imgroundzero.com

Well, I’ve been participating in product launches for the past couple of years, and it seems like everyone has their own case-specific course of action for making money, and that is what all the internet marketing fish are seeking.

Put more succinctly internet marketing prospects are always looking for the next hot money making method. In my opinion, that’s the reason most people do not find success online. They only complete the first or second parts of a 3 part plan for business operations.

To be successful in this realm, one has to only do 3 things consistently:

1. Plan – Find niches and opportunities, and determine the action steps to accomplish a goal.
2. Implement – Follow your plan as closely as possible.
3. Measure – Create processes and procedures for data collection, and analysis.

Being successful in business both offline, and online often comes down to how effectively the operations end of your business machine functions. All the planning in the world won’t save someone who can’t or won’t follow through on things. And anyone who doesn’t evaluate their success, or lack thereof, and adapt is a fool.

So following the three step process, we identify an area of opportunity, and then determine how to exploit it. We then take the actions in our plan, setting benchmarks for evaluation along the way. Then we measure anything, and everything that contributes to “success.”

You may note that I put success in quotes above, and that’s because it’s kind of a moving target in this field. Because there can be so many specific steps involved in our money making systems, we can define success in a lot of different ways. Each individual task along the way can have its own “success.”

For example, maybe it’s getting 15 high quality articles outsourced, or it’s building 300 backlinks to our money site, or it’s pinging everything. No matter what it is, we can only achieve the result by taking action. We need to adjust course if we are not achieving the benchmarks we set to measure our success, but each time that we accomplish one of our goals we strengthen the core development of our system. And we build a small pattern of success to build from.

So no matter what you’re currently doing online, be sure to evaluate your current operations practices, and make sure you’ve given a broader look at your money machines. Whatever niches you’re into, you will have your greatest success with a well laid plan you execute well that incorporates various feedback/evaluation mechanisms.

Enjoy and profit.

Eh this one could be a little tricky. You see I really believe that a lot of the products available for purchase on Clickbank are re-hashes, or worse. In some cases, the ideas and information presented may even be totally irrelevant. However, if you’re going to sell your own, or affiliate products in the IM niche – you are most likely going to deal with Clickbank.

Not only that, but on your quest to learn everything you can about IM, you are going to learn that the traffic streams you can stuff into Clickbank funnels are some of the most profitable anywhere online. The reason I tread lightly about discussing it though is really two fold:

1. A lot of the information products are rehashed, so there can be a perception sometimes that CB vendors are scammers.
2. The Clickbank Domination mantra may be overly misleading.

Everybody and their grandmother has a product available claiming it’s the magic pill to total Clickbank Domination. Even with all the disclaimers contained in books, and other materials, the whole SALES channel is massively promotional given that MANY suggested “domination” tactics are extrapolations of standard industry practices.

Let’s compare it to bricklaying for example. When is the last time you read sales copy for a course about Bricklaying that said, “Who Else Wants To Lay Brick Twice As Fast With Half As Much Work 8 Days A Week?” I don’t think that would work in the bricklaying niche. Of course, I have not researched it very far. The thing about the IM crowd is we are so hungry with our dreams of making it to the big time that we want – no, we NEED that pill.

Wahoo – time to wake up, and smell the coffee burning folks. There is no magic pill for Clickbank Domination, or any other kind of domination. However, with hard work, a little ingenuity, and determination, there can be steady progress. That’s why I try to only promote products that I genuinely believe will benefit my viewership.

In the end though, and no matter what method of approach you use to promote clickbank products, domination will surely only follow a concerted, and well thought out, and implemented plan. Some people call that work.

Technorati Tags: 30, 30 Days Of Content, clickbank, Clickbank domination, content, days, funnels, internet, Internet Marketing, marketing, sales, traffic streams

As we approach the conclusion of the 30 days of content series, I wanted to write a little about one of the fundmost important parts of any successful online marketing campaigns – keyword research.

When you are looking to sell products in the real world, you have to know where people go to buy these types of products. In the real world the old adage says that location is everything. You have to put your shop in the neighborhood that your prospects and customers hang out in.

It’s pretty much the same thing online, only finding out where your traffic hangs out is done quite a bit differently. What we’d like to do in internet marketing is determine not so much where our traffic hangs out, but actually how they get there. What are the search queries that most closely match our product.

It sounds pretty easy, but we also need to think objectively about our own SEO skills because being able to compete in any given market comes down to analyzing the competitors, and figuring out how to use the right combination of on-page, and off-page optimization strategies to beat them. That’s a story for another day though.

The Keyword Research we conduct for internet marketing is primarilly designed to answer two things:

1. What search words and phrases do people use to find products?
2. How strong is the competition, and can we compete or “rank.”

The first question obviously helps us determine the words we should target when trying to sell any given product. That’s certainly useful, but it’s only half the equation for effective keyword research. For example, if I was trying to sell “pool tables,” an analysis would reveal that there is significant monthly volume searching for these words, and this product, but – there are also over 2 million competitors when searching for the term in phrase match.

That market isn’t penetrable for me because  I don’t have the resources to build enough quality backlinks over time to get on page one of Google’s results. If we only looked at demand(monthly searches), it would look like a great market to enter. That’s why it’s so important to know the strategies you use for SEO, and how effective and scalable they are – you simply can’t get into some markets unless you strongly understand your own strengths and weaknesses.

There are plenty of solid niches, and possibly even some micro-niches laying in the depths of further keyword analysis for “pool tables.” A lot of people will probably wonder why I didn’t focus this posting more along the lines of a guide with concrete numerical examples, but the problem with that remains that it excludes consideration to people’s skillsets.

You’re going to have to learn on your own what levels of supply(competing sites) and demand(searches) allow you to compete effectively. In my personal experience, a good baseline was 1000 searches per month or more vs. less than 10,000 competing results in Google’s broad match. Those figures can be hard to find these days with so much data mining going on out there, so you might need to dig for quite a while, or try to compete in the larger markets.

Parting tips:

• Get Market Samurai
• Visit SEObook.com

Technorati Tags: 30, 30 Days Of Content, content, days, IM, Internet Marketing, keyword, keyword research, research

Some of you have noticed that the 30 days of IM content posts all fall under the sub-category “Experiments.” So what is this experiment all about anyway? You may also have noted a previous entry was titled, “You Have To Sell Something,” and yet I’m not doing so, so how does it all add up to an internet marketing experiment?

Well you may have guessed it’s really all about traffic. My hope in the 30 days of content series was, and remains simply to demonstrate that consistent effort and attention to your blog brings significantly higher traffic. And while I mainly chosen to offer an opt-in opportunity to my viewership, I certainly could have chosen to monetize it differently.

So let’s set the scene a little with some data:

Here is a screenshot of my traffic for the first 5 months of 2010. I’ve blocked out the traffic for june, so you can compare it in the next image.

imgroundzero.com Traffic Jan – May

For comparison here is the same graphic with June included. I believe it pretty clearly makes the case for the fact that when you are blogging you need to give your blog some love, and regular posting to really attract a steady traffic stream.

What A Difference - Active posting attracts so much more traffic.

When you look at the number of visitors for the year up through May, you can see it totals 1124, yet in June alone I’ve had over 2300 visitors. That’s two times what I had coming into the month. Well, so here’s the other thing.

I wasn’t overly promotional in bringing attention to the blog – honestly that’s because I wasn’t selling anything – and I wanted the traffic stream to be basically almost entirely organic. Apart from the occassional bookmarking run with onlywire, and a few tweets, this traffic is all organic highly targetted traffic.

So we’re in the home stretch of the 30 days of internet marketing content experiment now, and I hope you’v enjoyed the material thus far, and learned a bit. Tomorrow we’ll be going back to the basics so to speak as we explore keyword research in a little more depth.

Technorati Tags: 30, 30 days of IM content, content, days, experiment, internet, Internet Marketing, marketing