Posted by peter on May 31, 2009 | No Comments
For years now, I’ve wanted to start my own directory / database of Internet Marketers. The problem was, I was never able to find a suitable domain, things like IMwhois or IMrolodex, the sticking point, I found, was that the phrase “Internet Marketing” is just too damn long to make a good domain name!
With the introduction of so many new TLD’s (that’s Top Level Domains), finding the right keyword rich domain has gotten much easier - as long as you don’t absolutely require a .com.
So as I was searching (I like to use name.com to search for loads of different domain extensions) I had a moment of inspiration and entered: InternetMarketers to see what would come up.
I checked, and double checked, yes, internetmarketers.eu was sitting there and waiting to be registered! Awesomeness!
So I now have the (nearly) perfect domain to start building my database of internet marketers. To start off with, I plan on simply listing all the big names like Armand Morin, John Reese, Brad Callen to name but a few. Then I will expand it to list some vital stats about them, before moving on to list all their products.
Something I have learned about developing websites (and I have been doing it for over 10 years now) is that it’s useless to try and do everything at once. You should allow the website to grow and evolve over time - seriously, it’s the only way. If you do any development work, it should last less than 1 month - just trust me on this, I work for a web development company. Once that one month is up, launch the site, promote it, get people, get traffic, make money. Then, after a few weeks, start the next cycle - no more than 1 month. And continue like this.
I have a road map for Internet Marketers, with the profiles, products, reviews etc, but down the line, I also plan to turn it in to a social network - I think the ones so far aimed at internet marketers have missed the mark entirely. But, I will only develop it if I see any income or huge potential.
Click here (opens in a new window) to visit InternetMarketers.eu
Posted by peter on May 30, 2009 | No Comments
Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest way to start making money on the internet. The benefits are just enourmous, no product, no customer service, no after-sale support, no research costs and so on. You make a sale, earn a cut (often up to 75% of the product price) and focus on making more sales. You don’t get sidetracked with questions and everything else involved with selling your own product.
Infact, affiliate marketing is so powerful, I’d say that all the major internet marketers that you know and love (well, at least know) are doing it. Everytime you get one of their emails in your inbox, chances are they are trying to sell you one of their buddy’s products.
While affiliate marketing can be lucrative if it is done correctly, either through article marketing, email marketing or setting up numerous review sites, there are some people that try and take a short cut and use unethical methods to earn affiliate commissions.
One such method is called Cookie Stuffing. Since nearly all the affiliate programs are based on cookies (cookies are little bits of information that is held on the users computer and gives a website some details about them, in this case, it tells the website who referred the user and when) to track affiliate sales, controlling the adding of cookies to people that visit your site could be very lucrative.
Consider this scenario:
You set up a review website, which is indepth and contains a great amount of information on the products being reviewed. You spent hundreds of dollars buying and testing the products to give the best review possible. You spend time and effort doing SEO to get it to the top of the search engines.
You are now getting plenty of traffic, but not converting very well. What could be the problem? Well, it could be one of dozens, but perhaps people like to see more than one review so that they know your review isn’t just a one off, so they click the back button and read the next review available on the site below you. Or maybe they already know the website URL and are just doing some research to get a feeling of what others are saying about the product. They then go back to the original website without clicking on your affiliate link - even though you spent a lot of time trying to help these people, you won’t get any credit.
This is where cookie stuffing comes in.
There are many methods you can use to stuff cookies on to someones computer, but I’m not going to go in to details about that now - Google will give you more than enough resources for this.
What it does is secretly place a cookie on the visitors computer, they don’t even have to click on your affiliate link. Now, regardless of whether they leave your site, your cookie is ’set’ and when they buy, you are virtually guaranteed to get the commission.
Is it ethical? I personally don’t think so, but many marketers feel otherwise and think it is quite legitimate to get credit for the time and effort put in to their review sites.
But a word of warning…
Cookie stuffing is against the terms of virtually every single network (for obvious reasons, they will be unnecessarily paying out commissions, which hurts their bottom line), if they catch you doing it they will immediately delete your account and you will lose any commissions that you may have made.
Posted by peter on May 28, 2009 | No Comments
There has been a surge in interest over the last few months about taking internet marketing offline, or more specifically, consulting small offline businesses on how to make their presence increase online. Some people are claiming to make huge amounts of money from this, others are struggling to understand how it all works.
Now, I’ve never tried consulting to offline businesses, but this is just my opinion on the matter.
First off, you need to have confidence and you need to be able to sell. You need to have the confidence to contact businesses, even to the point of cold calling, and expect a high level of rejection. Even if you get an interested lead, you need to be able to go and meet them and sell them your services.
Then it comes down to money. A lot of people don’t have much confidence when it comes to valuing their services (and unfortunately, there are others that are all too keen to take money off other people). This makes it difficult to know how much to ask for, and sometimes, even more difficult to actually ask for the money to be paid.
When it does come down to valuing your services, one method to use is to establish what you want your annual income to be and work backwards to find your hourly rate. Be reasonable with this rate and consider what other businesses are charging. You will probably find a rate between $25 and $75 and hour to be suitable - assuming that you are a very good marketer.
One approach that works well, but comes down to trust, is to approach the business and offer to work on a performance basis. In this case, offer to get them a certain amount of traffic or raise their search engine rankings or get them a certain number of email leads. Once you have achieved this target, then you can ask the business to pay up. This makes it easier to ask for the money because you have done everything you agreed to do.
While everyone is raving about this ‘offline riches’, you have to remember that it is still very hard work. You will be competing against a large number of local web development businesses, and chances are, they’ve already tried to target the local businesses.
Personally, I would not look at offline marketing to increase my income, it’s too much like work!
Posted by peter on December 10, 2008 | No Comments
The Google Sand Box is not something that Larry and Sergy play in at lunch time (apologies for the crummy joke!), but it is a theory put about by webmasters to explain the strange effect of new sites in the Google Index.
The reason I say it’s a theory is because Google have not come out and said that such a filter exists.
What seems to happen with new sites is that they originally get some good rankings for 24-72 hours, but then they drop off badly. Then for the next 3-9 months, the site can’t seem to break above the 50th ranking, despite a lot of promotions by the website owner.
The theory says that it’s because Google doesn’t know if the new site is a trustworthy source of information and the Sandbox was created to stop blackhat SEO’s creating hundreds of new sites and getting very quick rankings. It’s in effect, thought to be a spam filter for the search engine.
Apart from age, the only way it seems to overcome the sandbox effect is to keep doing link building or to get some links from very high authority (pagerank 6-10) websites.
What some webmasters do, is buy domains and let them ‘age’ for several months before creating a site for it. Some webmasters even go as far as buying domains that are already aged.
If you are not in a position to buy aged domains or get high authority links, then the Sandbox is just something you will have to grin and bear for the next few months. You should not stop building links because it seems to have no effect, once your site breaks out of the sandbox (if it exists!), there will be no stopping you!
Posted by peter on December 4, 2008 | 5 Comments
A question that is becoming more and more common recently is “why is my new site getting good rankings and then disappearing from Google altogether?”.
It’s a valid question, because there are few things more satisfying than seeing your website at the top of Google, and probably few things more frustrating and sout destroying than seeing that ranking taken away from you the next day.
Well, if this is happening to you, take heart, it’s not unique to you and this is happening to a lot of other people out there.
The scenario is so familiar…
- You create a new site
- You link to it from a few places like in forums
- You wait 48 hours
- Yeah! There it is, high rankings and ready to rock
- 2 days later…there’s no sign of it.
- Cry
So, what can you do? This is happening to lots of other sites. For some reason Google now indexes your site very fast, temporarily gives you good rankings and then your site disappears altogether, often for up to a week.
Don’t worry though, more often than not, your site will reappear, but don’t expect good rankings over night.
Getting good rankings is a combination of factors, although it’s mostly centered around getting back links.
Posted by peter on December 3, 2008 | No Comments
Continuing our series of SEO questions, this one concentrates on the age old question of ‘why are my backlinks not showing up in Google?’
The webmaster forums like digitalpoint are awash with new webmasters who, between posting about why their pagerank hasn’t updated, are asking why Google doesn’t show all their backlinks.
For those of you who are not aware, if you go to Google (or most major search engines) and type:
link:www.domain.com
It will tell you how many backlinks you have to your site. Backlinks, of course, are the major factor in ranking websites. The maths (I’m from the UK) is simple: The greater the number of backlinks, the higher your search engine rankings.
OK, so there’s a tiny bit more to it than that, but all said and done, this is it.
Now, the problem arises when you go to see if all your hardwork has paid off, you know you’ve been approved in thousands of directories, so you are expecting to see a nice healthy number here.
You check and Google says that it found 4 back links. What happened to the other 996?!
The reason for this is that Google, for reasons known only to itself, only shows a portion of indexed links it has for your site. So what ever Google says, you can be safe in the knowledge that the actual number is a lot higher, and they are just choosing not to show you.
Sidenote: there are a number of conspiracy theories out there about why this is. The most popular is that Google wants to protect it’s indexing algorithm.
So now it begs the question, where can you go to accurately find the number of backlinks to your site? In days gone by, it used to be MSN/Live, but they have a pants search engine now, so the place to go is Yahoo Site Explorer.
This search engine will give you a treasure trove of information. All those crappy indexes, all those shady link exchanges will show up here.
Posted by peter on December 1, 2008 | No Comments
This is an extremely common question from newbie Webmasters (and alarmingly, sometimes more experienced ones too!).
The problem arises due to the lack of understanding on what Pagerank is, and how it works.
So often we see people in the webmaster forums asking questions like
- I’ve done so much promotion, why hasn’t my pagerank updated?
- HELP! I’ve got loads of backlinks, but no pagerank
- Is there a problem with pagerank? Mine hasn’t been updated in the last few weeks
More worrying is when you see statements like…
- I got a pagerank 2 after just 3 weeks!
- My new site went from 0 to PR 3 in a month, hope to get pr 5 next month!
So, back to the question, why isn’t your pagerank updated in the last few months, despite doing loads of promotion?
The answer is extremely simple:
Google only updates the pagerank that you see on the toolbar 3 or 4 times a year. That means if Google last updated their pagerank in April, and you started your site in May, you might not see an update until August or even September!
However, this pagerank that we see in the toolbar is a snapshot of what Google had several months ago. Their internal pagerank updates each day for all the pages on your site, but they don’t make this data public. Instead, they just export a ’snapshot’ a few times a year.
So, stop fretting over the fact that you don’t have that magic green stuff in the little bar yet. The next pagerank is just a few months away!
Posted by peter on June 25, 2008 | No Comments
When you can’t think of anything else to write about, a list of something usually helps you through a writers block.
Here’s my list.
You Know You Are An Internet Marketing When…
- You buy any product offline or online outside of the internet marketing arena and develop a nervous twitch when you are not presented with an upsell, downsell or one time offer.
- You see the words free report, and you instantly think “how much is the OTO going to be”
- You are confident that you can buy any product you want at 2am in the morning
- Every sales page you read has apparently been written the same day
- You expenses to earnings ratio is 10,000:1
- You have at least 73 unfinished projects
- 90% of your hard drive is filled with ebooks and courses that you have never read
- You find yourself constantly explaining to your friends and family what an ebook is
- You’ve advised your real world boss to change all the product prices to end in 7, but you are not sure why
- You can read a 15 page sales letter in 19.4 seconds and make up your mind whether you are going to buy the product
- You’ve had to hide the credit card bill from your significant other
- You know you have all the qualities and information to succeed, but haven’t taken action yet
- You feel slightly guilty about buying that $997 home study course given that the 5 others that you have ordered are sitting in tha garage. Unopened.
- Armand Morin has invited you to a conference
- You can reel off a list as long as your arm of names of great internet marketers, but you struggle to remember the name of your mother in law
- You know PayPals TOS backwards, forwards and damn near sideways!
- No one understands “what you do” on the internet and most assume it’s something to do with porn
- The only emails you ever receive are also being sent to 29,000 other people
- You did your first email campaign and a school boy error caused the ‘name’ token to not work properly, so everyone got an email that said “Hi %firstname%”
- You bought a product based on the promised rebate of the affiliate after 3 months and completely forgot to redeem it
- You’ve written a ’scam’ review to try and promote it
- You lost your shirt on AdWords but it wasn’t a total failure because as soon as you make another $99.28 in clickbank, you’ll get your first cheque
- You want to be like Joel Comm and be an AdSense God
- You also want to be like Mike Filsaime and be a Viral Marketing God
- You also want to be like Andrew Fox and be a Clickbank God
- You also want to be like Gary Ambrose and be a Email Marketing God
- You also want to be like Micheal Fortin and be a Copywriting God
- You also want to be like Brad Fallon and be a SEO God
- You also want to be like Ewan Chia and be an Affiliate God
- You also want to be like Edmond Loh and be a PLR God
- You also want to be like Russell Brunson because, well, he’s younger than you
- You don’t want to be like Armand Morin because he’s just too cheesy for words
- You have tried to see if you can get away with submitting PLR articles to EzineArticles
- You think PageRank is how your websites are ranked in the search engines
- You can think of a dozen more things to add to this list
That’s my attempt, there are probably hundreds more, so submit your suggestions as a comment!
Posted by peter on June 6, 2008 | No Comments
A while back I spoke about whether internet marketing will see a growth over the coming months. According to Google Trends, so far the answer is no.
But, what about in niche markets? With the slow down in the US economy, petrol (gas) prices hitting an all time high, it opens the road for the savvy internet marketer with the time and resources to start making some products that really solve the need of not just the internet marketing arena, but possibly 80% of the population of the US.
Off the top of my head I came up with the following…
- How to save money at the gas pump
Kinda obvious I know, but with gas prices making some American’s think twice about a car journey, everything possible should be done to reduce the costs. Create an ebook on how they can reduce these costs with simple, practical advice.
- Alternative fuel consumption
Most people don’t know that car engines built in the last 10 years are built to be ‘dual fuel’. This means that they can take other types of fuel besides gas, like bio-fuel for example. Creating a product that shows people how to convert their vehicle to run alternative types of fuel will be a hot topic!
- Grow your own food
With stockists reporting record growth in seed sales, it’s obvious that the average American consumer is looking at ways to cut the grocery shopping bill to pay for the gas. To most people, growing your own food is as foreign as the Rupee, so a how 2 guide on growing your own vegetables is a guaranteed best seller
- Make Your Own Soap & Detergent
More sort of a home crafts type product, this could follow on from grow your own vegetables because it helps to cut down on costs. Often, natural cleaners can be as effective as their chemical counter part. Lemon juice is great for removing grease, vingar is good for removing limescale and so on.
- Coupon sites
A site that can give people coupons to print out and use at their local grocery store will grow in popularity. Entire coupon hunting sites could spring up
- Ebay Guides
As people tighten their purse strings, many are going to be yearning for the latest gadgets still. Ebay is a fantastic place to get the latest gadgets and gizmos at knock down prices
- Cash in the Attic / Basement
Again, as people tighten purse strings and look to find more money, an obvious reaction is to start sorting through all the old ‘junk’ one has acquired over the last few decades. All over America there is going to be big sort outs. Remember, one persons junk is another persons gold.
That’s just a few that I could think of, but I’m sure there are hundreds of niches that you can start profiting from, even as America tightens it’s purse strings.
Posted by peter on June 2, 2008 | No Comments
I wanted to revisit a post I made earlier about creating some sort of group or network which allows people (specifically IM’ers) to get in touch and do a collaborative project.
Having given it some more thought and chatted about it with some online and offline colleagues it’s clear that some people are excited by the thought and others are a lot more cautious. The downside is obviously that someone may not pull their weight, or some might do more than others, in which case how do you decide how to split the profits?
I thought I should elaborate a bit more on how I saw the whole concept working.
First off, I see this as a social network / freelancer type project. Everyone who signs up would have their skills for other people to see. For example, my skills are:
- Writing
- SEO
- Access to quality programmers on demand
Now, either someone could approach me, or I could approach someone and say, hey, are you interested in my project? Would projects be listed like on scriptlance? I don’t know. Maybe you could have some sort of status which says “available for projects” or “not available for projects”.
You could network with people who have similar skills or areas of interest as yourself to create the foundation for a product. For example two guys that were in to SEO could record an interview together and work together on an SEO home study guide (which I don’t think has ever been done, btw).
There are then loads of collaborative web tools, like gantt charts, brainstorming tools, task lists, to do lists, milestones, whiteboards etc. that people can use to do the project.
The idea of doing a collaborative project instead of outsourcing all the bits you don’t like doing or can’t do (like graphics for example) is that it could help keep you motivated and focused. I imagine an awful lot of people could make tens of thousands of dollars (like me for example) if only they would focus and concentrate on doing just one small part of the project.
Anyway, more musings from someone with more time than money on his hands 
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