Internet Marketing Journey and Diary

I recently just added a few more friends on Facebook.

And I learnt from my business partner that Joint Ventures and emailing bloggers is the best way to get instant traffic rather than wait for Search Engine Optimization.

Apart from that, I added WordBook, a wordpress plugin that can send feeds to your friends Facebook profiles, which is a subtle marketing tool!

Paying for advertisements in E-zines is maybe one of the most cost effective
methods of paid advertising that is available on the internet today.
There are a great many free methods of advertising available to webmasters but
the best kind of advertising (paid for OR free) is the kind that is delivered to an
audience that is interested in what you are selling. A TARGETED audience will
always produce the best advertising-dollar to sales ratio.
You can find a list of E-zines that are published by searching for them on the
internet. No matter what the topic of your website is or the kind of products or
services that you sell, you can rest assured that there are many, many E-zines
being published everyday that are related in some way.
People subscribe to E-zines because they are looking for information related to a
specific subject that they want to stay abreast of. That is the basic idea of all Ezines.
They are not general publications like your daily newspaper or like many
hard copy magazines.
They are subject-specific and the people who subscribe to them are focused on
that one narrow subject so the mailing-list of the people who will receive your
paid-for advertisement that you place in an E-zine that is related to your product
or service is a mailing-list of your very best prospective customers. Now THAT is
targeted advertising!

Advertising in E-zines that are being sent out to a list of your best prospective
customers is very low. You can spend fewer dollars on this kind of target
advertising and get better results than with just about any other kind of
advertising.
The average cost of placing an advertisement in an E-zine will be between
twenty and thirty dollars ($20-$30) per mailing and your results might just be
spectacular.

“It pays to advertise” is only half the story. The rest of the story is that you have
to “pay to advertise”. I had a very wise friend once who told me that you always
must ‘pay something for something’. He was right. Free advertising methods all
cost time and the paid advertising methods all cost money. The idea is to get the
most bangs for the buck, so to speak.
Your advertising budget is no doubt limited as most advertising budgets are. So
you want each advertising dollar to produce as many conversions as possible.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) has proven itself to be an extremely effective paid for
method of advertising. It’s been around a long time now and it shows no signs of
lessening…as a matter of fact, it grows stronger by the day.
The two best known pay-per-click programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo
Search and Google Adwords is the one that seems to be gaining the most
market share at the moment.
The trick to using pay-per-click advertising effectively is your key-word strategy in
Adword campaigns and just how well you can analyze the results as the
campaign progresses.
All pay-per-click advertising campaigns need to be set up so that the keywords
that aren’t working can be filtered out and the ones that are really effective and
are producing sales can be enhanced or improved upon.
One of the better things about pay-per-click advertising campaigns is that you are
given the opportunity to set your own advertising budget so you do have control
over how much money you will spend.

This is an extremely important feature for those who have limited advertising
budgets and want to get the most they can out of a pay-per-click campaign and
spend as few dollars as possible to do it.

There are so many ways of gaining free advertising on the internet. Of course,
there are paid-for advertising methods as well and you really do need a good
combination of both paid as well as free advertising in order to become
successful.
Some additional methods of free online advertising that you might overlook but
that should still be considered as viable options are:

1. There is the free method of article writing and marketing to article
banks but there is also the writing and marketing of E-books.
There are E-book repositories that work just like article banks. Other
webmasters or E-zine publishers can download and use your E-book for
free but they must not change a singe word. Your website address can
appear on each and every page of an E-book.
That means that when it is reproduced that those who read it will see your
website address many times and your resource box will be included at the
end of the book.
2. Another free advertising option is Craigslist.
Craigslist is basically the world’s largest classified ad section and you can
place advertisements in Craigslist for free. It works just about the same as
the classified advertisement section in a newspaper.
There are categories for everything from housing to jobs to services to
personals. But there are also forums that are sorted by topics.
http://www.craigslist.com/
3. Link exchanges are another free advertising method that some have
found useful as effective.
The idea is to find a business that sells products or services that are
similar to or related to the products of services that you are selling and
simply exchange links.

Your advertisement appears on your link exchange partner’s website and
his advertisement appears on your website. The trick is to get a link
exchange partner who has a PageRank of seven or better.

Starting your own affiliate program is an excellent way to get other people to
advertise for you as well as sell your product or service for you.
There is an old adage that states, “Half of something is better than all of
nothing.”
This is basically what the entire principle of affiliate programs is built upon.
You are hiring commission salesmen who will advertise and sell your product for
you but you will not pay these salesmen one red cent unless they actually sell
your product or service and they are giving you a lot of absolutely free advertising
in the process.
An affiliate marketer isn’t going to make any money unless he sells your product
or service and he isn’t going to make any sales unless he advertises your
product. You do not pay him for advertising. The advertising that an affiliate
marketer does comes out of HIS advertising budget and not your advertising
budget.
Therefore, all of the advertising that an affiliate marketer does for you is free to
YOU. It may well not be free to the affiliate marketer bit that advertising isn’t
going to cost YOU one red cent.

Of course, the affiliate marketer fully intends to make a profit by selling your
product or service for a commission…usually about fifty percent (50%) of the
sales price and sometimes more.
Basically, an affiliate program means letting your product or service pay for its
own advertising.
Now some affiliate marketing programs do charge a fee for setting up an account
as well as a commission on sales but there is at least one free one as well and
others that are very low cost.
PayDotCom, for example is free and SalesFlurry.com is very, very low cost and
they don’t charge a commission on sales, either.
References:
http://paydotcom.com/
http://www.salesflurry.com/

Traffic Exchange programs have been around for awhile on the internet. These
programs offer two methods by which credits can be accumulated. One method
is by visiting other websites on the exchange for a minimum of thirty seconds
(usually) and the second method is to purchase credits.
Not all traffic exchange programs offer purchasing of credits but most do. There
are a set number of credits required for a webmaster to gain a hit for his website.
Some traffic exchange programs offer a paid membership version of the program
that gives the paid members a more advantageous credit to hit ratio.
There are several advantages to using a traffic exchange program. The first, and
most obvious advantage is, of course, that you are getting free advertising and,
as we all are well aware of, “FREE” is a very, very good thing. You can gain the
exposure by investing only your time and not your money.
Another advantage to the traffic exchange program is that you will be visiting
websites that you might find helpful to you in your own business. You might even
discover potential joint venture partners.
The traffic exchange program has the potential for creating more sales for you
because other exchange members will be visiting your website. Any visitor is
always a potential customer.
You really don’t have to read every single page that you visit in order to
accumulate your credits. Unless the traffic exchange program mandates the use
of CAPTCHA, you can even have the program running in the background while
you are doing other things.
Yes, there are many advantages to incorporating traffic exchange programs into
your advertising plan. Free exposure of any kind is always better than no exposure at all and the additional hits to your website can help to increase your
PageRank as well.

Everybody who has been involved in internet marketing for more than the last 15
or 20 minutes already knows that writing and marketing articles and E-books is
one of the better free methods available for free advertising on the internet.

Sometimes, however, the use of blogs and RSS feeds is overlooked as the great
advertising and SEO tools that they are.
For almost any topic that you think of there are a multitude of blogs and forums
on the internet that are dedicated to that topic. Blogs and forums are big on the
internet right now and they are a very big part of what we call Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 is what has evolved since the big dot com bust that happened back in
2001. The old web was driven by marketers but Web 2.0 is driven by users. And
users want a voice. Blogs and forums give them that voice.
While it is advisable for you to post to the blogs and forums on the websites that
belong to others, it is even more adventitious for you to have a blog or forum on
your own website.
The search engine spiders love websites that are updated and every post to a
blog or forum is a website update. If others post, it doesn’t even take any of your
precious time.
Another almost painless way to have your website updated constantly is by the
use of RSS feeds. An RSS feed can supply your website with constantly
changing content.
That is a very, very good thing. Not only is it good for your SEO but it also
something that the visitors to your website will like and come to rely upon. That is
what is sometimes called a win/win situation and by using both a blog and an
RSS feed; you will create a win/win/win situation.

Advertising on the Search Engine sites like Google is, of course, not free
advertising. Most all of the search engines use a method called PPC (Pay Per
click) to determine how much money you owe them each month.
There is a charge made for each time a web surfer clicks on your advertisement
whether they buy a product or not. It is a well known fact that the better
PageRank that you have the most click you will get and the more sales that you
will make.
PageRank is where your site ranks in search results when a surfer types your
key words into the search box and hits ‘search’. The higher your rank, the better
and this is and the method for getting a better PageRank is what is called SEO or
Search Engine Optimization.
There are many tried and true methods for SEO available on the internet and
while you pay for advertisements on search engine sites most of the SEO

techniques are free of charge. These techniques usually just require time rather
than money. Some SEO techniques are:
1. Writing and marketing articles and E-books that contain a resource
box with your name and a link to your website.
2. Posting to blogs and forums above a sig tag that contains your name
and a link to your website.
3. Submitting your blog and forum posts to social bookmarking sites.
4. Keeping your site key-word rich.
5. Frequently updating your site.
Remember that the idea for SEO is to get the spiders to visit your website as
often as possible and to put as many links to your website out on the internet as
you can. Those two things are basically the two determining factors of PageRank
and the two thinks that matter most in Search Engine Optimization.

One of the most effective ways of advertising for free on the internet is by the
writing and marketing of articles. It isn’t a secret that the internet has an
insatiable appetite for words.
Content really is king on the internet and there is a constant search by those who
own websites and those who publish E-zines for material…new material to put on
their websites or in the E-zines. It is true that the internet is made up of more
than words but words are in the greatest demand.
Articles that are to be submitted to article banks should meet certain standards,
of course, and you will not make any money at all from the articles that you
submit to these article banks. You will get advertising…free advertising but you
will not be paid.
Very, very briefly articles which are to be submitted to article banks need to:
1. Be no longer than 300 to 400 words long.
2. Need to be key word rich.
3. Need to have an attention getting title that includes key words.
4. Need to have an attention getting first sentence that includes key
words.
5. Need to contain a resource box that has your full name and the
address to your website.

You can write the articles yourself. You can hire ghost writers to write them for
you or you can purchase PLR (Private Label Rights) articles and rewrite them.
You can either do the submissions to the article banks yourself by hand, so to
speak, or you can use submission software that can help you cut down on the
time involved or you can hire an article submission company to do article
submissions for you.
Whatever course you choose for getting articles written and submitted will be
fine. You just need to do it because this is one of the most effective free
advertising methods ever devised.

Several years ago there was a movie that starred the late George Burns by the
name of ‘Oh God II”. In the movie a little girl asks God (played by George Burns)
why there were ‘bad’ things. George answered that He (God) had never figured
out how to make up without a down or a good without a bad or words to that
effect.
I guess that is as good an answer as any because for every advantage to
everything there is always a corresponding disadvantage and online advertising
isn’t the exception to that rule.
One of the disadvantages to online advertising is the somewhat lack of control of
cost that is almost built into it. For example: If you choose to place a banner
advertisement on a website, you will very likely be charged a PPI (Pay Per
Impression).That is, every time that anybody clicks on that website and your banner ad is
displayed, you are charged a fee….maybe not a large fee, but a fee
nevertheless. And these small charges can add up to very big bucks.
The effectiveness of these kinds of banner advertisements is somewhat
questionable, as well.
You can be charged as much as a thousand dollars and never have your banner
clicked on at all but you are still charged for each time it is shown. Only you can
determine whether this kind of advertising is really effective for you and your
product or service.
Another method of paid advertising on the internet that may or may not be
effective is what is called PPC (Pay Per Click). This is the way that most all
search engine advertisement is charged. You are charged when your
advertisement is clicked on.
Of course, when somebody clicks on your ad that means that they are visiting
your website so you sure have a better chance of making a sale than you do with
PPI advertising.