Welcome – it’s lovely to see you.

I hope that the material in my blog helps you to focus on learning in a logical, and methodical way.

As the title suggests, as you might have already come to appreciate, on-line marketing is a huge field.

I created this post particulalry to help break this down into very simple terms to help you understand the most improtant components and their logical order a long with their relationships.

But first.

Three Types of People

Firstly I would like to say there are generally three types of people that enter into the field of internet marketing.

1. Those with a reasonable amount of money to invest in their business, usually with not much time
2. Those who have a lot of time and little money to invest.
3. And those with No money and No time.

Now if you fall into category 1, I suggest you outsource as much of the work as possible and save the heart ache of trail and error.

If you fall into category 2, I suggest you use you time wisely to up-skill yourself in every aspect of marketing, in a logical and methodical way. Move through each step and learn progressively.

If you fall into category 3, you are in for a long and hard road. It is possible but a great deal of patience and persistence is required. As with those in the middle category, you will need to learn how to do everything yourself, so read, and learn in a progressive and consistent manner.

To all – get yourself a one-stop-shop, where you can learn from others instead of being all things to all people. Remember to include your family in on your plans, do not neglect them but be very regimented with your time and energy – do not waste either, both are very precious commodities!

The Break Down

I have listed here the key components of internet marketing in the order that they should be investigated and understood.

1. Research your market
2. Find your keywords
3. Build products and services around these keywords and gaps identified in your selected niche
4. Build a keyword rich and S.O.E (Search Engine Optimized), compliant website.
5. Set up a domain name, point to hosting, and set up autoresponders.
6. Forms of driving traffic to your site.
7. Test, alter, test, alter, test, alter…

Seven steps in total, each step must be fully understood and completed before moving on to the next step.

Be unique in your approach to whatever you are deciding to do – don’t be another clone. Dare to be different, dare to be you – the real you.

If you have already started down this road and perhaps have some unprofitable or unresponsive businesses already, my advice to you is kick it and start from scratch – regardless of how much you have invested in time or money.

Some of the tools and products you already have compiled may come in handy in each step, so keep these handy on your hard drive. You will use this material to READ and LEARN – but only as you need them.

Now lets do a very quick overview of each of the seven steps. This will not elaborate on each too much – the point here is just to understand the fundamentals of each component.

Research your Market

This is the foundation of your new business – it must not be underdone, just as you would not make a poor foundation for a new house you might build, so with your new business, it must be built on rock.

The idea here is to list the top ten things you personally are interested in. List them in the order of those you love the most down to the tenth thing you are less passionate about.

Don’t over analyze things at this stage, just list them. If you love sport the most, write it down. If you love being a mum, write it down, etc.

Now most of these are subjects or topics, not a niche, so the next thing to do is write under each of these ten subjects particular things you like about it. For example if sport was your choice, perhaps ice hockey or wrestling is your particular favorite. If being a mum, perhaps it’s teaching your children things like dressing themselves, etc. Perhaps you love making things, whatever – just do not discard anything.

Now you will use tools to research your market to see what is being searched on by people, questions they are searching for answers about that perhaps you can fulfill.

This can be a time consuming and arduous task – but, again it must not be underdone. Use all of the material you have to identify how best to perform this task or join a membership that will provide you all of the material you will need to do this.

Find Your Keywords

This is closely related to the previous step of finding your niche.

Keywords are what people use to search in the search engines, to find what they are looking for. For example they may be searching using the keyword term “wrestling heroes of the 90’s” or ” how to get your children to eat their dinner”, etc.

I have already entered a blog on keywords that I feel will be very helpful in this subject – so I recommend you read it fist, then go to other related material in your chosen marketing membership, or material you have already compiled.

Your chosen niche will help you to decide what keywords you should be using, so I won’t go any further into this topic for fear of losing your interest )

Build products and services around these keywords and gaps identified in your selected niche

Before spending any more money, you would want to develop a series of products and content that are directly related to your chosen niche.

This content and products, e-books, video’s, articles, e-mails that you can deliver to your interested prospects, newsletters that you can send out monthly or semi-monthly. This content should last for at least 6 months, so you can focus on the testing and improvement aspect of your site before having to create new content.

Starting from scratch is fairly difficult, but your aim must not be forgotten – to answer questions people are searching for answers on within your chosen niche.

Use your membership to gain PLR material about your chosen niche that you can pull to bits and alter to make your own product and provide answers to the starving thousands looking for answers. This is not too difficult, there are many opportunities to find such material, it exists everywhere. For example my membership has already given members over 600 such PLR articles in one monthly PLUS package, with another 8000 articles coming out in the PLUS July package.

Don’t be fooled into just buying any old PLR, you really need material within your chosen niche.

Another useful way is to get ideas from competitors, join their free forums or newsletters to get ideas for material that you can progressively release. Provide good material, not junk, and as original as possible. For example – everything, and I do mean everything, on this blog has been created by me from scratch. If I can do it – so can you.

Compile at least one or two original e-books and maybe a set of videos to sell to your customers. Make your news letters and articles lead your prospects to buying these items. For example – raise these problems in your e-mails, the answer to their questions – found in your material for sale, where else.

Don’t be stingy though, give your reader something new and fresh – answer some of the questions partially or fully if you believe your product is that superior. Maybe give them the first chapter of your book as an appetizer.

A good idea, if you are lacking in talent in this area, is to hire a professional ghost writer to do this job for you. Good ghost writers can be rather expensive, but you will end up with very original content that is very readable and targeted at your audience.

Warning be very specific in giving them instructions on exactly what you need – you can never give professional writers or designers too much information – be precise in your requirements and you will be very pleased. Do not skimp and hire a cheap one, you WILL get what you pay for.

Start with the service at Elance.com and search from there to find other good services if you wish to pay for a ghost writer.

Build a keyword rich and S.O.E (Search Engine Optimized), compliant website

Again, this section has been partially answered by my blog on keywords.

Your site needs to have several key components.

1. A great sales letter – forcing your customer to buy your product, they just can’t bypass it.
2. Attractive to the eye, not crapping looking or cheap.
3. Informative, funneling your customers to one ultimate conclusion – buy the product.
4. Be logical, easy to navigate and readable – not clogged with ’stuff’, ads and distractions
5. Keyword rich (for your natural organic rise in the search engines) and optimized

This is another rather large task that you may want to engage help in building your site. You do not want a clone of another site, you want a unique but have a visually beautiful site.

Whatever membership you have selected should have tools and material to help you build such a site, but remember that the HTML or PHP code should have your selected keywords infused in the right places.

Think of its design, how do you want to lay it out so its easy to find certain information. For example, if your site is about wrestling heroes of the 90’s, perhaps you might like to have a page about each of the characters, a page on famous matches, a page on competitions, etc. If you have one on training children – a page on toilet training, a page on teaching manners, a page on teaching them to perform simple chores, etc.

Will you have a separate landing page from your squeeze page, one to solely devoted to capturing your visitors e-mail information before sending them to your sales page? Perhaps you might take that opportunity to offer them an e-mail course, or newsletter, or other bribe your prospect in order to get their name and e-mail information. This is entirely up to you, but must be thought out – particularly if you plan to outsource much of this work.

Your site should have logical header information that has your keywords built into each of the titles. The content under these titles should also have the keywords repeated in the information, not in an unnatural way, but weaved in so that it makes sense. Search engines can pick up those spamming keywords just to get rankings – so be careful not to over do it.

You can always outsource this job if you have the money to do so, but not the time. Elance.com is a good starting point for these kind of services, search this name on Google and then click on the ’similar services’ link to find other such services.

A good website might cost you a bit but look around to find someone who can create you a site based on a basic template, but use original graphics.

Set up a domain name, point to hosting, and set up an auto-responder.

Now is the time to purchase a domain name and hosting account that will hold your website information.

First item of business – do not get your domain name from the same place as your hosting account. This could be described as having all of your eggs in one basket. You have been warned.

The domain name you select should be very relevant to your chosen niche and all attempts made to include your prime keyword, the one that best represents you service or product, the one that has been infused into your website everywhere. For example if your site is about training kids and your selected keyword was “toddler training”, perhaps a site name like “toddlertraining101.com”, or “earlytoddlertraining.com” or how about “toddlertariningformummies.com” (a little play on words there – hoped you liked it?).

Please purchase a dot.com name. Other domain extensions can be cheaper but can also turn off your potential prospects from clicking your link.

This is likely to cost around USD $10.00 per year, but I suggest you get the name for at least 2 years if you intend to stay in business, 5 years would be better. The cost for 5 years is not huge and avoid additional costs, like related names, etc – it just isn’t necessary at this stage. Perhaps if you start to get very big, other extensions (*.tv, *.net. *.us, etc) will then become important – just imagine owning yahoo.net for example.

I have personally used “Godaddy.com” for most of my domain names, just a suggestion – you go where you like. I have found them to be very reliable and a great service, easy to navigate and change your DNS server name quickly. DNS is the domain name server, or in other words where your site is being hosted, your hosting account.

Now to get a hosting account.

You need to have a very reliable hosting company, one that can grow as you grow and is responsive to you needs. Although I despise recommending, I have found hostgator.com to be a very reliable company and you can upgrade to a larger hosting account easily. A ‘baby’ account will set you back roughly $10.00 USD per month, so leave this purchase until you are ready to upload your completed site.

Think big – think very big. Can your hosting company handle the traffic you expect to send it? Is the bandwidth allocation you have been given enough? What if you had a 1000 visitors watching videos you have put on your site – this uses a great deal of bandwidth for each user, will it be chewed up quickly? Can you increase your bandwidth allocation quickly, without interruption to service?

The disk space capacity – is it enough to host the material you plan to put there?

Does the hosting account have c-panel? This is a very important tool, allowing you to manage your site quickly and easily. It allows you to create e-mail accounts and databases to facilitate software scripts that can assist you in automating you business.

Once you have uploaded your site into the main “public_html” folder, or sub director of that folder if you plan on hosting several websites on this account, you must now point your domain name to your hosting account.

You do this by getting the information from the e-mail sent to you by your hosting company after you have signed up. You will see in that e-mail several important things, such as the DNS information as well as the FTP information, so you must keep this e-mail somewhere safe and easy to retrieve.

No go to where you purchased your domain name (toddlertraining.com,etc) from, e.g. godaddy.com, and access your account. Now change the DNS name to the ones you where provided in the e-mail from your hosting account. Search on your domain name provides’ help section in order to find where to change the DNS information if you have problems. I have a number of training videos on my site on this subject, and I am sure others have similar videos if you need extra help.

This means when anyone types in your domain name, this will now point to where your site is located, your hosting account.

Ok, ok enough already. Just helping you make good decisions.

Does your hosting company have a autoresponder service? What is an auto-responder?

Simply put, an auto-responder is an automated piece of software that will respond to a set of common customer actions. For example you can set one up to send your customer a product link if they purchase your e-book or video (you normally have a thank-you page for this).

You can send out your monthly newsletter to all those that have subscribed. You will point the form on your website where the customer enter their e-mail address and name to your auto-responder and it will compile a list of these names. If you have setup a newsletter or e-mail course, these will be automatically sent out to your customer on the preset time you have defined in the auto-responder software.

Sorry -this is getting too long to explain auto-responders, I suggest you use your membership or other, already obtained material, to learn about this aspect of marketing.

Suffice to say that auto-responders are an integral part of automating your on-line business. You do not want to have to manually respond to every person that buys your product or signs up for your newsletter.

This is another cost that you must wear, but be careful not to purchase a sub-standard service or a free one that creates tacky adverts to the bottom of your e-mails. This looks very unprofessional and you can lose a great deal of your potential customers as a result.

Also, this mechanism is being used to compile your list of prospective clients, your list is your life-line, your money tree. Pick a bad service and you could lose you list – NOT GOOD, not good at all.

There are very good services out there, just search on google and be picky about the service you select, reliability, functionality, and longevity of the compnay should be of top most priority when selecting a service.

Forms of driving traffic to your site

There are literally a hundred different ways of driving traffic to your site, but my suggestion is you only focus on a few at fist, until you perfect them.

I have provided two good free sources of traffic (Web 2.0 and Blogging) in this blog, which I suggest you use and perfect before trying other forms of traffic. The only exception to that is PPC or Pay Per Click (paid traffic).

People can get very, very bogged down in trying to perfect too many forms of traffic, becoming a jack of all trades (traffic), and mastering none.

I beg you to just try three forms as I have suggested, use this blog to understand Web 2.0, but perhaps perfect a PPC campaign with Google adwords first, it is less time consuming at the beginning but does have an associated cost. Get it perfect in order for you to save money, then move onto Web 2.0.

This is getting far too long, so I’ll move on.

Test, alter, test, alter, test, alter…

This stage is critical to your success. This is where you find out what is working well and what is not.

Unfortunately this involves analyzing numbers, statistics, in order to understand what you can improve on to increase your R.O.I (Return on Investment).

You do not want to waste money on paid traffic campaigns if your customers are not buying your products or services, so its important to understand why.

If you have undertaken a PPC campaign with Google Adwords, they provide tracking software that will give you some idea of how long people are staying on your site, how many performed a certain action and from where on your site they did this.

For example, perhaps your sales letter is just not convincing enough and they leave after only a few seconds. Maybe there are not enough people actually clicking through on your ads, which need some work. Perhaps the product itself is priced too high, or too low – and they feel it’s probably rubbish.

Split test your ad campaigns first, so you have a decent click rate per 1000 impressions (how many times google shows the ad to your web searches that use related keywords). Try 2 different subject lines in your ad campaign. Try different material in the body of the message once you find a good subject header. See which one works best, then try different variations of each.

Once your click though rate improves, try improving your sales page by split testing. Try two or three different versions with different header titles and see which ones keep your visitors reading on – staying longer on your page.

Once that improves, but sales are still low, try different pricing options. See which makes a greater sales ratio per visitor improvement.

Keep plugging at this – again in a logical and progressive manner, one a time (so you don’t get confused as to what worked and what didn’t) until it is at it’s peek performance.

NOW try to formulate different traffic strategies in order to gain more traffic.

Look, I promised not to plug, but this blog has warn me down.

The key thing is to just join a membership that will provide you all of the training and materials you will need to get the job done. Now you can chose any you like, but I know my premium service will do the job. Sure you will still need an auto-responder, hosting and domain registration on top of that – however I am not aware of any membership that provides absolutely everything.

If I did, I would be straight with you and mention it. At the moment, until I get 100 into this membership, you will get all of these tools and training for nearly 50% off, which will remain that way for the life of your membership.

Anyway – that’s it from me. As always I would appreciate any feed back and comments, good or bad.

Signing off until next time.

Doug Turner,

MarketingWahoo.com

Love em or hate em, you will get sick of hearing the term “keyword” or “keyword phases”.

You really need to understand what keywords are and how to make them work for you, since they are the golden thread intrinsically linking your customers to you. Your customers are your ‘bread and butter’ and therefore it is important that you have a very thick and strong thread, after all you don’t want to loose your life line – you customer.

So then how do keywords work – how do they tie you to your customer?

I’ll ask you another question in order to answer that question. How do your customers find you online, what is their primary way of locating you – finding your business?

Well if you had an off-line business the primary method would have traditionally been via the yellow pages – right? But still, even then they would need to have a method of cutting down their search since those books started to get rather large, so they would restrict their search by business type, dentist, hair dressing, etc.

Well keywords are not that different, though this allows your customer to be even more specific. They would search perhaps on hairdressers specializing in perms or braiding, etc. Can you imagine if all online sites where placed in to a set of yellow pages – whoa, it would start to look like the national library – too overwhelming for anyone to search through!

The main method used today by folks to find a specific business is via their favorite search engine like Google or Yahoo.

When they search they can use a variety of search terms or ‘keywords’ in order to locate specifically what they want. As you already are aware, if you don’t specify your search correctly you end up with literally tens of thousands of websites that have little relevance to what you are after.

So people have become rather adept at searching for what they want by entering a precise set of keywords or key phrases that limit their search to get only very relevant results returned by the search engines.

Knowing this, the search engine owners based their entire technology around the use of keywords and keyword phases, not wanting to loose their customers by returning only what they have requested.

Now are you starting to see the importance of keywords?

That is why I keep banging on about being very niche, because people and search engines love very strictly relevant material. The other benefit of course is you will only get people clicking on your site link that really want your material which means your pay per click expenditure will be kept lower with a higher ratio of converting visiting customer to buyers.

You only want people to find you that need you, else you will pay for browsers to visit your site with no intention of buying or little interest in your site – probably brassing them off that you have misrepresented your site and wasted their time.

Since search engines love keyword rich sites, your chances of progressing up the organic listings within a search engine is severely reduced if you do not use keywords appropriately.

You need to think about what people would be searching on in order to find a small set of highly relevant keywords and keyword phrases.

For example if you had an online business around farm milking equipment, do you think one of your keywords would be “farming”?

Err – wrong!

Farming is too generic, be very specific “farm milking equipment”, “dairy farm milking equipment”, “equipment for milking cows”, “equipment for cow milking extraction”, etc, would be more appropriate wouldn’t it?

These are called ‘long-tail’ keyword phrase search terms, and now more than ever they have become necessary in order to ensure a good match of customer to website.

You could also attempt to find some very relevant ’short-tail’ keywords that might also be appropriate, for example “milking equipment”, “milk extraction” (that one might get lactating mums looking for a breast pump), etc – so you can now see how important it is to get this absolutely right.

It might be impossible to ship your product internationally, and you find there is a great deal of competition internationally for your type of product or service so perhaps including a geographical location in your keyword phase may assist your PPC efforts. For example “North American farm milking equipment” or “Kansas farm milking equipment” might be appropriate.

Step 1

Compile a huge list of keywords and keyword phases that you believe best represent your business or service 20-30 would be good for this exercise.

If you can’t think of that many it doesn’t matter but really rack your brain over this as it will also help you to understand your target market much better. Don’t cheat by shortcutting this process, as the next step will become less effective – so take your time in doing this first part. No more than a couple of days though.

Step 2

This is where we find out which keywords and keyword phrases are more frequently searched on, which will be more profitable, and which ones just are not worth keeping.

There are a few tools you can purchase to help you achieve this goal or for this initial phase you can use some free tools developed by the search engines to perform the task satisfactorily for now.

Note: You do get some tools in the Wahoo package (the second level, middle package) to help with this.

Also try the following URL’s as a start:

http://www.nichebotclassic.com/

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

I also recommend getting a $5.00 account with Google adwords, this will be of great benefit. Go to the main Google page, click on the “Advertising Programs” link and select Google Adwords.

I highly recommend getting an account with the following URL – the service is very good and there is a clear competitive analysis given to you. You can just get a 7 day account to perform this task. It’s well worth the money and effort given that this will form the foundation of your on-line business:

http://www.wordtracker.com/

I just want you to know that these are not affiliate links, I’m not making anything from promoting these links, just giving you some direction based on my own experience!

Step 3

One tool I have recently be introduced to is a free Microsoft product (MSN Ad Lab) that helps you analyze the commercial value of a keyword or key phrase. A rating of 0.97 is equivalent to a 97% possibility that people searching on this keyword or phrase are willing and ready to open their wallets – so check this out PRONTO.

Simply enter your keyword or keyword phase into the field provided, ensure the “Query” option is selected and submit.

Do this for each of your keywords or keyword phases, try some new combinations if more come to mind and record the value returned for each. IMPORTANT – do not remove any, regardless of the returned value just yet.

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/OCI.aspx

Step 4

Once you have compiled all of the data, the current competition, number of searches, likely ‘commercial intention’, you decide which of these keywords or keyword phrases you want to keep.

You must keep in mind that you may have different variations of keywords and phrases for each page. For example the main page, your landing and/or squeeze page may have direct sales copy that primarily uses of a couple of your key words. Subsequent pages may contain related, but different key word sets.

For example, say your site is about fishing. The first page is focused on the generic topic covered off in your site, fishing gear, fishing boats, best types of fish, etc. You may have a page just dedicated to fishing rods, maybe breaking out your three favored types of rod – mentioning them by brand name. Another page is about fishing tackle, types of tackle, best knots to use, sinkers, hook types, etc. See what I mean?

Each page will contain its own set of keywords or key word phases, because you talk specifically about these keywords.

Just imagine a person searches on “best hooks for catching bass”, and end up on your landing page instead of your tackle page, etc.

Step 5

Sort out how you will employ these keywords into your headers and content on each site page. This is what you want to do so the search engines make a decision when a search term is used. They look at your web page on fishing tackle and say – ‘hey, this page has an H1 title of Fishing Tackle, but an H2 Title on Fishing Hooks and specifically mentions in their write up about “the best hooks to use when catching bass is…”.

This is the logic the search engines use and therefore should be exactly what you use when designing your site.

Step 6

Identify your best keyword or keyword phase – the one with the least or very bad competition, one that you can dominate the market with. This one should be included everywhere, on as many pages as possible, in your H1Header tags, your domain name – everywhere. Any e-books you write should contain this word or phrase – be the KING of that keyword so you will rank number 1 in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Where possible use this keyword or phrase in naming photos, but maintaining what the image is about. I.e. if you have a video or photo of someone pulling up a huge bass, and you have selected as you main keyword or phase is “lake fishing”, perhaps name the video or photo “bass lake fishing” or “pulling up bass while lake fishing”, etc.

Recap

I know this is rather long so I will recap a simplified version to help ingrain this in your mind:

1. Keywords or keyword phrases are how people will find your site, be very specific
2. Search Engines where built around keywords, you must do the same
3. Make each page, title, headings and content tie into one or more specific keywords or keyword phrase
4. Select one keyword or keyword phrase that you can dominate the market with and infuse into your site

Well – hopefully I haven’t bored you to death and you have learned something valuable?

I really appreciate you feed back on my explanations or style of writing, good or bad – because I want this information to be used by others, not just sit in cyber-space for the Google robots to read. Hey they don’t go bass fishing too often!

Anyway until next time:

Learn and do one piece at a time.

Doug Turner.

marketingwahoo.com

So what the heck is Web 2.0?

Do you really understand what it is?

Well everything I have read and watched seems to point to one thing – socializing!

Socializing could be described as sharing stuff on mass….

For example here are a few things that really encapsulate Web 2.0

• Bebo, Facebook, My Space, Squidoo, etc – Personal web pages/blogs that can be interacted with other friends and family.
• You Tube, Google Video, etc – social video sharing sites
• Del.icio.us, Stumble upon, Technorati, Digg, etc – social book marking that can be shared

Services like My Space, Face Book and Bebo command more daily traffic that Yahoo and Google put together.

Did you just hear that right? More traffic that Google AND Yahoo – together!

Do you have any idea how many people use Google to perform searches on a daily basis? Think about this, “Google it” is now an everyday phrase – that’s pretty impressive.

So given that millions of people now use these social services, what does that mean for you?

Traffic – lots of it, tons of it, more than you can cope with….

Did you also know that Squidoo was too big for even Google to give the famous “Google slap” to! What the…

Squidoo is a perfect example for us to use here as a breeding ground for prospective customers. You see – unlike My Sapce, Face Book, etc – Squidoo is more topic or niche based as opposed to individual user or personalized page based.

Squidoo allows you to create a range of beautiful sites on any topic, then you can apply lenses – extra sub-pages that are focused on particular niches within that topic.

Using our gardening example, we can create a site around tomatoes, and niche lenses on tomato varieties – each lens linking back to your web site. pages related to the same subject.

Now – provide good quality material on the subject in each of the lenses and you’ll attract every tomato nut in the world to your site – meaning three important things:

1. A huge amount of traffic – pre-validated prospects who love information on your subject (tomatoes in this case).
2. Your site back-links alone will be drive up your website Google organic ranking.
3. Credibility as a professional in your chosen niche.

Do you have any idea how important it is to pre-validate your customers – massive?

See PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic, where you pay Google to send you traffic via your personally written ad, may not be really interested, since a badly written ad may bring people that misunderstood what your site was about.

No such risk with squidoo traffic that has already seen your material, knows its good, and wants more….

Also this traffic is 100% FRE.E – costing you nothing except the time you put into building your free Squidoo site. Now if your very clever, have a lot of PLR (Private Label Rights license which allows you to freely alter the material, e-book, video, etc) material, and have an automated or semi automated system – that task may not take you long at all!

Just imagine adding to your Squidoo and web site, social book marking as well!

Hundreds or thousands of your visitors will bookmark your sites as a “must see” or “great reading”, etc.

Thousands more bookmarking users will also be arriving – again FRE.E!

Now repeat that process with Bebo, Face Book, My Space…. OMG!!! Do you have any idea what sort of traffic you can command.

Whoa! Let’s say that again – ‘DO you have any idea of how much PRE-VALIDATED traffic you can command’?

Yes it takes time – but even if it took you 3 months, going from 50 visitors a day to 5,000 pre-validated visitors a day!

I’m serious – do it correctly and the sky is the limit.

The Key do doing this properly and ensuring success?

No surprises – FOCUS, consistency, and dedication!

Ever tried D.I.Y home decorating?

Big job, but focusing on one task at a time, and not quiting until its finished will guarantee you success – right?

Have you seen those reality T.V shows where there are D.I.Y disasters? The problem – tackling too many jobs at once and never completing one is usually the problem. The other one (less frequently) is being ill equipped to tackle the task at hand, wrong tools. or poorly estimated.

The same principles apply to building an on-line business! Focus, consistency, and dedication!

PREPARE WELL!

Start with Squidoo, build a strategy of how you want to build the site, read all of the material you can find on the topic, study the material on the site – get building! Don’t quite until it’s finished fully and repeat!

FOCUS AND FINISH!

The first site might take you six to eight weeks to complete, again dependent on your time commitment, but be patient and in no time flat you will have finished.

Build your back-links to your main site pages, ensuring you do not short cut this process!

Spend another week studying social bookmarking, joining the each of the larger bookmarking sites and bookmark your web site and Squidoo site properly.

Now sit back and what your site rise up Google’s organic ranking (organic ranking is the free ranking Google gives sites based on relevant search terms – another post soon on this one).

Now here is the beauty in all of this – you have just done all of the hard work!

Use the material you put together for your Squidoo site and repeat for Bebo, Face book, My Space – one at a time!

Bookmark each as with the Squidoo site – you already belong to these social bookmarking sites, so this is very easy (an hour or two at best). Your done!

No kidding, if you do the ground work, and do not skimp on quality material, you will have more FRE.E traffic than you will know what to do with!

Yes it will take a while – but “anything worth doing, is worth doing well” – right?

One more very important thing! Do not forget to use your keywords on each of the relevant pages you are building – ensuring the back links to your site have the same keyword sets on the page and in the header (H1). This is very key to your success and key to your organic growth in Google.

Soon everyone searching on Google using your your key word/s or keyword phase/s will find your site coming up every time, and cost you nothing when they click on your links.

Then there is video sharing! Whoa – too much info for one blog? Yeah, you’re right – we will make this a feature of another blog.

Remember what we have discussed here is only one traffic strategy – blogs another, there is more… much more but that is for another blog as well!

You can now start to appreciate why people become overwhelmed with information and really just end up going in circles, getting no where.

FOCUS on one thing at a time, as I have laid it out here, and you WILL be successful!

To your very good success and fortune. Until the next blog!

Doug Turner.

MarketingWahoo.com

Why do 99% of marketers fail in their 1st attempt to launch into the online business world?

The answer is really very simple – so simple this advice is consistently ignored when it is given to them.

DO not be fooled – follow this advice and you will succeed.

What I am about to tell you is probably going to hurt a little, so keep the tissues close at hand.

Find a profitable niche that excites you, learn in a logical and consistent manner, and Focus.

Seriously it is that easy. 3 basic things people fail to do.

Why do you think that is?

Well the reasons are as varied as the people that attempt to launch into the online world but the primary reasons are:

• There appears to be too much information to learn.
• They become a jack of all trade and a master of none.
• They fall into the trap of buying up everything they see in site and end up learning something new.
• Lack of commitment to a single task – they become easily distracted.
• They fail to view their on-line business as a real business.
• They fail to recognize the value of heir own time.
• They try too many things all at once.

Does this describe you a little?

“They bounce from one membership to the next looking for the miracle cure, the magic bullet that will make them millions and spend hundreds or thousands ending up with nothing but a hard drive full of products.”

So what is so hard about what I am proposing? Look at it this way, if you follow my advice – you, as a worse case scenario, will save money and become the best educated marketer around.

So what is the first rule?

STOP buying everything thrown at you. You need to focus initially on one thing and one thing only, researching your market.

If you already have some very unsuccessful businesses – cut your losses now. This will just suck up time and continue to be unprofitable.

Online Marketing is not a niche – all the resale rights products in the world cannot be sold by you unless you are a marketing genius, better than those who have been promoting them. Buy only the products that fulfills you immediate need – niche research.

Keep one very good membership, one that provides you all of the software, and information you will need and begin your task by downloading and studying only material to do with niche research.

Now make a list of the top ten things you are passionate about, you know and love – no matter what it is.

Generally speaking these are probably more topics than a niche. For example a topic would be vegetable gardening, where as a niche would be growing tomatoes, etc.

The next step is to use the material you have collected and study on how to properly research your markets. Find out how many people are searching online for this type of material and what type of competition there is out there. The more niche you go, the less good competition there will be – for example growing acid free tomatoes.

Your research should show up what niches are more profitable than others.

This is the building block, the foundation of your business so do not under do this key task!

Build your business around something you know well and love and this will come across passionately to those interested in the same thing. You will quickly become known as a guru in your chosen niche cause you are already half way there through your love of the subject.

Be very, very dedicated in your study and research.

How much time a day or week can you possibly commit? Be realistic here, do not over commit yourself to your task and end up neglecting family members or your normal duties.

If it is one hour a day – great, if more – even better.

Now ensure your family understand your commitment and between ‘this time’ and ‘this time’ (e.g. 6pm – 7pm, etc) you will be working on your internet business and are not to be disturbed – but explain that afterwards you will, help with their homework, cook dinner, go for a walk – whatever….

Keep them informed and help them to understand this is not a hobby but a new direction you would like to take in order to…. ’spend more time with the family in the future after quiting your full time job when your successful’, etc.

Just keep them in the loop and do not neglect them. After all you are doing this for them as much as for yourself – right?

Whatever your time commitment is, stick to it rigidly and be consistent.

Do not procrastinate during this time or be distracted by e-mails, surfing the web, etc. Only study and research on the specific subject at hand – researching your niche.

After 1 week you should be ready to apply all that you have learned and ready for stage two – building keywords to use as a foundation for your business. This however is a topic for another blog entry.

You will be astounded at what you will accomplish by following this simple but very necessary law.

FOCUS... A very good trait of successful marketers.

All the best.

Doug Turner.

Whats the most inexpensive way to create traffic to your web site?

A web log – commonly known as a Blog!

A blog is also a good field testing mechanism for potential markets, feeling out what your customers want or need in the niche you have chosen.

As you know creating on online presence can be a rather expensive exercise and you still cannot be sure that what you have built is servicing your customers needs.

The best way to know what your potential customer base wants? Ask them directly via your blog.

Traffic can be attracted in numerous ways, but most require you to have a website at least. Then of course you run into hosting costs, auto responder costs, product development, etc…

A blog is free and demonstrates your desire to engage your customer base. If you cannot attract customers to free information and tips you are able to provide them via a blog – what makes you think a website will be any different?

Now many believe in using PLR articles to develop their articles or blogs, but in reality the best way to engage people is – well, just laying out your thoughts as they come to you. Not only does this show you have a reasonable amount of talent in a particular field but often you can learn a thing or two from those who read your blog and respond.

I know that automation is a key part of an online business but when it comes to teaching people, they are all individuals and everyone has a different learning style. Responding to people who ask questions is key part of blogging, building credibility as well as showing a human face to those who show interest in your subject.

If you don’t like people you really don’t have much future in an online market – after all surely marketing is a process of selling to people.

I know blogging is nothing new, however it is the most inexpensive way to engage a potential customer base and by adding your website link (if you have one) to your blog, you can also increase your search engine ranking.

Try to teach people something you have personally found that works and never pitch to people, that is not the purpose of what you are trying to accomplish here. A good teacher is also a good learner and everyone has got something to teach as well as something to learn. I am yet to meet an exception to that rule….

Think about topics that interest your potential customer base. What turns you on? What would you like to know? After all it’s your blog – if you want to know something there are probably a thousand more folks that what an answer to exactly the same question.

Are there any rules that should be applied to your blog? Not really.

Be a little controversial – that’s always a good way of getting comments.

Ask questions of your readers.

What kind of subjects should blog about?

I am assuming here that you have already performed some sort of research after listing a number of subjects you are personally interested in and passionate about. Go niche, very niche after doing your research to identify the number of people interested, searching, on your favorite subjects – but that is another topic altogether.

Which reminds me of yet another blogging rule. Stick to the topic!

Think about all of the topics in your chosen niche that people would want to discuss. For example if your niche is growing tomatoes, best time plant, spraying or organic, types of tomatoes, staking plants, blah,blah,blah…

Check out the competition to see what they are talking about – the latest techniques, etc.

Remember to respond to queries and be human. Use humor if appropriate (death of a loved one might not be appropriate) and give some valuable information.

Blog consistently, and don’t give up. Once day or several times a week will be good. As your blog grows so will your audience and reputation.

Any comments would truly be appreciated and responded to – however spamming just to get back- links will not make it onto my blog.

Good blogging!

Doug Turner

MarketingWahoo.com