Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

I’ve been reading quite a bit about Adsense Arbitrage just to see what all the noise is about. From what I’ve read it seems to me that Adsense Arbitrage wouldn’t be a good idea for people who have little or no knowledge of the pay per click process.

With Adsense Arbitrage you advertise your website using a pay per click program in the hopes that your adsense ads will get clicked and those clicked ads will make you more money than what you paid for in pay per click advertising in case you didn’t know what Adsense Arbitrage was.

I have never tried the Adsense Arbitrage method but it’s pretty risky and it seems like you would have to constantly stay on top of your campaigns because you could very easily and quickly lose money with Adsense Arbitrage.

If you were to use adwords for your pay per click advertising with Adsense Arbitrage you would have to find very low cost keyword phrases in order to make Adsense Arbitrage worth your while and since adwords can be very expensive it would be pretty hard to make money using the Adsense Arbitrage method. A relatively low bid on a keyword phrase with adwords would be around 40 cents a click. Unless you get a high click rate and a high per click payout with your adsense ads it will be difficult to profit with Adsense Arbitrage. Even if you could get a 50% click rate on your adsense ads and averaged 80 cents a click you would only break even. I’m not saying that this scenario impossible, but it is improbable.

The only positive that I can see with Adsense Arbitrage is that if you use the right keyword phrases you are guaranteed traffic to your site and a percentage of that traffic will come back if your website has good information.

The only way that I can see Adsense Arbitrage possibly working is by using smaller pay per click advertising sites such as goclick. At least with goclick you can get highly competitive keyword phrases for pennies per click which would help make Adsense Arbitrage more profitable. In most cases it won’t cost more than 3 cents a click to get your ad near the top of the pay per click listings. That’s more workable because you won’t need a high click through rate or payout to make money with Adsense Arbitrage. If the average payout per click for your adsense ads were 30 cents a click you would only need 1 click on your adsense ads for every 10 clicks on your pay per click ads to break even assuming that it costs 3 cents a click for your pay per click ad which means that any keyword phrases below the 3 cents would make a profit at the same click through rate and payout on your adsense ad.

With that said, I don’t know what types of websites that goclick serves its pay per click ads on or how targeted they are and how much click fraud if any, there is.

I am really skeptical when it comes to Adsense Arbitrage and won’t be trying it without further research because from what I can see, a lot of things can go wrong and a lot of things have to go right in order to make money with Adsense Arbitrage.

If you have been thinking about trying Adsense Arbitrage you will be better off using a pay per click site like goclick rather than Google adwords or Yahoo because the cost is a lot lower making the risk much less. Approach Adsense Arbitrage with a heavy dose of skepticism and start with a very modest spend to see what websites your ads are being served on. Also use a tracking system outside of goclick that will show how long those clicks are staying on your website. If all of the clicks are not spending any time at all on your website chances are there is click fraud going on. The best tracker to use is StatCounter because it will tell you where the clicks are coming from and how long these people are staying on your website. Monitor your progress very closely.

Adsense Arbitrage sounds very inviting at first glance but by looking closer you will see that there is a lot of risk involved if done improperly or done without close monitoring on your part.

One last thing that you should look at with Adsense Arbitrage is Google’s stand on this practice. I don’t think that Adsense Arbitrage is what Google had in mind for their ppc advertisers when they came out with the adwords pay per click program. Keep in mind that Google may frown on Adsense Arbitrage and at some point may not allow it.

I found a cool wordpress donation plugin today that asks you to buy the author a beer if you liked the post that was written. Instead of coming out and asking for a donation this plugin asks you to buy the author of the post a beer.

I like the novelty of this idea. I’m not too sure how well this wordpress donation plugin will work in the long run after the novelty has worn off. I would have to guess when this plugin becomes more popular and more blog owners use the wordpress donation plugin it may become less effective. I do think this is a neat idea though.

The buy me a beer, wordpress donation plugin is displayed at the bottom of every post giving the reader the opportunity to buy the poster a beer after reading each post.

If you haven’t monetized your blog yet the wordpress donation plugin may be a good way to do so. I would think that a plugin like this would work best for blogs that don’t sell anything because most readers would view a monetized site as the blog owner doesn’t need the money and not donate.

The wordpress donation plugin works through the paypal system. When the reader clicks the buy me a beer button he or she is taken to your paypal order form where the donation is made. There is no required price but it is suggested that a glass of beer would be $3.00 and a pitcher of beer would be $7.50 but the person making the donation can pay whatever he or she wants. There is no minimum donation price.

If you have been thinking about setting up a donation option on your blog but didn’t know how, or felt uncomfortable about asking for donations, the buy me a beer plugin may be just what you need because it asks for you. You can download the wordpress donation plugin here.

Because of what happened to this blog overnight last night compels me to post this.

If you have a blog and don’t use any kind of spam filtering plug-in you are asking for trouble. I woke up this morning to 102 spams that were caught by spam karma.

The moron who attempted to spam this blog must have been using some sort of submission software because he or she attempted to post a comment to every, one, of the posts in every category on this blog.

If I didn’t have a spam filter in place I would have a serious mess to clean up after because some jerk thought that spamming a blog would be beneficial to his or her marketing approach.

The spammer has absolutely no clue on how to market because he or she didn’t even bother to try to spam a blog that is relevant to the product he or she is promoting. I don’t think that IM and Insurance quotes are real relevant.

Anyway, the point is, if you don’t yet have some kind of spam protection in place get it done right away. There’s no excuse not to. WordPress comes with Akismet so if you have a WordPress blog you don’t even have to find a plug-in for it. You only need to activate it.

Just because you haven’t had a problem with spam to this point doesn’t mean that you never will. At some point in time a spammer will find you. Make sure that you are protected when that happens.

I was asked this question not too long ago and I really couldn’t give much of an answer because I was very new to blogging. I remember when I installed wordpress on my server about a year ago and thinking what the heck, am I supposed to do with this thing. I had no idea what a blog was or what it was for. Needless to say I deleted wordpress and went back to my familiar html website where online life was easy to understand.

About 3 months ago I reinstalled wordpress back on my server and imported all of the information that I already had on my html based website into my new blog website. One thing that I had to my advantage that most people don’t have starting out was quite a bit of content. Most start with nothing and have to build their blogs from scratch. I only needed to pick up where I had left off. That’s a big advantage considering that a blog is a content based website.

A blog can be a very powerful marketing tool and there are quite a few things that happen with a blog that I would never have expected in the beginning. Here’s the biggest value that I found in having a blog and the advantage it provides

The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that I’ve gotten quite a bit of traffic from the search engines for unintended keyword phrases. For example, I have been found on Google for the keyword ‘paidsurveyprogram’. That’s not a misspelling. That’s how the keyword was searched. The funny thing about it is that I have been found many times from different search engines for this exact keyword. The thing is that I have never written, nor do I promote anything about paid survey programs on this blog. I was found because one of my readers commented about a survey program that she had to pay for. That is the only reference to pay survey program on this blog. Google found me through that keyword because someone simply commented about it.

I wrote a nothing post about the fall of the gurus manual and it certainly wasn’t one of my better posts but I am found through all of the major, and smaller, search engines for the keyword phrase, ‘fall of the gurus’. I have gotten hundreds of clicks with that one keyword phrase which was not my intention when I wrote that post.

You may be thinking that those are not targeted clicks. I thought that myself, at first. I have changed my mind on that because while those keywords have nothing to do with the content on this blog it did drive a lot of people who do want to learn about marketing on the Internet. I know that because many of those clicks stayed here for long periods of time and many come back over and over again. While neither of those keywords is targeted, the results are the same as if they were. There have been many other instances as well. The two that I mention here are the most prominent.

Commenting on other blogs is not only a great way to get incoming links to your own blog, it’s also a great way to make some contacts with other like minded bloggers that in return can get your blog mentioned on their blog not to mention the traffic that it will drive to you as well.

I could go on about this forever but I think you get the idea. The bottom line is, the biggest value of a blog is that it is a mean, lean, content driven, traffic machine.

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.

The nice thing about a blog is that it is a pretty informal place for people to go and read whatever it is that is written there. Because a blog is setup to be like a personal journal and is as easy to use as a journal, many new webmasters are attracted to the idea of starting up a blog site opposed to a more traditional website. Blog sites have become a very popular place for Internet surfers to go because they are usually more entertaining.

Because a blog interacts with it’s visitors by allowing them to leave comments or an opinion on any given post, gives the blog a personal touch. A blog helps make people feel like they are part of the something instead of just being a reader. I’m sure that there have been times that you wished that you could reply to something that you have read on a website but the site didn’t allow for it. Well, most blogs allow people to do this. As long as people are not using the blog to spam it, the blog owners usually welcome any and all comments from his or her readers.

Because the reader needs to leave his or her information in order comment, adds to the feeling of a blog being a place where everyone knows one another. Because the blog owner can interact with his or her readers through the comments that people leave on the blog site makes it a more familiar place for people to visit.

A blog is a more informal place than a normal website. Make sure that you write in a way that is informal. Talk to people and not at them. Respond to any comments that require a response. Don’t ignore your visitor’s comments because you will drive them away if you do. Don’t be afraid to use the smiley’s that come with your blog software. Using smiley’s will add to the informal nature that a blog offers. Just make sure that you don’t over use them and use them only when your content calls for one.

The commenting feature is a really nice tool for the visitor and the blog owner because it allows the visitor to ask a question about a certain post that he or she may not understand which actually makes your blog a built in customer service.

Hopefully, you can see the value that a blog has to offer. The built in features that a blog has should keep your visitors coming back and staying longer than they would on a traditional website and will give you a better chance of making money if your blog is a commercial blog site.

If you are using wordpress or are planning on installing wordpress sometime in the near future, here are some great plugins that you may not know about that will help make your wordpress blog more powerful and user friendly. I will give you a short overview of what each plugin does but I won’t give you any instructions on how to install or configure the plugins. You can download or view the documentation from each of the respective plugin websites.

User Sitemap Generator

The user sitemap generator plugin is a human viewable map of all the posts and pages that you have on your blog site. When the user clicks on the sitemap link on your blog, he or she will get a list of links of all of the posts and pages on your blog site. If you want to see what the installed sitemap looks like, you can click the sitemap link on the sidebar, under “Highlights”. This plugin is available here. user-sitemap generator:

Google Sitemap Generator

The google sitemap generator plugin is a map that allows the google spider to find all of the posts and pages when it crawls your blog. Simply put, it is a sitemap for the google robot. google sitemap generator:

Spam Karma2

Spam karma2 is a plugin that prevents users from spamming your blog through the comments system in wordpress. You really should install this plugin, otherwise you could end up with a blog full of adverts instead of content rich information. Without it, you could find yourself constantly deleting spam comments on your blog. comment spam filter:

New Visitor Invitation

The new visitor invitation plugin will display a message on your blog the first time a visitor comes to your blog inviting him or her to subscribe to your email alerts, or RSS feed. This message will be invisible to return visitors. This plugin is a great way to remind your first time visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. new-visitor invitation:

FeedBurner Plugin

The feedburner plugin detects and sends all of your traffic information to feedburner and will detect all ways to access your feed so that you can track all of your subscribers. This is a plugin that you really should install. You can get more information about feedburner from the feedburner site. http://feedburner.com and you can get the plugin here.
feedburner (RSS tracking):

Mighty AdSense

Mighty AdSense is a plugin that will automatically insert your adsense ads in your posts and on your blog pages so that you don’t have to copy and paste your adsense code every time you post to your blog. The plugin will insert it for you. The nice thing about this plugin is that you have the option of displaying your adsense ads where you want them to show on your blog pages. This is a must plugin if you have adsense ads on your blog. You can get Mighty AdSense: here.

StatCounter for WordPress

StatCounter is a must have plugin. This plugin is installed to your wordpress blog and sends your stats to an outside source where all of the stats for your blog will be kept. You will need to register a free account with statcounter. You will have to read all of your stats from statcounter. Simply login, to your statcounter account to get your stats. This is an excellent tool that allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, how long they are staying, whether they are returning visitors or not, and way more statistical information than I can tell here in this post.
StatCounter for WordPress:

All of the above plugins are open source and are free of charge. These plugins will make it easier to manage your wordpress blog and will allow you to see first hand how your blog is performing.

If you want to keep your visitors coming back to your blog on a regular basis you have to keep it updated with new posts. How often you post to your blog is really up to you. However often you decide to post to your blog be consistent with it. For example, if you decide to post three times a week to your blog and do it on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should post on these days every week because that’s what your visitors will expect you to do. Be consistent. Don’t change up on the days that you post.

The more often you post the better. To me it is better to post something everyday because it will get you return visitors everyday to see what you have posted for them. The more often your visitors come to your blog site the better the chances of you converting them to paying customers. I know that it is more work to post everyday but the rewards far outweigh the additional work.

Don’t post a bunch of garbage on your blog. Post quality, helpful, information that is relevant to what your blog is about. Keep your categories and your posts related to your original blog. That’s what your visitors came to your blog for in the first place. Don’t post something that will keep them from coming back.

So start blogging on a consistent basis and you will have a growing number of newcomers as well as return visits to your blog. The more you blog, the better you’ll do.

If you are new to Internet marketing or don’t want to mess around with html, a blog site is probably a better way to go. Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a journal where people can write down their thoughts and publicize them on the web for everyone to see. Blog websites were used as private journals in the beginning. When Internet marketers saw how much traffic these blog sites were getting many got onboard and started using blogs to promote their products. There still are a lot of private blogs on the net but there are more and more commercial blogs running on the Internet everyday. If you want to know what a blog looks like, you need not look any further. You are reading this post from a blog site.

If you have a lot of content or are planning to have a lot of content on your website, setting up a blog is the best way to go because you won’t have to write any html code for your web pages which will save you time that you can spend on writing the content for your website. Blogs are especially good for people who don’t know html at all because using blog software doesn’t require any knowledge of html or php code at all. The blog will write it for you.

You add your content to the blog from the admin in the form of a post. The nice thing about blog sites are that members of your blog can comment on any of your posts which will add free content to your blog site without any required work from you at all. Content is the name of the game. The more content that you have on your blog website will drive more traffic to you. Blogs were created with adding content in mind and can handle your content much easier and better than any html based website can. A blog site will help you organize your content by allowing the admin to categorize the content by topic. If you look to the right on the sidebar of this blog you will see a list of categories. This post is under the blogging category on this site. Having your content organized by category will make it easier for the search engines to list you and for web searchers to find you.

There are many plugins available that can be downloaded to perform specific tasks for your blog. You will want to download some of them because they will be very important to your online business. There are many themes that you can download so that you give your blog the look that you want. Changing a theme is just a matter of selecting the one that you want to use from the blog admin and submitting the change. Your theme will be dynamically changed immediately after submitting the change. What could be easier than that?

There are a couple of ways to start your own blog. There are hosts that will provide the blog for you for free. If you can host your own blog on your domain you would be better off doing so because you will have to abide by the rules on the hosted blog site which will limit you to what you can and cannot do. With your own hosted blog you’ll be able to run it the way you choose to. You make the rules, not someone else.

Wordpress is one of the best blog software. The great thing about wordpress is that it is open source. Most of their plugins and themes are open source as well. Wordpress is a very powerful software that is very easy to setup on your website and only takes about five minutes to install. If you are interested in getting wordpress for your website, you can get it here. http://wordpress.com

Here’s a hosted blog site if you’d rather have your blog hosted by someone else. http://blogger.com You can also run a search engine search to get a list of hosted blogs.