Five Common Mistakes Committed By Novice Internet Marketers
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Call them growing pains, but people who have been recently introduced to the otherwise promising field of Internet marketing are prone to commit some mistakes which, if they are left unchecked, could prove fatal. Every area of investment has risks like these, and Internet marketing is no different. Of course, education would help you avoid these pitfalls, but there are some areas which only experience would be able to teach.
Don’t be discouraged, however. Internet marketing is a very profitable field. But you have to learn the ins and outs of this trade, and learning often comes with some errors. After all, we learn best from our mistakes.
Here are some of the common blunders that beginning Internet marketers usually make. With this list, you’d hopefully know how to deal with them. As much as possible, do avoid these mistakes, but if it’s too late for that, might as well learn how to control the damages.
1. Believing that a program would make you rich overnight. Well, not necessarily overnight. Some programs are actually a little honest to tell you that it would take a little more time before you strike it big in Internet marketing. However, no program could make you attain online prosperity by the strength of its system alone. No matter how established and respectable that program is, the fact remains that you should be able to invest some effort and commitment to achieve success in this industry. No program will make you rich. Only you yourself are capable of such. Internet marketing programs are only there to give you the tools, and sometimes the network, which you need to succeed. The rest are up to you.
2. Believing that you could earn while you’re sleeping. This isn’t exactly a misguided claim. You could earn while you sleep, through income streams that generate passive, or residual, earnings. But you must make sure that you have an efficient system in place before you could expect such. And the only way to do this is by automating your business. Automation is no easy task, and you will have to make some financial investments for it. Which brings us to…
3. Believing that you could succeed in Internet marketing without spending a single penny. Granted that there are instances when people do make a killing in Internet marketing without doling out some cash, these are exceptions rather than the general rule. The fact of the matter is that this field requires necessary investments that would obligate you to spend. Tools like domain names, web hosting service, autoresponder subscription, scripts and programs, product creation paraphernalia, resale rights, and the likes don’t usually come free. You have to purchase some of them, and the others you have to rent. Additionally, you would have to spend for knowledge in the form of novel eBooks and special reports because another common mistake is…
4. Believing that once you start making profit, you won’t have to do anything else. This is absolutely false. Internet marketing is a constantly evolving field. You have to upgrade yourself to be able to cope up with the challenges ahead, and to keep in step with your competition. Some people fail to improve themselves, hence, their nonchalant attitude have caused their downfall.
5. Believing that Internet marketing is all about the numbers. Though this business is being conducted over the World Wide Web, never lose sight of the fact that you’re still dealing with real people, with real needs, and with real feelings. By realizing this, you’d be able to treat them well, and such would redound to the benefit of your business. The people you would deal with would prove to be important in the future, either as repeat customers, as essential contacts, or as advertising vehicles for your word of mouth campaign.
These mistakes can easily be evaded, but you need a resolute and committed heart for the business. Once you have achieved this, everything should be smooth sailing.
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 8:52 AM,
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Analyze Your Website Activity To Improve Its Efficiency
In an episode of the hit TV series, Desperate Housewives, one of the lead characters tried to explain the neighborhood’s fascination about a seeming suicide case of one of their own. She said that their curiosity is piqued by the ultimate taboo: finding out what your neighbors do inside their own houses. Well, not all manners of spying belong to the realm of the perverse. Some form of “voyeurism” could actually help us in our respective fields.
Take the case of visitor spying in Internet marketing. No, no, no… you’re not expected to pry on the personal details of people who come to visit your site. Only, a peek into their activities while visiting our web pages would greatly aid us in determining whether or not the business model we have adapted is actually working or not.
You see, what our visitors do while in our website would reveal a lot about the efficiency of our web design. Are they going where we want them to go? More specifically, are they clicking what we want them to click? Are they reading what we want them to read? Are they coming from where we expect them to come from? Knowledge of these information would go a long, long way in helping us make some adjustments, whenever such is demanded.
There are many tools that would make this possible. Most web hosting services have traffic analyzers that would deliver for us some useful statistics about our visitors. But more often than not, these are quite wanting as they only show basic numerical facts that are not quite as thorough as what we need. It would be best to invest on more powerful tools that would give you a comprehensive report of your visitor’s activities in your web pages. There are quite a number of these programs available in the market today.
Here are the useful facts that a good spying tool would be able to provide:
* Number of unique visitors to your site. Unique visitors are those who visit your pages for the first time. If you’re consistently getting a good number of them, then your marketing plan is on the right track.
* Number of repeat visitors. Good spying tools would be able to pinpoint recurring IP addresses, hence, they will be able to determine who are new visitors and who are returning ones. If you are consistently attracting a good number of repeat visitors, then something in your site is actually good enough to keep them coming back.
* Amount of time each visitor spends in your site. This would tell you if your web pages are interesting enough to sustain the fascination of those who get to view them. The longer they stay in your site, the more it means that your pages are quite enchanting.
* Referring URLs for each visitor. A good spying tool would be able to tell you from what site a visitor came from before visiting a web page of yours. This would inform you if the focus of your marketing plan is correct. If more visitors are coming from areas that are not covered by your marketing campaign, then perhaps a shift in focus is necessary.
* Each visitor’s exit link. You will also get to know where your visitors go to after gracing your pages. This knowledge would prove invaluable in predicting their behavioral pattern. Knowledge is half the battle won, so they say, and you could make some corresponding adjustments to keep them longer in your site.
* The links your visitors click while in your site. Are your visitors going where you want them to go? This is likewise an invaluable knowledge, especially for websites that are enrolled with the Google AdSense program. You’ll be able to find our which ad links are performing and which are not. Thereafter, you could simply filter out the ad links that aren’t doing well, and reserve valuable real estate in your site for ad links that are more promising.
Knowing what you’re doing right and knowing what you’re doing incorrectly are requisites of sustainable success. In every endeavor, we should always strive to improve ourselves, and this maxim is likewise true for business. Only in knowing can we make the necessary tweaks that could bring our enterprise to the next level. Truly, analyzing our website’s activities is an essential step towards online prosperity.
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 8:46 AM,
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An Introduction To Google AdSense
There was a time when webmasters had but a few options when it came to the subject of earning from their sites. They used to scamper for advertisers whose banners or links they can display in their web pages for meager fees on a per month lease. Not even the advent of affiliate programs was able to provide a sustainable income stream for these people, as affiliate programs back then weren’t as dependable as they are now.
The Internet landscape began to change a couple of years ago with the introduction of Google AdSense. It changed the way of how webmasters earned online, and enterprising Internet businessmen went along for the ride. Today, Google AdSense is one of the most profitable ventures when it comes to making money from the World Wide Web.
But what is Google AdSense and why is everyone raving about it as if it is God’s greatest gift to mankind?
Well, for starters, many actually claim that yes, Google AdSense is actually one of God’s finest creations.
Google AdSense is a Pay Per Click (PPC) program that allows the webmaster to earn every time an ad is clicked. The way it goes is that upon approval of your enrollment for the Google AdSense program, you will be given a code that you should incorporate in your website. This code would generate advertisements which will be displayed on your web pages. Whenever a visitor would click on any of these ads, you stand to earn the corresponding Cost Per Click (CPC) rate for the same.
But Google AdSense does not just send in some ads that they pick out of nowhere. The Google AdSense algorithm will send you contextually relevant advertisements. This means that the ads you pages will fetch are ones that are related to the subject of your site. If your site is about cats, Google AdSense will display ads about cat food, cat grooming, cat merchandise and the likes. Because of this, there is a good chance that your visitors, who came to your site because they’re looking for information about cats, would click on the cat-related ads.
Now, how will Google AdSense know the subject of your website? Is a robot intelligent enough to determine the prevalent topic of an online resource?
Well, yes and no.
You see, the Google AdSense algorithm is designed to pinpoint and distinguish the predominant keywords that abound in your site. If your site is about cats, like in our previous example, then chances are, your pages would be widely populated by the keyword “cat.” Google AdSense will then assign ads that have been grouped under this keyword.
The trick, therefore, is to optimize your pages by making them faithful to a particular subject, and accentuating the said subject through the dominant usage of appropriate keywords. You can’t have a site that deals with “cats” and “dogs” as Google AdSense might just send a mixture of ads that would be less interesting for your visitors.
There are accounts of people earning as much as $25,000 a month from Google AdSense alone. However, there are also accounts of people earning a meager 15 cents for the same period. What determines success under the Google AdSense program? Well, we could summarize these into three components:
* Cost Per Click (CPC) rate. Some ads may pay a mere 2 cents per click, while others pay as much as $50.
* Impressions. This refers to the number of times your page is loaded and the ads appear. Increasing your page impressions lie in increasing the traffic you generate for your site.
* Click Through Rate (CTR). This refers to the number of clicks you’ll get per the number of impressions your page would garner. The higher your CTR, the more successful your Google AdSense campaign will be.
Mastering these three integral factors would most definitely make you realize some handsome profit from the Google AdSense program. All in all, AdSense does make sense, and it is certainly worth the try.
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 8:45 AM,
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A Killer Strategy To Increase Your Page Rank In 3 days
A good 80% of the traffic that your website would garner will come from the search engines. It’s how the Internet works. If a user has no prior idea where to go for his information needs, he’d consult with the search engines by making a query. It is therefore a necessity that your pages should rank high in search engine results, to secure a good chunk of the Internet audience.
Whether you’re maintaining a website for personal reasons or for business, either by selling your own products or promoting your affiliate links, or perhaps dependent on Pay Per Click (PPC) programs, you would have certainly heard about search engine optimization strategies that promised to boost your page rank. You may have even tried some of them before. They range from keyword selection, to meta tag utilization, to blog support, to unilateral links, and even some unconventional means of marketing.
Some of them do work, but others are but myths. And a number of those that actually pay dividends would take some time before they can be realized. Such is the sad fact of the known search engine optimization techniques of today.
But there is one strategy that is guaranteed to get your web pages indexed in a matter of hours to a couple of days. It’s called the Blog/RSS/Ping combo.
Naturally, the tools you will need are a blog, an account that would accept RSS feeds, and a pinging tool. Simply follow the steps below:
1. Create a blog account, preferably with www.blogger.com , which is owned by Google. Google, of course, is the most used search engine in the World Wide Web. This would assure that your blog entries will be prioritized by the Google search engine spiders whenever a relevant query is made.
2. Open an account with www.myyahoo.com and www.mymsn.com . Yahoo and MSN are two of the widely used search engines aside from Google. Additionally, these accounts accept RSS feeds for easy updates on your contents therein.
3. Now, write about something that is related to the subject of your website. Within what you will write, include some links to your web pages.
4. Publish what you have written in your blog. Google’s search engine spiders would pick this up come the next relevant query.
5. Now configure your MyYahoo and MyMSN account to receive the RSS feeds from your blog. A blog entry can automatically be generated as an RSS feed, so you shouldn’t have any troubles here.
6. Go to www.pingomatic.com . Enter your blog’s URL address, as well as the URL addresses for you’re MyYahoo and MyMSN accounts. With the tools in www.pingomatic.com , ping the search engines you will find in the listings. This would inform their respective spiders that new content has been uploaded to the sites you have typed in, and they will check them out the next time a relevant query is made.
7. Sit back, relax, and wait for the rush of traffic that would surely arrive.
The beauty of this strategy is that you’ve got all the major search engines covered. Additionally, since your blog entry contains links to your main website, the volume of traffic that your blog would acquire would also get to know about your website. Also, the fact that your blog’s links are one way would do well for your main website’s search engine page rank.
The result? A higher placement for your website!
It is important to note that you must always repeat the process as much as you could. Do it everyday if you have to, to maintain the favorable position of your blog, and consequently, of your main website.
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 8:45 AM,
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