Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing Program’ Category
Bad Internet Marketing Ideas
There are a lot of bad internet marketing ideas out there. Sadly, the vast majority of independent internet marketers will never make any significant amount of money. These two facts are not coincidences. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of some of the worst internet marketing advice you could possibly get. Are you making any of these mistakes?
-If something doesn’t work immediately, switch to something else. You have to give something a fair shot before moving on, or you’ll never find anything that works for you. Even if it’s a good natural fit for you, remember that there’s always a learning curve.
-Don’t diversify. Stick with what works and make a killing. Even though it’s important not to spread yourself too thin or jump around from method to method, it’s also a good idea to diversify once you build one successful income stream. It keeps your income much more stable.
-Don’t tell your affiliate manager what you’re doing. It’s true that there have been cases of affiliate managers stealing campaigns, but this is such a small minority that it’s not worth getting too worried about except in the most extreme cases. In most cases, affiliate managers are people who want to help you maximize your income, not steal it. It might not make sense, but for the most part they’re people who value the security of a day job, or who lack the motivation (or maybe even the skill) to take your campaign and have similar success. Being too secretive, however, can ensure that you don’t get valuable insights from your AM or the advertiser.
-Skip the industry events. Although some people would argue that the money is better spent on testing or savings, industry events let you make valuable real world contacts in an industry where few people know each other in real life. They also have a huge motivational benefit. When you see what’s really possible, you’ll go home with a new level of determination.
What kind of bad advice have you gotten? Did you listen to it? Share in the comments!
Narrowing Down Your Options
With so many job opportunities offered online every day, it’s difficult to know where to begin. The law of averages dictates that not every home-based business can be successful, but there’s no doubt that many people make a lucrative living without ever setting foot inside a corporate office. The trick is to narrow down your online business ideas until you settle the perfect choice.
Most telecommuting jobs are offered on a contractual basis, and depending on the terms of the contract, you’ll be paid based on the speed and quality of your work. Other opportunities - such as affiliate internet marketing - implore you to recruit other business associates. If you’re a people person with formidable networking skills, affiliate marketing could be an easy way to make money online.
An Unlikely Source of Internet Marketing Training
You don’t have to seek out a guru to get internet marketing training. Obviously, that can be one great way to get training, but there are plenty of resources that can teach us more about effective marketing if we pay attention. In this case, I’m talking about a piece called “The Language of Advertising” that comes to us from Stanford University.
In this piece, they’ve taken different product categories and then figured out which adjectives were used most frequently in those product categories. Big deal, right? Actually, it’s a very useful study in how we market things. The ads they’ve analyzed come from big firms with huge ad budgets - enough money and experience to know what works. This data shows us that something as insignificant as one or two words can make a big difference.
Customers have certain expectations of different types of products. They want their banks to be reliable and trustworthy; they want their meals to be simple, healthy, and easy; and they want their office chairs to be ergonomic and comfortable. Sure, you could go on for several sentences about the way you’ve accomplished those things, and with some big ticket items, you may even have to. In general, though, what you want is to grab the customer’s attention and let them know that your product has what they’re looking for.
Too many of us in affiliate marketing get caught up in systems and courses and methods. While they can be helpful, we have to remember that in the end, we are marketers. When you nail the system and still manage to think like a marketer, you’re poised for success.
Internet Marketing: Program Your Brain for Success
If you want to succeed in internet marketing, program your brain for success. I don’t want to discount the power of hard work, but sometimes, brain programming is a big piece that’s missing for people. Many of us walk around with tons of negative thoughts and emotional weights, and that’s just not healthy. As long as we have those kinds of problems, we’re not likely to realize our full potential in ANY field, much less one as competitive and desirable as internet marketing.
But how do you program a brain? How do you overcome years of hurt and failure and rejection to feel like you can actually succeed? It’s not easy, but it can be done.
- First, you have to minimize your exposure to negative inputs. Give up as much news as possible, cut off your negative friends, and change the subject when people start talking about doom and gloom and unhappy topics. No sense in adding any more of that to your mind.
- Set concrete goals and a timeline. Don’t make it so strict that you know you won’t be able to adhere to it, but do be ambitious. Tiny goals encourage tiny progress. Success is about striking a balance. Some people will tell you that you have to shoot for the moon, but if you know your schedule won’t allow you to work the necessary amount of time, either come up with a way around that or make goals that are ambitious for YOUR situation and attributes.
- Keep your inspiration close at hand. Do you want a car? A huge house? A boat? Fancy jewelry for your wife? The ability to build a shelter for injured birds? Whatever it is, get pictures and keep your goals close at hand. It will make the hard work much easier.
Do you have other tips for programming your brain for success in internet marketing? Feel free to share in the comments!
Internet Marketing Tools: Picking a Domain Name
When it comes to internet marketing tools, few are more handy than the ones that help you pick your domain name. A great many of the “good” domains have been taken at this point, so it’s difficult to come up with something that’s keyword-heavy, memorable, easily spelled, and most importantly, AVAILABLE. The tools below should help you accomplish that.
- Thesaurus: This is the most basic tool in your arsenal, but it’s important. Suppose you want to make a blog about your obsession with chocolate. Instead of just giving up when “chocolateobsession.com” is already taken, you can use your thesaurus to come up with alternatives like problem, addiction, need, urge, and so on. With enough synonyms, you’re bound to find something that you like.
- Dotomator: This site lets you use multiple columns and enter words you’d consider pairing. In the previous example, you might put words like chocolate, choco, candy, and sweets in the first column. In the second column, you’d use words like obsession, problem, fanatic, etc. The site would then try every possible combination and tell you which ones were available for registration.
- Apt Domain: This site is similar to Dotomator, except that it lets you put all the words in the same column. This is better if you don’t care about the specific order of the words in your domain.
- Expiring Domain List: This is available through a number of registrars, and it simply lets you browse domains that are about to expire. Often, you’ll find hidden gems that you can snatch up immediately when owners forget about them.
Do you know of any other good domain-finding tools? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
Internet Marketing Ideas That Work
All too often, you see people acting like all internet marketing ideas need to be complicated. Guess what? They don’t. In fact, simple is often better. If you’ve been frustrated at the need for complex systems and technical knowledge, consider these tips.
- Take a guru’s tactic and apply it to something totally different. Is everyone making review-style landing pages for software products? Maybe you should make a review-style lander for vacuum cleaners or learn guitar courses or foreign language classes instead. And of course, use the required disclosure somewhere on the page.
- Use a tactic from another industry. You don’t have to read internet marketing blogs to get all of your internet marketing ideas. Take note of another industry that interests you and keep up with its news. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll pick up all kinds of neat tricks that you can apply to internet marketing. You’ll also put yourself ahead of pretty much any other affiliates who try to promote that niche, since you’ll have so much more insight.
- Stick with one method. You don’t have to master every internet marketing method to be successful. In fact, a lot of the “gurus” are completely clueless about methods outside of just one or two things that helped them make most of their money. If you talk to them about anything else, you’ll quickly see how fast their confidence fades.
Overall, the moral of the story is this - you don’t need a vastly complicated or unique idea to succeed. What you need is a unique work ethic!
Internet Marketing Tools for Twitter
In internet marketing, tools definitely make things easier. That’s doubly true for internet marketers who use Twitter in their marketing. It can be extremely time-consuming to sit and click endlessly, hoping a good percentage of users will follow you back. Then you have to delete everyone who didn’t follow you, and when that’s done, you have to find another group of people who might be interested in your topic so you can start the process all over again. It’s enough to make anyone crazy.
So, if you’re planning on working with Twitter in your affiliate marketing efforts, I would strongly recommend that you look into at least one tool to simplify your most common tasks.
- Hummingbird - A popular autofollow tool. This one also comes packaged with Anteater, a VERY useful tool for bulk deleting the auto-generated DMs that so many Twitter users send.
- Social Oomph - This is a good tool for accounts geared towards branding efforts. It’s not as good as some other tools for speed.
- Twitter Karma - Helps you figure out who is following you and who isn’t. Unfortunately, Twitter no longer allows it to use the bulk unfollow feature, but it’s still helpful for everything else.
Have you used any tools for building your followers quickly? If so, let us know more about what worked well for you.
Internet Marketing Program for SEO Success
If you’re doing SEO, you shouldn’t even bother without some kind of SEO internet marketing program. What do I mean by that? I mean that you shouldn’t attempt to do it all manually. When it comes right down to it, you’re going to waste hundreds, if not thousands, of valuable hours doing mindless tasks that could have been automated. And of course, we all know what that means - money lost.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of good SEO is finding potential inbound link sources. You have to manually enter your competitors’ URLs into Yahoo!, you have to look at each potential link partner, and you have to send them an email to see if they will link to you.
With software, you can run a report designed to give you a quick spreadsheet of that information, often with the “unlikely” link partners deleted. You can also use Hub Finders to figure out which pages are linking to multiple competitors. Those sites are often the ones most likely to link back to your site as well.
You can also use software packages to look over your site and determine its strengths and weaknesses. Instead of looking through your meta tags and keyword usage, a software can let you know exactly what search engines will think of your page.
Almost any SEO program can handle these basic tasks and many more. Do you use any specific packages that you’ve found helpful? What tasks do you most enjoy automating?
Internet Marketing Training: What to Do When Your Commission is Charged Back
There are plenty of topics covered in most internet marketing training courses - how to pick a niche, how to buy ads, how to make a landing page, and so on - but very few cover the topics that matter once you start to make a little money. Like what do you do if someone rips off your landing page? What if you get angry customer emails that should have gone to the original merchant? What if your site gets hacked? They’re all issues that many of us will deal with, which is why I wanted to start talking about the topics you don’t always get in training courses.
To start off, let’s talk about something extremely common - the reversed commission. This is especially common on networks like Shareasale or CJ where the merchant actually manages the affiliate program. With CPA networks like Azoogle or Clickbooth, the network has in-house people managing things, so you’ll probably only get reversed if there is a serious problem with something you’ve done, or if the advertiser doesn’t pay the network (and most networks will eat losses from advertisers who don’t pay).
To begin with, you should figure out why your commission was reversed. Shareasale makes this easy because they require advertisers to choose a reason when they void your commission. If you don’t understand the reason, though, or if you aren’t given one, you should contact the affiliate manager directly to figure it out. That’s the only good way to ensure that you know what’s going on so you can prevent it from happening again. There are a variety of common reasons:
- Self referrals (many merchants do not allow this)
- Unapproved method of promotion (such as bidding on the company’s trademark)
- Non-qualified sale or lead. Many merchants do not allow you to receive commissions on their existing customers.
- Returned order. If the order was refunded, returned, or refused for delivery, you can expect to see your commissions reversed.
Whatever the reason, check to ensure that the reason was covered in the merchant’s terms of service. If not, you may be able to politely point this out and get your commissions back while still maintaining a good relationship. If the merchant is unwilling to provide a good explanation and stand by their policies, however, you may want to ask the affiliate network to step in and get your money. In this case, hurting the relationship is probably not a big deal, as you don’t want to work with a company that doesn’t pay you like they promise.
Have you ever had a commission reversed unfairly? Let us know in the comments!
Your FTC Compliant Internet Marketing Program
Lately, I’ve been seeing a number of cases where internet marketing program owners encourage their students to use promotional methods that are not FTC compliant. If you weren’t aware, the FTC has become increasingly aware of the shady flogs and rebills that have thus far been staples of morally loose affiliates. A while back, they released a set of guidelines that every affiliate should be taking to heart. Failure to do so can result in massive fines later down the road.
Although not everyone is taking the rules as seriously as they should, some networks are cracking down on affiliates who don’t stick to the terms the FTC has laid out. Clickbooth, for example, will ban your account if they catch you violating the rules, and they also reserve the right to keep any of your unpaid commissions if you’re caught. Other networks are a little less proactive, but if you get caught, you can guarantee they will not stand up for you to the advertiser or the FTC.
Although this primarily applies to affiliates using false testimonials or flog tactics, there are subtleties to their guidelines, and every affiliate should read their exact wording to ensure that all promotions are compliant. You can visit the FTC’s website here to get the full details.
Even though these rulings have made it tough for some affiliates, it’s good for the long-run. There are just too many ethical ways to promote products, and there’s no good reason to resort to deceiving or otherwise tricking customers.