your keyword bid is the second highest your ad will come out in the second spot.

Keyword value will vary with each word and with different subjects. A few keywords will need very high bids to reach a high spot in the advertising displays.

Adsense is also a service offered by Google, but instead of you being the advertiser paying for the Adwords ad, you are the website owner who is being paid a percentage of that cost for having the ads displayed on your website.

Those same Adwords ads that are also displayed on websites, you can have on your website. You will get paid an amount every time someone clicks on one of the ads displayed on your website.

Google will automatically put ads on your site that link to the subject of your website. You will need to place the advertisement blocks within your pages and select the styles and colors that best suit your web site.

Then you just need to drive traffic to your web site so that you'll have people clicking on those ads.

Google Adsense can be a very fine method to make a few extra income if you set your site up right and gain traffic to your site.

Once you have this understanding of what both Adwords and Adsense are they can act a very big part in your online income accomplishments.

Want to find out more about (http://www.wpunplugged.com) Wordpress Unplugged, then visit Randy's site on how to choose the best Wordpress Information (http://www.wpunplugged.com) Wordpress Unplugged.

I hope this article filled in some of the gaps for those who weren't already familiar with Adsense of Adwords. And if that's you, I envy your 'newness'! There are just oodles of very interesting, neat, and lucrative things out there for you to continue exploring.

If this article was at all useful for you, please feel free to leave a comment. Even more so, if it wasn't that useful, drop a comment and let me know what you would like to see here. Anything at all, as long as it's related to Internet Marketing.

Avoid "Me Too" Marketing

I don't usually go in for the "fuzzy" kind of things like "The Secret", and at first glance, that what I thought this was. It's not. The article below, used with permission of course, talks about a very important point, just happens to have the unfortunate-sounding name 'Attraction Marketing'.

It's really a simple & straightforward idea: 'attracting' your market by being unique and, well, attractive.

I firmly believe that there are way too many Internet marketers doing the "me too" thing. Either they've latched on to the next big thing, like review sites, or are simply following a formula by rote.

The problem is that too many people are doing the same thing. There is no differentiation, and when someone does manage to get to your site, the marketing message is bland at best.

Take advantage of whatever your unique Value Proposition is in your marketing - try to consider the concepts below.

And as always, please feel free to add your comments!

Attraction Marketing Basics

by Dave Kotecki

Have you ever heard of attraction marketing? It's a very common word among people who are starting a business on the internet. Here's one of many definitions of attraction marketing: connecting with your prospects by injecting your uniqueness as an individual into your marketing. You'll want to be sure you understand the basic concept of attraction marketing when starting a business online.

If you have a clearly defined target market, and you concentrate your marketing on that group of prospects, you will "attract" those people who have similar likes, dislikes, wants and needs as your own. On first contact with your marketing content, they will be drawn to you because you're speaking their language.

It sure does help if you are good at copywriting, though no special tools or techniques are used. All you have to do is to be honest and tell the truth from your point of view. They'll get it. A straightforward approach written in everyday language will do the trick.

Have you ever read a piece of copy that held you spellbound, excited that you had found exactly what you've been looking for? Then you certainly understand the concept.

That's exactly how you want your readers to feel when they come across your content. Like they just have to hear the rest of what you've got to say. It's really not that hard to do.

Just pretend you're saying it to an old friend.

So what if they don't get it? No problem. They may have been more receptive if someone else had introduced them to the same thing. But they just don't have that kind of rapport with you. That just means they weren't really your prospect. The ones that feel like they're like you will get it.

After some trial and error, you'll find it's really very easy to do.

Want to find out more about (http://attractionmarketingwebinars.com/?t=aw1) attraction marketing systems, then visit Dave Kotecki's site on how to choose the best (http://davekotecki.com/my-customized-attraction-marketing-system/) customized attraction marketing system for your needs.

How To Rank High - SEO Made Easy!

If you've been in Internet marketing for any length of time, than you know the importance of Search Engine Optimization, of SEO. Unless you're strictly Pay-Per-Click, than getting good rankings is important.

Unfortunately, for many, SEO is something of a mysterious 'Black Art'. The reality couldn't be further away. SEO in it's most basic form is pretty simple and logical. In fact, taking care of just a few things like your tags, keywords, and backlinks, will do it all for you.

A while back, I came across an excellent "checklist" for search engine optimiztion by Edwin Reyes. If you use this list, you will find yourself doing much better in your SERPs rankings.

Print this checklist out and keep it handy as you work on your sites, and especially when you're getting ready to develop or launch a new website.

These tips can mean all the difference in the world for you, and that should translate directly into revenue and traffic.

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (Lynx source distribution directory)

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit The Web Robots Pages to learn more about Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

Showcase Listing

by Tony Burton

Internet Marketing is something that is a must in the online business world, not to mention the basis of many home-based business opportunities. You can make the prettiest website in the world, but if no one can find it, it's value is zero. A long term strategy that pays off well is to do Search Engine Optimization for your website. This includes on page and off page optimization. One problem I see all the time is when a website developer makes a website for a client, and their Title Tag for the website is "HomePage", or "Searing Glow HomePage".

For google, the title tag is extremely important. That is the text that people will be reading when they are browsing the search engine results pages. How is google going to know how to index your website and list you under the correct keywords if your title and other content on your website are not search engine friendly? If you sell shoes, then you need to have something like "Buy Shoes Online - Nike, Puma, DC shoes". Do you get the point? The you have to feed the search engines the information so they know where to index your website.

A Showcase Listing service will get your website optimized correctly using keywords that get traffic and business. Like I said earlier, if you do not market your website, it is not going to be seen.

A lot of business owners have no idea how to actually do search engine optimization. Of course, you could try to go online and learn it yourself, but it is a very time consuming trade to learn from ground zero. You can get SEO services from people who know what they are doing, and that way you can focus on running your business profitably instead of trying to learn how to optimize your website.

There are a lot of variables to deal with when you are running a search engine optimization campaign for a website. That is why it is best to hire people who know what they are doing in order to obtain the results you are looking for. A number of people will try to do SEO themselves, only to fail and end up hiring a professional.

Tracking your website traffic is an important aspect of SEO. Although it is nice to use Google's keyword tool to estimate traffic, it is better to analyze your incoming traffic to estimate the potential search volume of a keyword. Say for instance, you notice that 25 people are finding your site through the keyword "Blue Rubber Widgets", and your website is only in the 10th spot for that keyword, then you know that if you are ranked for the first spot that your will increase your traffic tremendously.

(http://nawny.com/2010/04/marketing-with-showcase-listing/)