Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

That’s a question that you have to know and need to answer if you expect to have any kind of success at all. If you don’t know where you are there is no way that you will recognize when something changes and chances are nothing will change if you don’t know where you are at this moment.

If you are trying to get your business off the ground whether it is an Internet business or any kind of business at all, if you have no idea where the starting point is there is no way that you will ever get to where you want to go. If you currently have a business it is to your advantage that you stop whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish and evaluate where you are at this very moment in your life otherwise no matter what you do nothing will change until you know where you are.

You can’t truly start if you don’t know where the starting line is and you most certainly can’t finish if you haven’t yet started.

I know that what I’ve just said may sound a bit confusing so bear with me here. What you have to do is define your life as it is today. (not your business) You need to look at your entire life as it is now.

You have to ask yourself what would I change? For example if you are living in a small apartment at the moment you probably want to upgrade your living situation to a house Using this example you want to be very clear as to what kind of house you want. How many rooms, what style etc.

You need to evaluate every aspect of your life and what you would change about it. Most importantly you must do a self-evaluation and be brutally honest. If you are known to procrastinate you will need to change that. You can’t succeed by doing nothing.

If you can’t change the things that you need to change about yourself you will never be able to move forward. Be brutal but don’t dwell on it; just change it.

You must understand that you got where you are by doing the things that you have been doing and you will stay there if you don’t make the necessary changes in your life. If you want to be somewhere else, you have to make changes in your life. You can’t possibly get to where you want to go if you have no idea where you are.

The choices that we all make in life are what make our lives what they are, good or bad. If you have not gotten what you want it is up to you to make changes. Simply put, if you continue to do what you have been doing you will get what you have been getting.

I know that self-evaluation is a very hard thing to do but it is imperative to your success. All successful people have had to do this at some point otherwise they would not be successful today. There are no exceptions. We all have to do this if we want to change our lives for the better.

It’s nice to want more out of life but you must realize that there will be a price to pay but the end result will be well worth it because you will learn a lot about yourself and will be a better person for it and you will know that anything is attainable.

The last important ingredient in the equation is that you have to put into action what you have learned about your present life otherwise it is useless information. You will never get to where you want to go if you don’t take the necessary steps to get there.

This is something that I do on a regular basis. You really want to do this when you start a new website or when you get on the top of the index.

If you have started a new website and have done all of the things that you need to do when starting a website you really should find out where you are listed on the major search engines so that you will know if your new website is going in the right direction or not.

In the beginning it will take time to find where you are positioned however it is well worth taking the time to do this.

There are a few ways to check where you are and how you are doing. You should do all of them when doing your evaluation. What you will want to do is to search your main keywords and keyword phrases as follows. Type these in the search field on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Run these three searches to see where you are listed. The allintitle you should be able to find somewhere right away providing that you used a keyword or keyword phrase that is not very competitive. If you are using a competitive keyword or keyword phrase you probably don’t have a very good keyword and you won’t be able to compete in the first place.

Click on every page of the results until you find your site using the above criteria. Use a spread sheet and type your position on each search engine no matter what position it may be.

It will probably take you some time the first time that you do this but after that you should be able to find your site pretty quickly for each of the search engines providing you document the results for each.

Check your position every day to see if your position has improved or has gotten worse. If you find that your website is improving, you will know that you are doing the right things to get your website ranked toward the top of the search engines. If it is getting worse then you will know that you need to make some changes to get it going in the right direction.

The thing that you need to understand is that your site will fluctuate up and down on the index. This is quite normal. What you want to look out for is that it is not heading in the wrong direction on a continuous basis.

Once you have found your website on the index of each search engine it won’t take you long to find it after that providing that do this on a daily basis. This is well worth doing and it will save you time and get you on the first page of the major search engines much quicker.

If you are already on the top of the search engines you definitely want to do this to make sure that you stay there. Things can change really quickly on a search engine index and if something happens to your position you want to know about it when it happens so that you can make whatever corrections necessary to get back on top.

I read an article over at ezine articles called how to get rich online. While I agree with some of the points in this article there are some things that I don’t agree with.

One of the points of this article states that you need to find a problem and solve it or improve on a product that is already out there. Let’s face it, most of us are not capable of doing this and it is totally unnecessary. You can make a lot of money online without having to reinvent the wheel.

Another thing that the article says is to start an affiliate program of your own so that others can promote your newly created product.

While all of this sounds great it’s not very realistic. As I said before most are not capable of creating their own products on their own. Unless you have a lot of money to invest so that you can hire someone to create a product for you, this is something that you probably don’t want to consider.

Staring your own affiliate program is a lot easier said than done. I ran my own affiliate program several years ago and can tell you that there are a lot of headaches associated with running your own affiliate program. The biggest problem is that you have absolutely no control over how an affiliate will promote your product. You can set all kinds of guidelines on what an affiliate can or cannot do however, it is the final decision of the affiliate marketer as to whether he or she will follow the guidelines of the affiliate program or not.

The problem is that many affiliates will do anything to make a sale. You will have to deal with your affiliates spamming people. If the spamming problem gets back to your hosting provider you will be shutdown without notice. There are many other problems with running an affiliate program, spamming happens to be the biggest problem.

The article goes on to say that you can’t make a lot of money without the help of others. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If you find a product that is not very competitive that pays a high commission you most certainly can make a great living online.

Research, dedication, and hard work are what it takes to do well online. You absolutely do not need to depend on other people to get you there. No one will take better care of your business than you will. The biggest problem is that everyone is looking for the easy way out. Do a little bit of work and you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in a relatively short period of time.

So many marketers don’t use the allintitle when running keyword research either because they don’t know about it or just don’t want to bother doing it.

What the allintitle does is it checks how many web pages have an exact keyword phrase in the title. There is no way that you can determine how competitive a chosen keyword or keyword phrase is unless you know how many people are using that keyword or keyword phrase. Using the allintitle will help you determine how competitive and profitable your keyword will be.

Keep in mind the less competitive a keyword is, the easier it is to get a high ranking on the search engines and the more profitable you will be. If you are using a keyword that 10,000,000 others are using you will have very little chance if any at all of being found and the chances of making money with what you are selling will be a lot harder because there will be too many others selling the same product as you.

Here’s how to determine whether or not your keywords will be too competitive or not. Of course you will have to get a list of your keywords before you can do anything at all. You can run keyword searches using the yahoo keyword tool or the new free wordtracker tool. I’d use the yahoo tool if it’s working because the yahoo tool gives you results by the month where wordtracker gives you them by the day. You can still determine approximately how many clicks a month by multiplying the daily number by thirty days.

Copy and paste the keywords that you find into an excel spreadsheet or any comparable spreadsheet. If you don’t have a spreadsheet notepad will do. Using a spreadsheet will make it easier to organize your keyword list but it is not essential that you use it. It just will be a lot easier using a spreadsheet.

What you want to do is go to Google and type in your keyword phrase using allintitle. Say that you are checking the keyword phrase ‘dog collar’, you would type it in the search like this allintitle:dog collar. To see this example in action Click here. If you look in the top right side of the results you will see that 158,000 web pages are using this keyword phrase in the title. The keyword phrase ‘dog collar’ without looking at how many people have searched that phrase is probably too competitive to use. If you were to make a slight change to that keyword phrase ‘dog collar’ and make it ‘dog shock collar’ you will get a very different result. Click here to see the results for dog shock collar. As you can see the results show that 671 web pages use this keyword phrase and you probably will be able to compete with this keyword.

To determine whether a keyword phrase is too competitive or not, you need to compare how many searches were done for the keyword phrase, against how many results there are for the allintitle search. If the searches are higher than the web page results from your allintitle search, then you have a very good keyword phrase. If it’s the other way around, you are better off not using the phrase as it will be very difficult to get a high ranking for the keyword phrase.

Because the search engines place so much weight on the web page title when ranking a site it is really important to do this if you want to have any chance of getting a high ranking for your keyword phrases. The less competitive the keyword phrase is the better your chances are of getting a good ranking on the search engines. You also will learn a lot about the product that you are promoting by going through this process.

First it was Day Job Killer and now it’s Duvet Dollars. A few weeks after Day Job Killer was launched, Duvet Dollars was launched. Some say that, Duvet Dollars is authored by the same person, Chris McNeeney. Don’t know if that is just speculation or if there is any truth to it or not. Personally, I really don’t care who wrote it.

I don’t know if anyone here has read the Duvet Dollars sales page or not. I have, and it screams ‘Come over here so I can pick your pocket’. I haven’t read the Duvet Dollars ebook nor do I intend to. From the few honest reviews that I’ve read about Duvet Dollars, the thing is a pile of garbage.

From the reviews that I have read pretty much everything that is written in the Duvet Dollars ebook is common affiliate knowledge that can be found on forums, blogs, and websites, for free.

If you are brand new to affiliate marketing the Duvet Dollars ebook is probably ok. It will save a newbie a lot of time trying to find the information bit by bit as long as it is formatted in an easy to read way and is workable. With that said, if this is a newbie guide then $77 is way overpriced for information that you can readily get for free. There are many guides our there geared for the affiliate newbie for a lot less money.

What irritates me about the Duvet Dollars ebook is that it is in no way pitched for what it is. Reading that sales page makes the reader believe that this is some deep secret that the author stumbled upon and implemented it and made their fortune with it. It goes on to say that you will be able to quit your job within a few weeks after implementing the strategies in the ebook. Kind of sounds like the Day Job Killer pitch doesn’t it. Probably the reason some think the two authors are the same. I don’t read too much into that because of all the copycat marketers out there.

I can’t believe how stupidly the Duvet Dollars sales letter was written. Just goes to show you that people don’t pay attention to what they read. If they did they wouldn’t have purchased Duvet Dollars in the first place. In one breath Victoria (the author of Duvet Dollars) says that you can quit your job in a few weeks and then in another breath says that Duvet Dollars is not a get rich quick scheme. If you can quit your job in a few weeks after reading Duvet Dollars, that’s get rich quick. Both can’t exist at the same time.

The fact that I have never heard of and I don’t think anyone else has heard of this Victoria person before Duvet Dollars makes me wonder if this person isn’t using an assumed name. She also doesn’t know crap about protecting her download page as it was listed on Google until she moved the Duvet Dollars web page a couple of times. A lot of people got a free copy of Duvet Dollars. I don’t think that I want to take advice from someone who doesn’t know how to do something as simple as protecting the very thing that is supposed to support them. A robots.txt would have kept that from happening. Like it or not, knowing basic things like this is part of being an Internet Marketer.

I’ve been watching the Duvet Dollars saga unfold for the past couple of weeks. I will say that it has been entertaining to watch. She has discredited herself, along with others discrediting her, to the point that she will never be able to sell anything using that name again.

I’d like to know, what the hell a Duvet Dollar is anyway? That was a rhetorical question. No reply is required. I can’t believe the crap people will come up with just to make a couple of bucks. The name Duvet Dollars sucks in my opinion and is enough to keep me from getting it on the name alone. I guess she thought it was cute.

I don’t know when people are going to learn that if you are not willing to do the work, you can’t make money online. Do yourself a favor and quit now. You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache and money. Internet Marketing is for those who truly want to change their lives and have the drive to do whatever it takes to make that happen including the work.

Here’s the link to the Duvet Dollars sales page - http://duvetdollars.com/

Here are a couple of websites that don’t think that Duvet Dollars is all it’s cracked up to be.
http://www.netfrontiermarketing.com - http://www.aojon.com/first-ebook-idiot-exposed/

Google recently launched a beta test program called ‘Pay Per Action’. Instead of paying when someone clicks on your ad a number of things have to happen before you will be charged. The person who clicks on your ad will have to complete an action specified by you before you will be charged. You only pay for the action and not for the click. You set the price of the action. You pay what you think the action is worth. I’m not sure if there is a minimum bid or not on an action.

For example let’s say that you want to build an email list. The action could be as simple as someone filling out a web form and supplying their name and email address. Another action could be a purchase which seems to me the best way to go because you will only pay when you get paid which is in essence free advertising for you. From what I can see, you can’t lose advertising this way.

The downside is, (yes there always is a downside) this is only available to people in the United States at the moment and will only work on your own website. Since you need to add code on your web pages to use this service, you will need to have access to your html pages to insert the code. You won’t be able to use this with affiliate products. You need to have your own product in order to use pay per action to make sales.

Another drawback is that ‘Pay Per Action’ will be advertised through the content network. I’m sure that you well know if there is a way to cheat this people will find a way to do it. I hope there isn’t. This sounds like it has potential and a better way for marketers to advertise their own products. I can’t see it easily happening using a purchase action. It’s the other actions that concern me. ie. Advertisers using it to collect leads. What would stop people from fraudulently filling out the web email form?

If you own your own products and sell them on your own website, this might be a great cost effective way to advertise your product or line of products. I wouldn’t try using it for anything other than purchases until you learn and better understand how the whole program works.

To get more info click the link here. It gives you more of an explanation to how the program works and its requirements. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/03/pay-per-action-beta-test.html

You may want to try this out while it’s still in beta because it will probably be a lot cheaper now than it will be when it comes out of beta. If you have your own website and products and set your action to be for purchases only you really have nothing to lose because you only pay when you make a sale.

Here are 5 very costly mistakes that webmasters make when optimizing their web pages for the search engines. The search engine bots are getting smarter all of the time and bad SEO practices no longer go unnoticed. A poorly or incorrectly optimized website will kill your online business with the search engines.

1. Not selecting the right keyword.

It is very important that you use keywords that are targeted to the content on your web pages. Using keywords that are similar is totally useless and will send the wrong traffic to your website. Your keywords must be exactly the same as your website content.

2. Keywords Spamming (Using the same keywords over and over).

Never use keyword spamming or stacking. The search engines will downgrade and penalize your website for doing this. Instead, use keyword rich content on your web pages.

3. Using a free domain name or web hosting service.

Never use a free domain to host your business website. You want a domain that you can name whatever you want. You can’t do that with a free domain. You will have to use the free hosts domain name. Search engines generally will index free domains as a whole but not individual websites, which will do you no good. Spend a few bucks and get a real hosted domain that you can call your own.

4. Using hidden text to make your web pages more relevant.

Hiding the text within your web pages to make it appear that you have a laser targeted website doesn’t work with the search engines anymore. You will be severely penalized by the search engines for doing this. Even if you remove the hidden text it will take a long time, if ever, to recover from it. Don’t do it. It’s not only bad for your search engine ranking. It’s unethical.

5. Using keywords that have nothing to do with your website.

Putting popular keywords on your web page for the sole reason of attracting people to your website is a huge mistake. Using unrelated keywords can get your website banned from the search engines.

I found this article and thought everyone here would enjoy it. It’s pretty funny!

How To Succeed At SEO (Not!)
By T. O’ Donnell

Here are a few tips to help a truly grrrreat site become even better. Try them all, you know you want to!

1. The Latest Grey-hat Wheeze.

Link farms, scraping, fake directories; whatever it is, get in there! If a newbie webmaster forum is buzzing about it, that’s the time to take it up. Put it on your main breadwinner, and wait for the hits to come in.

2. Over-optimisation.

Give the search engines what they want. Make damn sure they know what the page is about. Seven word image names, ten word ALT tags, hidden text, three H1 tags, that’ll tell the b*stards. Top of Google’s first page for you. Your clients swoon at your mAd skILLz. Respec’!

3. No Optimisation.

Google is run by Gods with brains the size of watermelons. Their algorithm is sentient. Whatever tricks you try won’t work. So don’t try any. And when your site gets booted in the next update anyway, defend their right to do so, piously.

4. Content Generators.

Life’s short. So much work, so many Stargate downloads to watch. Automate your content generation. Software is there to make life easier. Slap together RSS feeds, auto-generated text, free articles and Wikipedia pulls. Monetise with Adsense. Repeat for 300,000 pages. Is it time for that Pot Noodle? It’s _always_ time!

5. Reciprocal links.

Google loves links, and it’s too hard to get them unasked for. So ask! Send out 5000 emails cadging links to your .info domain. Don’t bother proof-reading it, they’ll only skim it. When they agree to a swop, you’ll be too busy to reciprocate. That’ll be a one-way link, then, ha ha!

Those sweeties at Google don’t mind reciprocal links. Lots of famous sites interlink, so yours should be OK too. WebDevDood on Leetwebforum.com said so.

6. Low original-to-duplicate content ratio.

People don’t read. Original content is too expensive to make. The Google algorithm ain’t all that. 200 words surrounded by the same header, footer and sidebars in a 20,000 page site will keep them coming back again and again. Have a pop tart.

7. CMS with same TITLE and no META description on each page.

There are so few pages on the internet these days that you can use any open-source CMS as-is. Just set up your forum, slap on the Adsense, let your visitors witter away, sit back and wait for the search engine lurrrve! You bad boy, have another Red Bull, you deserve it!

8. Because _they_ weren’t penalised, you won’t be.

So many webmasters say their site has X or Y, and Google didn’t mind, but funnily enough, _you_ got busted for it. Their content, backlinks, and site structure must be the same as yours, then, eh? Spooky!

9. Huge number of new links, in a short time, to a new domain.

DevWebDood says that if MySpace.com can get a million backlinks in a short space of time and not be penalised, then so can you. Just set up a travel or hotel site, join the Co-op and LinkVault, do a blog spam and watch your site race up the SERPs.

So what if it’s nowhere to be found next month? Better the fleeting taste of victory, than never having tried at all!

10. Got banned? Give ‘em Hell about it!

Write a long email to Google. State how great your site is, how they’re hurting your business, and how _you’re_ doing _them_ a favour by letting them list it. Admit no fault, it shows weakness.

Then get on as many forums as you can complaining about how the SERPs suck, how -> insert famous site here <- is doing just what you did, and _they're_ still in.

Google will be so hurt and ashamed, they’ll let you back in, and dial back that nasty update. You told _them_, all right!

I write these articles for fun. Pay no attention to my byline, and do not visit my site.

About the author: T. O’ Donnell http://www.tigertom.com/blog/ is an SEO genius, living in London, UK.

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COPYRIGHT: You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the byline above is included. You must publish the article AS IS. Do not modify, alter or edit it.

You are allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display in your website or ezine, so long as the text, hyperlinks and paragraph breaks are not changed or deleted. If presented in an HTML document, any hyperlinks present must be active, clickable, and go direct to the websites they represent i.e. no re-directs.

Notifying the author is NOT required, but doing so is appreciated, at http://www.tigertom.com/contact.htm

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.

Here are some things that you should consider before you decide to sign on with a merchant as one of their affiliates. You really should check some things out to keep you from wasting your time and effort promoting someone else’s product or products.

Check out the merchants pitch page and view it as if you were the potential customer. You need to know first hand if the sales pitch is convincing enough that it could entice you to buy. If the answer is no, move on because chances are everyone else will respond the same way as you. Besides, it’s pretty hard to sell something that you don’t believe in yourself.

If you think that the product is good but the sales page sucks check with the merchant and find out if you can use your own sales page to sell the product and whether or not you can bypass the merchants sales page altogether. This may or may not be a problem. Many merchants want their affiliates to send their potential customers to their website. To be honest most affiliate merchant sales pages are terrible and the fact that most of the big guys will make you send potential buyers to their sales page really cripples most affiliates.

It seems like every affiliate marketer jumps on whatever product is hot at the time. The fact that these products are very hot makes them very attractive. The problem is there will be a lot of competition and a lot more super affiliates selling these hot products. It is almost impossible for the average affiliate to compete under these circumstances.

It may be better to take a look at the not so hot affiliate programs that are out there. Just because a product is not as hot as some of the others doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not a good product. There could be several reasons for it such as the product may not be as well publicized as the others. The big name products generally have a network of big name gurus promoting it while the smaller guy doesn’t have that luxury.

It seems to me that it would be better to fish in a smaller pond where success is more likely and there is not as much competition and will give you a much better chance of making money.

With an affiliate program that is not so popular your chances of being able to promote the product the way that you want to will be more likely because the merchant is probably not making that much money and will be more willing to bend than the big guys.

Do some research over at Clickbank and Commission Junction to see if they have any little gold nuggets sitting there. You may find some great products that no one has taken notice of.

I don’t look at the smaller guys myself. I do intend to some time in the near future when I’m not so busy to see for myself what they have. I figure that it is much easier to be a big fish in a small pond than it is to be one in a big pond.