Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

Some webmasters use black hat strategies to give their website a boost on the search engines index. Using black hat methods is a bad idea because it can get you banned by the search engines. If you know about black hat strategies you can bet that the search engines do too.

In case you don’t know what black hat is, here is a very short and basic description. Black hat is methods that are used to optimize a website in a way that violates the search engines guidelines.

Here are the most commonly used Black Hat SEO practices.

1.) Keyword stuffing is probably the most used black hat method. Keyword stuffing is overusing keywords throughout the web page. What black hat SEO’s do is repetitively use their target keyword phrase throughout the web page. For example, instead of using a keyword phrase once in the title, a black hat method may use that keyword phrase 4 or 5 times. Basically, keyword stuffing is the use of keywords more often than needed and because of this overuse the content on the web page often doesn’t make a lot of sense.

2.) Another black hat method is inserting hidden text on the web page. This is accomplished by making the text color the same as the background color of the web page allowing the black hat SEO to place the keywords on the web page hundreds of times but the visitor will never see them. The insertion of the hidden text is for the benefit of search engines only.

3.) Redirecting visitors from one web page to another. This is done with a META REFRESH tag or with a javascript. The idea behind this method is to optimize one page for the search engines and the other is a readable version for human visitors.

4.) Web page cloaking is another commonly used black hat method. Cloaking is used to trick the search engine spiders by pointing one page to the search engines and the other is another version of the web page and is pointed to the website visitors. The search engine version is optimized for the search engine spiders and the visitor version is human readable.

The four above strategies are not all of the black hat methods that are used but they are the most widely used.

Using black hat methods may get your website an initial boost on the major search engines but somewhere down the line they will detect these methods and will surely ban any website that is optimized using black hat methods.

Stick with the methods that are allowed by the search engines otherwise you will find yourself with a website that you can’t do anything with because it has been banned by the search engines.

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 think that so many Internet marketers are so fixated on digital or service related products such as software, ebooks, seo services, etc that they really don’t bother looking into physical products.

To start with most of these types of products are so saturated in the IM market it is almost impossible to find anything worth promoting that is potentially profitable. Have you run keyword searches for digital or service related products? If you have I’m guessing that you haven’t found much that will be profitable or isn’t super competitive.

There are a lot of gems out there when it comes to physical products because most people that do promote physical products are business owners promoting their own products. I can tell you that if you are an Internet marketer who is worth your salt you can blow these business owners out of the water because they don’t know crap about promoting their products online.

I have a couple of products that I have recently found that has very little competition that appears to be extremely profitable. I’m not going to tell you what they are at this time because I just started to promote them and I don’t have any real data at this time. From the early indications it looks like I’ll be able to get on the first page of Google in no time for my main keywords. It only took me 72 hours to get the website that I’m promoting this product on indexed.

If you are having the same problem that most Internet marketers are having of finding decent products and good keywords for those products promoting real physical products is definitely an easier game to play because the playing field is a lot more level and the supposed Gurus don’t seem to like playing on that field.

I can tell you from the research that I’ve done you can find some really nice keywords that are not very competitive at all.

Here’s the key. Find a bunch of physical products that you may consider promoting. It’s important that you find the product that you want to sell first because that’s what you want to build your website around. You will want the type of product that you promote in your domain name if possible as well.

Find a main product and build a niche around that product. For example: If you ran a search on chairs and recliner proved to be a good choice you could build your online business around recliners. Let me say before I go any further that I have no idea whether or not if recliner is a profitable choice or not because I haven’t checked to see if it is or not. I’m using this as an example and nothing else.

Here’s how to determine if a product choice is profitable or not. Run a keyword search with the yahoo keyword suggestion tool. In the above example you would run a search on chairs. You would look at the results that sit under the main keyword of chair and check to see if there is anything there that has a decent amount of searches. In our pretend search above we found that recliner has a decent amount of searches. Let’s pretend that we found 20,000 searches for this keyword.

The best thing to do when running a keyword search is to copy and past the results to a spreadsheet such as excel so that you can further analyze each keyword or keyword phrase result.

Ok. We’ve run our search and have found that recliner looks like it may be a good fit. To see how competitive and profitable the keyword recliner is we will run an allintitle search. Don’t worry, an allintitle search is a very simple process that takes less than a minute to run. Go to Google and type in allintitle:recliner

In our pretend allintitle search we find that recliner is found in the title on 5,000 website web pages. To determine how profitable and how competitive a keyword or keyword phrase is simply divide the search results by the allintitle search results to get your answer. In our recliner example you would take the 20,000 searches and divide it by the 5,000 allintitle searches which would give us a 4.

What we have done is ascertained the supply against the demand for our fictitious keyword search for recliner. In our search we found that the demand is 4-1 against the supply, which is an excellent ratio and a product that is well worth pursuing.

What our keyword search has told us is that there aren’t too many websites that we need to beat and that there are plenty of people out there who are looking for what we want to sell.

I’ve rambled on long enough with this. I’m certain that you get the idea. If you want to see real allintitle search results check out this post to get a better idea of what I’ve been talking about here. http://the-truth-about-internet-marketing.com/2007/03/30/the-all-important-allintitle

Here’s the link to Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

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.

I don’t know about everyone else but I’m tired of social networking websites like digg and all of the other big social networking guys out there.

The problem with the larger social websites is that most of them are very limited in the categories that you can submit your stories to. Social networking websites like digg cater more to the younger crowd and is no longer a good place for most Internet Marketers to have their stories submitted to.

As with everything that we do when we market on the Internet our readers need to be targeted. Social websites like digg don’t allow for this. As a matter of fact, digg is probably the last place you want to submit your stories to unless you have a gaming website or if your website has something to do with entertainment. As I said before digg caters to the younger crowd. Most of the people who use digg ages range from 16 to 22. That’s not a good group to market to because they have little or no purchasing power.

Social networking websites like digg, reddit, etc. are huge websites and getting your story on page one is pretty much impossible. If your story is submitted to any of these mammoth social websites, your story will be seen by very few people. These big social networking websites are not what they once were.

The point is that you want to be using social networking websites that will be of benefit to your marketing strategy, not hinder it. You want to use social networking websites that cater to the niche market that you are involved in. Go and try to submit to a directory website and submit to a category that has nothing to do with what your website is about and see if the directory accepts your submission. I will guarantee you that almost all of them will reject you. The same applies with social networking websites. I rather not be on a social networking site if my story is not in the proper place.

Your best bet is to go find a niche social website that deals with the topic of your online business. More and more of them are now popping up and all of them are doing well because most marketers are becoming more and more frustrated with the big guys and want to get better results from their social network marketing efforts.

There are a couple of really nice social networking websites that I found that have been setup with the Internet Marketer in mind. They may be smaller than the big guys but I’ll guarantee you that you will get more traffic with them than you do with the bigger social networking websites because it will be easier to find you on the smaller niche social websites. Plus you will be getting a lot more targeted traffic from these guys because they deal with your particular niche.

http://the-truth-about-internet-marketing.com/
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Here are the two social networking websites that I just mentioned. They both cater to Internet Marketers.

http://plugin.com

http://marktd.com

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.

What’s up with that guy who has been scammed 37 times? It seems like I could run a search for apples and that ppc ad would still come up. He must be using every keyword and keyword phrase known to man. His advertising campaign must be costing him a fortune from all the clickthroughs that he must be getting. Unless he is a really dumb marketer he has got to be making money with the thing because that ad has been there for a long time.

I did click on the ad to see what he was doing so that I could add some good tidbits to post here but unfortunately there really isn’t anything to tell. What he is doing has been done many times over.

He offers a free report that reveals the three worse scams that he found. That free report is nothing but an email with three lines of the types of products that are scams. He doesn’t even name the products. Of course you are required to subscribe to his list in order to get the report. I opted out as soon as I received his email.

His pitch page is nothing special either. Same old review type of thing. He basically says out of 37 products that he bought 35 of them were total scams which leaves me with the question why does his ad say that he was scammed 37 times when he says on his pitch page that he was scammed 35 times? He also goes on to say that he had spent $4800 on the 37 products that he bought. He gives the impression that the 37 products were all information products. That would be about $130 on average, for each. That sounds pretty high considering the average ebook costs somewhere around, $30 to $50.

He also linked to the testimonials on the two sites that he was recommending in his review. I see nothing special there because just about everyone is doing that anyway.

There is nothing different about the two products that he recommends either. I know that one of them is good because I have read it. I can’t tell you about the other one because I never used it. They are not new products. They both have been around for a long time. So there’s nothing special there.

If you are waiting for me to tell you that I found something special that he is doing with that ppc campaign, sorry to tell you that I found nothing that would explain why he is doing so well.

The only thing that can explain it is for some reason people believe that review. I don’t know why because there’s nothing new or different about it from any other review that I have seen.

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.

Social bookmarking should be a part of your traffic building strategy. Because it is easy to do and it doesn’t require much time or work on your part, there is no reason for not doing it. Social bookmarking websites were created for people who want to have the ability to bookmark their favorite links on the web instead of just being able to save them to their favorites on their local machine. This gives people the ability to access their favorite links away from home and also share them with friends and colleagues. That’s about all there is to social bookmarking. You can find a much better explanation than I can give to you here by clicking this link. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

Setting up a social bookmarking account is quick and easy. It doesn’t take more than five minutes to get an account. Then you are good to go. You’ll be able to start bookmarking your website pages right away. You have the choice of making your links private or public. Since you will be using social bookmarking to drive traffic to your website, of course you will want to make your bookmarked links public.

Bookmarking websites work a lot like search engines do. People run searches in the same way that people do when searching for information. They add a keyword, or keyword phrase, and get a list of results. When you bookmark a link, you have the option of adding a short description about the content that the link leads to. There’s also a place where you add your keywords as well. It is really important that you add relevant keywords so that the searcher can find you. Keywords that are very competitive on search engines are not nearly as competitive on social bookmarking websites. Keywords that have hundreds of thousands of results on the search engines may have only a few hundred results on social bookmarking websites.

Many social bookmarking websites are huge which gives you the opportunity to get some additional traffic to your website and will give you additional back links to your website which will help you better your rankings with the search engines.

Do not add public links that lead to web pages that have ads only, or a sales pitch only, on them. Send people to web pages that have real information on them. You will make a lot of people angry if they are sent to a website that only has google adsense ads and banners on it. Searchers may complain to the admin of the social bookmarking site which could lead to you getting banned from the site.

So start adding the links to your web pages on social bookmarking sites. It’s easy to do and will get you additional traffic to your website for free. Here are two of the largest social bookmarking sites to get you started.

http://del.icio.us (No, it’s not misspelled :))

http://stumbleupon.com

You can find additional social bookmarking sites here.
http:// www.listible.com/list/social-bookmarking-sites

Happy Bookmarking.

While ad testing is not a new strategy, I’m amazed by how few Internet marketers test their ad copy. To me, this is a very vital part of marketing whether it is an online business or not. Just because you think that you have a winner ad doesn’t mean that you do. There is no way that any marketer can know how well their ad will do without testing it first. All successful marketers test their ads before running them. That’s one of the reasons that they are successful. If you are going to pay someone to run your ad, you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. The keyword here is, TEST! TEST! And TEST some more. Don’t pay any serious money until you know which ad pulls the best.

What you will want to do is write several ads for the same product. You can write one ad and make small changes to it such as the opening headline. I would however write at least 3 different ads and then begin to make small changes to them and use them as separate ads to test.

When you finish writing your ads you will need a way to track them. There are several scripts that will do that for you. I use ‘Ad Tracking Script’. This is a very easy script to use for tracking your ads. You can find it here. http://www.clickitpro.com/portal/free/track.html The ‘Ad Tracking Script’ will allow you to track all of your ads to determine which one will do the best. This script is really easy to get up running on your server because you setup the script variables on their website and then the script is emailed to you along with instructions on how to use it. The only thing that you will have to do is upload the script to your cgi-bin and set the permissions. This is a free script. Again, you can get the script here. http://www.clickitpro.com/portal/free/track.html

There are many free scripts out there that will track your ads for you. If you don’t want to use the one that is provided here, you can run a search by clicking here to find a different one. Don’t spend any of your hard earned money on advertising until you have tested your ad. You will save and make more money by taking the time to test.