Article marketing has always been a favorite marketing method amongst frugal entrepreneurs. Offering ultra-targeted traffic at a price that no one can argue with (hint: it is free), article marketing has been used as a promotional platform for everything from expensive watches to online informational products. A mainstay of offline and online marketing, the rulebook for article marketing is hundreds of pages thick and as complex as they come.

The thing is, to succeed with article marketing, you do not have to follow every rule that is out there. Sometimes, all it takes is a little knowledge of the major rules, and you are almost all the way there. Before you embark on an article marketing campaign, memorize these five major rules and use them to guide your marketing efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is a page always in progress and will just be a big long list of ways and sources of traffic to your site. As we all know everyone seems to be always selling some new and fantastic traffic sources but really there is nothing magic about traffic.

Getting traffic has always basically built on the idea that good content finds it’s way to the people looking for it. If you have the best weight loss page it will get lots of traffic and if you have a terrible page it will get no traffic no matter what you do.

At the same time the best article that is of no interest to anyone will still not get any traffic. So be sure to write to a market that is big enough.

So here are a bunch of methods and sources of traffic.

Squidoo Pages – Squidoo is a popular site. Just make sure that you are not writing spammy enough pages and add all of your backlinks to your related pages

Hub Pages – A type of article site that will give you lots of traffic as long as your personal rating is at least 75% and your article is over 50% Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

The SEO Book by Aaron Wall is a wide ranging book that is put together to teach you how to optimize your website to get more visitors by ranking high on the search engines.The Search Engine Optimization industry (SEO) is a very competitive industry as well as one full of the riff raff of the internet promising thousands and even millions of visitors and often offering old outdated information as well as very dodgy advice that can get you banned from any and all search engines if you put it into place.

Over the last few years I have read literally thousands of pages of information about how to build a better site, how to rank well in search engines and how to make more money online. In the early days most of the people selling or giving away information were truly saints, they gave good info and they gave it free. Over the last three years or so the SEO market has definitely changed as the money is bigger and optimizing for search engines has become more complex and changes on a regular basis so it is tough to keep up with. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing great articles is a core to your internet business. Not only is it a way to get traffic directly to your money pages but it is also a great way to build backlinks to your site through both the ezine articles site and anyone that uses your articles (as long as they keep your links intact).

Here is a great and prolific article writer Sean Mize with some tips to writing really effective articles.

1. Always use effective titles. Kick-start each of your articles by using titles that will make your audience want to read your articles. I wouldn’t lie about it; writing killer titles isn’t always easy but this is something that you need to learn and master as soon as possible. Remember, the success of your articles will largely depend on the effectiveness or attractiveness of your headlines.

2. Always start strong. Make it a point to put the most explosive information you have on your first paragraph. You would want to get your readers on the edge of their seats and you would want to hold their attention as long as possible. Kick-start your articles with intriguing questions or jaw-dropping statements. Ensure that these will help you make your readers want to read your articles until the end.

3. Make your articles informative. Don’t make your readers feel that they just wasted their time on your articles. Make them happy by giving them every information that they are looking for. These may include the solution to the things that they’re going through, answers to their burning questions, guides that can empower them to do certain things on their own, and useful tips and techniques.

4. Deliver well-written articles. It’s not enough that you give your readers useful information. To really satisfy them, you also need to give them great reading experience. You can do this by making sure that your articles are well-written. Your grammar usage must be perfect and you must use the most effective words at all times.

5. Ensure that your articles are flawless. Spend a couple of minutes checking your articles before you post them online. Ensure that they are free from annoying errors and make sure that your content flow smoothly.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article writing success, “Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide”

Download it free here: Article Writing

I have a 9 year old daughter and I thought that she was to old now to play with dolls until this past Christmas when she fell in love with American Girl dolls.

You are probably wondering what American Girl has to do with marketing but if that is the case then you probably have not seen this in action before.

American Girl sells high end dolls. These are not the kind of dolls that you buy at the store but instead you order them online for over $100, not your average barbie that’s for sure. Anyway there is a whole lot around these dolls to keep kids interested and do grow revenues. We can look at the integration of this and maybe you can see ways that you can wrap this into your business.

First the dolls. The dolls are about a food tall and are shaped like a real little girl. The dolls eyes open when you stand them up and close when you lie them down. There are a few choices for dolls. Either you can buy a American Girl labeled doll or you can get one that matches your girl that has the same hair and eye color. Finally there are different dolls for girls of different ages

So that seems simple enough but it is the tie-ins to the marketing that makes things interesting. First of all as I will see next month there is a tea room/restaurant in just a few cities that you can go for a formal meal with mother, daughter, and doll. At the store you can of course buy clothes for the doll and apparently match them with the girl, you can get the dolls ears pierced, you can by accessories for the American Girl doll and finally there are DVDs. More on that in a moment.

One of the great marketing/income methods that American Girl has setup is a collection of movies. Each movie features a starring girl character that girls fall in love with and this character is set in a certain time and place in American history. This makes the movies interesting to kids and parents and of course each of these characters is in fact another doll that you can buy.

Buy the movie, buy the doll, buy the clothes, and go for lunch.

I have of course been immersed in many different kids trends and fads and they are all very interesting but as a marketing system I do not think that there is any better market integration than American Girl. Even with a 50 year headstart I do not think that the people at Mattel have been even close to putting all the pieces together so tightly as this company has.

So the questions that you have to ask yourself is:

1. How do you integrate seemingly unrelated part of your complete sales process?

2. How smooth is the backend process of getting more sales from existing customers?

3. How many avenues and revenue streams do you have that are not competing with each other?

Many people do keyword reasearch by looking at terms that have high volume and are not competitive but I am not sure that is what you really want, or maybe it is? Well I have a few thoughts on this and wanted to wirte just a bit today to tell you what I look for.

Bum Marketing Keyword Research

When you are doing Bum Marketing as Travis Sago teaches it you are looking for two things. A hungry market and overlooked keywords. I think this is really important since you are really looking for people that can and want to buy something but are also available to you to pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it is Saturday night and I thought this would be an exciting night to start a Twitter account for this blog. You can follow me on Twitter at ibusblogger on Twitter.

I hope to post other peoples great posts as well as all of my own on there so follow me and watch and learn what you may have never known or forgotten about.

Well new years has come and gone. Have you made plans? I certainly have.

Over the last few years I have built up a large number of websites, although I do not track all of my sites I am a bit compulsive at times and will spend a day or do working on a site that has a lot of content but has not really built up any traffic. I believe I have about 90 sites in total and this is actually a big problem as set it and forget it does not work for many of these sites.

Looking back at 2009

Just to be clear. If I look at the just over two million pageviews that I got to all of my sites last year. about 70% comes from one site and after the top 7 sites the traffic drops off really quickly. I have one site that is a real set it and forget it type site and the rest of the sites will only get real traffic if I add content to them. So realistically I need to worry about adding content where it is desireable. Read the rest of this entry »

Keyword Elite 2.0 is the new product from Brad Callen, a person who has created some powerful software before this as well. Here are some of its features.

There is just a one time fee of $197 and no monthly fees to do your research. You can use it to search in all three major search engines Google, Yahoo & MSN. It shows you a huge list of profitable keywords. See different profitable Adwords campaigns and copy what they are doing and find JV partners online using the JV Diamond Miner

You can create your initial keyword list by adding long tail and short tail keywords using this program. After you have created a list you can filter out the keywords in all the different ways that are used. It will be possible for you to use Ask.com, Google Suggestion Tool, Meta Tags and Free Keywords to get keyword ideas.

With this program you can find out how competitive a specific keyword is in each of the paid “pay per click” search engines, such as, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing (MSN).

You don’t have to worry about creating your own marketing strategy, by using keyword elite 2.0 you can easily find profitable Adwords advertisers whose marketing strategy you can use.

You can see the Adwords advertisement history of a keyword for every website that has advertised with that keyword for at least in the past six months. You can also find out how good a specific keyword is in getting you a higher ranking in the 3 big search engines.

The software also allows you to see what percentage of people searching on your keyword are just surfers or could be potential buyers.

Another important thing that this software will show you are the “on page” optimization elements for each of the top 10 ranked websites for the keywords you input, giving you information on how you should be optimizing your own web page to make it to the top 10.

You will be able to see different specific keywords/website combinations in Adwords over a period of time. This will give you information about which keywords are used repeatedly by people.

This JV Diamond program enables you to find websites that are building an email list. You can partner with these websites because these can send some targeted traffic to your website by sending e-mails to their list.

With this program you will able to find CPA offers to match the niche that you’ve found to be profitable niche to pursue. You can search through 13,000 CPA and affiliate offers to find the best one.

When you use the software for the first time you get confused in trying to work out what each tool can do, but the amount of information it provides is huge.

Keyword Elite 2.0 can be used by both new and experienced marketers to get to identify profitable key words and products. The software comes with a 30 day search marketing elite membership and 8 weeks money back guarantee.

The guys over at Trend Watching have sent me this list fo trends to watch for in 2010. Some of them are obvious but as the market changes every year I am sure some of these will be interesting to many of us marketing online.

2010 is rapidly approaching; we hope the December edition of our Trend Briefing, detailing 10 trends for 2010, will assist you in getting things going (again). Go straight to the Briefing, or quickly scan the 10 trends below:

1. BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL | Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss. More » Read the rest of this entry »