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
