Online marketing Blog

In the beginning…

 When I first wrote this eCourse I had studied internet marketing and online business enough to where I had a general idea of what was possible for people online. I had tried a few things, read a lot about online business and had a good feel for which paths were real and which paths were simply hype.

The whole reason I designed the site was to lead people away from the hype, scams, schemes and bad ideas…

Now, a year later, I come to you with way, WAY more experience and knowledge pertaining to the online world. What does that mean? That means this course has become more valuable than the original version.

I could very easily package the words in this eCourse and sell them as an eBook or simply charge for people to see the eCourse.

BUT I want to keep with my original intent. To provide a free foundational eCourse for you to learn from. I firmly believe that everyone deserves a chance to find their opportunity and succeed online. And I believe everyone deserves a solid foundation to start their journey no matter what their financial condition is to begin with.

So hold on tight. You are about to be exposed to REAL opportunity and will be given a real foundation of how this online stuff works.

Load Speeds are important… 20 seconds is a little high; but that’s about right for the size of your page. I try to personally keep everything under 12. Then there is no problem… Why take the risk of losing just a handful of visitors because of it… they could have put some money in your pocket.

What kind of files do you have on this page? Do you have a lot of pictures etc.? If you do, I would consider finding ways to cut those down…

Otherwise consider breaking up your page. There isn’t anything wrong with that… people don’t mind hitting a continute or “next page” button. Especially if they took the time to read the initial 32.5K…

Another thought… Have you thought about learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)… That’s something I’m learning right now. I’m converting everthing over to XHTML/CSS… This really cuts down the code to the point that almost all the visitor has to load is text.

CSS also has another very nice advantage (the main reason I’m converting) that comes with it. The lay out of your entire site can be held in one file (an external style sheet)… so if you want to change the layout of something on your entire website, instead of changing it on each individual page, all you have to do is change that one file and it will change the whole site… especially convenient for menus…

That’s the whole benefit. Much of your code is in their own files on the server. So there isn’t much code to load on the page itself…

The only other thing is to split test. Cut your copy down and send a sampling of clicks to the new page to see if it converts better…

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Don’t get discouraged. I doubt there are any of us who have not felt like giving up at least once.

I’m always running into keywords that Google won’t give a chance. I normally don’t waste much time with them and try to find other niche keywords and phrases… OR I take that keyword and tear it a part (misspellings, etc).

Sometimes depending on the keyword there is a lot of competition for that keyword… maybe Google has some sort of maximum that it will allow in one keyword market (someone else might be able to answer that better than me)… which is probably just as well because it would be tough to try and get on top of a pile of 50 or 100 other affiliates bidding for that same keyword.

So my first guess is that you need to research some other keywords and keyword phrases. Study your competition.

There is a learning curve. The success of your campaigns depends on your niche and the products you are promoting.

When I first started out over a few years ago, I can’t tell you how many campaigns I set up until I finally found some profitable ones… but it’s different for everyone…<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
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You know that NetSnippets is really fun… I’ve found myself just buzzing through threads and saving valuable info in a flash… I’ve already have several folders full of great info to reference later.

Now we can research and snip!

I found an awesome use for Net Snippets… I have a problem with forums where my PM Inbox gets jammed all the time… I hate deleting them all because I may need something for future reference… even though I’ll probably never look at them again… I guess I’m a pack rat.

So I always cut and pasted into a doc file and saved in a folder… not very easy… or easily searchable.

Now it is. All I do is highlight the message, hit “Add Selection” from my menu, label it, enter into a special folder… and delete the message. Takes 10 seconds…

B e a u t i f u l !

I’m all about saving time and making things easy.

It’s not my intention to discourage anyone from practicing SEO; I probably made it sound impossible. It’s not.

It certainly is an incredible way to get free traffic. And any free traffic is good traffic.

I make money with the traffic. Absolutely… it’s interesting to see a commission show up for something odd… then look at your logs and see someone had landed on a page you weren’t promoting with anything. Someone just did a search on Google.

You just have to be smart and spread your risk… just in case.

I balance the two. SEO is more of a long term strategy for me, PPC a short term… among other marketing strategies.

Sometimes PPC is actually a good way to get traffic until the Search Engine traffic does finally barrel in…

AND you don’t always have to wait 3 months. With the proper niche research and some luck, you can draw traffic in days… Once your site is crawled regularly, you can put a page up and be indexed within a day.

I don’t think SEO is a waste of time unless you don’t plan on being in this game for a long time. I plan on being here in 5-10 years. So I’ll be patient.

SEO is a tough game no matter how you look at it. You can be at the top of the SERPs one month and drop out the next… I’ve seen people who have held number one positions for years and suddenly disappear all together.

It’s a dangerous thing having 100% of your efforts in one area and depending on one form of advertising… diversification is a good thing.

SEO and PPC aren’t even the only way to market online… some people do neither and make a ton of money.

Really… There is no predicting Search Engine’s… they will always mess with your head. Sandbox or no sandbox. The algos always changing… Their index is updated frequently. Google’s PR is always in flux…

After the last major update there was a lot of talk there is even a randomization factor involved now… maybe even certain industries being treated different… Outbound links becoming a factor.

What I experienced could have easily been something I did… It’s the closest thing to a Sandbox I’ve had. One day I have 50 keywords ranked high the next day they disappear. 2 months later I see visitors from those keywords back in my logs and sure enough they came back…

SEO has changed a lot this last year. It is not as predictable. A webmaster would be a fool to rely on Google for 100% of their revenue. I’ve seen it happen… huge revenue generating websites dropping out of the SERPs completely… what a rush that has to be!

LET ME be honest. Like I said. The sandbox could have been something I did or some random shift in the index… who knows… I can’t explain it so I call it a sandbox… but I’m always tweaking my sites…

A lot of it I think has to do with new webmasters who think if they follow the book they should fine themselves at the top of the SERPs… when they don’t, they automatically call it a sandbox if they can’t figure it out…

Reality… it might be that there are 10,000 websites that were there first with more inbounds and experience. You have to earn your spot…

Bottom line. Sandbox seems to occur, but it will only occur for crowded markets… which leads me to believe you need to work harder than a niche market with no competition… If there is no competition and your site is relevant, it will rank…

If a new eBook comes out, and I place it on my website… do a search for the title and there I am…

I’ve been on page one or two for the phrase “Adword Mentor” ever since I placed an article on my site about it (4 months ago…)… I’m on page 2 now I think… It was instant because I’m crawled daily and there was no competition for that phrase…

Sound familier… PPC?

I think some people just like to Coach and/or Teach…

I’ve done some adwords mentoring… but it was part of a broader thing that I do (Online Business Coaching).

Some might ask, “Why teach people and make a little money when you can spend that time setting up your own campaigns and making a mint.” I think it just comes down to your talents, your personality and your goals.

I have several of my own businesses, but I like helping other people with theirs. That’s why I started coaching. I hope to do a lot more… but for me I’m not coaching because I wanna get rich doing it; I enjoy it.

First, it has nothing to do with Adwords… although indirectly I suppose it does. One of the reasons Adwords is so valuable is because you can go around this important factor that Google has… And it also might be a good thing if the website you are promoting has a high PR, because the visitor might see that website as being more important and more of an authority website… etc.

This is related to Search Engine Optimization and Organic Results…

Google uses PageRank, as Jen said, to measure how important a website is. It’s based on a few factors, but the main factor is how many inbound links (and the quality of those links) you have pointing to your website.

PR is combined with Googles Algorithm to determine your position in the SEarch Engine Results Pages (SERPs)… if you notice the sites at the top of the your search results have more inbound links than the those below them usually. Sometimes it’s close because the quality of links are important also. If you have a PR8 website pointing to you, you are in better shape than if you had a PR3 website pointing to you… in essence it makes your website more important…

If you install Google’s toolbar… or

http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/

…you will see a bar that says PageRank. That bar ranks a site from 1 to 10…

9 or 10 are very difficult to get. Google.com has a PR10… W3.org has a PR10… DMOZ has a PR9…

Those are websites that have a lot of links pointing to them. W3.org is considered an authority website…

It takes some effort to get to a PR5… generally I think PR5 and up is really good. A lot of people when they are out looking for people to trade links with, like to focus on people with a good PageRank…

Check this out… One of the biggest things PR is used for these days is determining the value of a web page and selling ad space based on the PR:

http://www.linkadage.com

There is a lot of controversy as far as the true importance of PR. I’ve noticed most people that are against it are people that can’t seem to get it.

The original reason it was designed was to be an indication of the importance and popularity of a website, but in true Webmaster fashion, a lot of the community set out to find a way to use Inbound Links to manipulate Google and there started the Link industry… link exchanges etc, etc….

I just saw a guy earlier today that spent over $2300 to get PR3 or better links from 50 different websites…

One of the problems with that is PR alone does not provide you traffic… You still have to have a well optimized website, have done your keyword research and considered the other 100+ factors (some known, some unknown) that Google uses to rank a site in the SERPs… PR an important factor, but it isn’t the only factor.

AND ON top of that, it’s moves like getting 100s or 1000s of UNnatural links that doesn’t give PR a good name.

Some more info:

http://www.google.com/technology/

Yes, I have done some of that… I actually have a newsletter…

I don’t have a huge list yet, but I know many do and it’s a great way to market… IF it is an Opt In list… Although I have been promoting mine as much as I could.

The only problem I see with e-mail marketing these days is the difficulty of delivery. This is a real statistic: probably 30-40% of your list will receive the e-mails you send out. The rest are caught by filters or even just put in their bulk folder where they never look…

But if you do want to pursue it:

Using what’s called a “Name Squeeze” page is very effective. It’s basically just a landing page you set up for the sole purpose of capturing an e-mail address. You might require a name and e-mail in order for them to enter you website (or aff page) or you may provide them with a free report…

You see if you can provide them a free report and capture their e-mail you have a great thing going… you can promote your aff programs in the report… they already like and trust you because you gave them a something for free…

E-Mail lists are about building a relationship with the customer over time. Many people don’t buy the first time you ask them. Maybe it will be the 5th or 10th time you contact them.

This is real easy to promote with PPC if you have something valuable for them to want to provide you their e-mail. It’s always easy to get the clicks if you are offering something “free” in your ad.

You do need to be careful that this is an Opt In situation and that all your e-mails give that person the ability to Opt Out…

And if possible, it’s highly recommended that you are set up to provide a “Confirmed opt-in” (some people call it a double Opt In)… So they have to confirm via e-mail that it’s OK to send them stuff.

NOW how effective this is, as always, is going to depend on the product or service you are promoting and how it is handled… there are a lot of variables.

AND you may not get immediate results… it takes time to build a good list. So you may spend more than you make at first. Because you are providing something that is free, you are going to get a lot of “tire kickers” and people that aren’t in buy mode. So………..

All you can do is test it.

I personally use aWeber.com.