There are so many opportunities online to make money and make a difference. If you ever wanted to get started in this space, now’s the time.

I know that I’m a few weeks late, but I want to use this post to reflect on the past year in terms of what I learned about online business building and marketing. I’ll outline my top 5 learnings from 2009 and share my Internet marketing predictions and tips for the new year. Cheers!

1. Time is always against you – focus, hustle, and outsource
As I pile on new projects and campaigns on my plate, I’m learning more and more that time is always against you. There’s only so much you can do in a 24 hour day, so those who manage their time wisely and use it most effectively are going to win.

My biggest tip? Don’t spread yourself thin with too many projects and sites. You may think you’re doing yourself a favor with “diversification”, but in this case, it’s better to put your eggs in one basket. That way you’ll be able to focus all of your attention to growing one or a few sites to reach critical mass. Otherwise, you’ll likely see no results whatsoever.

Furthermore, don’t be afraid to spend money on outsourcing some of your work! Some people insist on doing everything themselves, but remember, time is more valuable than money. You can always make $100 back, but you’ll never be able to the get the past 10 minutes of your life back. Outsource whenever possible so you can focus on the activities that yield the greatest ROI.

2. The early mover advantage is growing
Back in May ‘08 I wrote that the window of opportunity is shrinking for independent publishers online. A lot has happened since then, but my theory still holds true. Webmasters who started their sites back in 2000 have a huge advantage over their more recent competitors. Not only are they given preference by the search engines simply based on age, but they’re more likely to have accumulated high quality links, social mentions, and stronger branding over time.

In some super competitive niches, it’s almost coming to a point where new sites with small or medium-sized budgets have absolutely no chance of competing. Even smaller less competitive niches are getting saturated very quickly.

The solution? Don’t delay any longer. Focus your attention on just a couple branded sites and build them out like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll want to start by focusing on and dominating a smaller sub-niche.

3. Buying established sites is a great shortcut strategy
In the summer of ‘09, I had my first experience buying an established site (a personal finance blog) in the 5-figures range. I’ve always wanted to get involved in this industry, and buying an existing site with good traffic and positive cash flow offered a great opportunity. Not only was I able to get a large head start in the personal finance industry but the cash flow allowed me to invest monthly profits back into the site for further growth. It’s a great strategy especially since growing a new site these days is increasingly difficult (as I mentioned in my previous point #2).

Monitor online site marketplaces like Flippa, Digital Point Forums, and eBay on a regular basis. You may be able to pick up a distressed site for relatively cheap – especially in this economy. People are more willing to part with their sites to gain cash quick.

I have a detailed case study about my experience buying an established site for 5 figures as part of my Winners Circle membership program. Check it out.

4. Ad-based business models aren’t reliable – build out your own products
If there’s anything the recession has taught you, it’s that you shouldn’t rely on advertising to make up the majority of your site’s revenue. I’ve written before that blogging for ads is dead and I think this is a trend that will continue moving forward. If you have a large site that gets a ton of page views, then sure monetizing through advertising can be very lucrative. But for 90% of sites out there, making a significant amount of money through advertising isn’t really feasible. Plus, an ad-based business model forces you to be at the mercy of sponsors. Who wants that?

A much better way to make money online is to create your own products – whether they be e-books, DVDs, subscriptions, or an actual physical item. It’s definitely not easy (I’ve experienced this first hand through my Winners Circle membership program), but the rewards are greater and much more steady even for small sites.

It’s fine to start monetizing through ads, but I think all online publishers should work towards some sort of paid model. With the web being polluted with free low-quality content everyday, readers will increasingly begin looking for better paid sites to cut through the clutter. You’ll want to be in a position of authority with your products ready to go when this happens.

5. You need creative & aggressive marketing strategies to stand out
As I mentioned, the competition online is getting stiffer and web surfers now have more options online than ever before. So why should they go to your site to fulfill their needs? You can say that you have better content, better features, blah blah blah. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to marketing. Yes, I agree that content is important, but what’s equally important, if not more, is getting people to actually see your content and come back again and again.

For that, you can utilize marketing strategies like social media votes, contests, link bait articles, software and tools, etc. In fact, I’m currently holding a huge contest over at Money Crashers with $8,300 in prizes. In just 2 weeks, RSS subscribers have increased from 500 to 3,000. Of course, for promotions like this you need the content to back it up and get people to come back when it’s all over. Even so, big promotions are great for giving your site a boost and actively putting your site in front of your target audience.

The most important thing is to keep hustling and working smart in the new year to see success. Consistency and persistence are always rewarded.

Do any of my tips and experiences resonate with you? What are your goals for online business in 2010? Share them in a comment below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Top 5 Crucial Internet Marketing Tips for 2010 – Are You Prepared?

• 3 Important Factors in Selecting Your Internet Marketing Strategy of Choice
• The Money Tree Online Business Formula – Who Says Money Can’t Grow on Trees?
• Micro Sites = Mega Mistake, Why You Should Focus on One Site
• 6 Crucial Factors to Determine Whether Continuity is Right For Your Business
• Don’t Just Make Money Online – Build Business Assets that Last

Khalid and Ayat over at Invesp do an amazing job with conversion optimization and put together a solid list last year – Top 100 Internet Marketers of 2008. I even did a followup post called How to Be a Top 100 Online Marketer in 2009 – 8 Lessons in Personal Branding which many of those included helped me to promote. In fact, my goal was to use the very principles I talked about in that post to get on the list for 2009. Well a year later, I made it… but it does feel bittersweet.

I’m not alone in voicing my issues with the list either. Rae Hoffman wrote a pretty comprehensive post (in her usual scathing hot style) outlining where the list went wrong – including all of the top marketers who were left off. No Chris Pearson? No Michael Streko? That’s like playing NBA Jam back in the nineties when Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal were left off in the game due to licensing reasons. Not as fun.

Anyway, I realize that a list like this is mainly for linkbait purposes (hey, I’m writing about it afterall). But the process could definitely have been streamlined to come up with something of higher quality.

Are you thinking about creating a Top X of 2010 list? Here are some of the biggest considerations and tips that you should have in mind based on the flaws of this latest list.

1. “Top People” lists work great, but…
Let’s be honest. Top lists of people work because they cater to people’s egos. Everyone likes seeing themselves included on a list – so they’ll share it and make sure others take notice. That’s free marketing that you can take advantage of.

On the flip side, the same lists can be double-edged swords. Sure, those included will help you promote but what about those people who were left off? Or what if bloggers and social media users damage your reputation because they don’t agree with you? As an example, John Chow went as far as to say that Invesp is on his **** list. That in itself probably offsets a lot of the benefit obtained through the strategy.

My point? If you plan on creating any sort of list that plays on people’s egos, be careful. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

2. You can’t please everyone
Like anything in life, you can’t always please everyone. This is especially true for top lists. There are always going to be different opinions, different vantage points, different relationships and different priorities. Just because you think someone should make the list, doesn’t mean the person next to you will too.

So if you’re creating a list of top people, develop a reliable system to base the rankings on. Ideally it would be something that would be hard to argue with (e.g. a list of top marketers based on income, not user opinions).

3. Use numbers and justify reasons for inclusion
You can’t argue with numbers. If possible, base your rankings on actual numbers rather than intangibles like popularity. For example, if you want to create a list of top bloggers in 2010, use metrics like traffic, revenue, social media, etc. Leaving the rankings to biased user opinion is a recipe for disaster. My list of the best Internet marketing blogs works so well because it uses a large set of data to determine the rankings. If someone has a quality blog, all of the numbers should tell the story.

Furthermore, add some reasons why that particular person is placed at the specified rank and why he or she deserves it. Invesp really dropped the ball here because it seemed like all of the rankings after the top 10 were completely arbitrary. To make matters worse, my bio was taken straight from the about page here.

4. Don’t leave it to public voting
I was actually quite surprised when I saw that Invesp opened up their top marketers list with a public call for nominations. Basically, anyone could add anyone else they wanted for consideration to the list. I get why the Invesp team might have wanted to do that to increase exposure and public interaction, but it certainly did not help the process. Many people nominated and voted for themselves and Shoemoney and John Chow decided to endorse a rather unknown marketer just to game the system. That caused quite a negative backlash that I’m sure did not help Invesp’s cause.

What are some of the ideas that you have for top lists? You’ll definitely want to consider all of the points I mentioned. Otherwise, you could end up doing more harm than good. Thoughts?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Big Flaws in the “Most Influential Online Marketers of 2009″ List and 4 Ways You Can Avoid the Same Mistakes

• 100 Most Influential Internet Marketers of 2008 – Who’s In?
• How to Be a Top 100 Online Marketer in 2009 – 8 Lessons in Personal Branding
• 3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Use Numbered Lists in Your Posts
• Get Off the Blogging Bandwagon & Set Yourself Apart
• Exclusive Interview with the Missing 41st Blog Blazer – Finally Revealed

You can see the full text of the FTC’s final guides governing endorsements and testimonials (link to PDF on the right sidebar). It’s an 80 page document, but it may be worth going through if you’re doing any kind of advertising or endorsing online through your blogs, sales pages, marketing campaigns, etc.

The new guidelines state the following:

1. Endorsements must be based on the honest opinions and experiences of the endorsers. Paid actors must be disclosed if they are used.

If you’re a blogger offering paid reviews, you can’t write glowing recommendations (against what you really think) just because you were paid for it. Reviews and endorsements must reflect true opinions and any money being exchanged must be disclosed (described in #4).

2. Endorsements may not contain any representations which would be deceptive, or could not be substantiated, if made directly by the advertiser.

If you’re an affiliate of a certain product, you can’t claim any benefit or result unless it’s something that the advertiser can say directly. For example, you can’t say that a weight loss product helps people lose 20 pounds in a week unless it can be proven by the advertising company.

Believe it or not, a lot of shady affiliate marketers used to write fake reviews of products with outlandish claims, just so that they could make more commissions. This sort of practice is very deceptive and wrong, but there’s no denying that it works in terms of making money. Thankfully, under these new guidelines, this sort of thing is now banned.

3. Endorsements must be representative of what most consumers can reasonably expect to achieve. Any claim made by the endorser must reflect the opinion or experience of a significant proportion of consumers. Disclaimers like “results not typical” are no longer sufficient.

A common marketing tactic is to display testimonials or case studies where amazing results were achieved. Examples include how a certain diet pill helped someone lose 50 pounds in 6 months or how an online training course helped someone else make $1 million. Advertisers frequently used these types of stories to lure people in – without having to clearly specify that similar results are actually very difficult to obtain (other than a tiny “results not typical” disclaimer).

Under the new guidelines, any claim made by endorsers must be indicative of results for the majority of people, not just a select few.

4. All material connections between the advertiser and the endorser (including research or medical organizations) that consumers would not expect must be disclosed, including free products or monetary compensation.

All payment for reviews or endorsements must be disclosed, including monetary compensation and free products/services. This is especially relevant for bloggers and celebrities who write paid reviews/tweets/whatever.

Who Does This Apply to?

If you make money online, chances are pretty high that these new regulations affect you in some shape or form. Bloggers must be transparent and honest, advertisers can only claim “typical results”, and affiliate marketers must stay within the confines of those advertiser claims. And in case you were wondering, these new regulations apply to all areas of the web – including blogs, social media, sales pages, emails, PPC and banner advertisements, etc – but only in the US.

Apparently you need disclaimers on tweets and Facebook status messages too. But paid links (for SEO purposes) and affiliate links by themselves are likely okay.

The penalty? Fines for violating the new rules could be up to $11,000 per instance. However, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines do not have the force of law (although the FTC can still sue for violations) and are mainly for advertisers (not individual bloggers). In fact, back in October, Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC stated that they will not be patrolling the blogosphere or investigating bloggers. Responsibility falls on the advertisers and that’s who the FTC will be targeting with the guidelines.

My Thoughts on the Guidelines

The Good
I’m definitely all for the FTC cleaning up spam and protecting consumers from shady marketing scams online. I’ve seen this sort of stuff first hand, and it really isn’t pretty. It’s easy for people to be tricked by the deceptive ploys online – which could negatively affect their health or finances. If anything, the regulations will instill confidence in the minds of online shoppers and further legitimize the real businesses out there doing it right.

Bloggers especially stand to gain. Being transparent is never a bad thing, and I think the disclosure will make bloggers more trustworthy overall. After all, it’s okay to write paid reviews – but readers deserve to know the motivations of why a certain product or service is being featured (sponsored or not).

The Bad
That being said, marketing online will become much more difficult with these regulations in place. For example, effective marketing tools like hype, case studies, and testimonials will take a major hit. How do you get people excited about something if your claim is something unspectacular like “lose 0.5 pounds in 3 months” or “make $10 working from home on the Internet”?

It’s the extraordinary claims and possibilities (even though they represent uncommon results) that sell people on an idea – and these claims don’t necessarily have to be deceptive or misleading. The new rules essentially take this option away and advertisers will need to find new ways to play on people’s emotions. Product Launch Formula guru Jeff Walker recently had to take down all of his students’ case studies.

The Uncertainties
I understand that the FTC’s intentions are good, but the steps for implementation and enforcement of the new guidelines are vague at best.

For example, what exactly is a “typical result” and how is it defined? How will the FTC police all of the marketing and advertising activity that goes on online? What about the offenders who operate outside of the US? Furthermore, can a review or endorsement truly be “honest” if money changes hands?

The FTC has stated that they will only go after advertisers in cases that are black and white and that they are “not interested in playing gotcha in gray areas”. But really, with such vague guidelines, what’s black and white?

Practical Applications
Alright so now that you’ve spent some time learning about the new FTC guidelines and how it applies to your business as a blogger, affiliate marketer, or advertiser, what are some things you should be doing now?

If you’re a blogger who accepts compensation for posts, create a disclosure policy page. For ideas, John Chow has a humorous one here and Jim Kukral has a more serious one here. You can generate your own at DisclosurePolicy.org. Also, be sure to disclose your affiliations with the product or company at the end of reviews or endorsements – whether you were paid up front, paid affiliate commissions, or even scored free review products. Michael Gray recently listed one out at the end of a review post.

Disclosure: This was not a sponsored post; however, I was comped a subscription to easytweets. A positive review was not required or incentivized in any way.

Again, the FTC will not be going after any individual bloggers, but this is all good practice so that advertisers will be willing to work with you under the new guidelines.

As for the “typical results” claim (#3), be sure to frequently survey your customers so that you have a better understanding of what you can realistically offer. Of course, you never want to stretch the truth, but you can always present the data in a way that is favorable for your marketing (e.g. amount of money made by users who finished an entire Internet marketing training program AND started an online business).

What do you think about the new FTC guidelines? Do they significantly affect the way you run your online business? Leave your thoughts in a comment here below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



New FTC Guidelines for Bloggers & Internet Marketers – The Good, The Bad, and Everything Else You Need to Know

• Does a Paid Review Mean a Positive Review? My Recent Blogging Dilemma
• The 12 Essential Elements of a Highly Effective Blog Review – Make More Money
• Affiliate Income is Most Stable
• What To Review On Your Blog – 7 Ways to Find the Right Products & Services
• Gasp! Advertising on Twitter with ad.ly & Sponsored Tweets… Is It Okay to Make Money?

Squeeze pages are important – no doubt about it. If you have a free offer that you’re giving away in exchange for user information (name and email address), you should be utilizing a squeeze page. If not, you’re probably leaving a lot of leads on the table and limiting your email list building potential.

I’ve written before about the 7 components of killer squeeze pages and you should look to incorporate all of them if possible.

But what if you’re not technically savvy or would rather rely on a system to do all of the heavy lifting for you? After all, tweaking and optimizing on-page elements usually requires a good understanding of technical code. Enter Squeeze Theme – a new premium Wordpress theme created by the team over at Unique Blog Designs.

Squeeze Theme isn’t really your typical theme in the sense that what you see is not necessarily what you get. In other words, you wouldn’t be using it for a set layout or color scheme. It’s more of a framework rather than a theme. There are a ton of options and configurations in the backend that allow you to customize the look and feel of your blog. Of course, the strong point of the theme is that you can easily set up optimized squeeze pages and sales pages in addition your blog – all with a few clicks of a button.

Here’s a video introduction to Squeeze Theme.

The Wordpress backend looks like this…

There are options for pretty much everything – including appearance and colors, layout, fonts, logos, form and submit button settings, etc. Here’s what the homepage of your default blog might look like. Keep in mind that many of the elements and colors can be changed however you wish. In fact, if you notice, the SqueezeTheme.com site uses the same theme.

In addition to the traditional blog or magazine layouts, the theme also allows you to create custom squeeze pages and sales pages (without sidebars). Below are some of the existing templates and examples to show you what’s possible.

Final Thoughts

Squeeze Theme costs $147 and definitely is not cheap compared to other premium themes out there. However, if you consider the value of squeeze/sales pages and the potential new leads and customers that they can help you obtain, it can be a very good investment. Furthermore, since Squeeze Theme can easily be customized, you can use it for many of your sites with different settings in place.

It’s possible to create squeeze pages on your existing blog by tweaking the code and adding some templates. However, if you’re looking to build an email list and sell products on your blog without much technical know-how, Squeeze Theme may be the perfect solution for you.

Try out Squeeze Theme now.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Squeeze Theme Review – Squeeze/Sales Pages on Your Blog Made Easy

• 7 Components of a Killer Squeeze Page that Gets Thousands of Leads
• Blog Themes Club – Win a Free 1 Month Membership for Premium Themes
• Tatto Media Keeps on Improving – Followup Review
• 11 Ways to Maximize Your Blog’s Subscriber Count
• Arkayne Review – Display Related Posts Around the Web

The bigger your list, the better. As your pool of targeted leads grows, you develop a solid foundation that’s not affected by how much search traffic Google sends you or how many of your blog posts go popular on social media sites. Sure, all of the marketing strategies help, but a big targeted list means you already have a high quality customer base you can market to over and over again at will. In other words, your job as an Internet marketer becomes easier and much more stable.

So why wouldn’t you develop your list? Every type of online business (including blogs, e-commerce sites, membership sites, forums, etc) can benefit from email marketing. Now is the time to get started if you haven’t already. I recommend Aweber as your autoresponder service to manage your email campaigns.

How to Build Your Email List to Massive Size

Okay, now that you understand the huge benefits of building an email list, the next question is, how? Do you just put up a random email form in the sidebar of your website? Or is there more to it than that?

The first step is to come up with a compelling free offer. What can you provide your potential customers that will entice them to give up their email addresses to get it? After all, you can’t expect people to sign up for no reason – especially with email spam running rampant. Free instant downloads of digital products like e-books, audio, video, and software demos tend to work best as long as you’re providing real value. A little bit of hype helps too. Just make sure you’re able to back it up. Here are some ideas for free products you can use.

If you haven’t noticed, my free ebook, The Winning Way – Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies, is my offer to build my list for this site. So far, it’s worked incredibly well – netting me around 2,000 email subscribers over the past year without doing much promotion off site.

After you’ve figured out what you’re going to give away, the next step is to create a squeeze page that’s optimized to maximize sign ups (we’ll get more into this in the next section). You’ll then drive traffic to the page via banner ads, paid search ads, blog promotions, SEO, etc and tweak the set up as you go along.

The Squeeze Page

So what exactly is a squeeze page? It’s a destination where visitors land, created for the purpose of getting them to opt in and give up their information (name and email address).

Believe it or not, there are a lot of intricacies involved and the best squeeze pages are those that have been split tested countless times to maximize conversions. For example, a slight change in layout, a tweak in the headline, or even a new color can have drastic effects on the sign up rate.

Some great examples of squeeze pages are below. In fact, you may already be familiar with some of them.

Facebook.com
I’m sure you’ve seen this one. In fact, you probably signed up. Facebook has XX million users and this simple yet effective homepage played a part in that.

DoubleYourDating.com
Eben Pagan is well known for the design of this squeeze page – which is the first step in the sales funnel of his $20 million per year dating business.

TheMotleyFool.com
This is a popular investing information site. The form is very simple, and the headline leaves you wanting more.

SqueezeTheme.com
This is a squeeze page created by Unique Blog Designs for their upcoming Wordpress Squeeze Theme. It looks pretty good. Gotta practice what you preach.

All of the above pages look very different, but they share some common characteristics that help them to generate a massive number of sign ups.

7 Components That Every Squeeze Page Should Have

1. Simple layout
First of all, make the layout of your squeeze page simple – no frills. Include a headline, maybe a paragraph of text or a short video, a sign up form, and submit button. That’s it. Make sure everything is above the fold and eliminate all distractions that may prevent users from signing up (e.g. external links, unnecessary images, clutter, etc).

2. Catchy, attention-grabbing headline
The headline is probably the most important component of the squeeze page. If there’s just one thing that a visitor reads, it’s the headline so make it count and entice people to continue on in the process. The best headlines are at the top of the page, big and bold (red usually works well) and are focused around people’s emotions.

3. A play on emotions
Simply put, emotion sells. Find out the hopes and dreams of your target audience and deliver on that. For example, don’t just offer an ebook with a bunch of information. Provide a manual to gain confidence with women. Or a method to finally make money online. Or a guide on how to get accepted by a dream college. You get the idea.

Also, be sure to touch on as many emotions as possible when writing your copy. Fear and urgency work best when trying to get people to take action.

Here are some examples.

Urgency: “Special limited time offer for the next 50 subscribers only.”

Fear: “3 out of 4 people lose money in the stock market. Find out how you can be in the top 25%.”

4. Selling on benefits
When describing your offer, sell on benefits not on features. In other words, explain how you will fulfill subscribers’ needs and desires. As the old marketing quotes goes, people want a hole not just a drill. Visitors don’t need to read through another product description. What they really want to know is, “what’s in it for me?”

This is essentially how you can give your offer a high perceived value. A PDF ebook in itself probably doesn’t have much value. But a guide on how to improve a person’s life in some way definitely does. See the difference? Use it in your marketing.

5. Minimal web form
Never ask for more information than you need. Can you get by with just an email address? If so, it might be worth limiting your form to just that. Get rid of all barriers to conversion. Not many people are going to want to give away all of their personal information for a free download.

6. Loud and clear call to action
Rather than use generic words like “go” or “submit” for your form button, use a clear call to action like “download now” or “get your free ebook now”. These tend to lead to much higher conversion rates.

Also test different colors, button sizes, and placement. You’d be surprised by some of the small changes that have a big effect.

7. Disclaimer and privacy policy
This is one component that a lot of marketers ignore or forget, but nevertheless is very important. Always include a disclaimer and privacy policy on your squeeze page. Not only will they protect you in case of a lawsuit, but they also help you to obtain the trust of your visitors.

Include a line like “We hate spam just as much as you do. We will never share your information with any third parties.” Displaying a security badge (e.g. Verisign) next to the web form also helps to prove legitimacy and thus improve conversion rates.

Final Thoughts

The guidelines listed in this article offer a good starting point for your squeeze pages, but you have to remember that you must constantly test things out. No matter how great you think a conversion rate is, every squeeze page can be further improved with testing, testing, and more testing.

So what do you think? Are you making the most of email marketing and squeeze pages to gain more leads for your online business? Share some of your favorite squeeze pages and testing results in the comments below!

Also, for more information on this topic, be sure to check out Squeeze Pages 101, a free report from Unique Blog Designs. The team over there is releasing a new Wordpress theme called Squeeze Theme next week specifically for squeeze pages and I’ll be reviewing it here when it comes out. Stay tuned.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



7 Components of a Killer Squeeze Page that Gets Thousands of Leads

• Squeeze Theme Review – Squeeze/Sales Pages on Your Blog Made Easy
• The Secret to Successful Marketing for Your Information Products
• Assembling the Internet Marketing Puzzle – Learn What Goes Where
• Make Money Online Ebooks – Are They All Scams?
• 16 Ideas For Free Products That Will Double Your Subscribers & Leads

To participate in Andy’s Startup Challenge contest, all you had to do was write a blog post describing your biggest challenge as a start up. I wrote about finding passion, both in yourself (as an entrepreneur) and in others (your partners), and apparently the post resonated with a lot of people. Check it out: How to Solve the Biggest Challenge For Your Online Startup Business

The article ended up winning first place – and it’s unbelievable how many great opportunities have come my way because of luck my super contest skills! (I won a free pass to Elite Retreat last year through a similar contest as well).

More About ThinkThank

ThinkTank was an awesome experience and I highly recommend it to advanced Internet marketers and entrepreneurs who want to take a nice vacation and network with some of the top players in the industry. The event is run by David Klein (DK), a standup guy who pretty much did anything and everything to keep us happy and entertained. For those of you who don’t know DK, he’s a San Diego chiropractor who runs an Internet marketing company, Purpose Inc (good at Facebook advertising too). He’s also the guy behind pretty cool events like ThinkTank and the Pubcon poker tournament.

As for the ThinkTank event this year, it was a small group of about 50 people. A big tent was set up on the beach – with plenty of delicious catered food, an overflowing open bar, and unique activities (like beach dodgeball, kickball, Jujitsu lessons from Brazilian champion Robert Drysdale, Hawaiian-themed parties and shows, etc.). Some call ThinkTank the “unconference”, a frat party for Internet marketers, and I think that’s pretty accurate.

Connections Made

I had the chance to connect with some pretty high profile people whom I have a lot of respect for.

• Shoemoney held a Q&A session – very insightful as usual and the guy is always willing to help. I recently had some trademark issues for Winning the Web and Jeremy called me up to offer his advice. Not only that but Jeremy is a business idea machine. He knows exactly what he’s doing and is pretty good at execution too.
• Andy Liu was generous enough to send me to ThinkTank and I can’t thank him enough. He runs huge sites (BuddyTV, Icanhascheezburger, FAIL Blog) and he’s probably the smartest Internet entrepreneur / online business person I know.
• Neil Patel is hilarious, always goofy, and knows how to make money. He even managed to squeeze out $100 from Shoemoney on a little bet they had.
• Jim Wang is the owner of Bargaineering, one of the top personal finance sites online. It was great to meet and brainstorm with Jim because I recently bought a personal finance blog of my own – very timely. Jim is a really cool guy, super chill – someone I’d want to be good friends with.
• Dennis Yu offered to do a live critique of my sites on the spot the minute he met me. He runs his own company Blitzlocal and the amount of knowledge and experience he has is absolutely insane.
• Scott Skinger of Train Signal gave me some awesome advice for my information marketing business (in the works). Scott sells advanced computer training packages through his site and the insights and encouragement that he provided me have really given me a fresh perspective.
• Corey Hammond was one of the guys I could really relate to since we’re in similar stages of our careers. We both work as SEO consultants with aspirations of growing our own sites and businesses to the next level. Great talking to you, Corey!  Let’s keep in touch.
• Jon Henshaw has a great suite of SEO tools over at Raven SEO tools. His “baby” he calls it. Jon is really down to earth and willing to help. I’m definitely going to check out his tools.
• Joanna Lord aka the tiara wearing thinktanker was one of the few girls among many boys. She’s super friendly and kickass at what she does – PPC and running her relatively new company, Your Job Stop.
• I’ve always been a fan of social media experts Brent Csutoras and Chris Winfield and SEO’s John Andrews and Todd Malicoat. Great to finally see them in action here. The sessions that they put on were especially good as well.
• Aaron Chronister aka The Mad Hat shared some of the shadier things he’s done with SEO – and it’s interesting to see how Google reacts to stuff like this. Also, his Bacon Explosion, which literally exploded virally nationwide, is heavenly!

I had a great time at ThinkTank and it’s definitely helped my business, with new knowledge and new connections. If you’re making money online and can afford to pay the $3,000 I’d say the event is definitely worth it.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



My Experience At ThinkThank 2009, the Hottest Internet Marketing Event of the Year

• Here Comes Elite Retreat 2009
• I’m Going to Elite Retreat – My Crazy Winning Streak
• How Google Chrome Will Win the Browser Battle – 51% Market Share by 2010
• Win a Free Pass to Elite Retreat 2009 – I Dare You!
• Winning the Web on Alltop – A New Milestone?

Doctors, consultants, lawyers, and web designers all live and die by their reputations. Marketing any kind of professional service is based on relationships that are traditionally built by word of mouth and networking. In fact, every professional service provider I know spends a lot of time “pressing the flesh” and asking for referrals to build their business. Since most of these professionals have expert status in their respective industries, they work hard to promote themselves as “thought leaders” with by-lined articles, tip sheets, and corporate logos. So why not modify each of these strategies to cash in on search engine traffic online?

As a reminder, millions of searches happen online every day on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The way to get your website to rank high on these engines is to have other websites link back to your website. Each link from another website is considered a “vote” for your website. The search engines strive to determine website reputation and relevance to actual search queries and they use links as a key indicator of reputation and relevance. So if you want to capitalize on search engine traffic for specific keywords, you need to get good at attracting links.

Here’s how to optimize each of the above-mentioned strategies (by-lined articles, tip sheets, and corporate logos) to attract links and boost your website’s search rankings.

Hack #1 – Supercharge Your By-Lined Articles

Popular bloggers, social media gurus, and web 2.0 experts will tell you that the best way to get traffic is to write for another site that already has lots of traffic. Consultants in the offline world do the same thing by writing by-lined articles in trade journals and niche publications. Publishers need informative content for their readers and authors need the publicity – so long as the articles are informative and not overly promotional, you’re almost guaranteed placement. Since these industry-specific publications also have “authoritative” websites, it’s crucial to write for them as well. Receiving just a few links to your website from these authority sites could skyrocket your website’s ranking for targeted terms.

The key to optimizing your articles for the web is to understand the keywords your target market is using to search on the Internet. For example, let’s say you’re a supply chain consultant that focuses on “supply chain integration” and you already write a bi-monthly article in a few popular trade publications. Most editors also publish content online so by peppering your article with a few keyword-rich links back to your website, you’ll not only get traffic to your site, but you’ll dramatically improve your search engine rankings.

Be sure to perform keyword research using the many free tools available online to see what your target market is searching for. So if you offer “supply chain integration” services, but your target customer searches for “supply chain collaboration”, you need to tactfully add links with the right keywords in your article and by-line.

Also consider ultra niche publications like “Seafood Business” and “Industrial Health and Safety News”. If you sell products or services to these industries, you’ll see how a little bit of keyword optimization can help you dominate the search engines for these niche industries. I have used this strategy myself to rank #1 on Google for a very competitive industry-specific keyword.

Hack #2 – Turn Tip Sheets and White Papers Into “Link bait”

Traditional marketers speak of the benefits of tip sheets as a way to get media attention, especially in industry specific trade magazines. For example, auditors may write something like “Top 10 Tips to Ensure Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance” or law firms may release studies like “Financial Implications of Not Having a Will”. These tip sheets are either copied verbatim, or are referenced in magazines and journals all the time. Link bait is a term describing compelling content that attracts natural links from other sites and is the internet’s version of the tip sheet.

Creating a really informative link bait article is an excellent way to generate tons of traffic to your site. You can either create a killer resource and host it on your own website or you can create an ebook or white paper and distribute it throughout the internet. The buzz you generate will attract links to your website, which will give your site a boost in the search engines. A great example of this kind of link bait is Gyutae’s The Winning Way.

What resources, ebooks, or industry guides can you create attract website traffic? One thing to remember is that the headline is the most important aspect of your ebook. Try using words like “hack”, “ultimate”, “underground”, “secret”, or “mind-blowing” to build a little curiosity with your link bait.

Hack #3 – Logos = Web Widgets

Many web design firms leave a logo at the bottom of their clients’ sites saying something like “Powered by Adaptive Solutions” or “Created by Programmers R Us”. Similarly, SEO’s and internet marketing professionals have been using clever little widgets to spread publicity about their companies as well as increase their search engine rankings. Consider BunkBeds.net. They created a silly quiz that gives you a score and a badge that you can embed on your own website. This quiz spread like wildfire and catapulted their humble site to the #1 position in Google because people took the quiz, embedded the score on their site, and told their friends about it.

Professional service firms can utilize the same basic strategy to generate lots of links and traffic to their sites. For example, a friend of mine works for a company that sells software to museum and zoo gift shops (talk about a niche market). The company has over 5,000 customers and all of them have its logo on their sites. This is great, but the problem is the logo doesn’t contain any keywords. If they simply added “museum POS experts” or “museum software experts” they would literally own these terms in the search engines. Luckily, since they already have relationships with these museums, they can easily send them an updated logo and request that they replace the old one. They could even diversify and send 2,500 logos with one keyword phrase and the other 2,500 logos with another keyword phrase.

The point is that besides the snazzy tricks and fancy sounding buzzwords, internet marketing is rooted in the basic principles of marketing. Professional service marketers just need to modify their tried and true tactics for the web to really knock it out of the park.

Raza Imam is a Chicago-based marketing consultant and owns an offshore software development company. You can visit his software outsourcing blog at www.SoftwareSweatshop.com.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



3 Hacks Old School Marketers Can Use to Cash in on the Internet

• 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum SEO Benefit
• 6 Crucial Questions to Ask Yourself Before Submitting Your Site to a Directory
• 6 Reasons Why You Should & Should NOT Buy Links to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings
• The 3 Strategies of Link Building – Why & How You Build Links
• Stop Building Invisible Links – 3 Ways to Find Them

Just like assembling a complex puzzle, successful Internet marketing requires you to piece certain parts together in a logical way in order to come up with a desired outcome – a profitable business.

Essentially, Internet marketing is divided into 3 parts.

1. Getting targeted traffic to your website
2. Converting that traffic into leads
3. Converting those leads into long-term customers

While it may seem pretty simple, it’s much harder than you may imagine. The majority of Internet marketers start out thinking that this whole online business thing is easy – but it’s not. It goes far beyond just traffic generation and gets much deeper than opt in forms and blatant email ads.  Let me explain…

Crafting an Internet marketing business from scratch is similar to architecture. In order to become an expert architect you need to master a diverse set of classes like Experiencing Architecture Studio, Foundations in Visual Arts, Building Technology, Design Computing and History and Theory of Architecture. The profession requires a solid understanding of a vast number of related topics.

In the same way, in order to become a master Internet marketer you need to first become an expert in copywriting, marketing, advertising, traffic generation, lead generation, and psychology. Moreover, you don’t have universities to teach you all of that. You need to have the courage to learn everything on your own by picking up courses, reading e-books and blogs, and most importantly diving in headfirst for the experience.

In order to provide you with a clearer picture of what Internet marketing is as a whole, here’s a breakdown of all the things you need to set in place for this money making mechanism to work.

The Skill Set

There is a common misconception that in order to succeed in Internet marketing you need to be a computer genius. If you are, I’m sorry to disappoint, but anyone can do it.

In fact, one of my first coaching clients was 79 years old when he first contacted me asking for help. I was shocked to find he was a grandpa, but it only confirmed my belief that Internet marketing knows no prejudices – man or woman, black or white, young or old, big or small – anyone can make it in Internet marketing with the right attitude, training, and hard work.

All facets of Internet marketing are important but with the insane growth of social media, the skill I highly recommend  is to know how to operate Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Many marketers rely solely on those three mediums to bring home the bacon.

Lead Generation and List Building

List building is an essential part of long term Internet marketing success. List building simply means building a list of subscribers you can communicate with on a regular basis through email. The list is by far your biggest asset.

In order to start building a list, first you need to set up what is called a capture page – the page where your visitors are going to be asked to provide their name and email in exchange for some kind of free gift. It can be a free report, e-book, video or demo software. Many marketers also offer free e-zines, daily tips and early bird notifications.

The idea behind the capture page is to capture your visitors’ contact information so that they can become more than just a visitor – a lead. A “lead” is a potential customer that is interested in your product or service.

An important tip for list building is to target your list as much as possible. For example, if you’re in the weight loss niche, offering a free report about dog training is foolish. You need to target your audience in relation to your service, product, niche, etc.

How to Create A Capture Page:

• Powerful headline. The headline is the most important part of your capture page as it will determine whether or not prospects will stay on your page and keep reading.
• Bullet points with benefits. “What’s in it for ME?” This is precisely what runs through your prospects’ minds when they hit your page for the first time.  You need to clearly state the benefits your free gift or product provides readers. Lay out the reasons why opting in will make their lives better. Show them them how your product is unique and why they need to take action NOW.
• Opt-in form. This is the actual form where readers will type in name and email information. Opt in forms are easily created using any email autoresponder service such as Aweber.
• Call to action. You need to remind your readers what they should do. Often, when readers are sold on opting in, they get distracted and forget what to do. It is vital that you remind them to opt in with strong reassurance and an effective call to action.

Traffic Generation

While traffic generation isn’t the most important aspect of Internet marketing, it sure is the most time consuming. You need to be spending about 40% of your time generating traffic for your website. Let’s face it, if you don’t have hungry eyeballs scanning your page – your business won’t grow.

Here’s a quick overview of the most common traffic generation methods:

• Article marketing
• Joint ventures (affiliate marketing)
• Blog commenting
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social bookmarking
• Social media
• Video marketing
• Blogging
• Email marketing
• Advertising – banner ads, pay-per-click

Please note that this list isn’t even close to being complete. There are hundreds of ways to generate traffic, but these are some of the more common methods. Feel free to explore the web for additional techniques to get more exposure.

Regardless of which marketing strategy you’re using, remember to target your traffic. Ten interested visitors will always be better than a thousand uninterested ones.

How To Monetize Your List

For some reason, many people seem to believe that by simply offering a product to their list they are going to make money. Not true.

In order to build a profitable business you first need to establish a relationship with your list. The best way to accomplish this is to run a newsletter or a blog where you provide helpful information, tips and guidance on the topic you’re covering. Constantly adding value will lead to a strong relationship between you and your list.

By utilizing this strategy, people will see you less as a salesperson and more as a trusted expert. You’ll no longer be the “guy who tries to sell stuff”. From that point on, your readers will consider your words carefully and in some cases, if your product suits their needs, they will happily pull out their credit cards.

Remember, people don’t like to be sold to – they love advice from a trusted expert.

Is your Internet marketing puzzle falling in place? What are some of the pieces that you’re currently lacking? Leave a comment with your experiences and thoughts below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Assembling the Internet Marketing Puzzle – Learn What Goes Where

• 3 Important Factors in Selecting Your Internet Marketing Strategy of Choice
• 7 Components of a Killer Squeeze Page that Gets Thousands of Leads
• An Internet Marketing Blog’s Content Strategy – What’s Coming Next
• 16 Ideas For Free Products That Will Double Your Subscribers & Leads
• 6 Powerful Principles of Persuasion for Influential Internet Marketing

In ideal circumstances (unlimited time, money, and knowledge) you’d work on incorporating every Internet marketing strategy imaginable. Think of all the traffic you’d get. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible for any company, big or small. Much like selecting a topic for your business, Internet marketing is most effective when you go niche and focus in on a few things.

When I wrote The Winning Way, I covered a vast range of marketing tips. However, it wasn’t my intention to imply that you had to check off each of items in order to be successful online. What I did was present you with a lot of different options. It’s your job to look through them all and find the ones that work best for your site.

How do you find the best marketing strategies for your needs? That largely depends on 3 important factors – effectiveness, skills, and resources. I’ll cover each of them here and explain how it applies to you.

1. Effectiveness of the Method

As you might have guessed, not all marketing tactics are equal – especially across different niches or industries. For example, while social media might be a great channel for a technology review site, it would probably be less beneficial for a site selling industrial tools. Similarly, display advertising works well when used for branding purposes, but usually lags behind other channels like PPC when used for lead generation.

Understand your business goals and your target audience. Where do your potential customers go online? What do they respond to? Once you have that down, analyze each of the different marketing strategies and see if they are good fits for your business. After that, it’s just a matter of testing and going with what yields the best results.

2. Your Skills & Experience

If you’re an independent webmaster, you can’t just throw money at marketing like some the big companies do. A lot of times you’ll have to do all of the promotion yourself. Sure, the effectiveness of the strategies is still important here, but that will depend heavily on your skills and experience. Are you a good writer? Then start a blog and build authority in your chosen niche. Don’t have much technical knowledge? Then stay away from tinkering with your site’s code for SEO purposes.

Focus in on the marketing that you’re good at. You don’t need to be a jack of all trades to be successful. For everything else, you can either bring on a complementary partner or outsource the work.

3. Your Resources – Time & Money

Finally, the last criteria for selecting marketing strategies to focus in on is resources (time and money). Time and money are limited and you have to spend each of them wisely to achieve maximum results. For example, if you have a lot of time, but little money, it makes sense to engage in guerilla marketing (e.g. forum posting, blog commenting). However, these practices are a waste of time if you have a lot of money. You can outsource these tasks and spend your time more efficiently. Same goes for SEO and PPC. If you’re strapped for cash, SEO makes the most sense. If you’re rolling in the dough, PPC is the way to go.

What Internet marketing strategies are you focusing on today to build your business? Have you analyzed effectiveness, skills, and resources to utilize methods that will get you the most exposure in your particular situation?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



3 Important Factors in Selecting Your Internet Marketing Strategy of Choice

• Quadruple Your Website Revenue by Outsourcing Your Work
• Time is Your Only Limited Resource – 5 Ways For You To Use It Wisely
• “Don’t Put Your Eggs In One Basket” is Bad Advice for Internet Marketers
• Top 5 Crucial Internet Marketing Tips for 2010 – Are You Prepared?
• 8 Jobs You Can Outsource Using Elance & oDesk

Get $50 for Reading The Winning Way – My Guarantee

With the launch of my new Internet marketing e-book, The Winning Way, I made a deal with all of my readers here. If you download the free resource and don’t learn at least 3 new things, I’ll pay YOU $50 for your time. That’s right – it’s completely free to download, but I’ll pay you if it doesn’t provide you with any value after reading it through.

A crazy deal? Some might say so… but for me, it makes sense because I believe 100% that The Winning Way is of high quality. The people who take me up on my offer will either be dishonest scammers or Internet marketing super gurus. I like my chances, so why not take advantage of the benefits of a guarantee?

The Benefits of a Guarantee

Guarantees are extremely effective online because they transfer the risk from customers to yourself – which of course is a good thing if you have a solid offer you believe in. People will be more inclined to try and buy since they can always get their money back if they’re not satisfied. Furthermore, if you stamp your offer with a guarantee, the claims that you make about your product or service will hold a lot more weight.

In the past 5 days, 328 people have downloaded The Winning Way so far. I’m sure that number would be a lot smaller if I didn’t have my guarantee in place.

Here are a few examples of guarantees you can make in your online business.

• X-day money back guarantee (usually 30, 60, or 90 days) – refund for a purchase
• Time guarantee (e.g. deliver in 3 days or your money back)
• Value guarantee (e.g. The Winning Way offer – find 3 things you don’t know or I’ll pay you $50)
• Performance guarantee (e.g. advertising will result in at least 1,000 new visitors – or you get it free)

If you make a guarantee of any kind, you have to stand to lose something – otherwise your guarantee will be nothing but fluff. In other words, you can’t just say “I guarantee it” without putting yourself in a position of vulnerability.

But isn’t it risky?

Guarantees do come with a lot of risk – especially if you stand to lose money or time like with my Winning Way guarantee. You could be wrong in assuming that what you have is amazing – and you have to be prepared to eat the cost if that happens. In fact, never make any promises unless you’re prepared to pay up. There will always be a percentage of people who take you up on your guarantee for a variety of reasons.

For example, if you have a refund policy, some people will want their money back because the product didn’t have what they were looking for or because it didn’t help them. People have different needs and tastes so this is to be expected.

In some cases, dishonest people will take advantage of your guarantee. In fact, I experienced this earlier today when I received the following email…

“It took me almost 2 hours to read through all what you have wrote in your book, but all i found is things what are just rehashed mostly and I already know Maybe there were ~1 new thing/way I didn’t know but yeah… So if it would be possible I would like my $50 , my paypal is…”

Little did this guy know that I have access to logs that show the exact time he signed up for the book – which happened to be 8 minutes before he sent this email. Spent 2 hours reading? Psh, right…

The Conclusion on Guarantees

Overall, guarantees are effective in increasing customer confidence and raising conversion rates, even with all of the risks involved. They’re used everywhere, both online and off – and for good reason. Conjure a guarantee for your own business and see how it affects your bottom line.

Do you have a guarantee yet? How has it benefited your sales and conversions?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Boost Sales & Downloads with a Killer Guarantee – Benefits & Risks

• Make Money Online Ebooks – Are They All Scams?
• The Secret to Successful Marketing for Your Information Products
• 1 Simple Word That Will Revitalize Your Entire Marketing Strategy
• Leaders are Readers
• 6 Powerful Principles of Persuasion for Influential Internet Marketing