Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

We as webmasters tend to look at things on a grand scale when it comes to marketing online. We seem to want to sell to the whole world and ignore other opportunities that lay before us.

The problem with this outlook is that there is a lot of competition and because most of us think this way we tend to go in that direction. It’s not all our fault though because most of us learned this from self-proclaimed gurus. While it sounds like the best way to make a lot of money fast and get the word out about our online business it generally doesn’t work out that way because everyone else is doing the same things as we are and we tend to blend in along with all of the other millions of online marketers.

To do well online you need to do what most others are not doing. If you do what everyone else is doing there is no way that you can be distinguished from every other guy on the net.

A very ignored place of marketing on the web is local web marketing. Most local websites promote their business on the Internet but sell their products in the offline world. Most of these businesses do very well because they are promoting their business from a specific location so the competition is very minimal if at all.

For example: Let’s say I were to promote my restaurant in the town or city that I live in. If someone were to run a Google search for restaurant they would get millions of results but if someone were to run a search for restaurant in a localized area of the country the list of results that they would get would be very small.

Click each link below to see the difference between a global search and a local search for the search term restaurant.

Google local search for restaurant

As you can see, the global search resulted in over 300,000,000 web pages that use that search term while the local search has less than 15,000 web pages that use that search term. Which search term will you have the better chance of being found with? Common sense should tell you that you will be more likely to be found with the search term restaurant in Manomet Massachusetts.

While the second search term won’t get anywhere near as many searches as the first search term you will more than likely get more traffic from the second search term as you would with the first because you will be much easier to find because of the lack of competition of the second keyword.

Granted you probably are not willing to start an offline business in your local neighborhood. You don’t have to. What you can do is check out local merchants to see if they offer a pay by referral program. While my restaurant example on restaurant probably won’t have such a program in place other types of businesses will.

Here’s a couple to get you thinking a little.

Travel Agencies

Real Estate Referrals

Using the 2 examples above you should be able to setup a local website using local keywords.

For the travel aspect you could setup a website using a theme of a specific vacation spot in the world. You would use keywords that would target that particular vacation spot.

Here’s a keyword example you might use. ‘Vacation on Martha’s Vineyard’ or ‘visit Martha’s Vineyard’.

You can do the same with real estate as well using keywords such as ‘real estate on Martha’s Vineyard’ or ‘homes for sale on Marta’s Vineyard’.

For each referral that you send that results in a sale you will be paid a commission.

You may be thinking that you won’t be able to make enough sales due to the lack of people that you will be able to refer. If you were to use just the one theme you won’t get enough referrals to be worth your while but if you were to setup say 50 to 100 themes using either of the two ideas above you will do very well. In other words take the main theme such as vacation and apply different vacation spots around the world and setup separate local websites for each. Do you still think that you can’t get enough referrals?

There are plenty of other ideas that will work well using a localized website you just need to find them.

I added the crazy egg code to this blog a few weeks ago to find that the code conflicts with the adsense ads displayed on this blog. When enabled all of the adsense ads on the main page of this blog are rendered unclick able. The ads on the rest of the pages worked fine. Unfortunately I had to disable the crazy egg function.

It’s too bad because crazy egg is a great tool for analyzing the hot spots on your website. With it you can see what links your visitors are clicking on and where they are spending their time on your website. It uses a heat map similar to the one google uses. You can see immediately where the most popular places on your website are. You can also view it in list form as well.

This is a great tool probably for 99% of websites. I’m guessing most won’t have a problem with it. I guess I’m one of the few that will have to live without it. If you’ve never used crazy egg you may want to run over and take a look at it. Despite the problem that I’m having this is a very useful and valuable tool for analyzing the traffic to your website. Here’s the URL http://crazyegg.com

Has anyone else experienced this problem with adsense ads and crazy egg? If so, were you able to resolve the problem? What did you do to correct it? Any input will be greatly appreciated.

Some of the comments that I’ve read on this blog (some live some not) has prompted me to write this post. I have read some comments here where the commenter complains about the lack of success that they are having. Some have even asked if I could direct them in some way to make them successful.

Here are some questions you need to answer honestly.

1.) Do you work on your online business everyday?

2.) Do you do research?

3.) Do you take action when something needs to get done?

4.) Do you jump from one thing to the next?

5.) Do you heavily promote your business?

6.) Do you update your website regularly?

7.) Are you willing to put in a lot of time and hard work?

8.) Are you looking for a get rich quick scheme so that you can make quick money?

If your answer except for questions 4 and 8 to any of the above questions is no or yes to questions 4 and 8 then you have found your answer.

I’ve said this a few times here on this blog that IM is a lot of work. There is no magic bullet that is going to suddenly make you successful. If you don’t put the work in you will get nothing back. If you jump from one thing to the other then expect to fail.

Running an online business is very time consuming and a lot of hard work to make it successful. If you owned a business in the real world would you sit back and wait until it somehow magically on its own makes you successful? Of course you wouldn’t. Don’t expect any different from an online business.

I’d hate to break it to those who are wondering why they are getting nowhere that if you want to have a successful Internet business you will have to promote, update your website, and do research regularly if you want to see results. You will see results if you put in a real effort.

If you want to be an Internet Marketer you will have to work at it every day to get it rolling and I can tell you that it will require many hours of work on your part. If you are not willing to put in the time and work to get your online business going quit now before you go broke.

One last piece of advice; Don’t post on a blog that you are having trouble getting traffic or making money. The sole reason that Marketers post is to show that they are an authority in their marketing field whatever that may be. Telling everyone that on a public site will not make things any better, it will make them worse. Do research and learn what you need to know to get things going. Better yet, hire someone to coach you. If you are spending a lot of money already on get rich quick crap you’d be better off spending that money on something that will teach you something useful.

Using forums can be a great way to market yourself as a knowledgeable marketer and in return will help you make a name for yourself and your online business. As with everything else that you do when you market, keep in mind that you want to join forums that are relevant to your online business. Being a part of a forum that has nothing to do with your online business is nothing more than a waste of time.

The biggest thing that you need to understand is that you can’t directly sell your products on a forum and is not your objective when joining one. What you join a forum for is so that you can sell yourself to others on your knowledge of whatever it is that you do as a marketer. If you try to sell people products on a forum two things will happen, you will be seen as a spammer to the other forum members and will most likely be banned as a spammer by the administrator.

There really are two reasons for joining like minded forums. The first I’ve already mentioned and the other is you will have the opportunity to learn from others. You can get some great info from forum members and can learn about some things that you may not know about and get some great ideas about marketing that you have not thought of. A forum isn’t just a great marketing tool it is a great place to learn.

How many times have you run a search for information and a forum post or two comes up in the results? I know for myself almost every time. If you have a post in the particular thread that the search result lists you will be found as well.

Unlike most marketing avenues, there is almost never any kind of review that is required to get your post listed on the forum. When you post it will generally appear immediately so you will have immediate exposure.

When you do post be sure to give clear and helpful information that pertains to the topic of the thread that you are posting to. I see this all of the time on forums as well as many other posting platforms where a person just remarks ‘great post’ just to get a post in. It’s fine to say ‘great post’ as long as it is followed up with some helpful insight on your part. Don’t say ‘great post’ just for the sake of posting. It is not only counterproductive, it’s also a waste of your time writing it and a waste of everyone who reads it time.

Remember join a forum to promote yourself as an authority on whatever it is that you do online and never directly promote a product using a forum. Never supply a link to your website in a post unless you are linking to additional information that you have on your website that is helpful to the subject matter on the thread that you are posting to. If you show people that you know what you are doing forum members will want to find out more about you and will click on the link in your signature and check out your site to see what information you have there. Directly promoting a product on a forum is considered spam and will ruin your reputation.

Run a google search that deals with the topic of your online business and join a couple of them. After you join make sure that you setup your profile and include the link to your website in your signature file.

After writing about Fall of the Gurus Manual last week got me thinking about some things to protect yourself from getting ripped off. If you sell your own products you need to have a robots.txt on your domain to protect your download page from being seen by the general surfing community.

A robots.txt is simply a text file that you place in the document root of your domain. What it does is tells the search engine robots what folders not to crawl and index. This is very important in protecting files and folders such as your cgi-bin that you don’t want seen by the general public.

If you promote and sell your own product, you definitely don’t want your download page listed on the search engines for everyone to see. The robots.txt will prevent that from happening.

The robots.txt in itself will not keep people from accessing your download page, it will just stop the search engines from listing it in their index. You need to take additional steps to protect it.

Most marketers, who sell their own products, use third party payment services. Pretty much all of them will require a landing page of some sort to where the consumer will be taken after payment has been made. This means that when the payment has been made the consumer must be sent to either a download page, a thank you page with a link to the download, or some type of instructional page on your domain.

The reason I mention the payment process is because the majority of websites that are compromised, are through these landing pages. If these web pages are not protected in some form they will inevitably be compromised.

Most of the time people who are looking to get stuff for free and can’t find the page that they are looking for in the search engines index will try to guess the most obvious directory and file names to where the download page may be.

My point is, don’t place your download page in an obvious place or give your download page an obvious name such as download/index.html or download/download.html or anything similar that can be easily guessed. Instead, place it several directories deep and use unique names for each directory that can’t possibly be guessed. You can use names that are total nonsense, which is probably the best way to go. Do the same for the download page as well. After all, you are not trying to rank for this page. You are trying to protect it.

If you have a domain other than the one that you are promoting your product from, you could also put your download page using the above method and redirect buyers to a download page on that domain which would further protect your product.

Another thing that you could do is password protect your download page. I used to sell some of my own products online. What I had was a script that would create a password and place that password on the landing page. When the user clicked away from that web page the password would be deleted. Scripts like this are pretty expensive and are really not required if you take the proper steps to protect your download page. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have bought that script. It does however add extra security.

Here are some of the things that you should have on your robots text.

There may be others that you’ll want to protect. Only you have that answer.

You can create a robots.txt by using an online robots.txt creator. Here’s one that you can use http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/robots.txt_creator.shtml There are many others. You can run a search to find additional sites that perform this function. You can also create one yourself manually if you’d like. There are several online tutorials that will show you how.

If you haven’t done some or any of the things mentioned here to protect your products, you really should go and take care of it by implementing the procedures mentioned here to protect them.

I found a great FireFox plug-in over at Christer Edwards blog today. This is a very simple plug-in that tells you whether a web page or the entire website for that matter is in the Google index.

The plug-in, named ‘Dexter’, places a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on the far right of your status bar to let you know whether a particular web page or website is in Google’s index.

As Christer explains it over at his blog that the plug-in can be used to check and see if a directory, forum, or blog, is indexed with Google before submitting to them. This will save you from wasting your time with these websites and you will know that you are submitting only to quality websites.

To me this tool is much more valuable than that for us Internet Marketers because it will also allow us to check our own websites to see which web pages are indexed and which ones are not.

Can you see the value in this? Think about it. As a webmaster and an Internet Marketer, the more web pages on our website that we get indexed on Google, the more ways people will have of finding us. That’s the name of the game isn’t it?

As Internet Marketers, we now have a great tool that will let us know which pages we need to improve on in order to get them indexed. That very fact makes this a tool that no Internet Marketer should be without.

To get this invaluable free resource, go to Christer Edwards blog and download it. You will find the link about halfway down the post.

PS. If you find that this plug-in is as valuable as I do, please drop a link on your website back to Christer’s plug-in post. Christer also provides the code in his post to link back to the plug-in.

Have you read a headline like this or similar to this from spam emails, or on website pitch pages from marketers? I sure have. These marketers will tell you anything to get you to buy the next best thing on IM.

You are told that the new IM secret that will be revealed to you will change your life forever and is not just a bunch of regurgitated strategies that have been written over and over again by just about every marketer on the net. You get excited and eagerly give your credit card information to find that the big secret is not much of a secret at all and is generally just a bunch of made up nonsense. Does this sound familiar?

I can tell you that I will take regurgitated over any supposed secret formula that is supposed to change my life forever because there is a good reason that these strategies are taught by so many and that reason is they work. They have been proven to work many times over. Don’t let theses marketers confuse you by using the word regurgitated. They use the word to somehow down play or discredit good proven strategies in an attempt to make you believe that you need what they have to sell if you want to be successful.

I think I’ve said this before somewhere on this site that I am a sucker for a good sales pitch. I will admit that I have spent a fair amount of money on information products on and off the net throughout my adult life.

Don’t get me wrong. All information products are not crap. There are some that are very good but on the other hand do not contain the big secret that will change your life forever either. The well written and informative information products that are out there all have one thing in common. They all use the same formula of taking a proven strategy and adding their own twist to it. Forget about the idea that one day a light bulb went off in the author’s head that made them millionaires overnight. They may have become overnight successes but the chances of someone repeating it and having the same instant success is minute. There’s a reason for those disclaimers on their website. There are no guarantees. Remember that.

This site has only been here a very short time and already I have had a couple of people ask me how to make money online. Online marketing requires a combination of many things to make it successful. There isn’t one set thing that will make you successful. It’s a combination of all of them.

The best thing that anyone can ever do is learn. Don’t expect one information product to get you to where you want to go. Internet Marketing is an ongoing learning process. Those who are successful continue to learn about IM. That’s partly why they are successful.

There is a lot of good info right here on this site that will help you with that learning process. You will not find any hyped claim that you will be successful overnight or will be successful at all for that matter. I’m telling you in advance so that you don’t waste your time. IM requires quite a bit of time and work on your part before you will ever see any benefit from it at all. You will benefit if you stick with it long enough. You just won’t see it as quickly as you probably would like.

Free information is generally the best because the author doesn’t have some hidden agenda and won’t give you a bunch of hyped garbage. I can tell you right here and now that if you are looking for get rich quick information, the material on this site is not for you. The fact that several of my readers spend hours on this site reading through everything here tells me that I did a good job of presenting it. It’s nice to see that there are some out there that take IM seriously. Those who are willing to learn will do well.

If you are just starting to build your online business or haven’t yet begun here are some things to take into consideration to avoid wasting time and money.

Make a plan of what you want your online business to be. Once you have decided where you want to go with your online business do some research on whatever it is that you are planning to do with your new website. It is very important that you research whatever it is that you plan to do with your idea because you have to know where you are headed and how much it will cost you to get everything in place. You may find that it is not worth pursuing. Research will help you avoid making costly mistakes.

Run searches on like minded websites to see what your future competitors are doing. You will be amazed at how much you will learn by researching what others are already doing. Look at how they have laid out their website and what kind of products they sell and most importantly what information do they provide. After you have researched some websites you will need to ask yourself, can I do it better? If the answer is yes, move on with it. If the answer is no, scrub it and find something more workable. Doing a little research of other websites will help you understand what you will need to do, one way or another.

If you find after you have done the research that it is worth pursuing, sit down and set a realistic budget. Itemize all expenditures from hosting costs all the way down to advertising costs. If you don’t know what everything will cost, I can guarantee you that you will waste a lot of money needlessly and possibly run out of money. Don’t let that happen. For the little time that it will take to do this, there is no reason or excuse not to. It’s really important that you know what everything will cost before you ever start because you may find that you can’t afford it.

Design your website to have a look and feel to whatever your business theme is. For example, if you have a website that is about health and well being you want the look and feel of your website to be one of good health. Add some graphics if you need to, to give your website the look and feel that you want. In other words, make it look like a website that is about good health.

Make your website so that it can be maintained easily. Don’t create a website with all kinds of bells and whistles if it makes your website difficult to maintain. You don’t want to spend all of your time editing this or that to keep things running smoothly. Save yourself from that frustration.

Your website should be easy to navigate. It should be setup in such a way that your visitors can find whatever it is they are looking for easily. You want your website to say here I am instead of your visitors saying where the heck is it? If you are going to have a big website that has a lot of content, create a user sitemap and make the link to it prominent on the main page so that your visitors can refer to it when looking for something specific. Also setup a search option on your website to allow your visitors to run searches on whatever it is they are trying to find. While flash may be cool to have as an opening to a website it is generally not practical for a business site. The dialup days are over and people are too impatient to wait for a website to load and will not be as impressed as you may think. Most people click away from flash sites before the flash presentation even loads. I know that I do. Your website should have a business look but at the same time it should be inviting to your visitors. If you have to compromise between one or the other, always go with inviting.

Whatever information you provide should be written in a way that anyone can understand. The school days are over and you are not out to impress your teacher. You are providing good information that is easy for your visitors to read. Keep in mind that you most likely will have people on your website where your language is not the first language for some of your visitors. You don’t want to impress your visitors with big words, you want to provide them with good information that everyone can understand. Keep this in mind while writing the information for your website.

If you setup your online business the right way from the very beginning you will end up with an online business that you can be proud of.

I generally don’t like the bonus angle of selling a product because to me it diminishes the legitimacy of the product being offered. Most bonuses are absolute junk. They are usually outdated information that no one wants anymore and probably were not that good in the first place.

If you are going to give a bonus with your product make sure that it adds value opposed to just throwing any old thing out there in hopes that it will be enough to entice the potential customer to buy what you have to sell. I can tell you it won’t.

By adding value, I mean that you need to take the product that you sell and add a bonus that will make that product better or easier for the buyer to use. For example let’s say that you are selling an ebook and you know that the information in that ebook is really good stuff but you found that the information may be a little difficult for a lot of people to understand. Here’s, a couple of things that you could do to add some value to your main product.

You could create a video that shows people how to do whatever the information contains.

Do an audio that explains what the different concepts are and how to execute them

People are fearful of buying things like information that they will not be able to do whatever the information requires them to do. Add a bonus that will remove those fears and you will convert sales far better than if you hadn’t added the bonus. You can also do the same type of thing with software as well.

Let’s face it. Nothing is perfect. Find the biggest problem with whatever it is that you sell and solve it. Add value to your bonus and you will do well.

I don’t know where I’m going with this post but hopefully it will come to me by the time I finish writing it. I haven’t written anything for a few days now because I have been promoting my blog with a vengeance.

I have also been doing a lot of research to get some ideas to post here. While reading through a lot of information on Internet marketing I kept on coming across the same thing over and over again.

It’s no secret that I actively promote the Rich Jerk Ebook since I have his banner on the sidebar on this blog. This post is, and at the same time isn’t, about the ebook and some of the strategies that are in the ebook.

I’ve read the Rich Jerk ebook and there are some great ideas in there but that isn’t what this post is about. I’m getting clearer to where I’m going with this but am not quite there yet.

What kept on jumping out at me is how people were using the ebook, and how they were trying to sell it online that was really bothering me. There is a section in that ebook that tells you how to write effective ad copy. Now this was just a simple example of a certain technique that is a little different than your typical hyped up sales pitch. What a lot of marketers were doing is taking that exact example and using it for their sales page.

The problem with doing something like this is that if you thought of doing a copy and paste to use the example pitch page, you can bet a lot of other marketers have too. I found this same example ad popping up all over the place. Now understand, I wasn’t searching for anything about the Rich Jerk. I was looking for topics on Internet marketing. If I found all of these phony ads without even looking for them, I can only imagine how many times it will come up when someone is looking for information on the Rich Jerk ebook. The sample ad is just that. It’s not based on anything real at all. The fact that the sample ad was signed Jane Doe lets you know that this is not real. The only thing that these marketers changed was the signature from Jane Doe, to their own signature.

If you know about the Rich Jerk then you know that he comes off as an arrogant S.O.B. He likes to talk down to his potential customers by using words and phrases like, ‘loser’, ‘I’m better than you’ just to name a couple. He also uses foul language and uses an asterisk in the cuss words. I guess he figures it’s not so bad if he doesn’t completely spell the cuss words out. His real niche is his Rich Jerk signature and his arrogance. It has worked so well for him that it has made him millions and the distinction of being one the Internet’s biggest gurus.

The whole facade of being the way that he comes off to be along with the Rich Jerk name in my opinion is his marketing strategy. That’s what makes him stand out from the rest. You can bet if that strategy had flopped in the very beginning there would be no Rich Jerk and he would not be the arrogant person that he portrays himself to be.

What else I came across was these very same marketers who are using the example ad that I mentioned before are also trying to become mini Rich Jerk’s by being as rude and arrogant as the Rich Jerk himself.

As I said there is a point somewhere to this and it just came to me. God gave you a mind. Use it!

I agree with the advice to find out what the successful people are doing and then duplicate it. That doesn’t mean to become that person. It means to conduct business the way that they do. Not to take on that person’s personality.

Be your own person. Be your own marketer. Do business that shows who you are, not how someone else is. It will show through big time if you try to be someone that you are not. I found that these sites were nothing but an annoyance and I know that at least, 9 out of 10 clicks will be immediately clicked away.

I don’t like the Rich Jerk as a person and find him very annoying but I do like his strategies. I don’t think coming off as a common thug is necessary because his marketing ideas speak for themselves.

Do copy what the successful people are doing. Just don’t become them. It will destroy your chance of becoming successful because people will see through you.