Internet Marketing

Finding the Right Balance for Arbitrage

Arbitrage, or using PPC (pay-per-click) to drive traffic to your website in an effort to get people to click on your ads, is a tricky, but potentially very profitable tactic for making money online.  When using Adwords to drive traffic to Adsense pages, there are a few things to keep in mind.  You must find the right balance of content, relevance, and ads to keep Google happy, or else you’ll find your Adsense account banned and your website ignored by Google’s crawler.  Worse yet, you may blow loads of money in PPC to find only a fraction of your costs returned in ads.  Let’s look at some important factors in finding the right balance for your arbitrage campaigns.

Probably the single most important factor in pulling off a successful arbitrage campaign is relevant content.  If the page you send clicks to via Adwords (or another PPC engine) contains relevant content, you are clear.  Google doesn’t have a problem with arbitrage itself.   Google hates the horrible, nonsensical Adsense scrub sites that clog the internet with gibberish and deliver nothing of value to the users.  And who can argue?  When was the last time you searched for something important, only to find several sites full of gibberish and ads?

Give the user content, whether a few short paragraphs or something longer, but whichever way you choose to go, keep it relevant.  If your page has relevant content, you will probably never hear a peep out of Google.

The next important point is that you find keywords to focus your content around such that your ads deliver the highest per-click payout possible.  If you are paying 10 cents per click to bring a user to your site, and the most you get if they click on an ad is 3 cents, you can’t hope to profit.  The best you can hope for is that maybe they click two ads before they go and you only lose 4 cents.  What’s the point?

There are many excellent tools to assist you in finding high-priced keywords.  Google’s keyword analyzer itself is one of the better ones.  Setting up an ad campaign and testing keywords through the campaign-creation is another sneaky but useful trick.  Aim for keywords that pay at least $4 or $5.  Make sure your content page title contains that keyword, and maybe drop that exact keyword once or twice more, while using several related keywords only once each.  Google has very clever algorithms, and it’s tough to get this exactly right, but it can be done!  Do not oversaturate your page with that one keyword or keyword phrase.  Google will ignore you!

Now once you’ve picked your high-price keyword(s) to base your page(s) around, use the same analytical tactics to locate as many keywords and long-tail keywords as possible that cost next to nothing.  While less searched than the expensive ones, you can combine a large number of cheaper keywords and come out with plenty of traffic coming into your page.  You pay the cheap keyword price for these people, and get paid the high-keyword price when they click on your ads.  That’s the name of the arbitrage game.

Hopefully you have a few more ideas about getting some arbitrage campaigns started.  Best of luck!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Three Important PPC Pointers

PPC, or pay-per-click ads, have the potential to reach an astounding audience on the internet.  Used correctly, PPC can drive loads of targeted buying traffic to your website.  PPC also doesn’t have to be expensive.  Let’s go over three pointers for getting the most PPC power out of your money.

Point 1: Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-Tail Keywords are generally meant as keywords using four or more words.  Short keywords, such as “buy Viagra”, are over-bid, and will cost you several dollars per click.  Using keyword tools, you may find that there are several related long-tail keywords that get decent volumes of search traffic.  Perhaps “buy Viagra online pharmacy” or “buy some Viagra online now”, for instance.  These long-tail keywords will cost you far less, and while they receive fewer searches, you will ultimately receive many more clicks at a lower price.

Point 2: Monitor Campaigns Closely and Use Split-Testing

Many campaigns that do not profit could be tweaked a bit to become profitable.  In many cases, certain keywords are underperforming, but you don’t know it until you really delve in.  Split test your campaigns, and make sure to weed out keywords that receive large numbers of impressions but a small number of clicks.  These are throwing off your CTR, or Click Through Rate, which causes your ads to place lower and cost more.

Also, by split-testing, be sure to weed out keywords that receive lots of clicks but few conversions.  If the conversions don’t cover the cost of the clicks, then that keyword is unprofitable.  Axe it!

Point 3: PPC Shines for List Building

The one area where PPC really shines is in building lists.  Acquire (or create) a product such as a 10-page report or a 5-part email series that you can offer in exchange for an opt-in.  Create a page with the opt-in form, and set up an auto responder to send your opt-ins the promised product.  Then create a PPC campaign, be as wild with the keywords as you want, and set a limit on how much you are willing to spend before pausing the campaign.

Driving large amounts of traffic onto the page short-term will allow you to quickly build a strong list for promotion of related products.  Your list will be your best friend, so build wisely!  If you create a product, allow users the option of opting in on the download page.  A list of people who have already purchased something is worth ten times as much as a much larger list of people who may or may not ever buy anything.  Think of your larger list as silver, and your buyer’s list as gold.

Using these pointers, you now have a competitive edge over your competition.  Best of luck in your online marketing.

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Three Incredible Adwords Tips

As the most popular PPC engine available, Adwords is a must when using PPC to pull traffic to your sites.  However, as the most popular PPC engine, keywords are often expensive, and a short-run ad campaign can cost an arm and a leg.  There are ways to grab more traffic while spending less using Adwords.  Let’s look at three tips for doing so.

Tip One: Use Hyper-Targeted Keywords.

Hyper-Targeted keywords are the actual keywords that sell – the ones that indicate your surfer is sitting there, credit card in hand, ready to make the purchase.  In general, I use the following three phrases when selling “product”:

Buy Product
Purchase Product
Order Product

And of course, use each of them with all of Google’s features – in quotations and in brackets, for each type of matching.  So for instance, instead of just Buy Product, you would use: Buy Product, “Buy Product”, and [Buy Product].  Depending on how hot an item you have chosen, these three primary power words – Buy, Purchase, and Order – can bring you more targeted traffic than you know what to do with, and these are people who are ready to purchase right now!

Tip Two: Use Site-Targeting.

Another feature of Adwords that most users completely ignore is the site-targeting option.  Campaigns can be keyword-targeted or site-targeted.  The beauty of site targeting is that you can target sites at the top of the organic Google searches.  This works better in some cases than others, obviously, but when it works, you end up paying a fraction of the cost for clicks that you would for keyword-targeted campaigns.

For best results, choose a few top keyword phrases and enter them into Google.  Look at the first 5 results for each one (or more if you like) and notice whether or not those sites use Adsense.  Also notice the Adsense placement – is it near the top of the screen?  The top left position is best, but as long as the ads are visible without scrolling the page, that site is a great candidate.  When you paste that site’s root into Adwords, it may or may not be approved.  If it is an approved site-targeted ads site, you’re in business.  Now edit the campaign and change the site’s root out with the direct link you got from your Google search – now only that page will show your ad!  Your CPM will be much lower than if the entire site was showing your ads, and you know your traffic is coming from people who searched for the term you entered.

Tip Three: Show the item’s price in your ad.

This one may sound simple, but it can really go a long way towards weeding out expensive clicks that had no intention of converting.  In my experience, showing the item’s price in the ad has weeded out approximately 80% of non-buyer clicks.  It reduces the total number of clicks, of course, but those clicks are higher quality traffic.  This is especially effective if your price is lower than most other prices on the same product elsewhere.

These three little tips will give you an advantage in the Adwords game.  Best of luck!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Article Marketing Miracles

Internet Marketing offers limitless opportunities for income creation by accessing the power of the World Wide Web.  With access to the online masses, you have the potential to reach an unimaginably immense audience with your products, marketing and promotions.  But how do you begin to tap into the power of the internet?  PPC, or pay-per-click ads, although popular, are expensive.  Used incorrectly, these can result in a tremendous loss of money and the traffic can dry up as soon as the investment capital does.  Enter article marketing – a free way to reach thousands of people very quickly, bringing long-term traffic to your website on a daily basis.

So what is article marketing?  Put simply, article marketing is the writing of free articles that point back to your website or product.  These articles are submitted to article directories across the internet, and from there they can be used by other people for content on their websites, with the condition that your author bio box remains in tact.  This is the true beauty of article marketing – a few minutes of your time can yield months of results!

Let’s look at the basics.  An article is approximately one page of text, using Microsoft Word.  Articles generally contain between 400 and 700 words, and are informative and helpful to the target audience.  You can find word count programs on the internet.  My favorite is: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml – you paste your article into the box, click “Calculate Words”, and it immediately tells you how many words are in your article.  You can even take the code from this site and put it onto your own website.  It’s completely free.

When writing articles, stick to topics you know well.  Or find an article similar to the one you want to write, read it a couple of times, and then rewrite it entirely using your own words.  You can also get some ideas from several articles, and then combine them into a totally new article.  You can even purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and use them on your site as-is, or alter them and submit them to article sites (be careful with this one – you must change them enough to be unrecognizable from the original, or you will be flagged for duplicate content).

To get your articles circulating on the internet, these are the most important sites available: http://ezinearticles.com, http://goarticles.com, and http://articledashboard.com.  These three, in my experience, have the most users and the most clout with Google.  They are all free to register with and submit articles to.  Just be sure to follow their rules (especially EzineArticles), to keep from having your account suspended or your articles rejected.

Finally, make sure you create a bio box that will draw readers to your site.  Your author bio should give a little info about you and give the reader incentive to come to your site.  This is where the traffic comes from, and the amount of traffic good articles can generate will blow you away!  Write useful articles, and you will find ezines and websites beginning to publish your articles, bringing in more traffic from their readers/visitors.

So what are you waiting for?  Go write your first article, and get that traffic flowing!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Affiliate Marketing – Alternatives to Clickbank

Entering the affiliate marketing game can be a ruthless and frustrating exercise in futility these days.  There are gobs of people attempting to make it big online as affiliate marketers, and those numbers definitely play against you when it comes to PPC and organic search engine optimization.  It can be very costly to begin drawing traffic, and in many cases you still won’t get the kind of traffic you’re looking for.  Let’s look at a few things you can do to shift the odds in your favor.

First and foremost, learn to write articles.  Article marketing is free and will bring you quality, targeted traffic for months and months.  It takes awhile to learn to use PPC and profit, so allow yourself to dabble in PPC while focusing in article marketing for the time being.  You will find plenty of prospective buyers without spending a penny in advertising.

Next, let’s get to the real topic of this article – finding alternatives to Clickbank.  Why?  Because Clickbank is oversaturated with affiliates and want-to-be-affiliates, so your competition is very steep.  The most popular Clickbank products, the ones that really sell, will cost you a fortune in PPC campaigns.  It is surprising that so many beginning affiliates do not realize how unnecessary Clickbank is.  The only real benefit to Clickbank is convenience, in that you can search products all in one place, you get paid from one source, and you only need one account to do so.  The benefits of using other sources, in my experience, have far outweighed those conveniences.  Let’s look at some other options.

Did you know that most sites offer their own affiliate programs?  Do a search for a general topic that you want to find products for.  Find several of the top organic search results pages that actually offer a product for sale.  Now scroll to the bottom of those pages (in most cases).  On many of these sites, you will find a link for “Affiliates”, “Join Affiliate Program”, “Partners” or “Become a Partner”.  There are other variations, but it should be obvious that you are seeing an affiliate program.  Click there and sign up with the sites that you want to promote with.  Many direct affiliate programs offer more options and better commissions than Clickbank programs, and you have the added benefit of competing against much smaller numbers.  Try to pick programs that don’t also have a program with Clickbank, or you wind up in the same position as before.

By going straight to the product vendors and becoming affiliated with them, you put yourself in the unique position of being one of the very small percentage of online affiliates who are working with individual companies, which gives you a great competitive edge.  It’s amazing to see a campaign that costs almost nothing yield great results, when having been accustomed to watching expensive campaigns hemorrhage your money.  Cutting yourself away from the masses of Clickbank affiliates is one of the best advantages you can give yourself.  Let the professionals dominate, and let the want-to-be’s through away their money.  This way, neither of those will stop you from taking your cut, nor cause you to pay far more than you should for PPC ads.

Good luck in your affiliate marketing, and may you prosper!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Creating an Income with Blogging

There is a lot of buzz these days around blogging for money.  In truth, it is more difficult to make money this way than some may lead you to believe.  However, if approached properly, blogging can become a very profitable exercise.  Let’s discuss some easy, practical steps you can take towards creating an online blogging presence that will make money for you.

First and foremost, a personal little blog is not going to do it.  Some people believe they can blog about their daily lives and make money.  I hate to break your bubble, but your life isn’t that interesting.  Don’t take offense – nobody’s life is that interesting!  If you want to pull traffic, you are going to need to offer a topic or topics that interest people, and in many cases answer questions that people have.  For instance, an Internet Marketing blog might have all general IM posts, or may be divided into sections for PPC posts, article marketing posts, affiliate marketing posts, and product creation posts.  Such a blog offers a subject many people are interested in, many subdivisions of that subject that people want more information about, and the posts can give great tips, advice, or share experience that can help others.

After beginning a blog focused around your niche, sprinkle a little Adsense around it.  Try to keep your Adsense in places that receive the most focus – the top of your blog (specifically top left if you can), between paragraphs in the text, or at the bottom right after the text ends, for people who are looking for more information after reading your post.  These locations seem to do well.  However, making money with an Adsense-only blog can be very difficult.  There is one more thing you should do to make your blog more profitable.

Once you have established yourself a little and built some rapport with your readers, you want to begin sprinkling affiliate products into your posts.  Don’t overdo this or you will run your readership away!  However, in a post describing a particular problem, you may post a link to a product that solves that problem.  That link would be your affiliate link, and any sales resulting from your blog post’s link would pay commissions to you.  You might even want to place one or two graphical or text affiliate links to useful, relative products in the sidebar or sidebars of your blog.  Be sure you don’t make it difficult to search your blog for all the ads and affiliate links!  You want your users to feel that you are blogging for them first and foremost, and your affiliate links are merely helpful suggestions you are making.

By establishing yourself in a niche, offering useful information to your readers, and sprinkling your blog with tastefully-positioned ads and affiliate links, you will begin to see an income coming through your blog.  Congratulations, you have succeeded!  Now continue to tweak and test what works well and what doesn’t so that you can continue to make your blog more and more profitable for yourself, while becoming more and more appealing to your target audience.

Good luck and happy blogging!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Low Investment Internet Marketing

One of the biggest problems for new internet marketers is learning how to advertise their products, affiliate products, or websites without spending a small fortune in PPC ads.  Luckily, there are several fantastic ways to go about this, some of which can help you to lower the costs of your PPC campaigns while others require no investment at all.  Let’s take a look at some of these methods for lowering the amount of investment you need to make when marketing products or services.

First, there are a few great methods for reducing the costs of your PPC ad campaigns.  Poorly constructed campaigns can drain your money faster than almost any other form of online marketing, and if you are a beginner, chances are you are making some crucial mistakes that are costing you big time!

Keyword-targeted campaigns are the most commonly used campaigns, so keywords are either your best friends or your worst enemies.  Many sources of internet marketing “knowledge” seem to state that giant lists of general keywords are the best route for pulling traffic.  While this does pull lots of traffic, short, general keywords are more often than not the downfall of an otherwise good campaign.  Lots of traffic equates into lots of per-click costs.  General keywords, however, do not generally bring converting traffic.  The thing to remember about traffic is this – one highly-targeted potential buyer is worth thousands of non-targeted non-buyers.

Trim your keywords and remove general, slightly-related terms that are only meant to pull more people in.  These keywords, in almost every case, will not convert.  They will also cost you quite a bit more per click.  Go for the long-tail keywords and the highly-targeted keywords.  Allow me to explain.

Long tail keywords are keywords that consist of four or more words.  Let’s say you’re selling a product to teach people to make money online.  “Make money online”, “make money”, “earn money”, and similar search terms are some of the most awful keywords you could possibly use, as these are some of the most over-used and therefore over-priced keywords possible!  Use some keyword programs and sites to get some long-tail keywords however, and you may end up with a list with keywords such as “earn more money online today”, “make money as an internet marketer”, “how do I make more money online”, etc.  These terms are going to pull less traffic, but if you put together a good number of long-tails, you will still pull a substantial number of hits.  The great part is that long-tail keywords are going to cost you substantially less than the general keywords, and therefore you get twice the traffic for half the price.

Highly-Targeted keywords are keywords such as “Buy product”, “Purchase product”, and “Order product”.  These terms are very specific, and will bring in those searchers who are ready to purchase a product right now.  This is some of the best traffic your site will see!

Site-Targeted campaigns in Google are an often overlooked but highly profitable way of running a campaign.  Find the sites at the top of an organic search for your keywords, put them into your site-targeted campaign, and watch those sites’ traffic filter into yours for a fraction of the cost of PPC.

Finally, one of the most effective marketing methods is also free!  Article marketing has proven to be one of the best ways to drive quality traffic to your site.  The best part about article marketing, aside from being free, is that your articles can bring traffic for months or even years!  This is a cumulative effort – the more articles you write and put out there, the more traffic will continue coming to your site.  It’s brilliant, it’s easy, and it’s free – give it a shot!

You should now have a few new ideas about lowering your marketing costs and improving the quality of your traffic.  Good luck!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Product Creation for Dummies

The best way to make money online, bar none, is to have your own product to sell.  Of course, it helps if that product is something needed, and if your niche is willing to shell out money for it.  There are some important factors to look at when creating a product.  Let’s take a look at how you can come up with your own wildly profitable product to sell online.

First and foremost, the biggest mistake most product creators make is creating a product first and attempting to find an audience second.  You should actually go about this in reverse.  Find a market, with an audience of thousands of people who want something, and then create a product to fit their needs.  This is a simple tip, but the most important one as far as having a product that is profitable.  Thousands of unwanted products sit online everyday and never make a sale.  This problem could have been remedied with a little research first.

Secondly, try to find not only a market that wants something, but a market that wants it desperately!  Information products do especially well on this point, and many of the most successful products are merely those that were marketed correctly to a desperate audience.  As you may know, internet marketers are desperate to make money online.  When was the last time you spent $97 on an e-book to help you do so?  Teens and adults who suffer from excessive acne are desperate to learn about what lifestyle changes or miracle cures are available to clear up their skin.  Someone worried about a pregnancy, a wedding, or a divorce would be desperate to get quick access to answers to the questions they have.  Pick a desperate audience and supply them with the answers they want, and your product will be a winner!

Finally, be prepared to step outside your comfort zone.  Maybe you found a market for some information that is simply not within your knowledge zone.  Spend a couple of days researching that topic, via Google, online forums, professional help articles, and through any other means at your disposal.  What you will find is that in most cases, you can gather the data you need from many different sources and then piece it together into one cohesive product fairly easily.  It’s not that most buyers couldn’t do the same thing, but they’re paying for the convenience of instant answers and not needing to research ad nauseum.  If two days of research yields you ten years of product profits, isn’t that a worthy investment?

So keep in mind, the most important part of product creation is to discover a product that needs to be created!  Find a market that is looking for something, and fulfill that need.  Then begin your online marketing efforts, and watch the cash flow in!  I wish you luck in your endeavours.

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Information Products and You

Information products, generally known as reports or e-books, are one of the most profitable products you can sell online.  There are many reasons for this – development price, printing costs (or rather lack of printing costs) and ease of distribution.  Internet users have become very accustomed to e-books and short reports as a form of online product, and are more than happy to pay for the information they want.  As everyone has something they know more about than others, this puts you at an advantage.  Let’s learn more about how you can profit by creating an information product.

Here are the basics to creating an information product.  First, pick a main topic, something you’re at least somewhat familiar with.  Next, search online and find any forums, communities, or question boards that deal with your topic (or a subset of your topic).  Read through some of the questions that are asked, and attempt to nail down a specific problem that many people need the answers to.  Research the topic more, discover the answers and other, related information that may be of use to these people.  Open Microsoft Word (or something similar) and write your report, e-book, or whatever you’re creating.  If you are a programmer, you may actually be tackling problems by creating a program to do so.  Complete your product, place a sales page online, and drive the people who want the answers in your product to your site.

If you are creating an e-book or short report, you may well wish to create it in Adobe .PDF format.  This is simple enough, as there are several free or inexpensive options.  I use PDF995 (http://www.pdf995.com), which is free, easy to use, contains no watermarks or penalties for not registering, and creates a professional product.  If you already own Adobe Acrobat, so much the better!  Users are far more accustomed to downloading a PDF than a DOC file, and many people don’t have Microsoft Word, nor realize that there is a free DOC reader available online.

If you are creating a software package, debug it until the point where you can’t break it to save your life.  You may not get a second chance to maintain your buyers, and if your program crashes or appears unstable, many of them may immediately request a refund.  They may also be wary of any products you release in the future.  Make sure your program is stable, works properly and answers the basic needs of your target users.

Finally, always offer a refund policy.  Many people will not buy without one, as they don’t know you from John Doe and have no way to know if you are peddling gold or peddling crap.  A refund guarantees, in their minds, that there is no risk involved with purchasing your product.  In my experience, refund requests are nonexistent, although if you do not satisfy your customer with your product, I’m sure refunds would be more frequent.  However, even really terrible products have a relatively low refund rate, so always offer one.

Good luck with your product creation, and I wish you success!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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Becoming an Internet Marketing Warrior

The Internet Marketing frontier can be confusing for the beginner.  It can even be confusing for the professional!  Finding a group of other marketers can offer innumerable benefits to the novice marketer.  Believe it or not, there is already a community of internet marketers, running the gamut from complete beginner to those who are making their full living with IM.  Let’s take a look at this community and talk about how to get the most out of it.

The site is called the Warrior Forum, and is located at http://www.WarriorForum.com.  This is a community of internet marketers from around the world who share experience, knowledge, and their products with one another.  Some of the most exciting parts of the Warrior Forum are the Warrior Special Offers, or WSOs.  This is where Warriors offer one another special deals on their new products, or exclusive offers only for other Warriors.

The Warriors are a tight-knit group, and are very supportive and helpful.  Joining the Warriors, you must remember that in order to gain the Warrior’s support, you must become a Warrior yourself!  Sign up, and then enter the Main Warrior Discussion.  Ask a question, or assist others with their issues.  Spend a week or two just browsing the discussions and throwing in where you have something beneficial to put forth.  Make sure you don’t spam the forum – even clever spam efforts are transparent to the Warriors, and your account will be called into question.  Maintain proper forum etiquette, and make yourself useful to those who need help on subjects that you are good at.

You will shortly find a few Warriors who are interested in doing something that you are interested in.  You may find that they are willing to partner up with you.  Here is the true power of the Warrior forums – finding partners for product creation, promotion, or cross-promotion.  Two heads are better than one, and maybe your knowledge and another Warrior’s technical expertise can create that million dollar website!  Keep your ear to the ground and remain active in discussions on the forum to look for mutually beneficial opportunities.

Finally, give back to the Warriors, not only by becoming a helpful contributor to the Main Discussion, but by offering the Warriors special discounts or deals on your products and services.  The Warrior Special Offers forum is where you post your WSO, and you will find an immediate and responsive audience in the other Warriors.  Here you will also find other Warriors’ amazing products, and can get them at a bargain, simply by virtue of being a fellow Warrior.

I hope you are beginning to see the advantages to becoming a Warrior.  Internet marketing can be a lonely, frustrating process, and having the assistance of experiences marketers can be an incredible asset.  Check out the forum and get involved – you won’t regret it!

Tags: Internet Marketing by zedbiz
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