Internet Business

Have you noticed the many internet marketing books using the word “secret” in their title, headline or copy?

Why do they do this?

Is their actually one or two online marketing methods or strategies that are going to bring to your site an ever growing consistent stream of willing to buy targeted clients?

The simple answer is NO.

Unfortunately many website owners think this is not the case and continue to accumulate book after book and software package after software package looking for “the ultimate web traffic method”.

The fact is that there is no one single marketing method that will make your online business successful, period. Only continual application of the right methods will see your business grow and expand.

The main reasons why most people think there is one main method is because of the following four elements:

- If you wanted to be a “plumber”, you would do your apprenticeship and then work for someone or then start your own business. If you wanted to own a “milk bar” you get a business loan, buy the “milk bar” and start running the business. Why do we know this and why are there no so called “secrets” regarding being a plumber or running a milk bar? Because these businesses have been around for a long time, to start them is “common knowledge”.

- Therefore because the internet is new and evolving, how to start an internet business has yet to become “common knowledge” and there is still many unknown aspects regarding the subject unlike traditional business. Unfortunately, many now capitalize on this “unknown aspect” by selling so called “secret information” type products thus only increasing the myth regarding internet business.

- Even if starting an internet business was “common knowledge”, there is simply too much information to decipher. Unlike going to the local library, finding the business section and picking one or two of the five books on “starting your own business”; you are now on the internet. You have a world library, the business section is as big as a football stadium and books on “starting your own business online” are in the thousands (including many misleading ones).

- This final point is the most important one. People want to believe there is an easy way to get a lot of web traffic and make a fortune without any work; they just have to find it! This is just human nature.

So know you know that you must use more than one internet marketing method to make your online business successful.

Stick with the main tried and true methods -

SEO
Content
Linking
Articles
Sales Copy
List Building
Joint Ventures

And your traffic will continue to increase rapidly.

Chris Taylor - helping web based business achieve unique distinction & maximum growth by building “life-time, client based relationships” - http://www.search-engine-optimization-training-resource.com

Copyright © CATDynamics - Catdynamics.com 2005.

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Ever feel like there is too much information to deal with? Well, it stands to reason. Extrapolate a 2003 study from UC Berkeley and you get a total of 6,917,529,027,641,081,856 bytes of data produced annually in all forms on Earth. That’s almost 7 exabytes - or around a gigabyte for each person on earth every year!

When you look at it this way, it’s not whoever has the most data who wins in this information economy, but whoever can make sense out of their own domain of knowledge in time to move through windows of opportunity or avoid disruptive surprises.

If it were possible to get your arms around just the World Wide Web (800 terabytes or 80 times the size of all print collections in the US Library of Congress,) you might be able to find key indicators that can have powerful positive influence on your day-to-day operations. There are industry events, legal decisions, and regulatory changes dispersed through the web like needles in a gigantic moving haystack. The bookmarks of today are the page-not-founds of tomorrow.

If you spent all day on the web you might get what you need - for today. If you are planning on gathering intellegence about your competitors for Internet Marketing, you may be able to use a little help! Tomorrow morning, your answers may be obsolete, and you’re back to square one. But there is hope, thanks to strategic use of Internet agents.

I define web agents as saved and scheduled queries which compile, sort and send results to you without intervention. They must only be set up once and are consistent in the information they send. They can be your eyes and ears on the web and blogging community, and they work for free.

The most basic type of agent is an email alert. These are old-school in that their delivery depends on it making it to your in-box and through your SPAM filters. Email alerts are available from many sources, such as Reuters and CNN, or even eBay. They are incredibly easy to set up, but can be tricky to stop or change. I find them of limited use, but Google News Alerts does the best job of any I’ve tried.

If you know in advance the URL of information you want, you may want to use a “page monitor.” These “visit” a site on your behalf and send you an email when the contents change. This is very useful for watching your competitions’ websites or press releases. For less predictably-located information you can use an “inverted search engine” such as googlealerts.com or feedster.com. Still, these make their way to you in the mass of other email you read, making them less useful.

Email notification methods are rapidly being overtaken by RSS, which stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary.” It offers many advantages over email alerts such as privacy and subscription control. To find RSS feeds (sources) you can use a search engine like feedster.com, which has indexed over 150 million RSS items, or look for the orange RSS icons found on many web pages. Feedster.com, in particular, will send alerts of new posts by author, subject, and more, and it will even combine your feed search results into a new “feed-feed” to scan quickly.

Feeds are usually viewed using software called an aggregator. These come in all flavors, including plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook and Eudora, as well as “live bookmarks” in the Firefox browser. Microsoft announced last month that RSS support would be built into the next version of Windows and Macintosh users have enjoyed it for a while.

Subscribing is done via simple click or cut and paste. You can assign expirations to keep your screen clear of old news. In some ways, it’s like a Tivo for business intelligence.

My current favorite combined system is Klipfolio by Serence, a free tool for assembling feeds to meet your own needs. There is a page monitor, feed monitor, and automated Google query system for web or news searches. You can browse an incredible “Klip farm” with thousands of data sources of all types. I have around forty precision feeds, page monitors and news searches, and find it quite manageable for a morning scan, and have never been so well informed.

A warning: Once you start using RSS or Klipfolio you will not be able to live without them. The first time you are able to make a competitive move based on a feed summary sent to your cell phone, you’ll be hooked. You’ll want to install it on your entire staff’s computers, and design queries for each person’s roles. “How’d you know that?” is something I love to hear, especially from a potential customer. “I try stay up to date” is my polite answer. Of course it’s possible to react too quickly or too often, so sometimes you can use multiple feeds to triangulate on the truth and see what’s really going on.

Albert Einstein once said “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.” I hope that some of these ideas will help you see a little farther ahead for your own business.

Scott Clark is an Internet Marketing Consultant and Search Engine Optimization expert since 1996. He specializes in critiques of existing sites and strategic marketing plans. Scott Clark can be reached at 888-668-4393 or online at http://www.sitecreations.com

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1. Maximize the effectiveness of your banner ads. Don’t just use the same ad on every banner, use a variety to attract the greatest number of clickers. Use a banner system, which changes the banners at you website.See: http://www.domainregistry.de

2. Make your web site load much faster by cutting down on banner ads and start using more buttons. Button ads are also smaller and take up less space.

3. Offer free advertising space to well known and respected companies on your web site. Sometimes people link their business credibility to yours.

4. People have been taught all their life to respect people in authority. Tell your visitors that you are the president or CEO of your business.

5. Offer people a free telephone consultation before they order your product. When they get to know you personally, it could convert to more sales.

6. Test the “bill me later option” on your web site. Most people are honest and will pay you. It is a powerful little niche and could increase your sales.

7. Find a charity your target audience would likely support. Tell people on your ad copy that you will give a percentage of the profits to that charity. P.S.: You should do also, what you have promised.

8. Hold a “buy the most wins contest” on your web site. Tell people each monthly winner will get their entire purchase refunded.

9. Attract visitors to your web site by offering them a free course. You could package the course on a follow-up autoresponder and send lessons daily.

10. Interview people related to your industry and get their legal permission to convert it to an article. Promote your web site by submitting it to ezines, article banks like www.articlecity.com and blogs like http://www.20six.de/secura1 (Guestbook).

About The Author

Hans Peter Oswald
CEO
ICANN Registrar Secura
http://www.com-domain.com

secura@domainregistry.de

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