So, you have a new terrific looking Website. You’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it is Search Engine Friendly, you have great content and you are sure that you are what the Search Engines have been waiting for! Your big launch date comes and goes, and nothing. But it takes time to show up on the generic Search Engine results, you might say. So you try an aggressive marketing campaign, and still, your sales are almost non-existent.

What is happening? Your keywords are the fundamental building blocks of your online success. Because the competition is so great, choosing general or broad keywords is almost a guarantee that either you will not show up on the Search Engine results, or if you do, your target audience will not be looking for what you have to offer. Your keywords need to be as specific as possible to get you the results you are looking for. In other words, shoppers ready to buy your product or services are your target and the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword, the less competition you will face.

Choosing the right keywords when your Website is new can be tricky as well as time consuming. There are a few ways to go about it:

1. You might not think objectively. Ask your clients, family members, or friends what they would look for if searching for your product. You might be surprised at what insights they can give you.

2. Get personal with your keywords. Take the obvious general keywords that come to mind, for this example we will use “toys”, and try narrowing it down. Try “toy trucks” or “infant toys” or “water toys”. Now go even deeper in your category and try “infant rattle toys” or “baby teething toys”. You see how you are now targeting exactly what someone might be searching for? 

3. Do a manual search for the keywords you choose, and see who your competition is. Is that your target? Also look on the upper right hand corner of your search results. Typically, Search Engines will display the number of found results. The more specific the keyword, the less results displayed, the better your chances of obtaining results for that keyword.

So now you have all these great keywords, what do you do with them? Knowing what your keywords are is not enough, you need to keep a few critical points in mind:

1. Continually evaluate your keywords, keeping in mind that trends come and go, and what is “HOT” today may not be what people are looking for tomorrow.

2. Keep track of where your visitors found you. If you are doing a paid campaign, this is easy to do, but if you are looking at generic results, you can use a tracking software to show you what your best resulting keyword searches are. Google Analytics is an example of a free service, and one of the best to track your traffic, visitors’ keywords and behavior.

3. Your visitors should never have to find what they are looking for on your Website. This applies mainly to your PPC programs. Point them directly to where they need to be. Whether it is the page where they can purchase your product, fill out a form or subscribe to a service, land them directly to that page. If you simply send them to your home page, you will lose that visitor because they did not immediately find what they were looking for.

4. Lastly, optimize your pages to your keywords. Take time to carefully write your meta-tags. Properly written Titles can make the difference if your generic result is clicked on or not. Edit the individual pages to have a keyword rich description. This does not mean stuff your keywords anywhere you can find space for them. Read it over, and make sure it makes sense to you. Keep in mind that you not only want to score a lot of points with the Search Engines so that they deem you content “valuable” to their users, you also want to make your visitors keep coming back to your Website .

All this may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But to put it bluntly, “what you put in to it, is what you get out of it”. If you put the time and effort into your keywords, you will eventually be rewarded with the results you are seeking.

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The first step in designing or redesigning your web site is to clarify the goals you want the web site to achieve. What is the purpose of your web site? What do you want your web site to do?

One of the goals of your web site should be to attract the attention of your target market. Most small business web sites fail to do this. Typically, these web sites are filled with information on the firm’s services, products and credentials.

These types of web sites do little to attract new customers, simply because they are “me” oriented. In other words, they don’t offer what the customer is looking for.

Most users of the Web are searching for information and solutions to problems. If your web site doesn’t provide easily found solutions the customer will quickly leave for other options.

Is your target market searching for the content you have on your web site?

Many small businesses have web sites in order to establish credibility. The mere presence of a web site is not going to convince prospects you can help them. To establish trust you need to demonstrate your expertise and qualifications.

One method for establishing credibility is by featuring testimonials. Comments from others are perceived with greater credibility than descriptions of your features and benefits. This will help differentiate your business from the competition.

What are you doing to differentiate your web site and build credibility?

Generating leads is one of the most important objectives for a small business web site. If people come to your web site for solutions, you want as many of them as possible to contact you.

It is also desirable for your web site to differentiate people who are not ready to buy from people who are ready to make a purchase.

Visitors to you web site need to be given direction and incentives.

Does your web site prompt people to supply contact information and contact you? Is there motivation for them to give you their contact information? 

Of course the most important goal of your web site should be to help make you money. If you sell services and products it should be easy for prospects to find them, along with comprehensive information about each product.

Ideally, you will want individual sell pages for each product or service. Again, you will want the content to discuss solutions to customers’ problems.

Is your web site helping you sell more of your products and services?

It is your customers’ problems that maintains your business. You need both customer problems and solutions to keep your business operating.

Customer problems are the fuel that provides the power to your marketing engine. Fueling your marketing engine requires a constant focus on customer problems. The better you can address customer problems the more powerful your marketing engine.

What are the concerns of your target market? What problems do they have that you can solve? What problems do they want solved?

Prospects want to see themselves and their concerns clearly identified in order to feel confident that you understand their needs. Don’t start talking about features and benefits until you have identified the problems that the prospects want to solved.

Switch to using your prospects problems as the core to your marketing message and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your marketing will accelerate your business.

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In direct response Internet marketing, you must be able to move your reader to take action (often it is to buy your product) simply by communicating through the written word. Doing that successfully takes a very specific set of skills. You must be a master at writing eyeball-grabbing sales copy.

Here are three elements of great sales copy.

Firstly, your copy must have an attention-grabbing and captivating headline. It must stop the reader in his tracks so that he reads nothing else except your copy. There are two ways of doing that. Firstly, you write the main benefit of your product into your headline. Notice it’s benefit, not feature that you must highlight. Suppose you are selling an automated blog post making software. Writing, “Introducing the World’s Best Software that Makes Blog Posts to Your Blog Automatically” is writing about the feature. But writing, “Discover How You Can Update Your Blog on Autopilot and Never Have to Look at it again for One Entire Year”, is writing about benefit.

Features of your product are important, but not in the headline. The second way to make a captivating headline is by writing something in your headline that puts a question into the mind or your reader. This makes him think that the answer must be in the body of your copy and he will continue reading. If you read the headline above, your most natural question would be ‘How is this accomplished?’ and you will likely read on. Once you get your reader thinking like that, then your headline has done its job. Now comes the body of your copy.

The body of your sales copy must be riveting and engaging. Every word must be written for the sole purpose of getting your reader to read the next sentence. Here’s one simple technique to accomplish that.

Think about the old bucket system of dousing a fire. Each person in the line passes a bucket of water to the next person until it reaches the end of the line and the water is poured onto the fire. That is exactly what your sales copy must do. It must move the reader to read the next line and subsequently the next paragraph until he comes to the end.

To do that, your each sentence must lead on to something in the next sentence that your reader wants to know. And the last sentence of each paragraph must leave the reader with some missing piece of the puzzle such that he is compelled to read the next paragraph. Look at the last line of each paragraph of this article. They were designed to lead you to the next paragraph. Can you see how it is done?

Simple, by using certain words like ‘if’ or ‘…you must be a master at…’ (as in the first two paragraphs), you covertly challenge the reader to find out something he does not yet know. Another way is by stipulating a certain number of points beforehand (as in the fourth paragraph) then your paragraph does not cover all the points you said you would bring up. The reader then concludes there are more points in the following paragraph and reads on.

Another way to write like a ‘bucket system’ is by using the last line of a paragraph to ‘introduce’ what’s in the next paragraph (as in the 5th and 6th paragraphs). Yet another way is to pose a question in the last sentence (as in paragraph 8).

Finally, great sales copy must have a clear call to action at the end. Your call to action must be convincing and compelling enough for your reader to take the action you want of him (usually it is to buy your product). Your call to action can be made more convincing by answering your reader’s objection, favorably comparing the price of your product with another similar product or challenging him to make a change by buying your product instead of remaining the way he is.

A clear call to action is a big topic by itself which can be written about in another article (can you see the ‘bucket system’ at work here?).

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Promotion of your site’s product or service should be the type of thing that is at the top of your list if you are intent on creating some traffic and sales.

Everyday you are likely flooded with new email offers which promise to create a flood of new traffic to your Web site. Some of these offers are fresh, creative approaches, but most of them are simply re-hashed efforts of systems and creations of others.

For the most part, if they sound too good to be true, they probably are.

This article is aimed at giving you three good, time-tested approaches to promotion of your site that brings you some long term residual benefits and traffic. As you probably already know, increased traffic = increased sales and more profit for you.

Here is three suggestions: 

(1) Write Articles

Writing and distributing articles is probably the very best approach in your promotional arsenal.

It’s something that you can do for free and with just a little effort. Try to include article writing in your weekly activities. Make a goal of creating one or more articles each week.

Once you have your articles written, you should distribute them through services like iSnare.com, http://www.isnare.com , an article submission and distribution directory. Your articles will be sent out to thousands of ezine publishers and article directories within a few days.

While there is a cost for the distribution, it is small and well worth the cost to quickly and efficiently distribute your articles widely and quickly. It would probably take days of your time to equal their efforts.

(2) Build A Partners List

Establishing a joint venture effort with several of your on line partners who have complimentary but not competitive Web sites, can be very beneficial.

One good source of potential partners would be the Directory of Ezines.com. http://www.directoryofezines.com/ . While this is not a free resource, it can be a beneficial investment that provides you with a ton of information on ezines, advertising and other resources.

You can then swap advertising efforts and share in promotion of each others offers. They can benefit from your promotion of their products or services in your list of subscribers and you can do the same.

To make your contacts with potential joint venture partners easier you can create some contact letters to use as templates. Simply personalize each new contact with their name and information.

It’s a win-win situation.

(3) Visit Forums

Location and use of on line forums which are appropriate to your niche can be very beneficial to your site. Most of them will allow you to include a signature file with a URL to your site in your posts you make to the forum.

To locate appropriate forums to visit, simply do a search on one of the major search engines for “forums:marketing.” Include the niche you want to find as the second word in your search.

Try to provide helpful answers to those asking questions and needing help in forums you visit. Become a resource that is trusted and respected. You will be more likely to gain some traffic and sales at your site. Be sure to read their rules to make sure you are not spamming.

A conscientious effort by you to apply these promotional efforts outlined in the article above create promotions that sticks like peanut butter and results in increased traffic and sales of your product or services

Let’s look at how you can increase your chances of meeting the tweeple. (This is just one of those new terms mentioned. It is so new that spelling checkers still think it is a mistake). Tweeple are simply people using Twitter. Why would you want to meet people using Twitter? The reason is that there is a potential to reach a huge audience very quickly. Unlike spam email the people reading your messages (or tweets) have opted in to do so by becoming your ‘followers’. This raises the possibility for Twitter marketing. 

It is not a good idea to blatantly advertise in twitter – even though many do. Apart from the fact that people may stop following you, they are also a lot less likely to click on any of your links. A better method is to tell a story. For example, you could send a tweet that said something like ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me at the shops today – find out the full story [link]’. This would arouse curiosity. The link would send readers to your blog or website where you could include an interesting pre-sell story. Not only would you get more clicks, you are likely to get higher conversions.

Of course, none of this is going to happen if you don’t have followers. There are some simple steps you can take to increase the likelihood of others following you. The simplest is to make good use of your twitter profile. You should include a picture of yourself in order to appear personal and approachable. If you have a website then you should include the URL in the profile. Twitter allows you to add up to 160 characters for your bio. This is an area you should put some thought into. As well as introducing yourself you should add something about the niche you are targeting.

An advanced tip is to change the profile background. Most people couldn’t be bothered doing this so this one small change can help you stand out from the crowd. Not only can you change the background color, you can also add a picture. This could be a picture of yourself, your product or one that just sets a theme.

If you set up your profile well and provide useful tweets that add value you are likely to build an army of followers as well as make some extra sales and get increased traffic to your website along the way.

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So a variety of solutions have appeared over the years to make it harder for the bad guys to win. There are a number of free services that will cloak your link for you, like TinyURL, KlasLink, and others (some of which are paid services), which serve the dual purpose of hiding your ID and shortening a very long link into a tidy bit of more manageable code. While handy, surfers are becoming more familiar with them, and jump to the instant (and understandable) conclusion that clicking on one of these links is going to take them directly to a sales page. Unless their credit cards are already out of their wallets and poised for service, most people are going to choose to forego the sales pitch, and your persuasive copy will never have a chance to work its magic. 

There are also several small software programs that will cloak your link – of variable usefulness and stability. Although you can download them for free, you’re left with the same problem of not being able to customize the code to de-emphasize the fact that the link is a sales tool.

The best solution I’ve found is a bit of php code that will give you everything you want, with a single initial setup and no cost involved. You don’t even have to know anything about php coding. As long as you know how to upload a file, you’re gold. Here’s how to do it:

Begin by logging in to your host account. Create a directory/folder under your main domain name and call it “recommends” (or any variation you prefer; “likes,” “suggests,” etc.). Whatever you call this directory will be viewable by your visitors, so pick something pithy and upbeat.

Let’s say your domain name is http://marketersdream.com. In your FTP program or on your cpanel, whichever you’re using to access your site files, right click on marketersdream and select ‘create folder,’ then give it the name you’ve decided on. Let’s say you name it “recommends.”

Now you have a path that looks like this: http://marketersdream.com/recommends.

Let’s say you now want to promote a product called “winzip.” You create a directory under the recommends directory and call it “winzip.” Now you have a path like this: http://marketersdream.com/recommends/winzip.

Nearly done! Now all you need is an index.php file that redirects the user to your affiliate link. Here’s how you do that:

In Notepad, make a file and name it “index.php.” Here is all that should be in that file:

header(“Location: YOURCOMPLETEAFFILIATELINK”);
exit();
?>

Whatever the affiliate program you joined gave you as your unique affiliate link, just paste it over the capital letters above, making sure it includes the http:// part. If you wish to take the cloaking one step further, you can cloak your affiliate link with something like TinyURL, then paste THAT code over the capital letters. That way you ensure that your affiliate ID can’t be seen at any step during the redirection process.

So, in our example, you would paste your complete affiliate link for the “winzip” product over the capital letters in the code, save the file as index.php, then upload it into the http://marketersdream.com/recommends/winzip directory that you just created.

You’re finished. Now, whenever anyone clicks on the link http://marketersdream.com/recommends/winzip, they will be redirected to your affiliate page at Winzip. In future, with each new product you’re promoting, simply create a new folder under “recommends,” name it after the affiliate product, and upload the index.php file with the new affiliate link. Quick setup, easy solution, no cost. Just like it says on the box!

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Yes, it is possible to become a successful internet marketer and make good money, but it’s not an overnight short path to riches that some may have you believe. There is a lot of learning that has to happen as well as hard work on your part to find the success and duplicate it again and again.

There are three stages of internet marketing that you will go through and I’ll explain them here so you understand what’s ahead for you in your big career change.

Stage 1: Information overload and paralysis by analysis 

You start off by making the decision to become an internet marketer. For some, it’s an easy decision and for others it’s hard. Either way, you have to decide to go all the way with it – not just dabble. Sticking your toe in and running the other way the minute you notice the water is a little cold will not get you the results you really desire.

You start reading sales pages and buying products to help you learn the market. They all promise great results if you’ll only take the time to read and follow their instructions. You’re excited because you see the potential. So what happens is you keep buying, keep trying the various business models being promoted, hop from one thing to the next and never give any of them more than 25% of your attention.

You’re now on dozens of marketers’ lists and you spend a good portion of your day reading their emails and following up on their latest promotions. You’re afraid not to read them or you might miss something. There has been so much information coming your way and you’re so busy trying to keep up and absorb it all that you don’t get anything accomplished.

Stage 2: Take focused action

The first stage lasts until one day you wake up and ask yourself what you’re doing and how come you’re not doing anything to make some real money yet. Some people jump ship before they reach this point. But you’ve realized it’s time to opt-out of most of the lists you’re on, pick a business model that resonates with you, become more focused in your learning (and spend less time on it), and begin taking focused action.

You’re fully committed to the one path you’ve chosen and you “drill deep:, and make some mistakes but have consistent success. This is when it starts getting fun, especially when you see consistent money coming into your PayPal account.

Stage 3: Fine tune and make it hands off

Now that you’re having success with the business model you’ve chosen, you will automate it as much as you can. Your emails go out through an autoresponder, your content is automatically delivered to your clients and subscribers, and you’ve got all your systems in place. You can easily duplicate what you’ve done because you’ve created templates, action sheets, and know all the shortcuts.

You are also building a team to work with you. You have a graphic designer, website maker, and article/blog post/ ebook writers at your disposal. You’ve built relationships with other internet marketers and have affiliates.

Next you’re starting a coaching program to help the new internet marketers do what you’ve done. You remember what it was like to be in stage 1, don’t you?

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This may seem very basic promotion and marketing information for many of you who have been working on line for any length of time. It seems that many others just have not totally figured out how to go about promoting effectively.

When you promote a bare affiliate link, the potential customer clicks on the link and goes to the site. They either buy at the sales page or surf on never to return The percentage of sales for first-time visitors is very low.

Whatever effort including money and time that you put forth to get the customer to that sales page is gone. That potential customer has been lost to you forever. 

Here’s a much more profitable approach:

- Invest some money and purchase a good, dependable auto-responder service. A simple search of the internet will provide you many options. Staying with one of the better known ones will probably prove to be your best investment.

- Get their name and email address by sending them to a lead capture page. These are simple to set up and there are even some free software programs that will provide you one by simply filling in some information about your site.

- After signing up to your auto-responder on the lead capture page, they are sent a welcome message with the link you are promoting, and they then go to the sales page.

- They are sent a series of follow-up messages over a period of days and weeks. Your offer is seen again and again by them. You will probably want to include additional, related offers for them to review also.

- Multiple exposures to your offer has been proven to be much more effective to over coming sales resistance. As many as seven messages may be needed according to some research. Remember, the “Squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

This approach of first capturing their name and email address on your list will turn out to be much more profitable to you in your promotion and marketing efforts.

Your sales will increase because you have captured their name and email address and are able to remind them of your product or service over and over again with personalized messages which are sent out automatically by your auto-responder at pre-set intervals.

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Perhaps you do not understand the various ways you can utilize these many types of social media to brand yourself and expand your business. Here are 7 types of Internet social media you should be doing everyday.

1. Blogging

Your competition has a blog and so should you. Blogs can serve many purposes. A couple of key points are host your own blog and consistently add fresh content. Never let your blog go stale.

2. Social Networking

My Space and Facebook are 2 of the largest. Building relationships online are a big part of having a successful Internet business. Social networking allows you to hang out with people that have similar interests to you.

3. Micro Blogging

Twitter.com is a combination of social networking and blogging. Building a large list of followers is a great way to meet people and increase traffic to your blog and websites. Plus it is fun to Tweet!

4. Social Bookmarking

Directories such as Digg and Technorati serve as search engine bait for your blog posts and for new traffic from people who read your blog articles. Bookmarking a blog post is very easy to do and the rewards can pay off for years to come.

5. Discussion Forums

This really was one of the first forms of social media and still is a great way to learn about the niche of your business and to drive traffic to it. Hanging out in discussion forums can be addictive so be careful to use them the right way and not waste time. There is an art to forum marketing and you must learn to do it correctly, but the benefits are many.

6. Email Marketing

There has always been money in having a list. The trick is to build relationships with your list and then sell to it after you have done that. For that reason we include it in social media. Today you can add video, audio, graphics, and other things to make your email more interactive.

7. Video Marketing

When Google bought YouTube everyone was put on notice that video marketing was going to be important. Today internet marketers can drive traffic and build credibility by adding videos to their blog and website.

This is 7 forms of social media you must be using everyday to build your Internet business. The most successful Internet marketers already are!

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It’s incredibly easy to get distracted and confused. There is so much information and so many enticing promises crowding the virtual airwaves, most of it uploaded by people whose primary interest is in separating you from your money. They want you to hurry up and get that website up (just purchase their easy template program!), launch that blog (just a “pittance” a month for their consultation services!), sign up for their affiliate wares, buy their “get-it-for-a-steal” product that will automate everything for you, and once it’s all set up, which they assure you will take but a single enjoyable afternoon of your time, the money will start pouring in like a financial tsunami!

Well, dealing with information overload and hype is a topic for another article (or ten). Right now you need to be aware of a vital truth that gets lost in all the hoopla: until you have a product to market, a targeted group of people to market it to, and the knowledge of how to get these things, you will spin your wheels furiously and not move forward a single inch.
When you’re first starting out, it’s probably best to steer clear of the tough markets to break into, like IM. There’s money to be made there, no question, but the competition is cutthroat, and you might want to get your feet wet by concentrating on a niche that’s less saturated – specialty items, hobby stuff – doesn’t really matter what it is, you’ll probably find somebody somewhere wants to buy it. For all you know there’s a dedicated group of one-eyed, hermaphroditic underwater pole vaulters with shingles who get together once a month in Kissimmee to swap handmade dolls made from used dog beds. Bet they could use a good source of flea shampoo. Sell it to them! Find a starving niche, feed them, make a good income.

But a further recommendation is that you stick to those niches you have an interest in personally. It takes some dedicated forum hopping to get to know your target niche well enough to sell them what they really need and want; you have to get thoroughly inside their heads. If you couldn’t care less about the relative depths of the dimples on golf balls, you’re going to be bored witless trolling the forums that talk about nothing else. Why burn the little candle of your life illuminating some corner wherein you have no interest?

So how do you go about finding a “hot” niche that you can actually get excited about? It takes some research to be sure that, just because you’re passionate about something, there’s enough other people out there dying to spend money on it too. Or even that they have any money to spend.

Start with Clickbank. They have a huge selection of products that you can be promoting, and you know there’s already a demand for them. But you want to find the right products for you. Stay away from the products that have high gravities (“high gravity” means there’s already a ton of affiliates out there selling the stuff). The numbers you should look for vary among the experts, but a good range seems to be minimum 30, maximum 200. This means that it’s probably a niche with a demand but not too much competition.

Once you’ve found one you’d like to pursue, you’ll want to check how many people are actually searching for this niche on a monthly basis. Go to the sales page and make a list of the keywords that are being used for this niche. There are a number of keyword tracking tools available online – Wordtracker is a popular one. They have a great free trial version you can use until you’re ready to go pro. Alternatively, you can use Google’s keyword tool. Then, put the keywords in quotes and plug them into Google’s search engine. You’ll be able to see how many competing sites are already out there.

So here’s a little formula: (monthly searches/competing sites) X monthly searches = KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator). If your KEI is 100 or greater, then that’s a niche you can hope to make some money in.

Finally, you’re ready to dive into those forums dedicated to the niche you’re after and get into the heads of your future customers. Do a search on Google: niche + forum. If you can’t find a forum, drop that niche and move on. If you do, get inside and start looking around. If the forum seems to be comprised of people who have no money to spend – kids, college students, people on unemployment – on to the next!

Keep an eye peeled for hot button words, like “problem”, “solution”, “how do I…?”, “where do I go…?”, “issue with…”, “I wish I had…” and so on. Read the sticky posts, read the posts that have the most replies. Find out what the people talk about the most, what they need, want, and wish they knew where to go to get. Maybe it’s just information – see what kinds of questions they’re asking, go research the answers, and put them in a little ebook you can sell them for $7. Participate in the forum if you can be at all helpful – it’s OK to have a link to your site in your signature, but don’t point it out. Get to be known as a source of help and information first – win their trust. The business will follow.

That’s basically it. Find the niche, check if it’s viable, find out what they’re looking for, and either build a site around an existing product or create your own. Then market the living daylights out of it.

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