Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

Have you ever signed up to a guru’s list without intending to? I have several times expecting to get some possibly good tips and ideas on their website to find that the only thing that I end up with is nothing but a borage of sales pitches of some kind.

Here’s what generally happens. You go to their website which is almost always a squeeze page that requires you to fill in your name and email address in order to read the contents of the website. I have no problem giving my name and email address, what I do have a problem with is that the information I give is considered to be opting in to their list.

The guru’s are the worst for tactics like this. I didn’t opt in to their list. I gave my info so that I could read the contents of the website. I think that this is underhanded as well as unethical. I don’t like being tricked into an opt-in list that I had never intended to opt-in to.

The worst of it is that you are constantly hammered with offers from that day on. You will almost never see any real information at all just a sales pitch or a series of sales pitches. I realize that you can opt out of the list but you shouldn’t have to opt out of a list that you never opted in to in the first place. You gave the information to see the website, not to get spammed.

The same thing happens when you buy something. You get spammed with new offers from that day forward. Again, you didn’t opt-in to anything you bought something that you felt might help your business.

Even worse, there are those offers that you like and make a purchase to find that as soon as you hit the submit button you are redirected to another sales pitch page trying to sell you something else before you even had the chance to download what you had just purchased. What kills me about some of these sites is that they tell you that you will never have to buy another thing again to be successful. If that’s true, why the hell are they trying to sell something else right out of the box?

The guru’s need to learn not to push so hard and not assume that just because a name and email address was given that you want to get emails from them. They may be very successful and good at what they do but that doesn’t give them the right to use the mentioned tactics described here to spam people. I always opt out of these types of things. I’m guessing that I’m not the only one.

I would think these guru’s, would gain a lot more trust from people if they stopped using trickery to get what they want. I guess that they think because they are well known that people will automatically trust what they have to say. Sadly, most people do.

There are so many great ways to deliver digital information products. The question you have to ask yourself is which is the easiest to use, and comprehend for the end user. I vote for video information products because of the ease of creation and it makes it far easier for someone that has little or no understanding of the topic in which the information is being taught to understand.

I know that I personally have read some ebooks that where the information being presented was very difficult to understand. Just because the information may seem very easy for the author to understand doesn’t necessarily mean it will be for the novice in that topic area. Then there are some strategies that may be written in the ebook that may be a bit vague or that give you a feeling of does he or she mean this, or that?

I think that audio would be my second choice. At least with audio the information is verbally explained but then again if the person who is presenting the information talks over your head by using terms that you don’t understand, you are again left to wonder whether you understand the information or not.

With video you get the best of both worlds. You get an explanation on the information that is being presented along with a demonstration of how to do it. If you don’t understand something that is being said, at least you can see how it’s done to get a better understanding of what is being presented to you.

If you think that you will have to get a lot of expensive video equipment to do a video, think again. All you need is a piece of software that will capture all of your on screen actions and a microphone to talk into and a piece of software to record to. You should be able to get everything that you will need for less than a hundred bucks. Simply run a google search for the items mentioned here.

If you are thinking about writing an ebook or doing an informational audio, you may want to reconsider and try going the video route because an informational video will far out sell audio or a written ebook because of the reasons mentioned here and most people are much more comfortable if they can see it in action opposed to the other 2 options and will put a much higher value on it.

I was reading through different Internet Marketing blog sites today and found some really interesting posts that had absolutely nothing to do with Internet Marketing at all. A couple of them that I read had me scratching my head.

On one of the of the blogs that I visited, had about two weeks of posts that talked about the blog owner’s vacation in Florida and was basically about the sites he saw and the different restaurants that he ate at etc.

On the other blog I read about how thrilled that blog owner was about the bears winning the NFC championship game and how excited he was that the bears were going back to the Super Bowl for the first time since their Super Bowl win in 1985.

Now the two posts came from two different blog sites that were both about Internet Marketing. So what in the hell does the Super Bowl and a vacation in Florida have to do with Internet Marketing? If I want to know about the Super Bowl teams I’m going to look for that information on a sports site such as nfl.com and if I want to ramble on about how great it is that my team finally made it back to the Super Bowl, I’m going to do that on their forum. I don’t know what to say about that vacation post except that I don’t care what places that this person went, or where he ate for that matter.

The point is, if your website is about Internet Marketing, then that’s what you should write about. That’s what people came to the blog to read about. I can only imagine how some poor schmuck will react when his or her search for more info on the Super Bowl lands him or her on an Internet Marketing blog.

Ezines are a quick and easy way to drive targeted traffic to any website. Among the main advantages of advertising in Ezines is that they have a highly targeted audience. Top marketers agree that ezines are the best medium you can advertise in. With ezines, you know that the reader is interested in your type of product before you place the ad, because ezines are about very specific topics.

I read somewhere that ezine emails never get opened. There is no way that this is true. By its very nature, emails sent by an ezine will be opened more often than any other email that one might get. People subscribe to an ezine because they have an interest in the subject matter that the ezine offers and many are very passionate about the information on the topic that the ezine offers.

You can advertise in most ezines. Ezines periodically send new information to its subscribers via email. Inside of those mailings are advertisements of products or information that are directly related to the ezines topic. Anyone can advertise in an ezine if they pay for it. Most ezines will not accept ads that are unrelated to the interest of its readers. You can never be accused of spamming because your ad is sent by the ezine to recipients who have subscribed to the ezine.

Most ezines will offer solo ads to its advertisers. A solo ad is a standalone ad that usually stands at the top of the ezine email guaranteeing that your ad will be read. While a solo ad will stand out more and will get you better results, they are a lot more expensive.

Ezines are an excellent place to advertise because they are very targeted and will convert very well. If done right, advertising in an ezine is one of the best and easiest ways to advertise. Unlike any other avenue of advertising you will never wonder whether or not, the right people are seeing your ad. As long as you choose an ezine that is laser targeted to your product, the right people will see it.

The ezine that you choose is very important. It must be highly related to what you sell or what your website is about in order to do well with your ads. For example, if you sell fishing equipment, you want to advertise in an ezine that is only about fishing and nothing else. The ezine must have a decent amount of subscribers. Anything under 50,000 subscribers should not be considered.

You should always subscribe to the ezines that you are considering to advertise in to make sure that they are targeted enough for what you sell. The last thing that you want to do is advertise to an ezine that you thought was a good choice to find that it’s not as targeted as you thought. Besides, you want to advertise to an ezine that provides good content to its subscribers. Ezines that email good content will get opened more often and will be seen by more people. Don’t advertise with the first ezine that you come across. Research them first and subscribe to the ones that you may consider advertising to before you put out any of your hard earned cash.

You should be able to find a decent list of ezines on your topic by doing a google search. Keep in mind that you won’t know anything about any ezine unless you subscribe to them. Make sure that you do. It will save you a lot of money. Do the research. It’s well worth it.

There is a right way and a wrong way to market your products via email. Of course the wrong way is to purchase a list and spam people with your offers. Stay away from this type of thing, it will get your website shutdown when someone complains about you spamming them. The right way would be to have people optin to your list. This is known as permission email marketing.

Here’s how it works. You would put a form on your website that would allow people to optin to your newsletter or ezine. A newsletter is simply an email that is sent periodically to your list with updated information about your website. An ezine is basically the same except it is generally published on your website and pulled in through an email and gives the email a look of your website. The subscriber can view the ezine from your website or through an email while the newsletter is in plain text and generally is not published on the website.

Your newsletter or ezine would be loaded into your autoresponder and sent out periodically depending on how often you choose to send your subscribers updates. To get more info on autoresponders go here. You would add your offers to the newsletter or ezine that you send out to your subscribers.

The biggest thing that you want to do when sending out a newsletter or ezine is that you send your subscribers useful information on the topic for which they subscribed. If you send useless information they will opt out of your list.

Always include a unsubscribe link and the reason why you sent them an email. Many people tend to forget what or whom they subscribed to. Include a link to your website so that your subscribers can follow it back to your website. If your autoresponder has a timestamp, use it. It will protect you by giving proof that the person did subscribe to your list by giving the date they subscribed. This will be very important if someone complains about you spamming.

If you are not using an autoresponder for your online business, you really need to start if you plan to have any success at all. I’m not talking about using them to spam people on a daily basis.

Without an autoresponder you have no way of following up with any kind of submission that your visitors may make. Following up to a request immediately is very important to your online business. It tells your visitors that you have a good customer service and lets them know that you have received their request instead of wondering whether or not you will respond to their request or not. An autoresponse will tell them right from the beginning that you intend to reply.

There are autoresponder accounts that you can signup for on the web. The thing with these accounts is that you have to pay a monthy fee for them and if anyone complains about spam, your account will be terminated without notice. It is better to purchase an autoresponder and set it up on your own domain if possible. You can buy one for a relatively low cost and the nice thing about it is you won’t have to pay ever again.

What you will want is an autoresponder that will allow you to setup multiple follow-ups to your subscribers. A good autoresponder will allow you to setup an unlimited amount of follow-up email responses and enable you to set a date and time for when the follow-ups will be sent. There are cheap or even free autoresponders out there however, they will not do what every marketer needs them to do which makes them useless.

AutoResponse Plus is an excellent autoresponder that will do everything that you could ever expect it to do. You can get it for less than two hundred bucks and you install it on your own domain server. The software is yours, not someone else’s. It is pretty easy to install. You just need to make a few changes to the script so that the software points to your domain server. You can also have it installed for you for an additional cost. I don’t think you’ll need to do that because there are full instructions on how to install the script and get it up and running on your server. If you follow the directions you shouldn’t have any problem installing the script.

I use AutoResponse Plus and never have had a problem with it. I am not trying to sell you anything here. I am not affiliated with AutoResponse Plus in any way and I will not get a commission from any sales referred by me. I’m just giving you information on a good tool that I use myself. If you are going to use an autoresponder, you want the best quality for the money. You can also run a google search as well to find additional follow-up autoresponders. The important thing to keep in mind is that you want to get an autoresponder that will fulfill all of your present, and future, marketing needs. Make sure that you compare apples to apples when choosing an autoresponder. Here’s the Url to the AutoResponse website in case you are interested. http://www.arpros.com

So, if you are not using an autoresponder that will send your follow-up messages for you, you really should get one because you are leaving a lot of money on the table everyday you go without it.

As someone who has been lured in by so many great sounding opportunities most of which were informational, I can tell you that it is very easy to get overloaded with too much information. I’ve read so many ebooks about Internet marketing that had my head spinning with confusion. So much of the information that I read was contradicted in its information from one ebook to the next leaving me to wonder which was the best course of action to take. Because of my confusion I often didn’t take any action at all leaving me with a lighter wallet and a bunch of information that I had no idea of what to do with.

It wasn’t until I sat down and took the time to decide where I wanted to go with my online business that things began to come together and became a lot less confusing. In order to get where you want to go, you need to know what path to take to get there. Running an online business is tough enough without getting false information that leads you down the wrong path. In my opinion, it is up to the individual to find their own path and take things to the next level from there. If you don’t know where you are going, there is no way that you can ever possibly get there.

Once you have a clear path to your destination, you’ll know what information you’ll need to get you to where you want to go. The best course of action in the beginning is to find whatever information that you can find on your Internet business subject that is readily available for free. Free info in general, is less likely to be false because there is no agenda on the websites part (e.g. trying to make a sale) and you are more apt to find non-conflicting information on the subject.

The paid for info almost always has some kind of secret to reveal that is generally very risky and is very short term and many times is false information that doesn’t work. The secret in many of these paid opportunities is to sell the information to other people which is not what we bought the information for.

As you get better at knowing what information is relevant to your business subject, it’s not a bad idea to look into buying an ebook or two. Just keep in mind that you want to purchase information that will help your business get to the next level. There is a lot of good, and unfortunately, more bad, information out there. Make sure that you take the time to investigate so that you can weed through the bad to get to the good stuff. Just make sure that what you buy is going to help you with your online business.

The point here is to take the time to plan where you want to go with your online business before you spend any money on information. Know what you are getting before you pull out your credit card. It will save you from all the confusion that I went through.

Having a decent host is just as important as any other part of your online business. Stay away from the free sites that offer to host your web pages because that’s all they will host for you making what you can do with your online business very limited. Almost all free hosts will put at least one of their banners or add some kind of advertising on every one of your web pages. You will end up with a very cheesy looking website that will be perceived as unprofessional by your visitors.

Your hosting plan needs to have at the very least two very important things. It should have a MySql database and allow for perl and cgi scripts. You will find at some point that you will need them both. MySql simply stores inputted data on your server in a database. Many online applications require MySql in order to function. Forums and blogs are a couple. MySql is used for many more applications than the above metioned. Perl and cgi scripts are used to perform automated tasks. Perl and cgi scripts are generally kept in the cgi-bin on your server. These scripts are needed for web forms to work along with hundreds of other applications that you can use with perl and cgi.

Because paid hosting is so cheap these days, pretty much everyone can afford them. You should be able to get a decent host for about six bucks a month. Many of these hosting companies will require you to pay for the entire year up front. Now that’s not a big investment. It will cost you less than a hundred bucks. The nice thing about paying for everything up front is that you don’t have to worry about paying again for another year. There are other’s that will ask for two years payment. It really depends on the hosting service how often you will have to pay.

If you are presently using a free hosting service you should really consider getting a new host. Most people don’t trust unprofessional looking web pages which is what you will have with the free host. None that I know of provide the tools that you need to run an online business. I don’t represent any hosting service and will not recommend anyone. Click the link here to get a list of some of the cheaper hosting services. http://www.google.com/search? Just make sure that the hosting service that you choose provides at least MySql, perl, and cgi. Most of them do.

It is much easier to build your online business around what you already know. Let’s say that you know a lot about computers. Wouldn’t it make sense to build your online business around that knowledge? The fact that you already know a lot about computers makes you authority on that subject right from the start.

Because Internet surfers are very skeptical about almost everything that they read or buy makes being an authority on a subject a must. Knowing what you are talking about on a particular subject will go a long way in gaining their trust. Trust leads to converting your product to sales.

Being knowledgeable will help make running your online business go a lot smoother. Because you already know a lot about the subject that you are promoting, it will be a lot easier to create a content rich website. You won’t have to take the time to research your subject matter because you already know it, which will allow you to concentrate on making money, which is why we all build our online businesses in the first place.

Trying to build your website around a subject that you know little or nothing about will make it a lot more difficult to run. You may find after you have put a lot of work, time, and money, into it that you are just not knowledgeable enough to make your online business work. You may end up giving up altogether. That’s the last thing that you want to do.

Having great knowledge of a particular subject will make you feel more confident, and comfortable, with what you are doing. You will enjoy running your online business a lot more if you know what you are doing. There’s no sense in running your own business if you are miserable doing it. You can get that result working for someone else.

So, build your online business around your knowledge. It will be a lot easier to run and will be a lot more successful opposed to building one about something that you know nothing about.

It is very important that you plan your website before it ever goes live online. So many webmasters are running from one thing to the next without any kind of plan in place whatsoever. That’s why so many fail in the online world. Fail to plan and failure is inevitable.

The planning stage is where every business will either succeed or fail. Put a solid business plan in place and you will do well whether it is an online business or not.

You really need to outline your online business. You need to have a clear view of what your business will be before you start to build it. You must know where you want to go before you can get there. This is your business map. Without it you will have no direction and will have no way to get where you need to go. This is the most critical part of starting your online business. If you don’t have a crystal clear view of where you want to go and how to get there, you will fail miserably.

Start by making a list. Below are some questions you may want to answer that will help get you going and will help give you a clearer view of where you want to go with your online business.

Since all websites have to be content rich you will want to use a topic that you know a lot about. Everyone knows a lot about something. You do too. You just need to tap into it no matter how silly you may think it is. I will guarantee that there are many others out there that will have an interest in your topic.

It’s best that your topic is about something that you enjoy doing or enjoy talking about because it will show through one way or another in everything that you do with your online business. You don’t want your visitors to have the feeling that you are in it for the money and really don’t care about the content that your website provides.

Your product must relate to your content. If it doesn’t you probably won’t convert very well. Everything about your topic should relate to everything that you do. Your product is no different. Know who you are selling to. It is important to know who your potential visitors will be in order to be able to approach your topic in the right manner.

Set goals to where you want to be in say 3, 6 and 12 months from now. If you plan where you want to be you will have a better chance of getting there. Goal setting is a very important part of planning a new business. It is a map within a map. Set goals and watch how quickly they will become a reality.

Outline your business plan and you will see results. It will help you eliminate any surprises that may arise later on and will help you deal with any problems that do come along. Plan every detail right down to how you plan to advertise. Since I don’t know what your business plan will be I can only give you a basic outline of what needs to be done. Only you have the answers of the best approach to take. The main point is, plan your online business in advance and you will do well.