Internet Marketing: Your Unique Selling Position

You must give potential customers some very good reasons for them to buy from you or your links. Offering special bonuses and discounts works wonders for your sales. Some of my most successful pages simply consist of coupons and discounts offered by different companies. If buyers can save $100's OFF by buying thru your links, they will.

Always remember, besides looking for the best deal or bargain, consumers are also looking for a quality product. If you're into affiliate marketing, only pick top quality products to promote. Picking top brand names also makes it easier to make sales. So too is only promoting popular online merchants like Amazon which can be an effective marketing strategy. Most importantly, always remember consumers are also looking for INFORMATION on the products they are considering buying, give them helpful information and you will succeed.

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Internet Marketing Wishes

On behalf of myself and everyone here at Consider Internet Marketing we wish to wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah.

As we rest and spend time with our loved ones and families, let's get ready to make 2010 the best year yet!

Peace be with You.

Jim Gage

Auto Responders, Líst Building & Online Relationships

Keeping in contact with potential buyers is mission critical. You must use auto-responders to send follow-up messages to build trustful relationships with your potential customers.

So building a large contact líst is essential. That's why the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace can be very effective marketing tools for building this online contact and trust. Truth be told, all these social networks are, more or less, just glorified auto-responders and líst builders!

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Internet Marketing: Automate Everything

The real beauty of marketing online and using computers... you can automate just about every process in your marketing system. Make it a point of automating everything you do... use autoresponders to follow-up with potential buyers, use automatic check-outs, automatic reporting... just set-up your whole internet marketing system that runs itself with little or no supervision from you. This will free up your time to concentrate all your efforts on marketing/promoting your site or product. Besides, nothing beats coming back from a vacatíon and finding out you have earned the cost of your vacatíon and then some - all the while you were lying in the sun and miles away from any computer.

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Internet Marketing: Target Recurring or Residual Income

One of my most effective marketing strategies is to promote and sell products and services that give you a recurring or residual income. Make one sale and get paíd for years or for the life of that referred client. Concentrate on services like web-hosting, telephone, marketing programs... once customers sign up to these services, they will likely keep them for years. I am still earning income from sales I made five years ago.

Building a large residual income could be the key to surviving in tough economic times. This will be income which will carry you or your business over the rough patches since it is based upon past performance and not on your current selling situation.

For more great tips and the latest in Internet Marketing, click here to receive our Free Internet Marketing Newsletter.

Until next time - be well.

Jim Gage

Internet Marketing: Go With The Flow

If you're marketing online, you have to follow what's working for you. Most times you will try countless ideas or tactics - once you have found a process or system that works, really work it or scale it up. Making your first dollar is the hardest, but once you do something that earns you that dollar, just repeat that "something" a thousand times.

Tracking what works is very important so keep a close eye on your site's traffic logs to find where your customers are coming from. Something like Google Analytics is simply priceless for "fine-tuning" your site and your internet marketing. It will tell you what's working and what's not.

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Consider Internet Marketing: Make Google Your Friend

Whether you love or hate Google doesn't matter, you just have to make it your number one ally in your online marketing. Google has just about conquered the world-wide search market, Yahoo and MSN are still important, but Google is the deal-breaker when you're selling stuff online. Consumers have enormous respect for Google; a number one listing for a lucrative keyword simply means money in the bank.

I have found using Google Search, Google Adwords, and Google Adsense have played a more than significant role in the success of my own online sites and marketing. Google tools such as Google Analytics, Google Alerts, Webmaster Tools... all have been invaluable and an enormous help in achieving my "web-based" lifestyle and livelihood. Of course, Google has also driven me around the bend more times than I can count, but no one is perfect. Besides, when it's all said and done, anyone marketing on the web must truly embrace Google if they want to reach their highest level possible.

Consider Internet Marketing: Website Keywords

Make Keywords Your #1 Goal

This is the single most important factor for my own online success. You have to make keywords and ranking high for them in all the search engines your main objective if you're marketing online. Might sound obvious, but many beginning marketers don't truly understand how important getting top rankings for your chosen keywords will be in your online success.

Target less competitive long tail (multi-worded) keywords to get started and slowly work your way up to more popular keywords. Center your marketing around getting those first page listings for your keywords. Achieve this goal, (especially in Google) and it will be almost impossible for you not to succeed and make a profit with your online marketing even in bad times.

Internet Marketing : Link Bait Tools

For anybody with a bit of imagination and a talented programmer, creating a tool for your site is the easiest way to link bait. Make the tool useful and well presented and its very easy to link to. Unique and useful tools can often turn a commercial site that struggles to attract any natural links into a useful resource that even competitors will link to and use on a regular basis.

Common ideas include methods to help people find information about products, test their websites, improve their skills, generate images or content for blogs and social networking profiles. Some of the best tools build millions of links without the users even knowing they are part of some clever link bait campaign.

Internet Marketing : Presenting your Link Bait

Although successful link bait will attract thousands of visitors you should not expect the visitors to click on any Ad sense adverts or buy any products from your site. The best way to make your site stand out and attract links is to remove all the adverts. Yes, you read that part right. Remove your adverts. You can put them back on in a month or so, if you like, but make sure the page is clean, well laid out, easy to read and ad free.

Design is another essential skill in a link baiter's arsenal. The page needs to look great and not look like just another Blogger blog. Invest the time and money required to make your site look great. People who go the extra mile and design custom graphic for a particular article or blog post will get more links because of it. If you are really creative then adding an image that’s cool enough for other bloggers to use it on their blogs while they link to you will make you more memorable and maximize the potential of your link bait.

For more FREE Internet Marketing information, why not stop by our web site and sign up for our Free Newsletter - you will be glad you did - http://www.ConsiderInternetMarketing.com

Internet Marketing : Creating Link Bait

My last post had to do with link bait, so I thought I would continue on that theme. Today we will focus on creating your link bait!

The first step to thinking of a really cool tool, unique news story or article is to find out what people want to read about. It sounds simple but following the breaking stories on the various social networking sites as well as Technorati.

Another good tip is to search the social bookmarking sites for things related to your site that have been popular in the past. You might find a nice tool that was on Digg 2 years ago and be able to use it to inspire something more modern for your site.

A quick look at some popular tools in different areas is often a good source of inspiration. For example you might see a tool on a car/auto website for valuing used cars and be able to apply it to your real estate site.

Internet Marketing : Link Baiting

Link bait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image.
Sometimes link bait is intentional but quite often the best link bait is conceived quite by accident.

My favorite example of a piece of link bait is the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. The download page has over 15 million links and is probably the most linked internal page on the web today.

The Top 12 Ways To Use Twitter for Internet Marketing

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)
2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.
3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?
4. You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?
5. Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.
6. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your opt-in house email list. Invite these people to join.
7. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.
8. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.
9. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
10. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.
11. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.
12. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep your and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 12 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

Internet Marketing : Google and You

Did you know that some experts estimate that Google gets close to 500 million local search results each month? Do you think there are people looking for what you may have inside your head? Meaning, your knowledge and expertise! Yes, people are looking for what you know, whether that is a hobby or your experience through a job or a small business that you own or have owned.

Why not turn your knowledge into products and services and become one of the hundreds of individuals we have helped to do just that. Please stop by our website and sign up for our Free Internet Marketing Newsletter - www.ConsiderInternetMarketing.com

Until next time - Be well.

Jim Gage

Internet Marketing : Why Social Bookmarking?

I figure that if you're reading this, you have that question, or a similar one.

There are three reasons:

     1 - More links

     2 - More traffic

     3 - More credibility

More links are always a good thing.

Think of links as the road traffic that moves through the web. If there are no roads to where your business "lives" online, namely your website, it's far less likely that the visitors you want will end up getting to you.

That's true whether you're talking about search engines or links from other sites. Search engines use a mysterious cross between the number and quality of links to your site in their determination of whether you should be number one or number 701 for your desired keyword.

In addition, the "nicer" the road, the more traffíc will flow through it - think of an authority site linking to your site as a highway that leads directly to your site, and one from a reciprocal link or link exchange scheme as a back street in a sketchy neighborhood full of potholes.

Improved traffic, also good.

From social bookmarking, this traffic is often targeted. Through tagging, the description someone writes, or the title they assigned to your link, the person who discovers the submitted link on a social bookmarking site knows exactly where they're going, and why they're interested in getting there.

It's like seeing the cover of a magazine on a rack. That's what pulls them in, they see a headline - and to get to the story they are compelled to take another action.

The more credibility thing is a bit harder to explain, so we'll go with another analogy.

Let's say I made a movie and I thought it was fantastic. If I hadn't met you before, and I tell you, "hey, I made a great movie, come see it!" - you may come see it, you may not.

It depends more on how much time you have and if you're interested in that kind of movie, or even how nice of a person you are, than my opinion.

Why?

Because I'm the one who made it, so you can't know whether to trust my opinion, at least in relation to how much YOU might like it. Of course I think it's great, but I have no way of knowing whether you will.

Now, if you knew me and my taste, and how alike our tastes are, you may be a bit more inclined. So if I'm, say, Michael Bay, and you liked my last movie, and my new movie is on the same type of thing, you might go see it based on the trailer alone. You know you're taking a gamble but it's a safe bet.

Now watch this.

Your best buddy, the one who likes all the same things you like, the one you hang out with and trust the most, calls you on the phone and says:

"I've just seen the best movie I've ever seen in my entire life. I have to see it again. When are you free, I'll come pick you up."

The only thing that could make that deal sweeter is if your friend has also said "My treat." At least as far as recommendations go, the person who knows what you like the most is likely to be the person whose advice you'll follow.

If you know that friend, and that person has similar tastes, or at least knows what you like, you're more likely to see the movie.

My sister and I have similar tastes in movies, but I'm a little more patient with beginnings and endings and like more indie-fare. Yet, no matter how many times I have suggested we watch a movie together that she ends up not liking as much, if I rave about a movie, she'll at least give it a chance.

Now, let's take that back to social bookmarking. Imagine you can find hundreds of people, all over the world, with tastes similar to yours, sharing information you wouldn't find yourself.

Or maybe you can just connect faster and more frequently for suggestions from people you already know. Wouldn't you be more likely to follow their suggestions than some stranger?

That's the power of social bookmarking. It's put a technology behind word of mouth sharing of web sites that anyone can use.