by Melih Oztalay

Back in 1994 after you created a website for your business, marketing was fairly simple. Generally you would make changes to your HTML code for search engine optimization and for the most part promoted your website through offline methods. These may have included business cards, letterhead, print advertising and other such methods. Whether or not your site was listed on the only search engine, Yahoo, at the time was purely based on how well you optimized our web pages. If you did a good job then multiple pages of your site would be listed consecutively for a search.

Twelve years later in 2006 the entire perspective of marketing your site on the web has become a science requiring a degree. Although, we are all eager to market our website on the web we are somewhat unclear how to accomplish this task through a maze of policies set by the Big 3 search engines – Google, MSN and Yahoo. Most businesses would first seek out professional advice. In the process of seeking professional Internet Marketing advice, your story may look something like this.

“By now I had heard about pay-per-click, something called Ad Sense, link exchanges, banner advertising and it all sounds quite confusing. After all as a business owner, my forte is to run my company, not try and figure out how to market a website on the Internet. As I seek out professional advice I get quite a variety of different stories. One person calls themselves Internet marketer and the only thing they provide is Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns. The next person I speak to also consider their business to be in Internet Marketing, yet the only service provided is Search Engine Optimization. Even that term was somewhat vaguely defined to me. I continue to hear about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but it seems to vary from changes to our website to advertising on the web. I am most definitely puzzled at this point. Can anyone describe what Internet Marketing is actually about?�

Advertising and Marketing has always been handled by professional firms that have college educated individuals and understand the difference between Advertising and Marketing. In case you are wondering, here are the definitions of Advertising and Marketing.

Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service.

Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

One of the primary issues of advertising and marketing on the Internet is that you may not necessarily reach someone educated in the field of advertising and marketing. Instead it is someone that has educated themselves about a particular area of Internet Marketing. For instance they may have specialized in Affiliate Marketing or Pay-Per-Click campaigns while another individual may know more about making changes to your website for search engine optimization. Currently these types of services are fragmented and they do require someone with the appropriate skills to manage an entire Internet marketing campaign.

If we take a look at all the different areas of Internet marketing you will find the following in your list:

Research, Analysis, Planning and Strategy
We need to research key phrases and look at the data to determine our title and description.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I believe it is safe to say that SEO is not advertising on the web. SEO is strictly modifications to your HTML code and website. Making sure your website is HTML validated, density checks, the keywords, phrases, content, alt descriptions, anchor titles and so on are in place for the entire website.

Internet Marketing
This is the actual process of promotion as the definition of marketing was described earlier. Some would call this Natural Propagation Marketing, others will call it Organic marketing. With this form of marketing you can rest assured the shelf life of the efforts put forth can be measured in years.

Internet Advertising
Although, the shelf life of Internet advertising can be measured in seconds and can hemorrhage a business financially, there are three areas of Internet advertising. The first would be to utilize an Internet Advertising Network (IAN) to submit a variety of banners through out a variety of websites in order to narrow your advertising to an area with the most response. Another area is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns such as Google Ad Sense or Yahoo Search Marketing. Lastly, you may consider direct advertising on websites that you have found to be of value to your business with high page ranking.

Management & Reporting
It is necessary to monitor all the various activities you are pursuing on the web. Internet marketing gives us the ability to measure almost all aspects of our advertising and marketing campaigns with the push of a button. You will want to keep an eye on your website statistics, check your Google page rank, your Alexa traffic ranking, and your link popularity overall to name a few.

If we consider all the various parts that are required for proper business Internet marketing, you will find the industry moving towards consolidation in the future. Equally, we will find that advertising and marketing on the web will eventually fall back to educated professionals who not only understand advertising and marketing, but will now include their education in Internet marketing as well.

by Barrie Pole

What are the easy answers to Internet Marketing?

Got a Website? Retail sales not where you think they should be? How you can increase traffic to your Website is the hottest topic on the internet today. There are those people out there that will tell you that they have the secret answers to driving traffic to your Website. They will also send you hundreds or thousands of hits to your site for “Free”. It only costs you $47 or $197 or what ever. Not exactly free, not exactly the answer.

Are you tired of all the misleading hype aimed at your pocket and not at your Website? How do you filter out all the hyperbole and find a solution to Website traffic. There is no easy answer, is the answer. Don’t go anywhere, now that you know there are no easy answers. Stick around and see what you can do to drive Website traffic to your site.

One of the things you can do is Surf the internet on those ubiquitous Auto Surf sites. You can rack up lots of surfing credits so that your site can be shown to hundreds of other people who are out there surfing to gain credits for their websites. Seems like a vicious circle with no one clicking thru to see the actual site.

Getting financially burned on the internet is a real and ever present threat. I have fallen prey to unscrupulous hypesters. The old adage “sounds too good to be true” is still very true for internet marketing. Buyer beware was never more appropriate in these days of greed and misrepresenting facts. So what do you do to help your business?

Search engine rankings are very important. Increasing your ranking is on everyone’s addenda. Malicious marketers are out for your dollars and promise to put you in the top 10 rankings in major search engines for internet marketing. They are always hitting you with quick get rich schemes. Some of these marketing schemes are not legal, ethical or moral. I am not hyping a return to the good ol’ days. They are gone for sure as far as the internet marketing is concerned. Nor am I content to do nothing in an attempt to steer traffic to my site.

There are those that will tell you the internet is saturated with article content. Content is King is still true today. Saturation of the internet with articles may be true to some extent, but the internet is not saturated with quality articles. Blog trending is on the rise and content is important. The honest approach to driving traffic to your site is to publish articles.

Oh, you say you are not a writer. You would be surprised to find that once you find your “hot button” or passion with which you are familiar, and you want to share. If you don’t have the stamina to sit and write an article, there are “Ghost” writers out there who will write about any topic that you want. Sure it does cost you some dollars, but it is a way for you to publish articles and can get your two cents worth into the internet. One down side of articles written by non professionals is the continual annoying avalanche of clichés. I dislike clichés and avoid them like the plague.

Pick a topic that you are passionate about. Something that you can speak about with some authority is the place to start. Remember the internet is all about information. You don’t need to have a physical product that you need to warehouse. You can drive people to your Website to have them click thru to your info-link. The info-link is the real answer to writing articles. So where do you point people in the content of your article. The resource box, is the most important part of an article. Regardless of what you are concentrating your article on, the gist of the article should be good honest content, but incomplete.

You want the reader to want to get to the end of the article so they can find out where to get more information. You do that in the resource box. Wet the reader’s appetite in the content but leave them a link in the resource box so they can click thru to find out more.

In conclusion, you can write good content articles. Find your passion, address challenges within the article and let the reader link on to get more info.

by Michael Fleischner 

When marketing your product or service, you need to have a firm understanding of your audience, the message you want to deliver, the offer you’re willing to make, and the optimal timing for your marketing campaign.

Too often novice marketers, even marketing veterans, make costly mistakes that result in poor performance of their marketing campaign. Common marketing mistakes can be avoided with adequate planning, attention to detail, and ongoing measurement and evaluation.

If you’re considering a traditional marketing campaign, an Internet marketing campaign, or something that’s never been tried before, be sure to avoid these common marketing mistakes.

1. Timing. You may have a great list, a fantastic offer, and even a well designed marketing piece, but if your timing is off, so too will be your results. As an experienced marketer, I have seen some very expensive marketing campaigns that were very compelling but failed to produce results. This is because the campaign reached consumers at a time in which they had no interest in buying the product. For example, trying to sell snow shovels in July would not be considered good timing.

2. Failure to Test Your Headline. As the first thing your prospect usually reads, the headline is essential for luring your prospective buyer into the message, your offer, and the action you want them to take. Regardless of the medium, you should continually test your headlines (or subject lines) by running split tests and evaluating response. This ensures that your marketing message attracts the largest number of prospective buyers.

3. Failure to Test Your Offer. In direct marketing, the offer is directly correlated to 40% of your response. If you have the right offer, people respond. There are other factors to consider as well, but providing a compelling offer is required in most instances. Offers can range from discounts to “hurry while supplies last�, but the commonality remains. Test your offers for optimizing response.

4. Having a Good List. Having the best offer and award-winning design is not enough. For many types of marketing campaigns, success is directly tied to having a targeted list. With today’s sophisticated list generation tools, you can acquire lists that are highly segmented based on demographics, psychographics, buying behavior, and many other characteristics. The key here is not to be penny wise and pound foolish. If you’re wondering where to invest your marketing dollars, spend them on developing a good house list (names you acquire on your own) or by renting/purchasing a well segmented marketing list.

5. Relying on a Single Communication. On average, consumers are hit with over 2,000 marketing messages everyday. In fact, recent studies have indicated that consumers need to see your marketing message an average of 12 times before they take notice. If there is any truth to the claim in part or in whole, it means that you must communicate to prospects on a regular basis. Placing a single ad in the newspaper or sending a single email cannot deliver effective results. Determine the media that prospects use to gather information and develop an ongoing campaign that works within your budget.

6. Not Measuring Campaign Effectiveness. Over time, your business is going to do a lot of marketing. Even if you are a small business wondering how you’re going to communicate to a prospective audience, you’re going to eventually have some type of communication. Regardless of the marketing campaign size or expense, you need to track your results. This can be done with a simple spreadsheet or a multi-million dollar CRM system. The bottom line is you need to record what works and what doesn’t so that you can improve your results in the future.

7. Failure to Continue the Dialogue. After consulting for a number of large companies, I’m still amazed at how many fail to communicate to customers on an ongoing basis. Often times, consumers or businesses only hear from the seller when its time to buy again. If you have an established customer base, chances are you’ve worked hard to acquire them. You should be spending some of your marketing budget to retain them. Be sure to open a dialogue with customers, solicit their feedback, and communicate with them regularly. This will help to build your business over the long-term.

If you’re new to marketing, have experience as a marketing professional, or simply want to improve your current marketing results, be sure to learn from the mistakes of others. To be successful, continually work towards improving your marketing effectiveness. Avoid the 7 most common marketing mistakes, and you’re on your way to delivering tangible results.

by Alexis Dawes
While everybody wants their site to receive a top 10 ranking in Google, it’s just not possible for everyone.

And this is especially true if you’ve got a brand new site. New sites that have been crawled by the Googlebot are sometimes given a decent ranking in Google for a few days before they plunge to the depths of Neverworld.

What a TEASE that Google is!

The unknowing webmaster thinks they’ve hit paydirt with an almost instantaneous top 20-30 listing. Then one day - POOF - their site is gone as fast as it arrived.

Now the webmaster has to prove that the site has staying power by getting links from other sites within its niche. Not just any links. Links from sites with a decent PageRank would really do the trick. Getting listed in the infamous Yahoo! or Open Directory would be even better.

That’s what the experts constantly tell us. And in fact, it’s all 100% true.

However as the old saying goes… There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

One of the things I teach my readers is that your site doesn’t necessarily need a top 10 position in Google in order for you to be successful.

You can get your marketing message listed in Google’s top 10 results for your targeted keyword, and still get a ton of traffic to your web site.

Let me explain how it works…

1) You advertise on a specific site. (I’ll tell you about this site in a few moments.) This advertisement will promote your web site;

2) Your advertisement get’s spidered by the Googlebot.

3) Your advertisement receives a top Google ranking for your targeted keyword.

4) People see your advertisement in Google, and click on to your actual web site.

5) And this has NOTHING to do with placing an AdWords advertisement. It’s a fantastic little loophole that most people don’t know about. And I’ve seen it work consistently for many different niches.

Article Tip
This loophole works because–

1) Google LOVES itself.

2) Google trusts that expert researchers are going to lead searchers to the right tools.

You see Google has an interesting service called Google Answers (http://answers.google.com/answers/).

Users submit specific questions to Google Answers, and specify how much they’re willing to pay for the answer. They accept questions on all types of topics ranging from arts and entertainment, business, health, science, and so on.

Google has an arsenal of 500 researchers who answer these questions.

While Google isn’t accepting any more researchers, anybody with a Google account can post comments answering questions. People who post comments don’t get paid like researchers, but that’s not the important part.

Now here’s where it gets juicy–

I’ve noticed that Google loves to list questions and answers from Google Answers within their top 10 search results.

For example, somebody posted a query saying that they needed a list of brokers who buy and sell used LED boards. You can view the query here: (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=458689)

I ran a search on Google for the keyphrase ‘LED boards’ and sure enough, this exact query from Google Answers showed up in the #2 position.

Any LED board broker could get a ton a free publicity here.

All they’d have to do is post a comment to this query listing their company as broker of LED boards. You can even list URL’s in the comment.

And VOILA your job is done.

Your marketing message is listed in the #2 position under an extremely targeted keyphrase.

It’s free, and you didn’t have to break a sweat to do it. You simply added some information about your site, and got instant rank.

[u]Making this technique work for you.[/u

Google Answers receives many new queries every day.

Your job is to keep an eagle eye out for queries that you can post comments to, referring people back to your site.

But it’s important to do a quick check several times a week.

It took less than 2 weeks from the time the LED board question was posted, till it reached the #2 position in Google’s main search.

You want to make sure you get prime advertising space before the query get’s a top 10 ranking. This way you maximize how much traffic you receive.

Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And it’s not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.

I take this example from Google because I’ve experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven’t exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here.

What’s that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but it’s a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. It’s not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.

Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.

Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.

So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at this link are valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com , a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.

They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Google’s robot called ‘Googlebot’ often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don’t go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.

Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.

Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.