This post was inspired by a thread on one of the internet marketing forums I moderate. People are arguing about the legitimacy of a certain program and the owner of it. There are some people calling it a scam and others defending it. However, one thing that stood out to me is that some of the people defending it are doing so based on the argument of how “nice” the owner apparently is even though they haven’t actually joined or have any real inside knowledge about it. If you ask me that’s about the worst way you could possibly make a business decision.
If you really think about it for a minute you will see that it is in the best interest of any scammer or shady business person to be nice and come off as a great person. That’s how they get you to trust them and ultimately give them your money or time, or whatever they are after. If they walked up to you and said, “Hi my name is John Doe, I am a total asshole and nothing but a scammer” — you wouldn’t be stupid enough to join their program or send them your money.
Instead they come off as very nice, helpful, legitimate and having your best interests in mind. Therefore, you trust them and defend them when someone calls them out for doing something shady or for flat out being a scam artist. That’s how they lure people in and give them a sense of security. They want you to think they are the greatest person in the world.
I’m not saying the particular internet marketer and program being discussed in the forum thread that inspired me to write this is a scam. I don’t know because I haven’t looked into it other than what is being said there. My point is simply that overall you should never get into a business, program, opportunity, or anything else just because the owner or someone else high up in the organization is a nice person.
Do plenty of research and get real information from people who have nothing to gain by giving it to you. Always make a truly informed decision before spending any money or time on any sort of internet marketing product or business opportunity. And don’t defend something unless you have actually joined and know firsthand what you are talking about. A nice owner doesn’t make something legit.
Posted in Internet Marketing, online business
When you are new to internet marketing then you will usually be called a “newbie” by the more experienced marketers. It’s not a bad thing it’s just the way it is. And if you are a newbie then I am sure you know that you have a lot to learn about online marketing and there’s a long journey ahead of you. As you begin your quest to learn how to make money online, you will find an incredible amount of information and resources. Some of it will be very beneficial to you but a large amount of it will be completely useless crap.
To help you start in the right direction toward success, I am going to give you a few pieces of internet marketing advice in this post that every newbie should read.
The first major piece of advice I can give you is to watch out for scams. There are plenty of very helpful and totally legitimate internet marketers out there but there are also a lot of scammers who are just waiting for a newbie to fall into their traps. As a general rule, if something sounds way too good to be true then it probably is, so don’t fall for the hype. You aren’t going to get rich in a month with little or no work, so run far away from anything that promises you will. Always do plenty of research on something or someone before sending any money.
The second piece of advice I have for you is that you need to be prepared to be very committed to your internet business and ready for a lot of work. Yes, internet marketing can be a lot of fun and you can make a lot of money doing it without breaking your back or enduring the corporate grind. However, that does not mean that you don’t have to work hard or put in a lot of time and dedication to it. You will have to work hard if you want to become a successful internet marketer. It’s going to be a while before you can sip mai tais on the beach while the money keeps rolling into your account. That is a fact!
The third thing you should remember is that you need a plan. This might be the most important of the three. Taking the plunge to become an internet marketer is a huge step in itself but trying to build a successful online business without any sort of plan is a bad idea. Your plan should be filled with short term goals as well as long term goals, and how you will achieve them. It can be modified as needed along the way but sticking to it as closely as you can will yield the best results.
Okay, now you have 3 very important pieces of internet marketing advice to remember. As a newbie it is very easy to fall for scams, not be committed enough, and forget about a plan. Don’t make those mistakes! Your online business will become successful if you follow this advice and stick with it even when things get tough.
Posted in Internet Marketing, online business
When you are first getting started with internet marketing, it’s very easy to make mistakes that end up turning into some bad habits. Many of these happen as a result of trying to cut corners or take the easy way out. It’s impossible for me to list or discuss every mistake many new internet marketers make but here are three that you should be sure to avoid.
1) Not Understanding Your Customers
Before starting an online business, launching a website, blog, or creating a product it is essential that you understand who your target market is and what their wants and needs are. If you dive in head first without doing the necessary research then you are setting yourself up for failure from the start. Instead, take the time to do some market research and learn everything you can about your potential customers. If you know who you’re marketing to you will be able to create and promote the right products or services to them correctly.
2) Selling Products, Not Solutions
For a product to be successful the customer needs to see the value in it. In other words, your products/services need to solve a problem the customer has as efficiently as possible. If your product doesn’t really offer the customer a solution to a problem, or answers to their questions, then your product won’t seem nearly as valuable to the customer as it otherwise would. The more valuable your product is in your customers’ eyes, the more sales you will make. It’s that simple!
3) Wasting Your Customers Time
When dealing with your customers it’s important to be upfront about who you are, what your internet business is all about, and what you are offering. If you waste time dancing around the facts, costs, purpose of your product, or anything else — Your potential customers will not stick around for long. Be clear about everything from the start and you will be a lot more successful in the long run. Stay away from hype and false promises. You might lose the customers who like to fall for that stuff but in the long run it will be much better for your internet marketing business.
As you can see, these three common internet marketing mistakes revolve around mishandling the customer or the product. If you make a real effort to understand your customers and their needs, you will be on the fast track to online business success.
Posted in Internet Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fancy term for a very simple concept – getting high rankings in the internet search engines to gain lots of free targeted traffic from them. It’s a very important internet marketing strategy. Utilizing keywords in your website content is one of the first steps for getting high rankings in the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, improper use of SEO terms can actually have a damaging effect on your website’s ranking on these search engines. Here are some tips to keep in mind…
Have Valuable Content
Search engines prefer to pick up content that has been written by a human instead of being pre-generated by a computer. You want to write content that not only contains the proper keywords, but also contains actual value for your readers. This not only gets the visitors to your website to stay longer, but it also gets you a higher ranking in search engine listings.
You don’t want to overdo it with SEO terms either. Every page on your website should stick to one general topic so that you can plan out two or three keyword phrases that would best describe the topic. Look at the most frequently used search terms for your topic in order to get the best possible SEO keywords to use in your content. Having multiple web pages with various related keyword phrases for each can help you to spread your presence on search engines and help your visitors find the information they are looking for.
Links and Title Tags
Often, people tend to forget about the other areas of a website that can have an effect on their rankings. The words you use when creating a link are often picked up by search engines as being keywords for your site. Use your SEO keywords in links to improve your search engine rank. Linking to other parts of your site can also improve your overall traffic.
The title at the top of a website is known as the title tag for that page. Adding keywords to your title tag is another good way to optimize your website for search engines. Your title tags will double as a description of your website for search engine listings, so you want to make sure they contain the best keywords and a solid explanation of the page’s content.
Know Your Visitors
Web sites receive visits from people from all around the world, which is why seo writers need to utilize multiple keyword phrases to get the best search engine results. Not every person searches for something using the same vocabulary. You must know who your target market is so that you can better plan your SEO keywords to target the demographic. Using social tools like polls, forums and other interactive venues can help you get feedback from your audience as well as provide entertainment that will keep them coming back after their initial visit.
You can often use programs to track your site visitors in order to see which days you have the most traffic, which search terms have the most hits and where most of your website’s visitors are coming from. By using this data, you can plan your content accordingly to achieve the best results possible.
SEO keywords can help you to attract more visitors to your website via the most popular search engines. The trick to using them is to have valuable content and to insert two to three keyword phrases naturally in to every web page. Links and tags also have an effect on your rankings, so be aware of how you use them. It is important to learn about the people who are visiting your website and plan your SEO content accordingly.
Posted in SEO
One you have decided to start a blog, there’s a strong chance you will ask the same question that most beginning bloggers ask… Is Blogger or WordPress a better choice to use? In this post I will discuss some pros and cons of each.
1) Blogger
Blogger.com has some good benefits; probably the most obvious one is that it’s completely free. It’s also incredibly easy to set up and use. It only takes a few minutes to get a blog up and running, even for beginners and people with no tech skills at all.
They also have some easy add-on “gadgets” to easily customize your blog. With a few mouse clicks you can add a list of followers, a search box, Google Adsense code to monetize your blog, photos, videos, links, create a poll, etc… There are several things you can add.
The biggest downside of using Blogger is that they own the blog, not you. So they can shut it down at any time for many different reasons, and it does happen to people quite often. You are also limited to what you can do with it because you don’t actually own it. And there’s a lot less options than there are with having your own domain, hosting, and a different blogging platform such as WordPress, which I will now discuss.
2) WordPress
There are actually two ways to create a WordPress blog, but one is far better than the other and that option is what I will mainly be discussing. The first way is to create a free blog on WordPress.com and it will be hosted on their servers. This is similar to Blogger, only worse for most internet marketers, so I am not even going to go into much detail on that option.
When you hear someone say, “WordPress blog” they are almost always talking about the wordpress.org blogging software that you use with your own domain and web host. This is by far the better WordPress option and is the one that gives you full functionality with almost unlimited things you can do with it. You own this type of blog so it’s yours to do as you wish. But this option is not totally free because you do have to pay for hosting and a domain, the actual WordPress software is free to download though.
If you choose the free wordpress.com version they don’t allow you to place commercial advertisements on your blog. It would be for personal use only and no affiliate links or contextual ads are allowed. There are other restrictions as well. This is bad for internet marketers and that’s why I say not to use them. If you host the blog yourself with the wordpress.org version on your own hosting account, you can do whatever you want with it.
Another great thing about WordPress.org is that there are thousands of great themes and plugins available for practically anything you want to do. Almost anything you want to add or change about your blog most likely there’s a plugin to do it. The downside is that it can be confusing to configure and learn what to do with all this stuff if your technical skills are minimal.
Overall, I would say there’s no doubt that using the wordpress.org software with your own domain and hosting is definitely the best option long term. However, you don’t have to choose one or the other – you can use both!
Why not build your main blog on whichever you feel is the best option for you after reading this post and then create another one on the other platform to use as a 2nd tier blog to help feed your main one? That’s a great way to do it. Or run two blogs that share slightly different information and target different keywords within the same niche. No need to limit yourself to one or the other when you can do both to keep from putting all your eggs in one basket.
Having a blog has become an integral part of building a successful internet marketing business so pick a platform and get one started right away!
Posted in Blogging
