Internet Marketing Problems

The greatest problem I had in learning about internet marketing is information overload. Once you download a free report or ebook, you get all sorts of emails offering more free reports, informational videos, or memberships. When you click on a link in the email you are taken to a "squeeze page" which requires you to give your name and email address to get the media. When you fill in the form you are sent an email confirming your desire to receive information. Before you get the free information you are sent to a page offering an "incredible" price on another ebook, updated membership, or whatever. Whether or not you buy, you may be sent to another advertisement or two. By the time you are done going through all these advertisements you don't know where you are to get the free media. In the case of memberships, each one has a user name and password. When you get done with all this you don't know where you have been or what you have purchased! If you respond to a free offering keep a log of the url of the site and the name of the person or company making the offering. Then go to your "Documents" file and make a new folder with the name of the person or company making the offering. Put anything you download in that file. Organization is the name of the game, otherwise much of the information you obtain will be lost. Organization is one of my weak points that I have to work on.

Many of the Internet marketing firms will offer free affiliate memberships. These often pay in excess of 50% commissions on anything they sell. You don't need a web site to obtain these commissions, you only have to refer people to the web site. This can be done by placing ads on the search engines. You buy an ad that is placed when someone searches on a key word or phrase like "work at home", or "make money". You have to bid for placement of your ad. The more you are willing to pay, the closer to the top of the first search page of the key phrase your ad will be. You do not pay for the presentation of your ad, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and are sent to the site you are advertising. This is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. All of the major search engines have PPC advertising. These are the "sponsored" ads you see when you make a search. The possibilities here fascinate me. Maybe I will give it a try.

There is a site www.clickbank.com that has over 10,000 products that you can market as an affiliate. It costs nothing to become a member of Click Bank to seek those offering affiliates. The reality is that the most popular affiliate programs already have too many affiliates driving up the cost of PPC advertising, so you have to find a "nitch" where there is demand for the product, but with relatively few affiliates. Once you decide what affiliates you want to promote, you write down all the keywords that a person might search under to find the product you are promoting. Google will help you with this. Click on the link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
I have started a campeigh with Yahoo Search Marketing because my web site host offered $50 free toward a campeigh, though I had to contribute $5 as well. Since my web site http://www.bowstabilizer.net was already no. 1 on the Yahoo "organic" or free search results, there was no point in paying for an ad to popularize that site. I put up another site advertising my Compound Bow Rest & Holder and advertised the new web site. The keywords I chose, bowhunting informaion, are not very popular, so it only cost me 10 cents per click on my ad, which appeared on the first page of the search results of that keyword phrase. This was just a trial to see how the system worked, and it did not drive much traffic to my site.

I think this story is now complete, so I think I will start another topic next. Income tax is coming up shortly so it may be a while.

Vernon Sandel

Internet Marketing 101

Getting Traffic to My Web Site

Having a web site does not mean that anyone will be able to find it. With no traffic to my site I recognized that not only did the Compound Bow Rest & Holder needed to be marketed, but also the web site (http://www.bowstabilizer.net) had to be marketed as well. I had no idea how to go about this. Fortunately, about in Nov 2006 I ran across this advertisement:

I ended up purchasing an ebook in addition to the free material. Although both were helpful, I was too green to put into practice the things they were teaching. What was even more helpful was the flood of emails I got and continue to get advertising ebooks, video courses, and teleconferences, many free but several purchased, which gradually gave me a reasonably good idea of how to drive traffic to my web site.

In a nut shell I learned that first of all the web site had to be optimized for the keywords that one would use to find my site, search engine optimization (SEO). Since the Compound Bow Rest & Holder holds a bow, steadies a bow, and acts as a steady rest, the most relevant keywords were bow steady rest, bow rest, bow stabilizer, and bow holder. To get higher ranking on the search engines, these keywords needed to be used frequently on the title of my site, in the headlines of my site, and in the body of my site. Furthermore, they needed to be listed in the "meta tags" of my site. Meta tags are a list of keywords that are listed at the beginning of the web site program but which do not show up when someone comes to your site. The search engines use these meta tags to help decide which keywords are relevant to the site. These are not the only factors that determine the position your site will show up when someone searches on one of your keywords, but they are important. With this information alone, I was able to become no.1 in both Google and Yahoo search under "bow stabilizer". I am no. 1 under the search term "bow rest" and no.3 under "bow holder" in Yahoo. When I searched under "bow steady rest" didn't even find my site within the first three pages. Looking at my meta tags, I had forgotten to list "bow steady rest". As you can see, meta tags are important. The omission was corrected today.

Google is a completely different situation from Yahoo. Searching under "bow rest" in Google I found my site on page 7. It is widely known that they take into consideration the number and "quality" of incoming links in determining a site's ranking in a given search. If your site has incoming links (a reference that sends the web surfer to your site) from a popular web site, it will give you a higher position on any given search. Getting links is much more difficult than adding keywords to meta tags or adjusting web site content to reflect keywords. You can buy links from some web sites or you can solicit mutual links with other web sites. I have not done this yet.

One of the most valuable things I learned was the existence of an awesome web site that provides many invaluable functions to web site owners. There you can find out which search engines have indexed your site, get an analysis of your web site and instructions to help you improve your search engine placement (search engine optimization, SEO), check your web site's search engine rank, and your site's popularity. They also have utilities to generate meta tags and to "crunch" (make smaller) JPG and GIF files so your site will load faster. All this free! Bookmark this site!

I also learned that email marketing is the way to sell a product. Even with traffic to your web site your conversion rate to a sale is usually quite abysmal. It usually takes at least several contacts by email before you entice a person to buy your product. But first you need an "opt in" list of email addresses. This list is usually obtained by offering something free, usually information, for which the person has to give his email address. Once a list is obtained, emails are sent advertising your product(s). The whole process is automated by an auto-responder program which you can buy or rent. The auto-responder will store the email addresses, confirm the opt in of the person by email, send the information packet, and then allow you to post email letters to everyone in your list. For more information on list building visit List Dot Com.

Getting traffic to a new web site through the search engines is a slow process. Even if your site's host has a program to submit your site to the search engines, you may not be indexed. Although my host claimed to submit my site to over 300 search engines, and later I personally submitted my bowstabilizer.net site to MSN search, it never did get indexed. Apparently you have to be persistent, and then your site may "drop off" a search engine for no apparent reason. Your site should be submitted to the search engines once a month to maintain your listings.

The fastest way to get traffic to a new web site is "pay-per-click" (PPC) advertising. This is sort of an auction in which you bid on keywords that someone would use to search for your site. The ads appear on the sponsored areas of a search page, at the top and right side. Each time a person clicks on your ad you pay the bid amount. The problem with pay per click is that when you bid you do not know what position your ad will appear. The higher the bid and the greater the click through rate (percentage of presentations that get clicked), the closer to the top in general, but with Google other factors also are considered such as the quality of the landing page (page to which the ad points). You set up an account, set the amount you are willing to spend each day, the amount you will pay for a click, and the set the time your ad will start showing. To set up an account, go to the search engine you wish to purchase an ad and search under "pay-per-click", but before you do you should visit this blog. It contains an ebook and a number of videos that will give you more information than you ever wanted to know about PPC advertising.

Well, that is a summary of what I have learned so far. While going through all this I became interested in affiliate marketing. This is a way to make money on the Internet with no product to sell, no shipping, and no customer support. You merely drive traffic to other people's web sites. If they buy something there you get a commission. Perhaps this will be the topic of my next blog.

Vernon Sandel