viral eBooks

posted under by CLYDE
Viral e-books are called "viral" because they can spread as quickly as a flesh eating virus. Of course, flesh eating viruses are bad...e-books are not ;-)

The concept of a viral E-book is quite simple:

Create a short e-book on a hot topic, make sure it has enough good content so that people will read it, load it with affiliate links or what ever it is that you want to promote and give away free resell and giveaway rights to everyone and anyone that wants it!

It works kinda like those free magazines. They don't make the money from magazine sales they make their money from advertising.

Do viral e-books actually work? Do they ever! Some of the biggest names in internet marketing have used viral e-books to get to where they are today.

Whether you like it or not, having your own product gives you more flexibility in your online advertising AND believe it or not, compiling an Ebook is no more then a weeks work part time if done correctly and IF you do it this way the profits will come in for life.

I have checks coming in still from work I did 2 years ago, thanks to the power of residual income affiliate programs and viral marketing Ebooks.

Ok, lets get down to the nitty gritty. What is a viral marketing Ebook and why should you create one?

A viral marketing Ebook is a book which sole purpose is to be spread around the Internet quickly, by any means possible. It's not meant to make you money on the front end. You want other people selling it and giving it away to as many people as possible.

Why?

Because the inside of that book is full of affiliate links to other peoples products and every time someone gives away your book or sells it, (depending on how you want to do it) more people will be seeing your affiliate links, and this is costing you what? NOTHING? Exactly!

The best examples I could give you of this process would be by Yanik Silver. He created 2 marketing books that spread over the Internet like wildfire. He gave everyone who purchased the book for $19 or $17 (depending on the book) the rights to sell it or give it away to their customers.

Needless to say, thousands of people starting selling it and promoting it all over the Internet. To this day, he is still earning good money from that book, plus he became one of the most well known Internet Marketers to date.

So how do you go about creating your own viral marketing Ebook?

Here are the steps.

1) Come up with a product idea based on your affiliate program you've already chosen and are already promoting.

Coming up with ideas isn't hard. For example, and I know I use this example a lot, BUT, If you are going to be promoting a sports betting affiliate program, why not create a book on becoming a successful punter. Then throughout the book, you can recommend your favorite sports betting affiliate program.

101 insider secrets to sports betting
How to bet with other peoples money

A good way to come up with ideas is to look at what others are already selling and mimic that. You dont need to recreate the wheel here, so PLEASE don't make things harder then they have to be.

2) Get the tools you need to succeed

You are going to need a few tools here.

A) A domain name
You want a fairly short domain name that describes the content of your book fairly well.

B) Webhosting
Let me say first, you get what you pay for. This has never been more true then with webhosting. YOU NEED a good reliable webhosting company with 24/7 technical support. If your site goes down and you can't contact anyone to help you get it back up, you will lose sales and a lot of them.

C) Autoresponder
You will need this so you can contact your prospects that don't purchase straight away. This is where you will give away your free course or someway to entice them to give you their email address so you can contact them periodically.

D) Credit card processor
Just use http://www.clickbank.com. This step is too easy. They will let you accept all major credit cards and start an affiliate program for a one time setup fee of under $50. They do take a percentage of every sale, but this is so much cheaper then getting your own merchant account.

Just about everyone selling Ebooks online is using Clickbank.

E) Ebook Software
You will more then likely want to create your book in PDF format so everyone can read it. Some Ebooks come in EXE format, but mac users can't read that format, so I find it best to use PDF.

F) Graphic Design Software
If you are anything like me, your artistic abilities peaked at age 7.

3) Outline your book chapters into articles

Writing a whole book in one sitting is hard, and trying to write a book without outlining the chapters is nearly impossible. My first book I ever wrote took me over 6 months but now most of my books take me less then a week to finish and that is with a sales letter and website up.

All you have to do is think up 12 to 15 article topics in sequence and write about them. Each page should be around 700 to 1000 words, full of useful information, not information people could get for free.

4) Write your content

Like I said just before, you need original content. There are too many books out there now where people are just regurgitating information others can get for free and this lowers the value of your book, which means less people will pass it around and even less will read it.

If you are really stuck with your writing, I suggest that you do the following.

The best way to get a good amount of original information without writing it yourself is to interview experts in the field. For instance, if you were writing a book about improving your golf handicap, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find some local experts who you could grill in person, over the phone or even via the Internet and you can then put all that information in the book. It's also a good selling point.

Also remember when your writing what the point of this book is. The point of the book is to earn you an on going commission with affiliate programs, so don't feel like you can't throw some affiliate links in, because you can, but make sure it's tactful and in
place.

Another good idea would be to put a "Subscribe to my newsletter" section in your book as well, so not only will you make commissions on sales, but also generate leads without doing any extra work.

Make sure you clearly state in the front of the book, that the buyer can sell this book as his own. State that he has Resell Rights to the product and can sell it or give it away if he chooses.

5) Create your sales letter

This is where you will be selling your book from and is critically crucial to your success. Creating a sales letter takes a lot of work, especially if your new to the whole thing. The best way and the way I use, is to mimic successful sales letters.

If for some reason you think you can't do this by yourself, you have 2 options.

1) Use software that helps put together your sales letter

and

2) Hire a copywriter

However, if you want to hire a professional copywriter, your looking at thousands of dollars, plus royalties from your book sales.

Remember that your selling this book with reprint rights, which means when they buy the book they can sell it as well. This is a huge selling point for you. You will also be giving them your Ebook cover, website graphics and sales letter to use to sell your product.

6) Plug in your free 5 day autoresponder series

The best way to write your free 5 day course that your prospect get via your pop up window is to take chapters out of your book and put them in as a free teaser.

Remember to emphasize an urgency. You want to make these prospects who don't buy straight away, feel like they are missing out on an opportunity of a life time and considering the low price of the book, if they don't buy, more then likely they weren't really interested or were freebie seekers from the start.

7) Advertise!

Depending on your topic, you will want to target different people. However, no matter what topic your selling on, there is one market who will want your book for the sole purpose of selling it, and that's the Internet Marketing group.

Your book could be on Hippo's but all they care about is the fact they can sell it as their own. This is why this type of book always does well.

The key is to target people in your market and then the Internet Marketing crowd.

And that, in a nutshell is how you create your very own viral e-book!

Key Performance Indicators

posted under by CLYDE
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that guide and measure your progress toward your business goals. KPIs support both the strategy and tactics for your business decisions. By knowing your KPIs, you’ll know how to manage your marketing campaigns for maximum profitability.

The most important KPIs for your business are average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), project rate of return (PRR), cost-per-action (CPA), cost-per-lead (CPL), and close rate (CR). These numbers quantify your goals and provide guidelines for your marketing efforts.

Business is also a social activity. For your projects to be successful, you need cooperation and collaboration with your team. To win support for your project, you need to be able to show the value of marketing in a simple and powerful way. Communicating information is just as important as gathering and analyzing data. By clearly stating the KPIs, you can tell the story you
need to grow your business as well as your career.

There is often a conflict between the finance and marketing departments. The two camps don’t speak each other’s language. Marketing sees the accountants as bean counters who don’t understand that it takes money to make money, and finance thinks marketing is a black hole with no connection to the bottom line. With a set of simple metrics, both sides can understand each other. You don’t need more than third-grade math to calculate these numbers.

A KPI-Driven Business Process
KPIs inform and guide the business process. They give you a rational method, based on objective data and results, for making business decisions. You first set your goals and then you establish how to measure the progress toward those goals. Thus, you will be able to answer the questions What is working? and What needs to be changed?

The following process will help you make the most of KPIs:

1. Define your tactical goals. This comes down to a simple goal: You want to get more ________. This may be leads, sales, subscriptions, downloads, views of a video, and so on.

2. Establish the target KPIs. By knowing the KPIs, you’ll know how much you can spend and still make a profit.

3. Launch your marketing campaigns in SEO, PPC, radio, TV, print, and so on. Use the target KPIs to set the budgets.

4. Measure the actual KPIs. Collect the results and see the actual KPIs for each campaign.

5. Optimize your marketing channels. Improve the successful campaigns and reduce or close the unsuccessful campaigns.

6. Communicate the results to your team, including coworkers and upper management.

What is integrated marketing

posted under by CLYDE
Integrated marketing is a process by which all communications and marketing programs
delivered to a customer or prospect are relevant and consistent. This applies whether the
communications are offline or online, inbound or outbound.

Online marketing channels include any e-marketing campaigns or programs, from search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, affiliate, e-mail, banner, to the latest web-related channels for webinar, blog, RSS, podcast, and Internet TV.

Offline marketing channels are traditional print (newspaper, magazine), mail order, public relations, industry analyst relations, billboard, radio, and television.
Enterprise marketing management (EMM) technology delivers a complete platform for integrated marketing. It is uniquely based on a system of record for marketing, which you can think of as institutional memory for the marketing organization. The system of record brings together marketing assets, such as creatives, reports, budgets, and business definitions (for example, customer segments and best practices) so that marketers can manage their creation and usage, rapidly assemble them to execute different programs, and measure performance.

This free flow of accurate, up-to-date information speeds marketing execution, reduces mistakes, boosts productivity through automation and reuse, and enables faster, better decisions.

It helps companies manage their marketing campaigns, programs, and activities across time and across channels. In that respect, all those pieces work together to help marketers better address the needs of the customer through whatever channel the customer wants, ensuring sensitivity to customer preferences and consistency of message delivery. This is what integrated marketing is all about.

Digital marketing strategies

posted under by CLYDE
The goal for marketers is to optimize the customer’s experience. This means giving your customer what they want, when they want it, in the media form they want it in. This is the way for businesses to open the pocketbooks of their customers.

Digital marketing strategies may include the following tools:
●Analytics Software to track and analyze the results of marketing campaigns. It allows segmentation and profiling of customers. Companies include Omniture, Unica, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics.
●PPC (pay-per-click or paid search) Ad services by the major search engines that let you place ads on the search results pages.
● Multivariate testing (MTV) software that allows you to create and test permutations of your web pages to find the version that performs best. MVT is offered by companies such as Offermatica and Optimost.
● Targeted messaging Using databases, analytics, behavioral targeting, and customer profiles to send targeted messages.
● Business intelligence (BI) Software that collects and presents the company’s sales and financial activity.
● CRM Software to track customers, such as Salesforce and Sugar CRMMarketing can be digitized. This means it can be quantified and rationalized. New advertising, enabled by digitization and digital tools (analytics, multivariate testing, and so on), allows integrated marketing across multiple channels.

Previously a small marketing team could only carry out and manage several dozen ad campaigns. Now they can execute and manage several hundred campaigns simultaneously. The tools can collect and analyze massive amounts of data in multiple dimensions. You use analytics to study
the data. You use KPIs to guide your efforts. Digitized marketing can be tracked, so marketing is evolving into sales. Marketing channels are now turning into sales channels. With the ability to compare the various channels and by knowing the KPIs, a company can test channels to find the ones that produce profits. Once they know which ones work, they can turn up the volume by focusing more of their budget on the top-performing channels.

In online marketing, due to advancements in web analytics and BI technologies, we know about our visitors. We know where they come from (approximate or specific location as well as any referring sites or search engines such as Google), what they are looking for by the keywords they
type in, what they show interest in, and so on. We can add to a Claritas demographic profile which tells us about our market’s lifestyle and behaviors.

Because digital technology allows tracking, Directors, VPs, SVPs, and CMOs are expected to show and describe the results of their marketing efforts. They have to boil down many scenarios with many outcomes into clear wins and present this to upper management. Sales-marketing is about generating as well as increasing revenue for your company. Think about how to tell those stories around your big wins as well as incremental wins.

There are a couple of ways to increase revenue. You can market to your target audience or you can find new market opportunities. A number of tools enable this.
To reach customers in a highly fragmented world, marketers must learn how to deliver their messages across many channels. For example, a company selling koi fish can advertise through e-mail lists, radio, web banners, SEO, and paid search (PPC). This will generate the traffic to your business.

Applying an end-to-end strategic approach, coupled with business processing rules, to your prospects focuses your traffic to deliver meaningful and well-qualified prospects, leads, and customers. This method is also referred to as strategic marketing. Through this, you deliver value to your prospects and customers.

Because the majority of a business’s prospects prefer to visit the business’s website first before engaging in any purchases, it is critical to apply web analytics to help them solve for their needs. Furthermore, analytics can be applied to your current customer database or CRM system to identify new market opportunities and to sell more products and services to customers based on what they may need.

As a business marketer, it is your responsibility to develop a data mining and segmentation strategy. This helps your teams divide up the customer base into smaller, understandable categories. From this, your teams should be launching new campaigns based on the method of listening to and processing the messages your customers are sending. This cycle repeats over and over in a continuous fashion to improve the sales-marketing process.

The advertiser displays a message at the audience through multiple marketing channels. These channels can include search engines, radio, TV, and newspapers. Each of these channels points the viewer to a unique URL. The URLs have tracking code so the analytics can capture data on origin, location, keywords, and so on. Analytics tools can use rules to manage decisions. The
rules can use visitor ID, such as IP address, cookies, e-mail login ID, or loyalty card ID. For example, if the visitor came via TV, a video can be offered. Visitors who use their cell phones to visit the unique URL can be shown content that is formatted for mobile devices.

Active Brand Building

posted under by CLYDE
Super affiliates do not remain anonymous. Instead, they work to build instant brand and name recognition. Branding is a proven trust-builder, as well as a publicity tool. The more brand-
awareness you build, the faster you acquire new customers.

It’s the same principle at work here as you see off-line with new product launches or even with celebrities. The more you see or hear a product or person's name mentioned, the more likely
you are to give them a chance.

It goes without saying that existing brands benefit from a market's automatic trust in established brands (with good reputations). This is just human nature.

If you were faced, for example, with the choice between a $5 off-brand radio versus a $15 Sony radio, you'd more than likely choose the latter, even though it is $10 higher in price.

Building your brand as a super affiliate means employing some key tactics, including:
1) Using your full name and personal picture on (some) opt-in pages, 'Thank You' pages, on your blog, etc.

2) Make sure any graphics you use as site headers, in special reports or products you've created, display your name and personal image.

3) Creating a recognizable personality, tone or 'performance' style. In other words, what is your image? What image do people associate with your name?

Let's say you want to go into the 'health niche'? Maybe your image is that of a 'rebel' who shares alternative health information the medical community doesn't want anyone to know?

Or, perhaps, you want to promote 'beauty products', and your is image is that of 'the girl next door' who discovered how to get super-model looks using inexpensive products?
You'll carry this across not just visually, but also in the way you speak and write.

4) Come up with a memorable 'tag line' or slogan.

5) Focus on creating a logo and color scheme for all sites, reports and bonus products.

The key is really in tailoring your image TO your market - determine how to best present 'your story' to them.

Understand how they respond to language:

Is it best to speak to them as casually as possible, or do they require a more formal, professional tone?

Use market-appropriate graphics and colors:

For example, if you are running an affiliate site targeted towards parents of newborns, you wouldn't want your site's color scheme to be gun-metal gray and red! Instead, you'd want to use softer, more neutral colors.

Finally, make sure you begin your branding work from the very beginning.

Even if you don't know what you want for a logo yet, you can still get the ball rolling by making sure to put your name and picture on things like your “Thank You” page, blog and in any freebie reports you give away.

Conversion

posted under by CLYDE
As a super affiliate, you must focus on improving conversion at all levels.

Conversion, in essence, means how many people out of 100 take a given action.

For example, if 5 people out of 100 visitors to your web site decide to opt-in to your list, then your opt-in page has a 5% conversion rate.

Likewise, if your opt-in list has 500 subscribers and 200 of them respond (purchase a product) to an offer you send, then you have a 40% conversion rate. There are many factors which go into conversion. The only way to improve is to learn how to test and track your conversion rate.

This means testing out different 'tactics' while measuring the effects these changes have on your conversions.

Opt-In Pages for example, can be run through a series of tests on these factors:

  • Use of graphics versus text-only page
  • Headlines and sub-headlines (which ones capture your visitor's attention?)
  • Long versus short copy on opt-in page
  • The 'offer': or what you use to entice people to opt-in to your list.

Follow Up E-mail Conversion can be run through tests using factors such as:
  • Better e-mail subject lines (to improve e-mail 'open and read' rates)
  • Time sensitive offers
  • Bonuses
  • How you present an offer (the tone and language you use), which benefits
  • are emphasized, whether it helps to mention guarantees and refund policies, etc.
  • Directing subscribers to a blog or main web site to read reviews, watch video tutorials, etc.
This is just a short list of some of the most common things affiliates test and track in an effort to improve conversion rates across the board.

Follow Ups and List Relationships

posted under by CLYDE
Super affiliates have a systematic way of following up with leads, and they focus on building a 'personal' relationship with list subscribers.

However, your communication with your list must be consistent, even somewhat methodical.

A successful affiliate will plan his communications in advance, with a specific objective in mind.

This doesn't mean you avoid spontaneity. Rather, it means that your follow ups and relationship-building efforts should be, in part, guided by your branding objectives.

Your subscriber will have already formed an initial impression about you based on what he or she saw on your opt-in page and 'thank you' page. Therefore, your follow ups must strive to build on this image, as well as reinforce its continuity.

Really, what you have in front of you is TWO objectives:

1) Follow up on the information and offer made on the opt-in page, and

2) Begin building a relationship with your subscribers that goes deeper than just trying to 'get the sale' from them.

Performing this job effectively requires skill and practice. You must learn when to push the focus of your follow ups more towards the product versus when to hold back and put the focus on pure, informational content.

The way a super affiliate does this is by making use of both an autoresponder and a blog to insert the right content at the right time.

You need to have an in-depth understanding of the products you're promoting
and how to present them. You also need to plan out in advance what type of information you want to feed to your list, and when – while keeping an eye on balancing your two main
objectives: Getting sales and building the trust relationship.

Lead Generation and List Building

posted under by CLYDE
Super affiliates spend as much or more time working to get qualified leads onto their opt-in lists as they do converting those leads.

The money is in the list, but why?

The reason is that “selling” is really all about relationships.

Sales don't exist in a vacuum. There is always a seller and a customer in relationship with each other – whether they meet face-to-face at a physical store or conduct business miles apart from each other via the Internet.

Yes, you could just send traffic to a sales page and hope that some of the visitors actually purchase a product.

When you do this, you are gambling on the law of averages to create your income and, frankly, the odds are not in your favor. When you build your own leads list, however, you benefit from
the following 4 outcomes:

1) Potential customers interact with you (the affiliate) first, rather than going directly to the merchant.

2) You have more control over the customer's perceptions of the product because you can pre-sell or 'educate' them in ways the merchant does not. (This is especially important if you are promoting the product of a merchant who has a mediocre sales letter.)

3) You are able to generate repeat business from existing customers. As long as you've got someone on your list, you can promote multiple, market-specific products to him in one place.

4) Over time, the trust you establish with your list will generate more sales. You'll see a lot more returns for the work you've put in.

Also, when you build a list, your customers and subscribers benefit from:

The high-quality information you provide to them. You'll be able to help them find the solutions they need to improve their lives.

Better buying experiences. Your trusted recommendations also lead them to appropriate solutions, and this takes the stress out of buying products/services on-line.

So, the affiliate opt-in list is not just a powerful sales tool, but also a win-win method for everyone doing business on-line. It helps you streamline communication with prospects, as well as nurture the relationship you have with existing customers.

This is why super affiliates are constantly seeking new ways to add more subscribers to their lists.

Plus, the leads you generate, the more 'market share' and ‘mindshare’ you will claim.
You'll have competition no matter which market you go into, and many of your subscribers will also be on competitor's lists.

You must strive to grab as large of a share of the market as possible, and see to it that your list becomes the preferred source of information and recommendations.

Why Use Subdomains

posted under by CLYDE
The enormously popular and colossal Google AdSense Heavyweight About.com is a fabulous example of an effective use of Subdomains.

About.com at its core is about stuff, that is all organized into subdomains. Although clicking on the topics on the home page take you to a subfolder – the actual contents are organized into subdomains.

This structure has proven very effective for About.com – just look at the number of pages in Google’s index to see how much they like this website. You can hardly swing a dead mouse on the world’s largest search engine without hitting an About.com page.

I’ve always felt that one of the reasons for About’s success is that since English is read from left to right – you see the subdomain words first in the search results – while a “duh” word like “about” is rendered basically invisible to the eye.

If you have seen those funny emails where every word is misspelled and discover that if you scan it quickly you can read every word – because adults don’t so much “read” every word but recognize word shapes.

Most people are all about on page factors, and knock themselves out to get their page in the search engine index – but studies show that what your search results looks like in the engine’s index is CRITICAL to your CTR.

This is one reason I think Yahoo Search is a piece of crap and never use it – the search results are so littered with ads and junk on top, on the side, on the bottom which have pushed organic results to the minimum.

Stastical data research studies have shown that using your keywords in your domain name increase your SEO success. Many SEO experts theorize that, beyond what seems obvious to me, that a site called RedBalloons.com is likely about Red Balloons, that
that the explanation for keywords in the domain is likely attributable to the fact that most of your inbound links use your domain in the anchor text.

This makes sense in that Google’s algorithm is admittedly about links if the anchor text, contains your keywords you get a certain boost. So it’s easy to see how using a subdomain with your keywords in a subdomain for linking purposes will help your overall SEO.

Social Networking Sites List

posted under by CLYDE
http://360.yahoo.com

http://spaces.live.com

http://www.MySpace.com

http://www.orkut.com

http://www.facebook.com

http://www.hi5.com

http://www.friendster.com

http://www.fotolog.com

http://www.livejournal.com

http://www.bebo.com

http://www.xanga.com

http://www.multiply.com

http://www.linkedin.com

http://www.piczo.com

http://www.last.fm

http://www.stumbleupon.com

http://www.broadcaster.com

http://www.gaiaonline.com

http://www.mybloglog.com

http://www.squidoo.com

http://my.opera.com/community/

http://www.buzznet.com

http://www.imvu.com

http://www.twitter.com

http://www.slashdot.org

http://www.wayn.com

http://www.classmates.com

http://www.meetup.com

http://www.vox.com

http://www.blackplanet.com

http://www.faceparty.com

http://www.yelp.com

http://www.ning.com

http://www.secondlife.com

http://www.myyearbook.com

http://www.hubpages.com

http://www.43things.com

http://www.mog.com

http://www.reunion.com

http://www.xuqa.com

http://www.ecademy.com

http://uk.tribe.net

http://www.tribe.net

http://community.adlandpro.com

http://www.greatestjournal.com

http://www.nexopia.com

http://www.care2.com

http://www.mobango.com

http://www.couchsurfing.com

http://www.fanpop.com

http://www.gazzag.com

http://www.ryze.com

http://www.unyk.com

http://www.migente.com

http://www.downelink.com

http://www.bluedot.us

http://www.gather.com

Clean Up Your Blog

posted under by CLYDE
It does not make sense to try getting lots of traffic to a poor blog. Your visitors will visit once and never return, wasting all your traffic-building efforts. Sometimes it just takes a few simple changes to make your blog outstanding, to make it something that people would want to link to and keep coming back to.

Here are some specific things you should check for:

Good Content
Are you providing valuable and unique content? Don’t just regurgitate what you see elsewhere. Provide your own unique ideas.

Update your blog daily. This is very important in the beginning. Later you can cut back to several times per week, but you need to post every day until your traffic snowball has started to build.

Clean and Easy-To-Read Design
Watch out for your colors. Make sure the text is easy to read. Black or dark text on a white or very light background is easiest to read.

The design should look attractive. It doesn’t have to be a custom design. There are a lot of free templates/themes available. Just pick one that looks nice and not too confusing.

No Ads
In the beginning, it is best not to have any ads on your blog. Wait until you have a good amount of traffic. If your traffic is low, you will not make money on ads anyway.

It is a lot easier for people to link to your blog when it is not covered in ads. Nobody wants to send their readers to a horrible ad-plastered blog, even if the content is good. They want to link to blogs that look nice too.

10 Sites You Should Know

posted under by CLYDE
1. ScamBusters
The submitter of this SiteSighting claims that it's the #1 site on Internet fraud. Well after visiting the ScamBusters site and signing up for their newsletter,
I'm inclined to agree.
I think my favorite part of the site is the Urban Legends section. If you've ever received an email about anti-perspirant causing cancer or some kid who needs a kidney transplant,(which I think all of us have) then I'm sure you'll appreciate it as well.

2. Pay Per Click Analysts
Pay per clicks are a great way to bring targeted traffic to your site, because you only pay when someone actually visits your site. It's a great idea, but now it's been copied so many times that it's impossible to keep up with which ones are worth getting listed in, and which ones you should avoid.
That's what makes Pay Per Click Analyst such a useful site. They keep tabs on all the new PPCs and tell you which ones are the best. If you're serious about marketing

3. Translating the Internet
If you do a lot of business with people from other countries, or if you just have friends that speak another language, T-Mail could be just the thing for you. They give you a FREE email account and it translates your incoming foreign language email into English. It also allows you to surf the web in foreign countries in English. I realize this won't apply to everybody, but for those of you who do a lot of business outside of your native land, it could very well be a Godsend.

4. Free Email Directory
Want your business to go international? This is the best place I've found to get email addresses around the world. Think globaglobally, appear local. It has a few pop-ups, but hey, somebody has to pay the bills.

5. Yale's Web Style Guide
This is the definitive web style guide covering everything that has to do with site and page design. If you're new, this site can be a great place to learn the basics. And if you're an experienced designer, this site is a great place to review the basics and polish your skills.

6. Self Promotion.com
The World Wide Web is littered with sites that want to tell you the best way to get your site listed in the major search engines. Search engine auto-submitters are also a dime a dozen, so it may surprise you to know that that's exactly what this site is all about.
The thing that sets this site apart, however, is this sentence (which can be found on the site's homepage): "If you feel the site is useful, then pay me what YOU think the advice and service is worth!" That's right! The site owner actually offers access to his research, services, and programs for FREE! You only pay him what you think it's worth. A deal like that is certainly worth a look, wouldn't you agree?

7. Free Web Tools, Web Builder 101, and The Free Site
These sites are so closely related that I decided to just include them together. Each one of them offers free tools for webmasters and online business owners, so between the three you should be able to find something immediately useful to your business.

8. Setup Generator
Basically, Setup Generator is a simple freeware installer, designed to help you quickly and easily create installation setup files for your products. Not only does it make the installation process easier on your customers, it also adds a touch of professionalism to your product.

9. CJB.net
If you're using a long affiliate URL in your promotions, or have an email account that you'd like to get forwarded to your main one, then CJB.net may have just what you need. They offer free sub-domains, as well as URL and email forwarding, which makes it more than worthy enough to hold a space in my favorites bar. The only downside is that you have the cjb.net ending on your URL, but it's still shorter than some of the affiliate links out there.

10. Publicity Insider
Even though this site sells a product, it still has a whole lot of free info on how to get quality PR for your business. And as a person who recently benefited from an online news article, I can tell you that it's quite possibly the best form of advertising you'll ever see.

Craigslist and eBay Marketing

posted under by CLYDE
Craigslist is great for SEO purposes. The ads actually produce results too! Post a simple ad for your website, but avoid the “for sale” section. It is heavily policed and you’ll get caught very quickly. I post my ad in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, and Dallas. These are the most populated Craigslist sites. I post every 7 days with an ad that includes my URL. It generates traffic and can get your site indexed by the search engines within a few days. The backlinks it creates are very powerful, as well.

Ebay is a link building tool that must be handled carefully. They do not want you linking to your websites in most spots. There are a few instances where you can get away with it. Your “ME” page is one spot you can use to link to your websites. Another method is to link to your website in an auction to a “non-sales” manner. For instance, you can post a link to a page of images for a product. You type – click
here for more images and make it link to the page on your site. I recommend setting up a store there, as auctions only last a week. Store listings last at least 30 days.
Ebay offers a bunch of features to direct traffic from within their site to your listings and profile. They have a wiki, blogs, forums, and chat rooms. Use these! Post articles to their wiki, blog using their service, chat in the forums and chat
rooms. Brand yourself on Ebay and your business will benefit greatly.

Article Directories

posted under by CLYDE
Writing articles and submitting them to directories is one of the best methods for search engine optimization and driving traffic to your websites. There are some key tactics you must use to be most effective:
Vary your anchor text with the largest directories. I recommend changing the anchor text and layout of the links in your resource box for the top 4 article directories:
ezinearticles, goarticles, articlecity and articledashboard.

This will get you the best results as these are the sites that most people take articles from. Watch your conversion for which site directs the most traffic to you, and use that resource box for your widespread distribution.
Keep your articles between 400 and 600 words. Any shorter is not effective. Any longer can be OK in the right situation, but don’t write a book. Use words that are easy for everyone to understand.
Write about what you know. If you are in a niche that you don’t understand, outsource the writing of your articles. You can find freelance writers all over the internet.
Submit a few articles per week and you’ll find that your reputation will spread very quickly. I still receive phone calls regarding a niche that I conquered in the past. You’ll find that helping people will generate a level of trust that you can’t get elsewhere.

top