Internet Marketing Solution

Here’s another tool I use all the time to help with my link building campaigns. This one’s called RSS Submit. You’ll love it because all you need to do is find your rss url, copy and paste it into the software and click “Submit”…

Now go take a 5 minute break and get yourself some chocolate, a drink, whatever.

When you come back, RSS Submit will have a nice little list of all the RSS directories it submitted your feed to. It’s about as hand’s free as you can get. This tool will submit your feed to about 50 RSS directories on auto-pilot. You can also buy the RSSTop55 plug-in to get another set of RSS directories that you will have to submit your feed to manually.

Now don’t get too upset… I should say semi-manually. What you do is enter in your feed’s details (like author name, email address, feed title, feed url, description, etc) once and then click on the RSS directories one at a time. The software will fill in the details for your feed so all you need to do is select the category and hit submit.

There are over 100 directories in this plug-in. And the best part is, virtually no one takes the time to submit to these (since they have to actually do something) so your feed will get quite a bit more exposure. I estimate that you can submit to about 20 directories in 10 minutes time.

Getting your feed into these RSS directories will give you one-way backlinks. As you know, this will raise your rankings in the search engines for the key phrases you use in your anchor text. Just make sure before you submit your feeds that you have crafted a good title and description for your feed.

You will also get some traffic just from the directory itself. There are people who search for feeds through these directories. If they’re interested in the type of information you write about, they might visit your site and even subscribe to the feed. This can bring you traffic on an ongoing basis.

Click here to learn more about RSS Submit.

Technorati Tags: link building, RSS, RSS Submit

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I hear people ask questions like this all the time… “Is Adsense a Valid Business Strategy?”.

Well considering there are companies out there making millions with it, I’d have to say it is. In addition, many individuals are raking in quite a mint with Adsense.

So here are a few thoughts I have concerning Adsense and where it might fit into your business strategy …

The main issue I’d like to address in this article is the “Am I putting all my eggs in one basket with Adsense?” arguement. Quite simply put, if Adsense is the only way you’re generating money online, then yes, you stand to lose all your income if Google decides to shut down your account because you violated their terms or they close down (not likely, but let’s just pretend).

But for a moment, let’s stop and think about this. If you’re actually putting up real sites, with real content, and you’re getting real traffic, can’t you make money with other methods as well? I mean, you’ve done the hard part, can’t you now just replace the adsense with something else and maintain your income?

I think you can. Adsense is just a way to generate advertising money. You don’t really need Google to do this. Of course it’s nice and easy (just copy and paste the code they provide for you and you’re done), but you don’t really need Google to be your advertising middle-man. You can do it yourself.

For years before Adsense ever came around and even now in the Adsense Hayday, website owners have been playing the advertising game. Whether they charge by the click, the impression or just a flat rate for the size and duration of time to leave a banner up, saavy internet business owners have been doing this for years.

That’s the beauty of a real content site. The content attracts traffic … and other businesses clamor to put their message in front of all these sets of eyes. There are thousands upon thousands of websites out there that charge $500, $1,000, or even upwards of $5,000 (and then some) to allow another business to temporarily claim a piece of their traffic pie.

You can do this too.

It does require a little more work than copying and pasting Google’s code to your site, but it’s still not that tough to set up. And then it’s really your business, not just you getting paid by another company.

Alternately, you can always add in affiliate banners. Just be careful to select those that people will really want and try to “pre-sell” your visitors. By this, I mean you may want to make your own ad with a nice teaser of a headline, get your visitors to click on it and sell them on whatever the product or service is. You can just slap on an affiliate banner, but then you probably won’t make quite as much with that tactic (remember, anytime you’re williing to do more than the other people out there, you’ll be way ahead of the game).

But there are even more options. Yahoo has a program very similar to Adsense that is in beta and should be released soon. There is also talk that MSN will soon follow. So that means all your eggs really won’t be in one basket for long. There are many other similar programs out there that you can give a try if for some reason Adsense dries up.

You might also be able to create a product or service for the visitors who frequent your site. If you collect emails (and you really should), all you need to do is ask your subscribers what they want. Direct them to a survey and collect statistics on who wants what. Then just create it for them. You can make a ton more money this way than with virtually any other method available to you.

So in all reality, Google Adsense may just be a crutch. I think it’s a great program and I hope others open up in the future, but it’s really a lazy way to make money (please don’t be offended since I’ll admit that I’m lazy and I take advantage of it too).

In all reality, once you get a site up, you start making money with Adsense and you increase your site’s popularity in the search engines, you may make quite a bit more if you explore some of these other options. Think of Adsense as a “test” base. Once you get x amount of traffic per day, try to replace it with something else (i.e. something you put more effort into than copying and pasting in a few lines of code!) and see just how much more you can earn.

Technorati Tags: adsense, advertising, Google, Yahoo

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In one of my other posts, I mentioned the tools I use in order to get a high page rank in just one update and more importantly, a steady stream of free traffic from the search engines.

One of those tools is Directory Submitter. At the time of this writing, Directory Submitter will help you submit your site to over 300 directories. All of these directories accept links from other sites … in fact, they want them.

That’s why submitting your site to directories is a much easier task than trying to get one-way (or even reciprocal) links from regular sites. The whole point of a directory is to maintain an ever-growing resource of websites. Directories may be general in nature, like Yahoo and DMOZ, or they may be niche directories.

Most of the directories listed in Directory Submitter are general, meaning they will take all the high quality sites they can find. All you have to do is enter in your site information, find the right category, and click submit. You can do this by hand, or use Directory Submitter to save yourself some time.

With the software, you just enter in your information once and click on the directory you want to submit your site to. The software automatically fills in the information for you so all you have to do is find the right category and click submit. You can easily submit your site to about 20 directories in about 10 minutes.

The best part of Directory Submitter is that it keeps track of all the directories you submit your site to. So even if you just submit to 20 directories at a time, you’ll know where you left off. In addition, you can use it for more than one site.

Directory Submitter has a built-in profile manager for you. Just enter in your site’s name, the title for the link, description and a few other details and it will store it for you. Even better, it will allow you to enter in several different anchor text titles and descriptions and will rotate through them as you submit your site to the different directories. In my opinion, this is the most powerful feature of Directory Submitter.

Just find a few low competition/highly searched keyword phrases, load them into Directory Submitter and start submitting your site to various directories around the internet. These one-way backlinks will be picked up by the search engines who will catalog them by key phrase. This will boost your rankings for these low competition/highly searched phrases and you’ll start getting some free traffic.

Learn more about Directory Submitter.

Technorati Tags: page rank, Yahoo, keyword

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I’ve written about link building campaigns in several previous posts. I do have a method for building links to each of my sites that works very well. In fact, I have been able to go from a PR 0 up to a PR 5 in one update. I’ve heard of people going from 0 up to 6 or even 7 in one update (the time between an update is usually about 3 months in case you’re wondering) so virtually anything is possible.

While Page Rank itself isn’t such a great measure of anything relevant; like how much money you make or how much traffic you get, you can get high rankings in the search engines with a link campaign (which will in turn boost your Page Rank). To do this, all you really need to do is select your anchor text carefully. So rather than get 100 links to my site with the text “Internet Marketing” (and get absolutely nowhere because that term is way too competitive), I would use Wordtracker to find about 5-10 low competition/highly searched key phrases and interchange them as the anchor text.

That’s really all there is to it. The benefit of this technique is that you will start to see some traffic from the search engines fairly quickly. And faster results (even if they aren’t phenomenal) will propel you to do more work and achieve even better results.

So go out and find these golden keywords, write a short title and description of your site using them and then get some links. It’s not really any more difficult than that.

You can create an Excel file for all your keywords, descriptions, and your links to keep it all handy if you want. Here are a few other tools (in addition to Wordtracker) that I use…

I use Directory Submitter for submitting my sites to directories, Link Metro for getting reciprocal links from relevant sites, and RSS Submit for submitting my RSS feeds to the RSS directories. If you use those 3 tools, you can get hundreds of backlinks in no time.

If you write even just one or two articles for your site and submit them using Article Marketer or iSnare then you will really generate an absolute ton of backlinks.

You can very easily get a high PR in one update with these methods. In addition, you’ll move up in the search engine results for the terms you use in your anchor text. I’ll write up a review explaining exactly how I use each of these tools later for your convenience. You don’t need to go out and buy them all (or any of them), but they can simplify your life.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, link building, page rank, RSS, keyword, Wordtracker, RSS Submit

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I’m a big fan of content management systems (CMS). I define a content management system as a tool you can use to create, manage, and publish your information easily without having to hand code all the different pages. So according to my definition, I consider many of the blogging platforms to be content management systems. Really, it just depends on your definition as to whether you agree with me or not (Wikipedia.org defines it this way to so I’m sticking with it).

I regularly use Mambo & Joomla and of course, Wordpress to help publish my content (this site uses Wordpress if you didn’t already realize it). There are a ton of others out there as well. I suggest you start with just one and once you have mastered it, move on to another if you need to. Each CMS will have its own learning curve, so you don’t want to waste your time figuring out the details of each.

For the purposes of most internet marketers, Wordpress will do the trick. If you want to do something a little more fancy, then Mambo or Joomla might suit you. Drupal is another CMS that is commonly used. Each of these four content management systems are open source, meaning they are free. There is also a ton of support for each of these. Watch out for other open source CMS’s that might not be as actively supported.

The main factors you want to consider when choosing a content management system are; is there support, will it produce a site that is search engine friendly, and are you going to be able to use it quickly and easily. I’ve found that Mambo/Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal meet this criteria.

Someone else may prefer another CMS over what I’ve listed here. It’s really just personal preference. But I’d suggest if you’re planning to make money from the internet, unless you want to make it as a CMS expert, just pick a couple to use … there’s no need to try them all.

Technorati Tags: blog, search engine, content management systems, Mambo, Joomla, Wordpress

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One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned with Adsense is to not fall into the trap of thinking you only need a handful of websites. This is especially true if you plan to gain traffic primarily from the search engines.

The search engine algorithms change constantly. Trust me, you don’t want to be the poor internet marketer nervously checking his search engine rankings constantly. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I have sites that have successfully stayed ranked on the first page of Google for highly searched terms for years. But I’ve also had a couple of those sites get knocked down to page 135 (or something obnoxious like that) due to a search engine update.

You don’t want to be in that position. Never allow one factor to have control of your entire business. So if you plan on playing the adsense game, don’t think you’ll make thousands of dollars a month with just one site (or even a few). You want to be in several different markets and have several different sites in each market.

The most successful adsense players don’t even know how many markets they’re in. Obviously, you have to start somewhere, but eventually you will have so many sites in so many markets that you may lose track as well.

Not only do you need to build many different sites, but each site should have several pages. If each page is optimized for a single keyword, you can easily build hundreds of pages for most decent sized niches.

Another big lesson to learn with Adsense is to first figure out what works for you. Are you going to try to drive traffic to your sites with search engine traffic? Are you aiming at using pay-per-click traffic? What are your limits when it comes to auto-generated content? How are you planning on getting content?

Once you take action, build your site, start getting traffic to it, and generate adsense clicks, you need to try to improve on it. Get more traffic and more clicks — and a higher clickthru rate too. Also, and this is key … figure out a way to build more sites like this one as quickly as possible.

If you can generate even just $5 a day in profit consistently, that’s $150 a month. Not a whole lot, but just think if you have 100 of these sites. That’s now $15,000 a month. So the key is to try different techniques until you come up with a winning plan, and then mass produce it (or pay someone else to do it for you).

If you think about it, all that separates you from a 6 figure income is a website that earns you a measly $5 a day. Are you going to let that stand in your way? I decided a while back that I sure wasn’t!

Technorati Tags: adsense, Google, keyword, search engine

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If you’re looking over this site, you may notice a few things. For one, you may notice the Page Rank. Right now, as I type this in April of 2006, the PR of this site is only a 2. For someone who’s sharing a lot of SEO techniques, that’s a pretty pathetic Page Rank (although remember that PR doesn’t always equal traffic).

So what’s the scoop? Well, here’s something I do that I recommend you try if you have plans to get a site ranked well in Google and/or Yahoo.

Buy the domain, put something there and leave it alone until you are ready to use it. I bought this domain name around August of 2004. I did not really decide to do anything with it until about the very beginnning of April 2006.

A lot of people buy a domain name and let it sit around until they get time to actually use it. There’s nothing all that special about this technique and some might even call it procrastination.

But here’s the trick…

Make sure you put a few pages up, even if they aren’t perfect and get a few links to your site. This will get your site indexed in the search engines and it will help to “age” it. That means when you finally do get around to doing something with that domain, you aren’t going to have to wait weeks and weeks to start getting traffic.

At this point, April 19th, I’ve still not started my link building campaign (but I do have some PR, even if it’s only PR 2). I’ve torn down what was originally on this site and put up a blog with just a few posts. But just watch what happens in the coming months!

Remember, if you’re going to buy a domain, put something up on the site and get a few links to it. A few decent links will get your site indexed in Google and Yahoo in about a week or so. I’ve noticed that these “powerhouse” search engines (they’re the top 1 and 2 search engines, repectively), seem to give more credit to sites that have been around longer.

That way, when you finally decide to use your site, you have a serious head start!

Technorati Tags: link building, SEO, page rank

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I’m sure you know that getting other websites to link to yours is the key to higher rankings. Link building is called off-page optimization. Once you’ve optimized your sites as best you can (called on-page optimization), then you need to work on your link building campaign.

Link building is one the most important SEO factors there are so I’ll cover this in great detail in several posts. Unfortunately, one link isn’t going to get you very far (unless it comes from a wildly popular site like CNN.com and even at that, you wouldn’t want to stop there).

To get anywhere at all on the search engines, you’re actually going to need to follow through with a link campaign. You’ll have to integrate getting links to your site from several different sources.

When it comes to links, there are a few ground rules. I’ve listed a couple of “link building truths” here…

The text used in the link is very important. For example, if I’m linking to my own site and I use the following for the link … Internet Marketing Solution, I’ve just optimized my link for the words “Internet Marketing Solution”. I know that this key phrase is searched for a decent amount on the internet. So having a link with those words in it will give me a little boost in the search engine rankings when someone types in Internet Marketing Solution.

Contrast this with the following link … iMarketingSolution.com. Now I’ve just optimized my site for that particular key phrase. How much more often do you think the terms “Internet Marketing Solution” is typed in over “iMarketingSolution.com”? Well, I’m not sure anyone ever searches for the second one, so it wouldn’t do me much good at all to go out and get 20 links like that one.

So please be very careful of that when you begin your link building campaign. That’s why the absolute first thing I suggest doing is research key phrases with a tool like Wordtracker. At the very least, use the free tools available to you like the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (now Yahoo Search Marketing).

Let me tell you a real quick related story. When I first started out optimizing my very first site in 2002, I didn’t realize the value of the keywords used in the links. So I went out and put links all over with my company name. Of course, I wondered why I didn’t really get anywhere in the search engine results.

Then I ran an analysis on my site to look at the keywords used in the links (this is called anchor text). It finally hit me that they were all my company name which is not what anyone was searching for! It’s no wonder I wasn’t ranking all that high for the keywords I hoped to rank well for.

So just remember to get some good keywords chosen before you before you ever get your first link.

The next “link building truth” is to make it look natural. Don’t use the exact same anchor text and description for each of your links. The search engines may penalize for this (or if they don’t yet, I’m sure they will eventually). So get several key phrases and anchor text written up before you ever start. Then switch them up. If you have a big enough site, chances are, you’ll provide more information than what can be summed up with a single key phrase. So get links with them all the related phrases.

One of the best things to do is get key phrases that are searched a decent amount, but with relatively low competition. Start with those as anchor text. That way you will see a little traffic from the search engines before you try for the more competitive key phrases later. This way you’ll actually feel like you’re getting somewhere (and this is actually more important than you might realize).

I’ll explain how to use Wordtracker for this later on.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, link building, SEO, links, Yahoo, keyword, search engine

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