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Why Internet Marketing Is For Your Business

Many people still have the impression that Internet marketing is just for people who have e-books or other electronic products, or for those who have a lot of technical know-how. However, the World Wide Web has changed the way we do business, and these days websites and online sales are for everyone-even you!

No matter what type of business you are involved in or thinking about starting, there is a place on the Internet for you. E-commerce, which is a fancy term for online selling, has enabled companies large and small to reach a bigger customer base than ever before.

 
Everyone is online these days…

There are literally billions of people who use the Internet every day, and buying goods or services online is no longer intimidating or threatening. In fact, many people prefer to shop on the Internet for everything from books and videos to big-ticket items like cars, boats, and real estate. You can even buy groceries online and have them delivered to your house. Now that's convenience!

There are two main categories of Internet marketing: strictly online businesses, and expansion of traditional brick-and-mortar (offline) companies. Offline businesses are companies like Coca-Cola, Reebok, Neiman-Marcus, and Honda: businesses that exist in the "real world" and use Internet marketing to reach more potential customers as well as give their existing customers access to information about their companies. Business websites for offline companies also offer a chance to interact and offer feedback on products or services that worldwide customers would not otherwise have.

Online businesses include giants like Amazon and eBay-they are companies that don't have physical store locations, but sell goods and services online. Companies based on e-book sales or various Internet services are typically online businesses, as they have no need for a physical store.

Regardless of the type of business you're running or planning to run, the Internet is a powerful marketing tool. Everyone uses the Internet for business today, and if you aren't online, you are missing out on potential customers. Go ahead-come up with the most obscure type of business you can think of and enter it in your favorite search engine. You'll be amazed at the number of results you get.

Your website doesn't have to be just a sales tool. In fact, it should be more than that, regardless of whether you plan to sell through it. The most successful websites are informative and interesting to visit, providing information about your business whether or not you actually offer online purchases.

How do you know what belongs on your business website? The type of company you run, along with your personal business goals, will dictate the style and function of your online presence.

Why Domains are so Important

To establish a successful business online it is necessary for a “location” to allow your website to be easily found. Just as for brick and mortar establishments the location of a business can make or break its success.

Imagine wanting to open up your own fast food restaurant in the desert of arizona where every other house is no closer than 10 miles apart. I highly doubt you’ll get many people to your restaurant because very few will know you are there.

Your domain name is your location that will be used to market and brand your internet identity. It can be used to brand and market brick and mortar establishents as well.

Imagine having a domain name that instantly captures and lures targetted visitors to your website. How much would one of those targetted visitors to your site be worth?

Depending on what you sell, a high priced product can convert into hundreds of dollars in profit.

If you could snatch up a great domain name that receives 10 targeted visitors to your website would it be worth it?
Lets assume the following:

* cost of domain name is $10/year or less
* the domain name you register is www.buymywidget.com
* you are selling “my widget” for $39.95 and receive $25 net profit from each sale
* your visitor to sales ratio is 300:1
* www.buymywidget.com gets 10 targetted visits a day

Lets calculate how much is visitor is worth:

* 10 visitors a day = 300 visitors a month
* your visitor to sales ratio is 300:1 so in that first month you make one sale
* you make $25 profit on your bla bla product
* so already you’re up $15 ($25 profit - $10domain cost) on the investment of your domain name
* each visitor would be worth about $.083 ($25/300visitors) to your business

That’s just a very simple scenario of how much each targeted visitor could be worth to your business. Add on the strategies of email marketing and list building and you can multiply profits ten-fold!

Conclusion: good domain name = good business strategy

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.
The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.
2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.
3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.
4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.
5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

Some new PageRank changes have been confirmed, so it really looks like an export (of some sort at leas) is happening now. these changes seem to have happened some time within the last couple of days:

• phpbb - 9 to 8
• Internet Archive - 9 to 8
• Apple - 10 to 9
• MSN - 9 to 8

I’m not sure about all of the old PageRanks, but they appear here how I remember them, and how they appear on some old lists of high PageRank websites. More changes have probably happened, and if you can report any, please leave a comment with your findings.

Interestingly, most of the changes I’ve noticed are drops on 1 PR for high PageRank websites. Is this an indication of a change in the PageRank algorithm, since surely all of the above websites cannot have lost backlinks? Have some of the backlinks to these sites been disregarded, or has the minimum number of link to high PageRank been increased?

Another theory is that this is caused by the increase in the number of pages in Google’s index. Since according to the original PageRank design, the sum of all PageRanks is a fixed number (usually believed to be 1), adding new pages with PageRank would drop the PageRank of all other pages. This PageRank number is the raw PageRank number, from which the toolbar value is compiled.

Thanks to yourwebsiteprofit

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You don’t have to have your own site or blog to make money from adsense.

Earnticle.com is a site that shares its adsense revenue with its authors. You just register with them and start writing articles and the ads are served 50% with your adsense id and 50% with earnticles’ id. In other words you make roughly 50% of the ad revenue your articles generate.

The design is very pleasing to the eye and the blog machine behind it is wordpress. Thus you can expect that posting an article is as easy as it gets.

The articles on earnticle cover a wide variety of subjects from family and health to web development and SEO.

Although it does not have many authors/readers yet since its a brand new site, I expect it to get many more interested in writing and frequenting the site soon.

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Today, affiliate marketing programs is seen as one of the most important methods by online companies and merchants to market their products and services because implementing an affiliate program doesn’t cost much money and it helps generate a consistent stream of online profit.

On the other hand, the affiliates see affiliate marketing as a feasible and low cost method to make online online by promoting other people products using a website or without a website (using Google AdWords PPC advertising program).

There are many affiliate programs on the Internet and not all of them are similar. The most basic affiliate programs fall into 3 categories:

• Pay Per Performance
• Pay Per click
• Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs

Pay Per Performance
Pay per performance (PPP) affiliate programs are what most companies and online merchants likes to use. The companies only need to pay when an affiliate referral translates into an action. The action can be a purchase or a lead. The affiliates will spend their own money to promote the affiliated company’s products, This save a lot of money for the company. PPP affiliate programs can be futher classified into 2 sub-categories:

• Pay Per Sale (PPS) The title says it all. The company only pays the affiliate when a visitor referred by the affiliate make a purchase.
• Pay Per Lead (PPL) PPL is a little different to PPS. PPL affiliate programs usually used by finance and insurance companies. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate will be paid a fixed commission whenever a visitor referred by him/her to the merchant’s website requested a quote or filled up an online application form.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Programs
PPC affiliate programs are most popular. You should have heard them a lot. PPC programs are probably the easiest way for web publishers to make money from their websites and blogs. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount ($0.05 to $0.50 usually) whenever a visitor click a banner or text ad displaying on the affiliate’s website. PPC typically used by contextual advertising companies like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Networks and much more.

Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs
In this type of programs, the affiliate not only compensated for every customer referred to the merchant’s website, the affiliate is also paid whenever the referred customer returns to the site and buy another product.

The different types of affiliate marketing programs would deffinitely work differently for merchants and affiliates, and each would have their own advantages and drawbacks. To find out which types of programs work best for you, you’ll have to know which one of them suit your need and characteristic most. And then start testing them.

1. Bost to your advertisers what you can offer them:

Show of your website sites, take a screen shot a put it up there! This will convert like crazy if you got some crazy amount of traffic.

2. Tell your advertiser what you can offer them:

• Huge amounts of targeted traffic
• A rocket boost in the Search Engine rankings
• An increase in Google Pagerank
• Brand perception boosts
• Increased monthly sales and profits
• Advertising methods that actually work
• Advertising packages that actually work
• A partnership with a leading webmaster website
• The secrets of “The Big Dog” (top secret)

3. Let your advertisers sell your advertisers

Get your current advertisers to write testimonials for your advertise page, include names, pictures and websites if possible.

4. Tell them what they wont be getting

• You wont be on rotation with 100 other advertisers
• Your advert wont be seen on only some pages
• You advert is important to us
• Once you given us your money we wont forget you
• No Refunds

5. Give Aways and Clear OutSales

• Any Reason for a Sale - Need to pay my Speeding Fine Sale
• If they want to buy a years advertising give them 4 months free
• If there advert doesnt convert, give them more time, after all if it doesnt work for them then they wont carry on advertising.
• If there buying the banner adverts, give them some text adverts for free.

There are billions of websites on the net, but YouTube incredibly gets 14% of all Internet traffic.

Below is a cutting edge, and not entirely moral trick to sneaking onto the most viewed and most popular pages of Youtube.

Step 1 – Create Your Video

You are not going to have success on a video site without a video, so grab a video camera, or your webcam and make your vid. Infact, ideally your video should be an advert for your site, so ensure that you have your website url in big writing.

WARNING: It is best to create a video without any sound. You will see why in step 3.

Step 2 – Upload Your Video

This can take around 15 minutes to upload. Be patient!

Step 3 – Put the video in an iFrame and insert into your website.

You will need a high traffic site for this to work best. What you need to do is put the video in an iFrame, but use zero by zero for its size. This will make it invisible. Then stick it into the footer of your site and each impression on your site will count as a view of the video, thus rocketing it up the Youtube rankings.

Step 4 – Test.

Check to make sure the video is invisible on your site, also check that the amount of views are increasing in Youtube.

Then just sit back and watch as your rankings rocket in Youtube.

Step 5 – Build rewards.

If your video gets a LOT of views, then it could win awards. This will help it rank in all the top 10 sections of Youtube, and this in turn will sky rocket the views even further.

This is a great way to get thousands of extra unique page views per day. This truly is one of the few ways of getting free traffic to your site.

What Adsense Can Do For You AdSense automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.

Google Adsense is easy and quick to setup and will be accepted on almost every website, even the website is a day old, there for it is one of the quickest ways to monetize your website. Once you have been accept, you can put adverts instantly on your website and they will be related to your website. Below is a screen shot of adsense on a page about making money online, look at how targeted the adverts are.

You can add Adsense to as many websites as you like, Google Adsense will show you how many times your advert has been seen, how much clicks, the rate of click through and earnings so far. Here is a screen shot from my adsense today:

Creating your Adsense

Sign in to your adsense account and click Adsense Setup at the top of the page, on the next page click adsense for content.

You will now find your self on the Adsense for Content Wizard Page, here you will have colour and appearance options. When you receive your adsense code you are not allowed to alter it at all or you could find yourself banned. Adsense are always coming up with better and new ways to make your ad appear better on your website. You will see on the left side of the wizard a example of what your advert will look like. When complete with the wizard click continue you will now be able to receive your Adsense code. Make sure to blend your adsense in with your website theme, don’t use colour’s that wont match.

Copy and paste the code into your website where you would like your advert to appear. Upload and with in a few minutes you will be seeing adverts which are relevant to your website.

Once you have create your Google Adsense make sure to test it, change the colour’s and ad units size to see what works best for your website. What works well for one website doesn’t always work well for another website. Your target audience has alot to do with how you should make your adverts look and d where you should position them. For example, i have a gaming website, gamers love image adverts, the bigger the better, but when i put adverts on my cooking website, they like small adverts which blend in with the website.

Google Adsense Money Making Options

Adsense for Content - automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you
can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience
and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.

Adsense for Search - allows website publishers to provide Google web and site search to
their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the
search results pages.

Referrals - Google Referrals allow you to choose specific products or groups of
products to advertise on your site, allowing you to match ads to your
content. Choose up to 15 products or specific ads to rotate in the referral unit. You can also choose categories and keywords to ensure that you get newer ads as they become available.

Tip: Review the product your Referring

What works well with Adsense

When creating a site solely to create revenue from Google Adsense, you want to pick high paying key terms. By choosing the right key terms you can earn more than 3x the amount you are currently. I use a some software called Keyword Country, there software lets you search between 6.5 Million High paying keywords, Traffic Building Keywords, High CTR Keywords and Thousands of Niche keywords from 600,000 markets Online! At the moment there isn’t any software on the market that will come anywhere as close as this. I highly recommend signing up for it now!

From Using Keyword Country i have found that the term “Kitchen Supplier” is a high paying Niche keyword. From that i created Kitchen4uk.co.uk, below you will see a screen shot of this website. When a visitor comes to your website they will look from top to bottom, the first 3 main things you will see on my website, is my logo, a Adsense block and a adsense text link block. All the adsense shown’s links my visitors want to find and give them no choice but to click them for more, this morning i had 5 visitors to my site, every one of them clicked a advert making me a little more than $5! A Dollar a person is great, if you have 100 people a day i can make $100, now imagine if you create 100 sites (which is very easy to do and can be done for a very low cost, il show you how below) that’s $10,000 a day!!

Markus Frind is a Canadian entrepreneur who owns PlentyofFish.com, the world’s largest online dating website. According to reports in 2006, he earned around $10,000 a day through Adsense’s contextual advertising program.According to a recent article [1], Plenty of Fish now receives 45 million visitors along with 1.1 billion pageviews every month.

His annual income from PlentyofFish.com alone is currently $5 to $10 million a year.

What is fascinating is that Markus Frind is a one-man show. He virtually ran Plenty of Fish by himself, along with help from his girlfriend and other voluntary moderators.

This is however, set to change as Markus has plans to gradually develop a team of 20 to 30 employees over the next few months.

Notes on Markus Frind and PlentyofFish.com

Two weeks ago, we did a case study of Ashley Qualls, a 17 year old girl who makes $70K a month from her Myspace layouts website. The story was inspirational for many and I’ve thought of doing a similar piece on Markus Frind, who is currently the largest individual Adsense publisher/earner.

The amount of money he makes and how he went about creating this million dollar business has been the subject of much discussion in various webmaster forums. Some bloggers have done interviews with Markus or have written about his success.

Only a very small number of people can achieve a similar income level just from one website and what he has achieved is due to a combination of multiple factors such as technology, market entry/positioning and sheer personal effort.

While what worked for his website might not work for your niche and interests, hopefully this article on his success will help you in some way, to make more money from your existing sites or businesses.

17 Tips on Building a Lucrative Online Business or Website

The quoted text is extracted from some of Markus’s blog posts as well as interviews over the past few years. All of the specific references are left at the bottom of the post and do visit them to read more, if you’re interested.

1. Enter the Market at the Right Time. “As for the growth, a think a lot of that was accidental or first-mover advantage. Here in Canada LavaLife was the only real dating site, and they had a monopoly. I had a couple of my friends sign up from the major cities and after that the site just started to grow and spread.”
2. Free is a Powerful Business Model. “I always liked free sites and couldn’t see why companies had to change insane amounts of money for something that was trivial to make.”“The community was really built by word of mouth. There was a need for a free site and because no one else was providing it, it just grew like a weed. A lot of people just don’t want to pay for dating sites.”
3. You Don’t Need a Team. “It’s just me right now, my girlfriend helps with some of the customer service stuff when I don’t want to do it. I am planning on expanding into other markets but I don’t think I need to hire any employees any time soon. Nearly all the work can be automated away except for user stupidity that leads to crazy questions.”
4. Offline Marketing is Not Essential. “Offline promo works well when marketing to huge existing customer base. It does not work well when trying to grow big…Like nearly every other site I sort of ignore offline marketing, as it is far too expensive when you don’t have huge numbers of people in your target market already using your service.”
5. Success Doesn’t Just Depend on One Thing. “I like simplicity, and I am not a graphic designer at all. Success doesn’t come down to just one thing. Its not like Microsoft can clone Google’s layout and be the largest search engine. Success is a combination of things and having the right idea at the right time.”
6. Uptime is Just as Important as Innovation. “I redesign my site every couple of weeks so it doesn’t get crushed by the sheer number of users online. As for front-end design I could care less, lots of users are using my site and more are coming every day, my number one focus is making sure the site stays up for another day.”
7. Create Unique Sites that Stand Out. “Google pays out $500 million a quarter to AdSense users. That money is going somewhere, and if you look at the top 1000 sites not a hell of a lot of them have AdSense.Statistically speaking those sites that have low numbers of users and high EPC [Earnings Per Click] will make the most money. Build sites that no one else has done before, stuff only goes viral the first 1 or 2 times after that you have to buy your way into a market.”
8. You Need to Have a Rigorous Work Ethic. “When I came home from work I sat down and I forced myself to code for a hour or 2. The enemy was thinking, whenever I paused or started to think I would force myself to type something, its amazing how much you can get done when you just type.For that business its just a matter of repetition and fighting boredom. At the end of the day you just need to sit down and DO it. Most people don’t.”
9. Site Value and Functions Trump Design. “Function over form to build an emotional connection with the user. Blend ads into content, No flashing crap, make the site useful. Basically all those things that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do.There is no magic bullet, but you should always test new designs or new text etc to get the result that you want. You will never have the worst design and never the best, but through testing you can always improve.”
10. Think of Monetization Potential Before Starting a Site. “Build something useful, simple in ways that people will use. Explore things like Ad Sense, affiliate programs, and just explore ways of making money. Most 2.0 companies will never make a dime and they’re not built to make a dime.So I would start looking at how to make money before you even design or think about starting a business.”
11. Don’t be Discouraged With Low Income. “I had a single affiliate program but it didn’t even make $40/month. I went and added Adsense pretty quick, I made a whole $5.63 cents my first month, but that was more then enough for me to realize that I wouldn’t go broke running the site and I could make a business out of this with enough traffic.”
12. Learn What You Need to Know. “Basically I spent every waking minute when I wasn’t at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out “enemies” and did everything I could to defeat them which meant being bigger then them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things.”
13. When You Have Traffic, Look Beyond Adsense. “The main goal is to start replacing adsense/dating ads and hire sales people. I spent the last few weeks working long days optimizing my ad revenue and as a result adding over a million a year net per week of work.At the end of the day its not possible for me optimize revenues myself or to outsource sales as no one vender could sell more than 3% of my inventory. I am at a size now were there are no off the shelf solutions and everything has to be built from the ground up.”
14. Know the Limits of Your Business Model. “If I wanted to generate $100 million in revenues per year it would be pretty easy, all I need to do is convert to a paid site. To generate 100 million a year as a free site is virtually impossible as the market isn’t big enough.I’m already the largest player in the UK, Canada, and US. Growing the company another 10 to 20 fold just isn’t realistic.”
15. Always Have a Goal to Work Towards. “If you are working in a cubicle, your goal may be to experience the world outside of your cage, or stay at a 5 star whenever you want, or to go on vacation whenever you want.For me i’d set my goal to owning the whole resort and the yacht out front and making 100 million a year instead of just millions.Just because you are already successful doesn’t mean you don’t need a goal to work towards. Don’t assume that anyone successful thinks differently then you.”
16. Success Doesn’t Happen, It’s Created. “Now I know most of the people reading this are aspiring to create a business of some kind. Many will just day dream all day but never actually do anything.I was like that a few years ago, then I finally sat down and did something, and kept forcing myself to do it till it became a pattern and it turned out hugely successful.”
17. Weigh Your Costs to Estimate Profitability. “In my opinion if the cost of your operations are 2-3 cents a unique visitor chances are plain advertising will bring you to profitability. If your costs are over 10 cents a unique visitor then you will need to sell a product or service.This of course assumes a high traffic site with at least 100k uniques per day. In about 2 years from now we will probably see a 30-50% decrease in operational costs as hardware and software costs continue to fall.”

I might not agree with some of Markus’s opinions but I do think he has a great amount of experience on managing a profitable one-person business. These tips might be helpful if you are starting your own websites to generate some income.

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