If you’ve been involved in Online Marketing for any amount of time I’m sure you realize the importance of Keyword Research. And if you don’t know how important it is, trust me on this, Keyword Research is Extremely Important!

Let me expand on this briefly. There are numerous publications that go into great detail about the importance of Keyword Research. All of these can be summed up fairly easily.

If you want to market any product or service online how do you know if your product or service will be a money maker or a dud? You do Keyword Research and determine two things. How many people are actually searching for your product/service? (Your potential customers.) And how many people are marketing the same or a similar product/service? (Your competition.)

Hey folks! This is the cornerstone of marketing! The Law Of Supply And Demand.

You can’t sell a product/service that no one wants! Conversely, if you have a product or service that everyone wants, and you position yourself in front of all those people you will become extremely wealthy!

Let me give you an example of yet another benefit of Keyword Research. You want the Search Engines to find your website so that you can sell tons of your product/service even when you’re at the beach or golf course, right? Isn’t that every online marketers dream; a business on Autopilot?

Basic Search Engine Optimization employs the use of the right keywords to attract the Search Engines to your website and you find the right keywords using Keyword Research.

Without good Keyword Research Tools, finding the right keywords can be a long, time consuming process. Fortunately there are some very good Keyword Research Tools available. Unfortunately, these tools are beyond the budget of people just starting out in Online Marketing or those who are looking to supplement their incomes using the Internet.

Keyword Helper is a very affordable, comprehensive Keyword Research Tool that is available for Instant Download. You can be doing your Keyword Research today!

Check it out now! Keyword Helper.

Take Action! Build Your Business!

Paul Johnston

Your Source For Home Based Business Resources

A new breakthrough secret is all you now need in order to get your Google AdWords pay-per-clicks FREE!

A gentleman from New York discovered what he calls an “oversight” on the part of 99.9% of all marketers that allows him to get otherwise paid-for advertising at Google as well as all other search engines that allow sponsored ads.

And no, nothing about his “secret” is illegal - nor does it require that you know someone on the “inside” at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Overture and others.

Instead, the New Yorker boasts proudly “…this is something that I caught onto just before 2000 when there was so much search engine craze running around, and started doing small just to test things at first … but which I later expanded on after getting the hang of it.”

This same fellow went on to start and operate sixteen separate online companies selling everything from pet food, DVDs, children’s toys & games, books, software, and sold not only his own manufactured products but became an affiliate for other web businesses - all the while applying his mastermind secret.

Over the course of nearly eight years the New Englander confesses “I’ve actually gotten over $87 million in advertising that using my secret I never had to pay for … and the largest share of which was more recently in Google pay-per-clicks as well as other forms of paid advertising at search engines … all of which I got for free …”

So powerful is his secret that he’s able to monopolize any niche online, and can always secure the top premium spots just above the usual organic results featured at most search engines.

He still has to set up an account with the search engines - but after applying his secret he is removed from having to pay for all the costs otherwise involved.

Again, nothing about his secret is either illegal or robs from the search engines.

One spokesperson from one of the most popular search engines said chuckling after being made privy to this amazing secret “Wow! Ha! This is really unique … and in my expert opinion it would only serve to enhance and bring more business to us at [name of search engine withheld for legal & confidentiality reasons] and not cause us to lose business in the slightest. Amazing!”

The northerner revealed that in this nearly eight years’ period of time since applying his secret he’s done well over $300 million in sales revenue with a most diverse line of products, and most recently in the last two years netted nearly $166 million after really “buckling down and pressing my secret to its fullest potential.”

Now to everyone else’s fortune, the city slicker is releasing his secret for getting an unlimited amount of pay-per-click ads to the general public. But he’s not promising any of us for how long.

A bit of an eccentric, the gentleman says “We’ll see just how long I can make it available before it saturates things.”

One famous public web guru pointed out that although this man may gain economically more so as a result of the publication of his secret “he’s already so amazingly rich that whether he continues or discontinues its sale will neither make nor break the man, but not grabbing it for yourself while it’s still available could prove disastrous for you as you may only have one chance, and a very limited one at that, to get this.”

It is currently available at:

Google Ads Free

…so you may want to head on over there now and get it.

It’s in a very easily readable format and is quickly and readily understood and mastered by anyone with even a 4th grade reading level.

While you’re there, why not scroll down and review for yourself the huge successes others are now having with this incredible breakthrough in targeted advertising now made freely available to the rest of us?

To your success,

Paul Johnston

Your Source For Home Based Business Resources

How many times have you surfed to a website and, upon arriving, been completely overwhelmed by what you find there. I’m referring to sites that have several animated banners, a whole bunch of product offers, an opt-in form (or two), a Flash Animation (or two), etc., etc., etc. There’s so much stuff going on that you’re not sure what the site owner expects from you and so you just leave. Have you also noticed that these types of sites take a long time to load?

Back in 1998, when I first started designing websites, it was my goal to build this type of site. After all, I was marketing myself as a Webmaster and I thought that people would be impressed by all the things I could do. And I was right. I designed a lot of “flashy” websites for people. Every new customer wanted a website that was more “spectacular” than the last one I built.

Not one of those websites survived on the Internet. Zero, zip, zilch. Remember, in 1998, High Speed Internet was a 56K Modem (lol). And how many people actually had a 56K Modem? Very few. People were surfing away from slow loading sites before they even completely loaded. Those of us who were building websites were doing our customers a great disservice.

Fortunately I learned from my mistakes. I began to appreciate and love simple, well designed websites and I’d like to share these ideas with you.

It’s extremely important to remember why people use the Internet. The number 1 reason is to find information. Realizing this is what propelled Google into the Internet Stratosphere. Google has even become a verb as a result. “Google it.” If you want to succeed on the Internet as an Internet Marketer (I refer to this in the general sense, selling on the Internet) you absolutely need to provide information. This applies to any type of product - device or digital. Here’s an example.

I need information about how to attach two pieces of wood together. I don’t have one, but I think I might need an electric drill. Since I’ve never used an electric drill I think it might be a good idea to do some research on how to use an electric drill. So I Google it.

Guess what. You happen to sell electric drills on the Internet. And you’ve posted an Article on your website that explains how to use an electric drill. Now, you’ve properly SEO’d this site so that you get a 1st page listing on Google. Or, you are using PPC to get a 1st page listing in the Sponsored ads.

Anyway, I see your listing and click on your link. And you show me how to use an electric drill. You also, through ad placement, show me that you sell electric drills and, you offer me the opportunity to sign up for your Newsletter that will show me “Selecting The Right Bit For The Job” or “The Benefits and Pitfalls of Wireless Drills” etc.

You’ve done an excellent job! You’ve got me sitting here learning what I need to know, offering a solution (product/service) and you’re offering me an education in my area of interest. So, what do I do?

Well, thanks to you, I’ve learned that I do need an electric drill and I even know how to use it. Now I procrastinate and tell myself, “I don’t really have to attach these two pieces of wood together today so why don’t I save myself a trip to the retailer? I’ll just order from this website and have it for next weekend. And why don’t I sign up for the Newsletter and really learn how to get the most out of my electric drill?”.

Give yourself a Big Round of Applause!

OK. I’ll admit that the previous scenario won’t succeed in a sale 100% of the time. But I guarantee that it will work better than a website that says “Electric Drills For Sale!”.

And guess what. It can all be done with a small number of pages. Really Simple Websites.

Really Simple Websites load fast. With todays High Speed Internet, pages can load in seconds and even less (no graphics). The faster your page loads the better are your chances of catching your visitors interest. Websites with one Article load the fastest because they are primarily text. If you want to market you need to include graphics. So we trade speed for graphics and properly compressed graphics can load very fast.

Really Simple Websites are easy to scan. People not only want information, they want it fast. An uncluttered web page allows people to see your solution quickly. If people can’t find what they are looking for almost immediately they are more likely to surf somewhere else and you have lost the opportunity to make your product presentation and convert your visitor to either a customer or subscriber to your Newsletter.

Yet another advantage of Really Simple Websites is that they are much easier to optimize for the Search Engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a key ingredient in getting your website indexed by the Search Engines and basic SEO is easy to accomplish if you use informative or educational Articles on your website.

In our electric drill example our Article about how to use an electric drill would have the “keyword” electric drill in the title of the Article and would be liberally used throughout our Article. This technique informs the Search Engines that the “theme” of our web page is “electric drill” and enhances the chances of our site being indexed for the keyword “electric drill”.

The opposite of this is a website that sells GPS devices, iPods, Satellite TV receivers, Cameras, etc. This type of site doesn’t promote a unified theme, unless you consider “electronic devices”, which is a very general keyword that will not make your site stand out from the thousands of others in the same category.

If you wanted to market any, or all, of the devices mentioned in the previous paragraph, the best way would be to set up a separate website for each device with informative and educational Articles that can be used to attract visitors to your sites.

I hope that you have found this Article useful and that you will use the information in it to help you build a successful Internet Marketing Business. This site has many other informative Articles designed to assist you and I hope you will take advantage of those as well.

To Your Success
Paul Johnston

Your Source For Home Based Business Resources

Just what does it take to become successful at Affiliate Marketing? What are the ingredients of an Affiliate Marketing Success Story? Is there an easy solution to Affiliate Marketing Greatness? These are questions that are asked by most people who want to make an income in Affiliate Marketing.

Even though Affiliate Marketing is rated as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it’s not as easy as it sounds. The Smart Affiliate Marketer plans and executes every action in the best way they can and maximizes the potential to earn by employing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Marketing Business.

Having consulted some of the most successful Affiliate Marketers in the business I’ve discovered the Most Essential Tools for a Successful Affiliate Marketing Business.

Essential Tool #1: Your Own Website

Your own website is not only the most important tool in Affiliate Marketing, all of the Top Affiliate Marketers agree that it is indispensable. You need a good, credible and professional looking “Squeeze Page” in order to maximize the potential of any Successful Affiliate Marketing Business. Here’s how it works.

In order to get traffic to your site you need to advertise. If your advertising sends people to the sales page of the product that you’re promoting then you’ve lost something very valuable, even if they buy the product and you make a commission. You haven’t collected their contact information and you aren’t building your own list. All the “Big Guys” in Affiliate Marketing stress the importance of building your own opt-in list to whom you can present follow up information and promote other products for which you are an Affiliate.

Simply put, a “Squeeze Page” pre-sells the product that you’re promoting and offers a “Bonus” to those visitors who fill in and submit the form. The form, which is tied into an Autoresponder, then redirects your visitor to the product sales page. By using this method you’ve accomplished two things; you’ve added to your mailing list and you’ve put your visitor in front of the product that you’re promoting. Even if they don’t buy the product you still have their contact information and you can send them other offers and information.

**Here is an example of a Squeeze Page**

One final point before we move on. If you are going to use Google AdWords to advertise you need to know that Google frowns on the use of Affiliate Links in your AdWords Ads and there is a very great chance that your ads won’t be shown. By sending traffic to your own website you will avoid this problem.

Essential Tool #2: An Autoresponder

Obviously, in order for the method in the previous section to work, you need an Autoresponder. Your Autoresponder will create the form for your Squeeze Page, will collect your visitors’ contact information, will redirect your visitors’ to the sales page and
will send out a series of pre-written emails to your subscribers.

So what do you put in this pre-written set of emails? Content. Here’s a suggested plan.

Email #1
* Thank them for their interest
* Provide the download link to their “Bonus”
* Supply a link to the Original Product (in case they didn’t already buy)
* Inform them that an Unadvertised Bonus is a Subscription to your Newsletter
* Give them a link to the First Edition of your Newsletter.

Ok, this takes a bit of work but is absolutely necessary for success. Write or acquire a series of articles about your niche and set up a seperate webpage for each article. Put AdSense blocks and Product Ads on each page. Take advantage of every form of advertising here.

Now, the rest of your Autoresponder emails will simply provide the links to your series of articles.

Remember to also include some content in the email. You don’t want to just send a “Click Here” email. Be conversational and friendly. You are building a relationship with your subscribers. You want them to like you, trust you and even admire you.

By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a believable expert in your niche, making you a more trustworthy promoter of the product or service you’re offering. The first step in building up a loyal consumer base is Establishing a Good Reputation .

You need to use every method you can find to encourage people to, not only to visit your site, but also click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. A good Autoresponder will have a Broadcast feature that allows you to send the same email to your entire list whenever you like. So you can send an offer to your subscribers whenever the opportunity presents itself.

I hope you have found this article both informative and interesting.

To Your Success
Paul Johnston
Get my Free Course On Affiliate Marketing

Your Source For Home Based Business Resources

Affiliate Marketing is the process of marketing someone else’s products or services for a commission of each sale that you make. So, essentially, Affiliate Marketers are Commission Salespeople and many Affiliate Marketers earn a very good income selling other people’s products and services. One definite advantage that the Affiliate Marketer has over the general Commission Salesperson is that the Affiliate Marketer can sell the products or services of any number of companies as opposed to working for just one company.

Many people do Affiliate Marketing full time and they don’t have to deal with customer service, shipping orders, or anything else. All they do is promote other people’s products or services, everyday.

Other people, myself included, use Affiliate Programs in conjunction with their own products or services, by using Affiliate Programs as front end products, up sells, and back end products. For example, if you had an information product about weight loss, you might want to market exercise equipment, exercise clothing, vitamins, or other items or services that are related to weight loss along with your weight loss information product – to increase your revenue.

Some people even give away low cost information products, such as ebooks, in order to sell high ticket Affiliate Products or Services. Alternately, some people just use inexpensive affiliate products to enhance their own high ticket products or continuity programs, such as membership sites.

There has been some confusion about what Affiliate Marketing actually is. Many Merchants who have products and offer Affiliate Programs for those products might say that they sell their products through Affiliate Marketing when, in fact, they have Affiliates who sell the products for them, but they are actually Merchants or Affiliate Program Managers.

So basically, Affiliate Marketing is selling someone else’s products or services through various means, for various reasons – either to earn an income, to enhance a product, or even to sell an additional product. In fact, many people use low end Affiliate Products as lead ins, or entry level products, for higher end Affiliate Products and never actually create or promote a product or service of their own.

Is money being made? You’d better believe there is! If you include all products and services that are sold through Affiliates, Affiliate Marketing is essentially a billion dollar industry, even though it isn’t technically considered an industry in its own right.

Right now there are thousands of Affiliate Marketers that you have never even heard of promoting Affiliate Products and collecting huge commission checks every month. Why haven’t you heard of them? You haven’t heard of them because they are not in the Internet Marketing products market. They are in other ‘consumer’ niches, such as weight loss, health care, sports, gambling, education, financial products or any other niche that you can think of.

If you have ever searched for information or products related to your interest on the Internet you have most likely come into contact with an Affiliate Marketer without even being aware of it. You may have even purchased a product through an Affiliate Marketer without even knowing it.

Even Google AdSense can be considered as an Affiliate Program even though it isn’t technically called that. EBay has an Affiliate Program, as does Microsoft. There is an Affiliate Program available for just about any product that you can imagine.

Affiliate Marketing presents a win-win-win situation. The owner or maker of the product being sold is making money. The Affiliate Marketer is making money, and the customer is getting what they want or need. Everybody wins. Affiliate Marketing has also been around for longer than you might think.

Many people think that affiliate marketing started sometime after the Internet came into existence. This is wrong. Amway, Avon, Mary Kay – all of these are essentially Affiliate Programs, but the people who were actually doing the Affiliate Marketing were called Distributors or Representatives – and they are still called Distributors or Representatives to this day.

Affiliate Marketing can even include Network Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is the act of selling a product for a commission. Network Marketing also involves selling a product for a commission, but also focuses on bringing other resellers (or Affiliate Marketers, Distributors or Representatives) into the program as well. Many Affiliate Marketing Programs provide incentives for you to not only promote their products or services but to promote the Affiliate Program as well.

Although Affiliate Marketing is different things to different people, the goal is the same – to make money. Affiliate Marketing offers you the opportunity and ability to make money without creating a product of your own, without having to deliver the product and without having to provide any customer service; an Internet Marketers dream come true.

If you would like to learn more about Affiliate Marketing, or you would like to become an Affiliate Marketer but don’t know how to go about it, I have a free Affiliate Marketing Course that explains the ins and outs of Affiliate Marketing.

Your Source For Home Based Business Resources

Today’s article is taken from the Early To Rise Newsletter. I have been a subscriber to this Newsletter for approximately 2 years and consider it to be necessary reading because of the wealth of quality information that I receive from it.

This article, written by Early To Rise’s Internet Marketing Director, Patrick Coffey, focuses on one of the most important, but mostly ignored, facts about marketing on Social Media Websites.

Here is the article.

The Internet has been buzzing with praise for “social media” as the way to drive traffic to your website. By “social media,” I’m talking about sites that (1) allow you to submit content and (2) allow other people to comment - and even vote - on it. The higher they rate your submission, the more exposure you get, with lots of people clicking on your link.

But today, I’m going to show you that this massive traffic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So far, some of the major players in the social media world are:

Digg - digg.com

Stumbleupon - stumbleupon.com

Sphinn - sphinn.com/

Reddit - reddit.com

Del.ico.us - Myspace - myspace.com

Facebook - facebook.com

These sites - and dozens and dozens of others that I’m sure I’m forgetting - have quickly become behemoths in the online world. In fact, many of them are getting even more traffic then the all-powerful Google.

At first, this might seem like an online marketer’s dream…

“If I could only get my article or blog post on the home page of Digg or Stumbleupon, my site will be flooded with traffic.”

It’s easy to see why so many marketers are foaming at the mouth over the idea of tapping into all that traffic. But real online marketers understand that traffic does not mean anything without conversion. In other words, if you can’t turn your traffic into sales or e-mail sign-ups, it’s pretty much useless.

You may have heard of website traffic referred to as HITS. I’m sure you’ve been to websites that have a little counter at the bottom that tells you exactly how many HITS the site has received.

Well, this is my definition of HITS: How Idiots Track Success.

Just think about it. What should you really care about? How many people visit your site? Or how many people buy from your site?

Now you might be thinking, “Patrick, how do you know the traffic you get from social media is useless?”

This thing is, Alexis Siemon, ETR’s resident Search Engine Marketing Specialist, has been experimenting with trying to drive traffic via social media channels.

You can see how this is done by looking at the funny little logos at the bottom of each Early to Rise issue. These logos allow you to submit our content to various social media sites. And they have been helping us get “free” traffic. Through some trial and error, Alexis was able to help our natural health e-letter site get a boatload of traffic from Stumbleupon. In fact, in the last month, one page generated over 28,000 new visitors.

When I heard this, I thought it was great news. You see, when we get traffic from outside sources, we can generally convert at least 10 percent of it into e-mail sign-ups.

So how many of these 28,000 social media visitors do you think signed up for our natural health e-letter?

500? 1,000? 1,500? 2,800?

No! Try 80. That’s a conversion rate of just over 0.2 percent.

Compare that to the conversion rates we’re getting from search engine optimization (SEO), e-mail marketing, website advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and even direct mail. I’ve seen traffic from these sources convert to e-mail subscribers at rates of up to 50 percent.

That’s not the only reason I say social media traffic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Recently, several of the top marketers here at Early to Rise and I went to the Webmasters World Conference in Las Vegas. We wanted to learn directly from many of the world’s top search engine marketers and see what they made of all the buzz surrounding this supposed traffic goldmine.

When I looked at the schedule, I was excited to see a panel discussion titled “Monetizing Social Media Traffic.” After all, isn’t making money the point of getting website traffic? So we all attended this session with great anticipation…

The consensus of the panel was that it’s difficult to monetize social media traffic. For whatever reason, this traffic is resistant to advertising and tends not to stay on the site very long. In fact, it appeared to them that one of the only ways to monetize this traffic is by using a CPM (cost per thousand) advertising model. This is where you sell ad space on your site and charge the advertiser based on the number of people who see their ads. Certainly not a good model for those of us who run direct-response websites - because not only are these visitors not buying from us, they’re also not clicking on our advertisers’ links.

Even worse, this heavy influx of traffic can put a strain on your hosting servers and cause your site to crash. So you have a bunch of people visiting your site who don’t buy, don’t subscribe, and wind up crashing your server. Talk about turning your social media traffic dream into a nightmare.

But I don’t want you to think social media is all bad. Of course, we are delighted to allow our readers to share ETR articles that they think are good. And we are very grateful that, in one case, 80,000 people read our extremely valuable content as a result of this free traffic.

Many of the top stories on Digg and Stumbleupon get picked up by blogs and other websites. And when an article from your site is being bounced around the Internet this way, you’ll get inbound links from various sites. These new links help you get direct traffic from the linking sites. Plus, they help you with search engine optimization, which can, in turn, lead to more converting traffic and more subscribers.

At Early to Rise, we will continue to test social media and use it as a link-building tool. But if you’re looking to build your online business, it’s better to focus on the proven direct-response marketing methods we’ve been telling you about. Don’t be afraid to pay for traffic through e-mail list rental, text-link ads, and pay-per-click advertising. These methods might cost a little bit of money… but you’ll be attracting targeted visitors who will buy from you.

[Ed. Note: Patrick Coffey is ETR’s Internet Marketing Director. He is also a contributor to ETR’s Internet Money Club, which shows you how to build an online business within the next 12 months. The Club’s membership was 100% filled last month - but we’ve just opened up a handful of slots for a very limited time. To check on availability, click here.]

Your Source For Home Based Business Resources

]]>