As you enter the world of internet marketing, I have no doubt that you have been hammered with offers of ‘the perfect money making system’ or ‘join now, get rich tomorrow’ kinds of websites, systems and products.
So you want to earn income through online marketing. You’ve read everything you can on how to set up a WordPress blog, how to write headlines, etc, and all that other good stuff. Now you need a product or a service. What are you actually going to promote or offer on that shiny new web [...]
Tom Ewer, over at Leaving Work Behind, has posted a fantastic list of the top 100 blogs you need to know about. These blogs cover, in general, the following topics: Entrepreneurship, Blogging, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, SEO/SEM, Niche Sites, Freelancing and Affiliate Marketing. Folks, this is a gold mine of information! Here’s a quote [...]
When I first started this site, I posted about a very cool plugin that had just been developed call WP-Lynx. What it does is add Facebook style links to your WordPress pages. Here’s an example: Philippine Expat Guide – Live In The Philippineshttp://www.philippineexpatguide.comMoving to the Philippines is a dream that a lot of us have. [...]
I’ve had some incredible problems with the old WordPress theme and plugins I was using. Constant data loss, incompatibilities, and so on. Today I uploaded a new theme, activated it, and the site blew up. It seems that other theme put a ton of non-WordPress-standard code in the database, and it was “hooking” into the [...]
I like selling e-books because they give the customer real value. The hardest part about it is generating quality traffic, because there are quite a few sites pushing these products, and it’s hard to rise above the noise.
As you enter the world of internet marketing, I have no doubt that you have been hammered with offers of ‘the perfect money making system’ or ‘join now, get rich tomorrow’ kinds of websites, systems and products.
It has often been said that the only people that get rich in internet marketing are the internet marketers who market to newbie internet marketers!
Note: if you are writing to get search engine traffic, try not to do what I just did in that last sentence!
There are training courses and other materials that are useful and provide value. The biggest problem is that they are so hard to find, and if you find one, how do you know it’s reliable, and not just another make money scam offer?
For one, I hate those awful squeeze pages that everyone screams you must have. I’m talking about those super long one page sites that start off telling how great this system is, and how you, too, can be successful! Then, they show you just how successful you can be by dropping in an image of their sales from ClickBank.com or another affiliate program site. After this, they show you all the wonderful endorsements from affiliates who also got rich from their program, e-book or videos. Lastly, they tell you that you only have a few days to buy the program at the current price – “Hurry, this won’t last forever!”.
Every product I’ve purchased from sites like these have proven to be utter bullshit. They are either old and outdated – one ‘traffic secrets’ e-book talked at length about setting up a friendster account. Do you remember friendster? neither do I!
Private Label Rights (PLR) articles are usually no better. Most PLR’s are simple compilations of the most basic information that is easily found on the internet, massaged into a specific niche or general strategy, are being sold as complete tutorials that give you “everything you need” to strike it rich. If you find some of these, compare them – you’ll find they contain the same information, just rewritten slightly, and perhaps written to target a certain niche.
Anything that has words similar to “riches, goldmine, explosion, master, quick, overnight or easy” will not get you what you want.
I mentioned earlier that there are very useful web sites and courses that do deliver on their promises. I think I found one of these today.
This site offers a free trial, and has some very good information available at no cost. You don’t need to sign up with a credit card or PayPal.com, and you can simply walk away at any time.
The free trial opens up several areas so you can get a good feel for how they present their training and informative courses. These include a complete beginners course, consisting of 10 lessons with follow-up tasks, a comprehensive keyword research tool that really does work very well, access to live chat, and automatic addition to their affiliate program. The information might be somewhat basic to experienced marketers, but even they will likely find some good nuggets of new information.
You can also set up two WordPress blogs of your very own. Called “WordPress Express”, their system lets you set up your own blogs in no time – it’s so easy anyone could do it. The system walks you through each step with clearly explained tutorials – for this reason alone it’s worth taking advantage of the free trial.
The free trial is perfect for anyone who is just getting started. For once, you get good information, useful tools, help from other members, two free WordPress blogs, and there is no need to cancel any kind of recurring or scheduled payments or give them a credit card number.
After trying the free access level, they offer a signup for 30 days as a Premium member, for only $19.00, if you upgrade to Premium within the first 7 days. The site has a countdown clock that is plainly visible everywhere to remind you.
Tomorrow I’ll upgrade to Premium – I can handle the $19 to find out – and I’ll continue this in a new post, letting you know what I find out.
Check it out. The site is WealthyAffiliate.com.
So you want to earn income through online marketing. You’ve read everything you can on how to set up a WordPress blog, how to write headlines, etc, and all that other good stuff.
Now you need a product or a service. What are you actually going to promote or offer on that shiny new web site of yours?
The process to determine what product you want to sell online is not difficult. There can be some “branching” depending on your initial choices, but overall the concepts are very simple.
First and foremost – do you already have a product or service? If so, and the product or service isn’t brand new, then you should have been in the online marketing game a long time ago. Don’t worry, it’s not too late!
Blogging is a fantastic way to promote a service that you can offer. Personally, I promote my web site development and management services, as well as my photography services. I’m pretty lucky, because I can focus on building and managing web sites for hotels, resorts and restaurants, and I can marry my two primary (and favorite) skills – web development and photography. I take photos of all the hotel rooms, restaurants, beaches, pools, and so on, and include them in the sites I build and manage.
Tom Ewer, over at Leaving Work Behind, has posted a fantastic list of the top 100 blogs you need to know about.
These blogs cover, in general, the following topics: Entrepreneurship, Blogging, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, SEO/SEM, Niche Sites, Freelancing and Affiliate Marketing.
Folks, this is a gold mine of information!
When I first started this site, I posted about a very cool plugin that had just been developed call WP-Lynx. What it does is add Facebook style links to your WordPress pages. Here’s an example:
As you can see, it adds a bordered link with the site or page title, the URL, and a section of text from the page, and am image from the page. The admin screen shot below show how you can not only select the image from the page, but you can also select the specific paragraph of text you want to show.
I’ve had some incredible problems with the old WordPress theme and plugins I was using. Constant data loss, incompatibilities, and so on.
Today I uploaded a new theme, activated it, and the site blew up. It seems that other theme put a ton of non-WordPress-standard code in the database, and it was “hooking” into the current theme in very unpredictable ways. Very unprofessional.
Anyway, I recovered most of the posts from the old database, and completely re-installed WordPress. If you were registered before, you will need to sign back up.
I should have the theme configured and most of the needed plug-ins installed and working in a day or two.
I will be adding the tutorials and downloadable files as time permits.
This new theme will not cause a problem like this again. You can sign up and feel secure that you won’t need to do it again.
I personally prefer affiliate marketing over PPC advertising. I feel you get more value for your time, assuming you have targeted traffic that is actually looking for the products you promote.
I’m always looking for new products to push. I’m having some great success with a new product – The Philippine Expat Survival Guide E-Book. I also put up a site for the Philippine Expat basic Training Manual and am starting to see some sales.
I like selling e-books because they give the customer real value. The hardest part about it is generating quality traffic, because there are quite a few sites pushing these products, and it’s hard to rise above the noise.
We’ll get into traffic generation in other posts; for now, I want to show you how you can promote e-books starting today. Literally today.