gainfully unemployed » internet marketing

Are You a Blogger or an Internet Marketer?

chris — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:28:08 +0000

I don’t really know if there is a truly distinct difference between a blogger and an Internet marketer, since most bloggers delve into Internet marketing when they want to start monetizing the traffic that comes to their blogs.

Still, I think it’s an interesting question.

It seems to me that bloggers write for themselves and for their audience, whereas in the marketing realm the largest concern is supporting the product you are selling. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but it seems that if there is a distinction between the way the content is created in blogging vs marketing, that would be one way to put it.

To be honest, I think I enjoy the marketing aspect of creating content the most. To me, it’s fun to create great content and build traffic to it and watch it move up the search results pages, get a lot of traffic, and convert.

It think it’s important to keep a solid mixture of both Internet marketing mentality and the blogging mentality in your online content creation or whatever it is you do online to earn income. The reason is because people more than ever crave authenticity.

If you can provide an authentic voice–truthful reviews, incredible value without really asking for anything in return (since if you do it right, you will get more back than you give), and providing useful information–then you will be very successful in Internet marketing or blogging.

Marketing your Internet Business with a Cool App

chris — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:18:47 +0000

Internet marketers, at least some of the smart ones, have always seemed to be able to come up with clever ways to promote their websites.

One way to promote your service or product is to create an online application or website that does something interesting or provides some value or entertainment for visitors.

Everyone likes a clever commercial.

Well, doing something interesting can be your clever commercial and a good way to establish some goodwill with potential clients.

An example of building an app that does something very simple for people while also getting the word out about a company is DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.

Every once in a while, you visit a site that won’t load and you try to reload and reload with no success. At downloadforeveryone, you type in the website in question to see if the site is down for everyone or just for you.

Below the search query, there is a link to Site5 Web Hosting, a small company, with a message that reads:

“We Guarantee Our Uptime! Switch to Site5 Web Hosting!”

It’s a very simple thing that can be useful in some instances, and it is a clever and simple thing for a company to do. People using the tool may not necessarily be thinking about hosting a website, but they are interested in checking downtime of sites they’re interested in (ie facebook, twitter, and other social networking sites).

Still, when these same people (who may easily become regular users of the simple tool) decide they want to buy hosting for a website, they may decide to purchase a plan from this company.

This is a good example of a company providing a free tool (content) in order to gain awareness, provide value, and establish goodwill with potential future paying customers.

9 Ways to Be a Better Internet Marketer and Blogger

chris — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:11:14 +0000

Create Valuable Content and You Will Succeed Online

These are a few points I have been thinking about for some time now that I believe will make you a better blogger and internet marketer.

Create Value – This is simple, right? Well, not really, but the idea of it is. Create something that helps people solve a problem or provides them with useful information that adds immediate value to their life. This is the kind of thing people will pay for. I know I will.

Give Give Give - Be generous. The beauty of the Internet is that it’s a platform that reaches almost everywhere. If you give 110% of yourself on the internet, you’re giving it to hundreds or thousands of people.

The more you give, the more you will get back–nowhere is this more true than online. Build trust and authenticity by giving. When you’re thinking of a product, don’t think about what you want to make, think about what your audience needs, and of course, what they will pay for.

Try Interesting Things – There are thousands of sites, businesses, blogs, and sales pages popping up every day. Try something that’s never been done before. Put your own spin on things. It’s so cheap that there’s no such thing as big mistakes. Being interesting will help you stick out in a crowded (and extremely competitive) business.

Don’t Be Boring – Don’t be antiseptic. Inspire people, make them laugh, entertain and enlighten them, but most importantly, let your personality (or eccentricity) shine through. Boring doesn’t make friends, so why would you think it makes sales?

Be Transparent – Why not be sincere and honest? Being honest with people is the difference between making a few bucks on a one time transaction versus having a customer who comes back to buy your products repeatedly and has such a good experience that she tells all her friends to buy from you too. Besides, transparency is easy–all you have to do is be yourself. People respect this and trust this.

Make Partnerships – Go out and find other people doing similar things to you and see if you can help them out. Offering to help someone or simply extending your hand is the seed of a partnership. It’s hard to do things on your own.

Make Friends – If you’re running your business well, you will have a lot of friends. Go out of your way to make some friends. Besides, who do you think is going to help you sell your next great idea? Networking is key and will help you find work, new projects, and opportunities.

Have Fun with What You’re Selling – Enthusiasm sells itself and makes your job easier. Doing something you are genuinely interested in energizes your business.

Work Hard and go the Extra Mile – When you think you are done with your blog post or sales page, sit back and take a few minutes before you publish it. Is there something you can add that will make the post a little bit more interesting or helpful? Maybe you skimped a little on research.

Maybe there’s another resource you can link to that will help your reader out a little bit more. These tiny details are what make people bookmark your posts, pass them to their friends, and encourage people to be long term readers and subscribers.

It’s all about the audience. This is the first thing we forget.

img courtesy of bizior at stock.xchng

Freelance Resources at Freelance Switch

chris — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:14:11 +0000

Freelance Switch is a website I check out at least once a month to find up-to-date articles about how to manage the freelance lifestyle–and folks, it is a lifestyle.

There are always useful articles about things that concern freelancers and internet business owners written by people who know first-hand what they’re talking about.

Here are a few posts that have helped me and may help you.

Freelancers: Do you need a business plan? Maybe

9 Ways to Make Your Writing More Compelling. Grab onto your readers with a vice-like grip.

Marketing Your Website with Search Engine Optimization. This is as good a basic primer on SEO for your web business as I’ve seen anywhere. It is a very uncomplicated look at making your site more accesible and attractive to your visitors and the search engines.

You would do well to subscribe to Freelance Switch’s feed or email list to get up to date info about freelancing.

6 Online Business Myths that are Way Off

chris — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:27:33 +0000

Just like any other human venture, online business is burdened with collective beliefs, common knowledge, and myths that just are not true. Here are a few of the myths.

1) Succeeding in online business is easy. This may be a point that I haven’t quite hammered home on this site. In fact, I may make internet business seem a little easier than it really is. This is far from the truth. Internet business is just as hard as any business out there, just as competitive, and can be just as demoralizing. That being said, if you are a superstar or a hard worker with great ideas, you will climb to the top.

2) Online business takes a different skill set than “normal” business. Online business is just that, business. Everyone who has a website talks about “social media” and “web 2.0″ and the amazing benefits tools like Facebook and Twitter create for online businesses. These tools do create a lot of amazing opportunity for those who know how to use them to stay connected to their audience.

But if you don’t know how to connect to people in the first place or have a valuable service or product to offer, then these tools are not going to magically help you get your message out and make sales for you.

If you have sales skills or marketing skills or the ability to rally people around you, then you will be able to transition right into the internet business world. The same rules apply. Create a great product, give great service, and find the people interested in your product. Hit it out of the park for people, and you will win.

The only difference is that instead of having customers come into your store on the street, your store is now visiting your target audience via computer screen in their living rooms. Or on a beach in Jamaica that has wifi.

3) Online business is for tech people. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Sure, it helps to have someone who knows their way around a computer, but internet tools are so easy to use that you really do not need much technical or design expertise. If you can use a keyboard and a mouse and are willing to put in the effort and learn about things you don’t know much about, then you will be able to create a viable online business.

Working on the internet can also consist of your direct skill set. ?If you’re a writer, you can start a freelance writing business, and if you are a web designer or social media pro, you can do the same. ?You can even become an information entrepreneur and create informative blogs based on different themes and monetize them in many different ways. ?For the content writers out there, read my post about how to make money with Hubpages.

4) Internet marketing is just spam. Sure there is a lot of spam out there, but there are hundreds of thousands of legitimate companies doing business online. Every single brand name company has an internet presence. If they don’t, then they don’t exist. There is nothing shady about doing business online. In fact, I would be surprised if in two years you will be able to do any business at all without using the internet.

As people gravitate more and more to the web to do their shopping, to find their directions, to communicate with their friends, and to plan trips and flights, there will be more opportunities for online businesses of all kinds. If you aren’t preparing your small business for an all-internet world, then you may be left behind.

5) I can’t start an online business because the Internet is too crowded. The internet is crowded and it gets more crowded every day. But guess what, the streets of your town are also crowded with businesses, but new businesses start and old businesses fold every day.

Google and other search engines are becoming better at weeding out the fraudulent, worthless, and spam sites, which makes it easier for the high quality online businesses to shine. Search engine traffic is a huge part of success on the internet and if you play by the rules and create a great product, service, or entertainment, you will rise to the top, as the cream often does.

6) I don’t have time to start my online business. Building an online presence for your small business is vital to your success going forward. There are few companies that will be able to avoid doing business online. A website or an e-commerce store selling your product should be a priority for you.

A good (and easy way) to start is by creating a blog. You can even do it for free. Start a free blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com, find a custom theme online so it looks a little more professional, and start pumping out content and your message. There are so many things you can do with a blog to promote your company and your brand. Even just getting out there and promoting yourself will help you a great deal.

Just like in anything, the people who work the hardest and test different ways of doing business to find what works will be the most successful. The thing that the internet does for business is the same thing it does for communication–it speeds it up. This means that you can rise quickly, but you can fall just as quickly.

One of the best things the internet provides though is free access to your target audience. You can find and reach out to your community on so many fronts, it’s ridiculous. And you can do much of this for free because all it takes it time and the willingness to do good work. Getting your message out and driving targeted traffic to your web presence are both important element in the online game. But having an amazing product or service is the most important thing.

Create an amazing product with a great story behind it and that fulfills a human need or solves a problem in an interesting or new way, and you just might be the next online success story.

How to Make Money Online

chris — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:16:11 +0000

If you have a blog or website that is getting traffic then you may be looking to make money from that traffic. There are many different ways to make money online with a website or blog. I am not a guru or even an expert, but I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned, which I think is some pretty good knowledge to have starting out in any kind of online business.

How to Make Money Online: Pay Per Click Advertising.

You may have heard of Google Adsense, which is a huge advertising network online. In fact, it probably is the most popular one online for a few reasons. It is rather simple to sign up and it couldn’t be easier to start using. All you have to do once you sign up (besides adhering to the Terms of Service) is put a few lines of javascript code onto your website where you want the advertisements to show. Ads will show up on your pages and will be contextually relevant, meaning they will be (or should be) related to the content published on your website. This advertising platform is popular and a lot of people do quite well with it. It is a pay-per-click ad network, which means that when someone clicks on an ad on your page, you get paid anywhere from $.01 to $10.00, although as you can imagine, the ten dollar clicks are hard to get. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get them.

Many people start with this network because it is simple to get started, but as I mentioned, it isn’t necessarily easy to make money with it. Your website needs to have a lot of daily visitors in order to receive a lot of clicks. One thing you want to keep in mind is that the advertisements displayed on your site will be related to what you write about. So, if you write about electronics you may earn more than if you write book reviews. The reason is that a high end stereo system has a higher profit margin than a paperback book, so an advertiser is willing to pay more for a click to a page selling that product. This last “rule” applies to most online advertising programs and is something to think about as you plan to monetize your website.

Chitika is another ad network that you might consider using as a way of making money with your site. It is similar to Adsense in some respects, but also very different. Many people actually use the two programs together on the same webpages as a way of complementing each other. The easiest way to start using Chitika is by creating Chitika Premium ad units (which only work from traffic from the US and Canada). This kind of ad is not contextually relevant, but rather, behaviorally targeted. This means that the advertisements displayed are related to the keywords that a visitor to your site uses to find your site. In other words, they are based on the search terms someone put into a search engine that led them to your website. This is good because the visitors who see the ads displayed on your site are more targeted by the ad, making them more likely to click them. Chitika Premium works on a pay per click model. Learn more about how Chitika works.

Pay per click programs might work well for you if you receive a lot of traffic from a click-happy audience, but you might also want to consider affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is advertising a product on your website in return for receiving a percentage of the sale amount. This is typically a lot larger than what you may make with other programs, but keep in mind that it is harder to get someone to actually purchase something in contrast to convincing them to click an ad, which is basically just selling their attention for a few moments or minutes. Affiliate marketing is really a different animal and the people who are very successful with this kind of online sales often create email lists, know the importance of copywriting and sales pages, and have knowledge of other less basic sales tactics. But if there is a product that fits in really well with what you write about, it is definitely worth it to create a link to it from your home page or display a banner ad. What might work better is writing a review of the product and posting it on your website.

How to Make Money Online: In-Text Advertising

Have you ever come across a website or blog posting that has a word or a phrase underlines by two blue or green lines? When you hover over the text, a box pops up with a link to a product. This is another form of internet advertising that many people are starting to use as a way to add to their online earnings. If you display this type of ad on you website, you get paid per click. Two companies that run this kind of service are Kontera and InfoLinks.

It is fairly easy to implement this kind of ad to your website–all you have to do is put a few lines of code into the template of your site. Results with this kind of advertising is very mixed. The amount of money you earn really depends on what “niche” you write in, but even then, from my experience, results vary wildly from one day to the next. I wouldn’t really even consider this type of ad if you are just getting started.

How to Make Money Online: Affiliate Marketing.

Two popular affiliate networks are Clickbank and Commission Junction. Clickbank has hundreds maybe thousands of digital products that you can choose from and immediately display links to. If someone purchases a given product through your link, you receive a certain amount of payment. This is a very easy way to get started with affiliate marketing because you can find products you may be able to sell and you don’t have to wait for approval from the creator or the website.

Commission Junction is another affiliate marketing network that is different from Clickbank in many ways, but one of the biggest differences is that they have a lot of well-known name brands with products that you can try to sell. Most of the companies require approval before you can display ads for their products, which means they look at what websites you own in order to determine if you will be a good fit for their program. For some, you will be automatically approved.CJ is also very easy to use, that is to say, it’s easy to implement, not always easy to make money with. Once you are accepted by a chosen company, you gain access to their “creative”: banners and links that may help you sell the product or promote the company. You actually have quite a bit of latitude in how you display their ads. You may want to put a banner ad at the top of the page or in the sidebar and just see what happens, or you may want to include links within your articles and posts.

Some companies that work with CJ are Blockbuster Online, Zappos, Citibank Credit Cards, and hundreds of other companies, many of which you probably recognize. Internet marketing is a tricky business, but there are thousands of ways to make money at it if you learn how to do it. It just takes a little time to learn about the internet sales environment. If you like to test out different methods of selling and don’t mind constantly tweaking your websites in order to optimize them for the best sales, then you will do fine in internet marketing and affiliate sales.

Another way to become an affiliate is to work directly with a company that specializes in one business that you can plug your traffic stream into. One such company is LeadFlash, which specializes in payday loan leads. This is a very smart route to go because the more you can “niche down” or make the thing your selling as targeted as possible, the more sales you will be able to make.

How Do I Start to Make Money Online?

The best way to start making money online is by building an audience. So how do you build an audience? One way to do this is by creating quality content. Well-written posts will not only attract people to your website, but they will also bring the same people back. And when people are impressed with your work or it is useful to them, they may want to share it with their friends and save it to social networking websites. Word of mouth can really help your site grow. Think about the three or four websites that you visit every single week. What are the owners and writers of these sites doing that brings you back? Figure that out and do your best to replicate it. When you land on a website, you often know within a few seconds whether or not you “trust” the site you are on. If you don’t trust the site you are on or relate to it in some way, you’re not going to stick around very long.

The most successful sales people look at their products and sales strategies with the purchaser in mind, not from their own point of view. You are trying to make money by selling something or want to promote a product that you like, but you need to evaluate why someone would want to buy it. What need does it fill? What is the conversation you need to start in order to present the product in the right way? Who are you talking to? Who is the person who is going to buy this product? This is why it helps you immensely to sell a product (or write a blog with pay per click ads) related to something you are familiar with or better yet a product that you yourself would buy. That way you can easily relate to other people who want to buy it.

Creating great content and then promoting it will help you gain an audience and will slowly (or quickly if you’re lucky) move your site up in the search engine rankings. The higher your site pops up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask, the more traffic you’ll get. This brings me back to the first point I made in this article: you need traffic in order to make money online.

Find Out How Much Traffic any Website Receives

chris — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:07:54 +0000

If you do any kind of business online or own a blog and are trying to compete for search engine rankings, then there’s a great tool for you to use that’s free and can be found online.

The tool is a very basic internet traffic estimator that gives you a pretty good idea of how much traffic a given website gets over a thirty day period.

I’ve used the tool with several different websites that I already have a rough estimate of traffic for already, and this tool was pretty close to being right on every time.

The tool can be found at TrafficEstimate.com and all you have to do is put in the URL of the site you want data for. If you are an internet entrepreneur, this is a pretty good way for you to gauge how much traffic a competing site receives.

Online Business Karma

chris — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:27:19 +0000

Online business (much like any other business) is really about give and take.

There is your “give,” which is what you bring to the table: your content, entertainment, or useful information. Then there’s the “take,” which is what you get out of this social transaction.

Here are some typical “gives”:

Information. Most people online are looking for information. Either it’s directions to a restaurant, a movie review, or an article about anything. Good websites provide useful information of some sort.

Entertainment. Another thing people search for online is entertainment. Whether it’s a viral video website or a website with the latest gossip, people actively look for this content. Many websites are based around these themes.

Free Stuff. Many companies, individuals, or websites give away a free product in order to establish a relationship or to get visitors to “opt in” to their email list. The free gift can be an ebook, an informative newsletter, or coupons.

Here are some of the typical “takes”:

Community. Some people just want new readers to become regular visitors to their sites and make friends with like-minded people or those with similar interests, talents, or ideas.

Business. Many websites are set up just to get ad clicks or impressions, or ultimately to convince visitors to buy a product or service.

Profile. Some people want to raise their profile in a certain industry, or distinguish themselves from others in a particular market–in other words, they want to create a brand.

For online article marketers, the give is the informative article they write. Maybe it’s a review of several similar products or it could be a short tutorial on how to start your own website. The take is the link to their website in the signature box at the end of the article.

For someone with a freelance writing website, the give can be informative articles about how to look for writing work, how to write SEO articles, or an ebook about successful strategies for writing for the web. The take would be a link to their writing services.

For someone who owns a video entertainment site, the give is obviously the entertainment. The take typically is advertiser revenue or some kind of membership cost. Internet marketers use the awkward phrase “monetizing traffic”, which basically just means that people who come to a site are subjected to advertisements

You always hear people say, “Content is King.” This is no more true anywhere than online, where search engines operate mostly from “reading” written text.

The better your content–your give–the more successful you will be, that is, the more opportunity you will have to receive something in return.