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.

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

The first thing to realize and understand is that most people are afraid of getting ripped off buying products online. I’m sure that you’ve been to a review site or two and have read the supposed unbiased opinion of the website reviewer. The website will have reviews of products to stay away from and the ones that are the safest to buy.

These review sites are far from being unbiased. This is a marketing strategy that the review site owner uses to sell his or her affiliate products. Generally you will get a rating of the good products and the most expensive is the one that almost always wins out because the more expensive the product, the more money that the review affiliate will make in commission when he or she makes a sale. Many times, but not always, the reviewer will be an affiliate of all of the good products reviewed. Some review sites, will throw in products that he or she is not involved in appear unbiased.

I know that you may think that this type of strategy is unethical, but I disagree. To me, if the reviewer truly believes that the product he or she is selling is of high quality and does what it claims it does, I see nothing wrong with it. Keep in mind the visitor came to the review site to get a second opinion. The final decision to buy is still solely on the visitor. On the other hand, if the reviewer has never used the product or has no idea if the product does anything that it claims it does, then it is unethical to even have an opinion about the product one way or the other let alone, review it.

I think that this is a great strategy for an affiliate marketer to use because he or she is telling the visitor about the product without having to resort to using a lot of hype. The affiliate gives the visitor an opinion, which is what he or she came for in the first place and hopefully have made their visitor more comfortable and more importantly has helped the visitor make a positive decision to buy.

If you are having trouble selling your affiliate products, you may want to try selling using the review strategy to help you convert your affiliate products. Don’t make false claims. Be a true authority of the products that you review by using, and knowing them well. Give this a try and I think that you will find that it will be a lot easier to convert your affiliate products to sales.

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.

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.