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!