The New Kid On The Block

by Eric Goodman

The New Kid On The Block by Eric Goodman

Before I begin, I want to let you know that prior to me attempting to try my hand at Internet marketing, I had very little knowledge and experience with the Internet. In fact I had very little knowledge and experience with computers. I was a construction worker for 15 years, until an injury prevented me from continuing that type of work. The Internet was a new challenge for me and I was very intimidated because of my lack of knowledge. I spent a year wasting my time doing what everyone had told me to do to make my website successful. It just didn’t work! I wasted a lot of my time and money. The Internet is so large and there are so many people trying to make money. Some are trying to make it anyway they can. Therefore, being the new kid on the block, it was hard to decipher what was real and what was not real. Knowing who to trust and who not to trust was confusing. Knowing what was a scam and what was not a scam created many headaches.

What Product to Sell The first thing that you need to do is decide what product that you want to sell. Sit down one afternoon and just brainstorm. Write down every product idea that you can think of without being objective. Try and create a list of 100 products. Start with the first product on your list and work your way to the bottom of your list, weighing out the pros and the cons for each product. With the pro products, created another list and with the con products simply discard. Continue this process until you chose 1 product to start marketing. For some recommended products that sell very well on the Internet, go to The Best Marketing Infomation.com

Product Research I went to the Google search engine window and entered a search term relevant to my product, and to my surprise there were 493,000,000 websites marketing products just like mine. I got a big knot in my throat and said to myself, “how could I possibly compete with all of those websites?” Begin surfing the Internet. Visit as many websites that are successful in marketing your product and visit many websites that are not so successful. You will notice that there are many websites that are selling your exact same product. Some are doing well, others are not. You will see as you visit these websites, it really doesn’t matter what your product is. Please understand, as in any business, the key to your success is in your marketing.

Building a Website Building my first website was a very enjoyable experience for me. It gave me an opportunity to use my creativity and insert my personality. You don’t have to possess any special skills to be able to build a professional website. There are many inexpensive programs available that literally do most of the work for you. FrontPage 2003 is one that I personally recommend. Once you complete your website and put it online you will experience a tremendous feeling of success and accomplishment. Now your adrenaline is flowing and your confidence level is high.

Marketing Your Website Now you are ready to market your website. This is what separates the men from the boys. Remember the key to your success is in your marketing. There are so many ways to market your product on the Internet. There is no magic formula or secret for success. Finding the right marketing strategy is the most frustrating part of establishing a successful home-based business. There is a vast array of websites that claim to show you proven methods and guaranteed methods of generating tons of traffic to your website and making tons of sales. When you visit those websites, their sales page is very compelling to make you believe their method of marketing works and with little effort. That is the power of words. My rule of thumb is, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is too good to be true.

You Get What You Pay For There is one thing to keep in mind, as with anything, you get what you pay for. There are many free ways to advertise on the Internet. Whether it’s free classified ads, free directory submissions, free ezines, free article submissions, free newsletter campaigns, free site rotations, free for alls, free link exchanges etc., you basically get what you pay for. Most times using these free advertising methods, people go from one deal to the next, looking for that magical formula or advertising opportunity that will never appear and they eventually just quit.

A lot of people use the excuse they don’t have any money to become successful on the Internet and waist a lot of time and effort in trying numerous fly by night opportunities that require no money that sound too good to be true and never make a dime. However, there are home business opportunities that will give you a good foundation to start.

If marketing on the Internet is something that you want to do, you will find a way to get money to invest in your marketing campaign and you will find a way to make it work. There are always going to be obstacles that tell you that you can't do something. But you have to know deep inside what it is that you really want. Once you find the answer to that you will find what it takes to be successful.

Think about this. If you are a grown adult over 25 and you do not have a few hundred dollars to start a home-based business, or cannot come up with a few hundred dollars to start a home-based business something is seriously wrong. But what you need to do is take a serious look at yourself and ask, "What is it that I want out of life." And whatever your answer is, that is your motivation for starting your home-based business. Because once you find the thing that motivates you, there will be no more excuses and you will be unstoppable.

Marketing Strategies There are many marketing strategies that work however you need to find the one that works best for you. The following are some marketing strategies that I have found to be very successful:

Search Engine Optimization and Submission In order to have an effective search engine strategy, you have to understand which keywords your targeted audience is searching for, and how popular one keyword phrase is compared to another. You can easily obtain this information. Overture.com has a free keyword search tool that is highly effective. With this tool you will know exactly what keywords people are searching for. You should experiment with as many possible word searches as you can think of. The next step is optimizing your website. Web Pages are generally programmed using HTML coding. HTML is the coding that tells your web browser how the web page you are accessing should look. In order to design an effective search engine strategy for your website, you need to be able to view the HTML source code for various websites, especially those of competitors who are currently listed high in search engine results. Within this HTML coding is were your pages are optimized. In order to view the source code for a particular website you need to:

Go to any website with your web browser. Go to "View" on the menu bar. Go down and click on "Source" in the drop down menu.

When you do this, a text editor program on your computer (Notepad in Windows) will be displayed. This is the HTML source code. If you have never done this before, you should try it now. Don't worry about making sense of what you see at this point. You can close the program containing the source code when you are done looking at it. To optimize your website effectively you must have proper keyword density. Keyword density is how often a keyword appears on a page as a percentage of all words on the page. You must also include proper meta tags. Meta tags tell search engines about what the web page deals with. Search engines take the information included in the Meta tags and build the listing for that particular page. Meta tags include your sites title, site description and site keywords.

I know all of this sound very difficult however there is a software that I highly recommend that is extremely effective with assisting you with your search engine optimization and your search engine submissions, go to http://www.axandra.com/go.to/bestmarketing/2. This software also includes many other useful programs needed by a Webmaster. This software will make you a search engine optimization expert.

Exchanging Links Trading or reciprocating links with other web sites is the best way to bring you qualified traffic, period! The more links you have, the more successful your website. Having hundreds or even thousand of relevant websites linked to yours makes your site popular and is therefore recognized with search engines which in turn gives you a higher search engine position. Creating qualified traffic to your website can be accomplish by trading links. One good reciprocal link can give you the same amount of traffic as a major search engine. Exchanging links is a very long and frustrating process.

First you need to find websites that are relevant to yours, visit these sites, do an alexa search at www.alexa.com to find out how their website ranks and does it have traffic, then you have to find a form on the site to fill out to exchange links, if you can’t find a form you have to find a contact email address, then you have to email the webmaster and request to exchange links. Most of your link exchange requests never gets a response and sometimes it take two or three requests before they do respond. For me using this tedious process, 1 out of every 75- 100 requests actually exchange links with me. So you can imagine how time consuming this could be. There is a program that I recommend that makes exchanging links and managing those links much easier and will save you thousands of hours, go to http://www.axandra.com/go.to/bestmarketing. One thing that you need to be on the alert for, services that offer to improve your traffic by means of automatically generated link pages for you to post in your website. On paper, the potential they offer looks good, but the pages are usually chaotic, with no themes or common thread at all. This is a quantity versus quality approach, and may actually derail your efforts. Since you are linking to a number of sites on pages that lack cohesive themes, you simply have no way to know if those other sites have any traffic that has any bearing whatsoever on your themes. If most of those sites have little traffic, say less than one hit per day, then what good is it to be linked in this way? Not only that, but you are actually being even more counterproductive. Belonging to a consortium such as these, many times you need to put up banners that may advertise competing products, and they may even want you to host another page of links and submit them to search engines. You are aiding and abetting them in this sloppy method of link production (and that's all it is, link production)! It begs the question; “Is this the way to bring in truly qualified traffic to your site?” The answer to this question is no. What you end up with is pages full of potentially unrelated links, and your site being added to a similar page elsewhere! Is this the way to get qualified traffic? Of course not!

Newsletters For the new kid on the block, newsletters are an extremely effective way to advertise your website. The most successful websites on the Internet are adding subscribers to their permission-based email newsletters every day. And as these newsletters grow, so do your opportunities for marketing and promoting your site. Most of these newsletters are free to join, and they cover thousands of topics. Subscriber bases of these newsletters vary from just a handful of subscribers, up to hundreds of thousands, and even millions. Advertising in newsletters of creditable websites will expose you to hundreds, thousands, and millions of your targeted audience, subscribers, people who asked to receive these newsletters. There are thousands of these publications that go out weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Advertising in one of these newsletters will cost you anywhere from $25 - $100 per week. Some of these websites will even allow you to send a solo ad or article to their entire mailing list. I have one newsletter that I advertise with that goes out weekly and costs me $35 per week. The email list has over 10,000 subscribers. Now imagine advertising in 10 different newsletters in one week. Can you see how much exposure you can potentially receive? The key is to find relevant websites that are already established and credible with high traffic rankings. Their newsletter should have a large opt-in list. This is who you want to advertise with. This is considered a credible website. The power of credibility also makes people automatically trust you. It will be your responsibility to live up to their good reputation and build your own credibility.

God Bless You and Best Wishes Eric Goodman

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