Internet Marketing 2008 by Terry Mn - HTML preview

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Copyright 2008 by Yap Tat Meng All rights reserved.

No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may

quote brief passages in a review.

 

This ebook is a concise version of the book

“Internet Marketing for Seniors from concept to delivery” and is free for distribution. You may also redistribute it in any way you deem fit, provided no part of it is materially

changed in totality or in part. It must also not be sold. The contents of this book is correct at the time of publishing.

Contents
Your strategies ………………………………………………………….4 How to come up with a new idea ……………………………………..5 Your product …………………………………………………………….7 Next, can you make it?. ………………………………………………..8 Your marketing plan ……………………………………………………9 Your delivery ……………………………………………………………9 Your collection system ………………………………………………..10 Your promotions ……………………………………………………….10 Branding ………………………………………………………………..11 How to be found? ……………………………………………………...11 Top 3 Tips to get indexed …………………………………………….12 Important factors for good search engine rankings ………………..15 Do you need to be concerned with Page Rank? …………………..18 Do you have duplicate contents? …………………………………….20 Google’s new Pay Per Action ………………………………………...21 Ever heard of search engine spam filters? ………………………….22 Google’s tips…………………………………………………………….23 Can your new site get ranking in forty eight hours? ………………..25 Google’s Algorithm …………………………………………………….26 Are image search important? …………………………………………28 How do search engines describe your web site? …………………..29 Over optimized? ………………………………………………………..30 How to get to the top …………………………………………………..31 Have you been stung by Adwords …………………………………...33 Is your web site being sabotaged? …………………………………..34 Web site designed wrongly……………………………………………34 What is semantic indexing? …………………………………………..35 Why your rankings dropped? …………………………………………36 Do you need the new sitemap file? …………………………………..36 Make your web site umber 1…………………………………………..37 Linking patterns…………………………………………………………38 About the author………………………………………………….last page

Internet Marketing 2008
Your strategies

Are you going to market something? Would you want to market a product through the Internet? Yes, you obviously do, otherwise you won't be taking the trouble to read this free ebook, right? However, although many of us who harbors a dream of one day being able to sell our very own product, there are many of us who will chicken out even before we go and find out more about the way to do it. Well, there are shirkers and doers. I hope that you belong to the later ones.

This ebook that you are about to read is a concise version of the book entitled 'Internet Marketing for Seniors from concept to delivery' that I have published. Although it is a concise version, it will give you sufficient information to use as a guide to make that 'big' idea of yours into reality. Of course there are a lot of free information out there about Internet Marketing but I will concentrate on one of the most asked questions that will confront the marketer, and that is, 'what can I sell on the net?'. I believe this is the most pressing question and one of the most important hurdles that an Internet Marketer will have to overcome. Although there are articles that suggested hundreds of potential products for you to take up, they are mostly outdated and not worth your while to consider. Just imagine when thousands of similar items are found at affiliate sites; what would be the chance of you, a late comer, to compete with them! In short, you must not follow those suggestions, otherwise you will waste ten years of your life for taking a wrong direction. I will not say that all those product ideas are useless, but if you can take a different perspective of them, you might come up with a fresh new idea and prosper on it! I will elaborate on it and show you how. But before that, I would like to suggest to you about adopting a strategy.

Would you create a new product and sell it using Internet Marketing? All right, it sounds like a very ambitious idea, but believe me, it is achievable as I have done it many times before. Before you chicken out, I have to advice you not to take an easier route by taking up an offer from those thousands of affiliate sites out there selling some one else's product. The truth of the matter is that 95% of affiliate's sites don't make any money. Be smart, come up with a new product of your own and let others sell it for you instead! That will be the best strategy that you can take at this time, 2008. Period.

How to come up with a new Idea?

Coming up with an idea is easy. Or is it? It is easy, if you just know how! Let me take you back in time to a period during your younger days. Think back and think hard. I am sure you must have thought of a fanciful idea way back, perhaps during your younger rebellious days? Of course you had conveniently forgotten about it. Now is the time to bring it back. Never mind how ridiculous it was. This is the Internet age, the more ridiculous it is, the better!

What ever idea that you have, whether it is of a tangible or an intangible kind, you will need to make it suitable for marketing through the internet. I will tell you about what to and what not to sell on the internet later on, but first, allow your idea more time to develop. Ideas evolve and mutates. Whilst it is still in your mind, you will have to ask yourself a lot of questions like 'what if I were to put a little bit of attachment here' or 'if I were to combine a movable part there' sort of query. You have to visualize it moving, flying or even exploding. You will have to role play it and see what the possibilities are. Let the whole thing simmer.

Let us take an example
I would like to give you an example of where to look for a new product idea, after which you will begin to see possibilities in every corner of your surroundings. Let us take a look at our cutleries like forks, spoons, cups, plates and glasses. When you have guests, you will normally offer them tea and coffee. You will normally wash and rinse the cups and plates before serving them. Sometimes, you might have to wipe them off with a table cloth. The purpose is of course to clean it before you use them to serve your guests. However, it is not always that you have clean cups after all the rinsing, and wiping because the water or the cloth might have already being contaminated. I would like to propose a secondary method of further cleaning of these cutleries. Let me propose a portable oven-like contraption that you will place all the cutleries into. This contraption has an electrically run ultra violet lamp. Its main purpose is to expose all the cutleries for a minute or two so that all the pathogens (germs and bacteria) can be killed. It will render your cutleries doubly clean, so that when you use them to serve your guest that cup of tea or coffee, you are confident that your guest will not go home with stomach acres (assuming that the other snacks are hygienically safe). Further more, you can also place the foodstuffs in this contraption for sanitizing, just like the cutleries. The proposed contraption is a simple device with an electrical wired violet light lamp and can be produced without much effort. It uses already known technology. What is new is the concept of sanitizing those cutleries that you use to serve your guests. When your guest finds out that you have gone through great efforts to ensure them safety, they will leave with great appreciation. Just imagine if this thing take of in homes. It will spread to the other outlets that serve foodstuffs to people! It could be a billion dollar business! And you say you have no good idea? Want more ideas? So you see there are many great possibilities even at places that you normally take for granted! All you have to do is to use your imagining power to visualize it. You can do it right in front of your eyes!

In case you still find it hard to come up with fresh ideas, you might want to consider using advance visualization techniques to sharpen your mind. Or perhaps you can get yourself a copy of my book entitled 'Inventing: the moment before the spark came', which teaches you how to condition your mind to spark creations. The book's ISBN is 978-1-4303-1304-5 and is available online at LuLu, Amazon, BarnsandNoble and Target.

Remember we were talking about those hundreds of suggested ideas from free ebooks? Well, you can actually use some of those ideas there as seed ideas. You then use your visualizing powers to turn those seed ideas into something else. New ideas always come from existing ideas. Smart people can use their inventiveness to turn a stale product into an exciting product. So can you.

Your product

Products can either be categorized as tangible or intangible ones. Intangible ones include information ebooks and computer programs and they are easier to sell because they can be delivered electronically and instantaneously. There is no shipping cost to talk about. However, since it is easier to create, there is also more competition out there. You should get into some niches that have fewer competitions, or something that is completely new. As like anything that is marketed through the internet, you will have to get to terms on things like 'keywords'. We will touch on it later because it is of great importance.
Tangible products are more problematic because when you have to ship it, there are many considerations to be taken into account. Shipping charges are mainly determined by the weight of the product. Volumes are also taken into account because no matter which method you ship it, space is a limiting factor. Generally, the heavier and bulkier the product, the higher is its shipping cost.

*If your product is weighty and cost less than a hundred dollars, it is not suitable for marketing through the internet.

 

*If the volume is large but priced below two hundred dollars, then it is not viable for selling through the net.

 

*Products that can be returned for wrong sizes and colors should not be considered as well.

 

There are of course other considerations as well, so you will need to ponder over it before you embrace Internet Marketing.

 

Next, can you make it?

You either make it whole or part or outsource it out to third parties. Products that are simple in nature can be made with very little effort. Consider your own capabilities first before you launch any sort of manufacturing. You will need some sort of expertise. You also need capital, a proper place and plenty of time. I would however recommend that you dish out the manufacturing to a third party and instead concentrate on the marketing aspect of it. In case you have a product that is new, you will need to be careful as not to reveal it to the third party before you made them sign a non disclosure agreement. You might also have to look into product protection and things like patents and trade marks. Filing Intellectual properties is a time consuming and costly affair, so before proceeding, do a proper research of it first.

______________________________________________________ Your marketing plan

When you are considering your marketing plan, you will need to take into account the type of product that you have. First of, decide whether you are going to sell it yourself or you allow others to sell it for you. If your product has plenty of competitors, you will be better of selling it yourself. But if your product is a new item that has got very little competition, then getting others to sell it for you would be more viable. You could then use an affiliates program or a franchise system to market it. Which ever method that you choose will also have to take into considerations like whether it is going to be a local or international affair.
Locating your markets is an important part of any marketing campaign. You will need to do a research study to determine where your market would likely be. The more research you do, the better.

Your delivery

If you sell it through your website, then, your logistics will require warehousing, packaging and administration. Setting up an ecommerce site to do your selling is easy if you know a little bit about computers. However, you will need to learn about basic HTML and you need to do a research on other people’s website. If you are starting from scratch, you will need at least six months of preparation. You could of course buy those ready made set ups and start of immediately. Delivery or fulfillment is very important and if you falter along the way, or you cannot deliver what you promise, then your internet reputation will nose dive. And bad news spread very fast!

Sometimes, it is better to set up a small brick and mortar outlet to kick start your campaign, rather than to use an internet only business Model. It really depends on the type of product that you have. Selling to your local neighborhood might be easier as you will already have known contacts there. You can deploy an internet setup later on when you have gained some measure of confidence.

Your collection system

If you want to sell anything through the internet, you will need a good payment system. For starting on a small budget, you can use PayPall and CheckOut to test your market. It is quick and efficient and you don’t need a programmer to deploy it.

Most Internet Marketing companies will require a good merchant account to do collections as they progress. Merchant accounts are quite affordable now in the Western countries, but it is still a hassle in developing countries. The bank charges are quite reasonable too. However, integrating a merchant account into your shopping cart is not as straight forward method as you want, and if you have different products to deal with, with different shipping charges, then you will really need to test your system properly. Any problem here will drive your customers to abandon buying and never to come back again.

If you cannot get a merchant account from your bank, then you can use third party programs from Worldpay and 2checkout as well as many others. If your product is not time sensitive, then accepting bank checks and money wire might work.

Your promotions

Like most marketing companies, your Internet Marketing outfit will have promotion campaigns using both on-line and off-line methods. Sales promotion is an effective means of getting people's awareness about the company's presence. Sales campaign should start as early as possible. In today’s business, if you have something that is not very news worthy, you still need to shout it out. If you keep quiet, then the rest of the world might not know you exist. For your local area, try to use some local press releases to announce your promotions. If you have an item that has got world potentials, then the best method to promote it is to use on-line press releases. It does not cost much and the news can spread widely and remained there for a long time.

Branding
A company is known by its brand and an internet company must also brand itself using both on-line and off-line methods to establish itself. Before you even start trading, you will need to plan your branding strategies. Think very carefully what is it that you want people to remember you for. A good brand will impart unto the users pleasant memories. It will also include all your channels, including your packaging, your delivery systems and even your front desk. Any complaints must be handled professionally and any bad press must be overcome as fast as possible.

How to be found?
The internet is a numbers game. If you have a website, you will need to optimize it so that it can be easily found. You will need 'natural traffic', that is to say a lot of your prospect can find you without you dishing out money to drawl them in. You also need good 'conversion', that is to say when your prospect come to your website, they should buy from you instead of just taking a look. Generally, only one to two percent of your traffic will convert and buy from you. So you see, you need a high traffic number in order to make that one to two percent meaningful, in terms of revenues. It thus becomes a prerequisite of any e-commerce website to be able to attract high traffic. Failing which, you will have to 'pay' for your traffic. There are various schemes where websites can get their traffic like Google's 'pay-perclick' and Overture's ('pay-per-inclusion'). These methods will however cut into your earnings as each click to your website can cost from ten cents to ten dollars. If you cannot afford to pay your way there, then you will have to learn how to optimize your website and your set up. About eighty percent of buyers find their seller from the internet. You need to learn about Internet Marketing techniques fast, otherwise you might just wait and wait for your customers and yet they don’t come. Big companies don’t bother about being found on the net because they have big budget to spend on advertisements. Small guys will have to learn to get things for free. In order to be found on the net, you need to be found on the first three pages of the search engine’s listings called SERPs. This is because most people will not go beyond the first three pages, unless their job is to do researching. Your potential buyers will most likely pick on the first page listings.

Search engine optimization is all about how to turn your web pages to show up in the front. It is very competitive out there. If you are just starting, then you are already a late comer. But late comers can also succeed, albeit with a lot of hard work. We will now talk about the important things that you will have to perform. There are two things to do. One is called on-site optimization where all the work will be done on the site itself. The other one is called off-site optimization which means that you will need to do it on other people’s website, like getting links from them. Optimization is not a one time process, but a long term exercise. You will need to do it as long as your web site needs visitors (the free kind). In the internet, more visitors mean more buyers. No visitors mean time to close shop! We will now elaborate on things that you have to do. Before anything, you will need to be indexed by the major search engines. It doesn’t happen automatically either. You really need a lot of effort. Here are some tips.

Top 3 tips to get indexed on Google within 48 hours

Tip 1: Get a link from an existing site
Links are very important for high rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. The more (quality) links you have, the higher your page ranks. It used to be easy to get free links from search directories, but since

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most of them have converted to pay-for-links in order to survive, getting these links should not be easy anymore. You should spend more time using other methods. One easy way to get a link to your website is to join a forum. Choose forums site that are related to the topic of your website theme. By just posting relevant comments at these sites, you will be allowed to put a one way link back to your site. This way, you add value to your site and get a free link back. Others who read your comment might click on your link just to see what you have on your site. However, do not spam forum sites with worthless comments, for they may reflect badly on you. Then again, not all forums allow your link to be spider by the search engines. They have some tags like the ‘no follow’ tag that helps them to retain their own page rank. More of it later.

Tip 2: Create an external blog

Put up a blog and create useful contents. Then put a link back to your site. As Google like blogs, it will quickly index them and along the way, it will also find your website. In this way, you could get your website indexed in less than a week. Some in less than forty eight hours!

Tip 3: Get as many links as you can

If you have many other website linking to yours, then the search engines will find you and give you good rankings in heir search results (SERPs). The trick then is to get as many websites linking to you as soon as possible. But do not get links all of a sudden as the search engines might think that you are paying for those links. They abhorred paid links, and you might be relegated to their suspect’s list.

1. Which type of link should you go for?

There are various types of links- One-way, Two-way and Three-way links. Which type should you go for then?
One-way links
One way link is a simple link from one website to the other. If your site is offering a free computer program, then other sites might want to put a one way link to your site to show their visitors that there is a free program for them to download. So giving away something useful for free is a sure way of getting plenty of one way links. The other method is to put up useful contents like articles and free e-books.

Reciprocal links
You get a reciprocal link if you link to a website and that website links back to your website. You normally write to their webmaster and request a link back. Preferably, put a link to their site first so that the other guy will sense your goodwill and out of courtesy, they might give you a link. Reciprocal links used to be popular but it seems that search engines are giving less relevance to them now. You also have to be careful as to who to link to as there is such a term as ‘bad company’ and ‘link farms’ that will adversely affect your ranking if your site is linked to them.

Three-way links
As reciprocal links are getting out of favor, someone invented the three way links. Here is how it works. Website A links to website B, website B links to website C, website C links back to website A. For all intents, there is only one way links, so the search engines might think that the links are natural and not cooked up. However, as search technologies are improving all the time, it is only a matter of time before this ruse is found out and the search engines relegate less relevance to such links.

What matters?

1. Plenty of inbound links. It shows that the site is somewhat of an authority. Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. It is worthwhile to spend time on getting links. 2. A single link from a relevant site is worth more than twenty other irrelevant sites put together. Go out there and find relevant sites and plead to them to exchange links with you. If you have good relevant contents that are useful to the other relevant site, they might even give you a one way link.

{{Something to think about: A study shows that as many as 45% of all queries are re-finding queries; that is to say people often search back the same thing that they did before. It also means that they are searching for something that might change with time, like updates. In order to help them remember your site, do something out of the ordinary so that it stays lock in their mind. Mediocre contents will never get any re-visits! Useful contents with updates is the trick}}

3. Plenty of inbound links. It shows that the site is somewhat of an authority. Good inbound links will help you to get higher search engine rankings. Get more inbound links, but don’t buy them!

Important factors for good search engine rankings.

There are many factors to consider before you get good search engine rankings. Most major search engines have hundreds of factors to consider, and they are called algorithms. They also change constantly. Here are the main ones that you should pay attention.

On-site factors
On-site factor is one of the things that you can do to the content of your web pages. The title Meta tag is one of the most important elements as that is the first thing that search engines look at. Meta tags are meant for the search engines and normally you do not see it, unless you click on the ‘view source’ dropdown tag of your browser. It is a HTML code.
Put your relevant keyword on the title tag first. Help the search engines to properly identify your page content and you will get good rankings. Make it short, but relevant to your site content.

You should also have relevant keywords spattered over the whole page. Write it in a natural sequence, more at the top and less of it at the bottom of the page.

The next thing is keyword density. You should not have more than three percent of it in the page. You can have plurals, adjectives, nouns and verbs of the keywords but not repeating the same word many times in a sentence. The art is to write in a natural fashion, not like spammers who usually squeezed two same keywords in a sentence. Different pages should also have different title meta tags. It is logical to assume that you put different contents on different pages. So are keywords.

Off-site factors
The main determinants of off-site factors are links. You will need relevant links. Get as many as you possibly can. One-way links are preferable. Sometime back, webmasters use to sell their one-way links for a monthly fee. But search engines don’t like bought links and so do not go and buy links from others. The other thing is that it is important to have relevant ‘anchor text’ when you get links from others. These text are the basis that search engines refer to the contents of your site. Weak or wrong anchor text will not bring any benefit from the links. Most of the time, you do have a choice to frame your anchor text, but in case you don’t, then politely ask for correction from the site that give you the link.

Then there is keyword
Most of the information on the internet is searched and presented using keywords. So knowledge of keywords is an important factor in attaining good search engine rankings. If you want to be found, you will need to learn how to use keywords wisely. Before you decide which keyword to target, do your research first. People always think they know which word to use in describing their web content. In reality, they are normally wrong! Then there are different terms used in different countries to describe the same thing. If you want to be found, you will need the right keyword. How you describe your product is very important. Do more research on it before deciding.

After you have decided on your keyword, you will need to find out what is the competition out here for that particular keyword. On the net, you are competing to be found! More competition means more difficult to be found. For any keyword, there will be hundred of thousands of web pages in the search results. And they are ahead of you. How will you beat them to the first page listings? Sometimes, it is easier to target a keyword that is less competitive, or a keyword phrase with four or five words. Then there is the technique of using wrongly spelt words as people’s spelling is getting worse with frequent usage of SMS languages. With keywords, you get better with practice, and lots of it. As competition is getting intense, having additional websites with wrongly spelt names will tap on the increasing number of young people miss spelling when they key in their search terms. There is also an increasing use of searching using cell phones. Here, using wrongly spelt terms is common, as well as some using local slang unwittingly.

Remember, even if you have obtained a lot of links, and have plenty of contents, you still need to target the right keyword or keyword phrases. When a person wants to buy something, he will first do his research on the net. When he finds something, he is more likely to use a two letter keyword. There will obviously be a few thousand results. Then he will use a four or even five letter keywords to narrow down his search. Finally when he wants to choose the website to buy, he might use a completely different keyword phrase.

If all your efforts are not getting you anywhere, there is an alternative method and it is called pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion. You can choose your keyword and you pay your way to be found. It cost money of course, but there are many webmasters out there that has mastered the technique and they earn more than they pay out to the search engines.

{{Important notes on European Search Market:
Germany: Google-85%,Yahoo-5%, T-Online-2.5 %, MSN-1.5, France: Google-88%, Yahoo-4%, MSN-2%, Orang-2.2%, Free-1.2% United Kingdom: Google-77%, Yahoo-8%, Ask-4.5%, MSN-3.7% Remember, Google USA results are different from Google UK, Google Germany and Google France. You will need to fine tune your website for these areas as well}}

Do we need to be concerned with Page Rank?

Page Rank (PR) is the little green pixel bar introduced by Google to rate the popularity of websites. You will need to install the free program on your browser to view the ratings. The ratings are from zero to ten, where ten is the highest. Normally, popular sites like MSN and Yahoo will be rated a nine and unknown sites get no ratings at all.

Then there are blacklisted sites that have a grayed out appearance instead of the little green bar. In the eyes of webmasters, knowing which site rank well and which site gets blacklisted is important. You will want to link to a site with high rating and will not consider a site that has been blacklisted! Links from a high ranked site will mean a sort of endorsement and so webmaster will go al