Internet Marketing Quiddity

What's the most important issue with running an Internet Marketing Business? Some would say have a great product and an irresistible offer, because with nothing to sell, no-one's going to buy! Others would say Traffic Generation, because without traffic, no-one sees your offer. Others would say its Traffic Conversion, because all the traffic in the world is useless if no-one is taking any action. Getting more sophisticated, you might say it's getting sufficient Income Per Visitor (i.e. the total amount you earn, on average, for every visitor to your site - taking account the lifetime income you get from each customer). And so on. But, of course, ALL of those issues are important. You obviously need something to sell (somewhere along the line), and you won't have a viable business unless you have traffic, and that traffic has to convert well, and your income per visitor is sufficient for you to be able to spend enough on generating MORE traffic so your business grows. So what's the problem for Internet Marketers? The formula is pretty straightforward, isn't it? Perhaps it's a shortage of advice? Perhaps people don't know how to generate traffic or convert it or create a product (or find an affiliate product)? But I don't think that is the case. I suspect if you could search on the hard drive of any internet marketer who's been in the business for a few months, you'd find eBooks and videos and audios and links to membership sites that are full of advice about all those topics. So on that basis, I would suggest that none of those issues is the a critical issue. I would say that the two most critical issues for Internet Marketers are:

• Being Organized

and

• Staying Focused

Staying focused means having a plan or an agenda and sticking to it: not being distracted. Being organized means having processes and organizational systems (such a folder structures) so you know where to store all your information and records, and where to find them again rapidly. I believe these are such important points that I created a seminar for Internet Marketers on just these two issue. It's on Monday 1st September, at 7.00 pm Easter - and it's free! (Find the time in your time-zone)

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Technorati Tags: internet marketing focus, internet marketing organization, internet marketing planning, internet marketing strategy, traffic generation

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

*** File under "Business Strategy" in your IM Index Mind Map - click for details. Internet marketing blueprints. The much searched-for golden egg of making money on the Internet. We are all searching for that one effective, sure-fire, guaranteed step-by-step guide to riches. Preferably, it should be "secret" and "never-before-revealed". We are all ready to make the sacrifices of time and effort. And we are even ready to learn a few skills (HTML, how to use FTP, CPanel etc.) All we need is someone to give us the exact steps. The formula. "Just gimmi the goddam blueprint!" Here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson has to say about this:

"As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."

An Internet Marketing blueprint is, in essence, a "method". So we could paraphrase and get:

"As to Internet Marketing blueprints there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully create his own Internet Marketing blueprints. The man who tries Internet Marketing blueprints, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."

I couldn't agree more. Time and again, I read sales material about some way to make money on the Internet, and a key "benefit" of the product is that it is 100% Practical - No Theory! In Emerson's terms, that means "100% Method - no Principles". And in Emerson's view - and mine - that is a recipe for failure. And people love that idea because it means (they assume) that they don't have to think! They don't mind working hard and perhaps learning a few skills, but thinking? - no thanks! Here's a specific example from my own experience. I recently signed up to follow a blueprint about Social Marketing. It is probably one of the best and most comprehensive step-by-step guides to building traffic using social networks and blogging. But I have to say .... "phew"! To be fair, the people who put it together make it clear that it's hard work, and they don't pretend there's no thinking involved. But the amount of detail is massive. To follow it through requires a huge amount of dedication (which they make clear from the outset). And few people actually manage it all. I quickly realized that I was never going to be able to follow all the steps, and for a lot of the time, I had no idea why many of the steps were there, nor what many of the terms meant. So I stopped following the steps and decided to try and extract the Principles. What I've ended up with is a Mind Map containing the concepts, the principles and the resources organized in a convenient form. And now, I can develop my own blueprint - my own step-by-step guide - that fits in with my own needs and time availability. The guys who put this system together are honest, respected people who know their field inside out and back to front, and they've put a huge amount of effort into making their system easily accessible and easy to use. But it could be so much better. They are no different from 99% of other people providing guidance in the Internet Marketing world (and many other worlds as well). Knowing a subject well is not a qualification for being able to organize and structure it so that others can learn it. The way people learn, the mix of theory and practice, the different types of expertise, and how they are acquired and developed, the forms of practical support needed for different types of task and different stages of learning - these are all deep and complex issues that are not considered by people creating learning and guidance systems. These are - dare I say it - knowledge management issues!

Technorati Tags: emerson, ForFB, internet marketing blueprints, internet marketing strategy, making money on the internet, ralph waldo emerson

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

 

*** File under "Traffic Analysis" in your IM Index Mind Map - click for details.

If you've developed your internet marketing business far enough to create a website, one of your daily routines has to be to analyze your website traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of an internet marketing business. Without knowing how much traffic you are getting, and where it is coming from, you're dead in the water.

The first step is to decide what tools you are going to use for analyzing your website traffic. And then you need to set up a regular routine for checking and analyzing that traffic.

Tools for analyzing website traffic

Cpanel - Awstats

The simplest tool of all is the Awstats facility that comes with your cPanel website hosting administration interface. If you search around on your cPanel page, you will most probably find either a direct link to Awstats, or something like "Web / Ftp Statistic" - which should itself lead you to Awstats. Click that and investigate the facilities available. You'll find things such as:

• How many hits, how many visits and and how many unique visitors your site received (per day, per month)
• What hours in the day were most popular
• IP addresses of visitors
• What Spiders and Bots visited you
• The lengths of time people stayed on your site
• What pages they visited
• Which sites they came from
• Which keywords were used if visitors came from a search engine
• ... and a great deal more

Google Analytics

This is another free tool - but it is much more comprehensive than Awstats - and you need to put some effort into setting it up.

Firstly, you'll need a Google Adwords account. Google created this tool primarily to help their Adwords users test their Adwords campaigns better, but you can use the tool freely without ever setting up an Adwords campaign.

With Google Analytics you can do everything that you can do with Awstats, and a great deal more - including setting "goals" for your site, and have Google Analytics measure the success of those goals under different circumstances, such as for different traffic sources.

To set up Google Analytics you also need to add some code to every page that you want Google to monitor. This can marginally slow down the loading of your pages, but is a very small price to pay for the huge amount of information you get. If this were a commercial tool being sold to the general public, I would expect to pay several hundred dollars for it.

But it's free from Google - no strings attached!

Click Tracking Tools

The third option is to install a click tracking tool, or subscribe to a commercial service. These tools provide a lot of functionality that you cannot get from tools such as Awstats or Google Analytics. This functionality includes:

• Link cloaking. This allows you to create URLs that you make public, but when the user clicks on the link, they get taken to a different URL. The most common use for this is when you are promoting an affiliate product. Instead of promoting a long and complex URL that you are given from your product vendor, you can use a short URL based on your domain name. For example, the click tracking tool I use is GoTryThis.  If you hover over that link, you'll see a nice, friendly, URL linked to to my IM-Index.com domain, instead of this long a ugly ULR that I would have had to use:
  https: //members.gotrythis.com/aff.php?aff=242
• Also, with link cloaking, you can change the URL that your link points to if you need to. For example, if the affiliate product you were promoting went off the market, you could easily substitute a different one just by change the destination URL. The fact that your cloaked link was widely publicised all over your sites, in your newsletter, on bookmarking sites etc. would not matter at all.
• You can arrange to alternate between different destination URLs: this can be very useful when testing different products or different pages within your site.

Regular Routine

Setting up your testing tools is not enough.

You need to make use of the data that the tools gather for you, and use that data to adjust your business operation in some way. Otherwise, all your time would have been wasted. But that's not quite as easy as it appears. Of all the information you get, what is important? And how do you know how to respond to it?

The answer is - you have to start with some planning and some goals. That topic is far too big to include in this article, but you should be able to see that it makes sense.

For example, if you want to make 2 sales per day, what does that mean in terms of visitors to your site, and conversion rate of visitors? If you're not making those sales, what is happening? Which traffic sources aren't giving you the traffic you want? Which are converting the best? How are your visitors behaving when they reach your site?

Decide what needs to happen for you to reach your goals, use the tools for analyzing website traffic to check what is happening, make some changes, and then use those tools again to check what changes as a result.

Based on your goals and what you need to check to see whether you are achieving them, write down your daily routine or checking your website traffic. That will ensure your time spent analyzing website traffic is used most effeciently and effectively.

Technorati Tags: ad tracking, analyzing website traffic, awstats, click tracking, ForFB, Go Try This, google analytics, Traffic Analysis, website traffic analysis

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I'm going to ask a big favour of you.

Please, for my sake: do NOT create your own internet marketing strategy and absolutely NEVER get as far as having anything that even resembles an internet marketing business plan.

You see, once you have a strategy and plan in place, I'm going to find it three or four times as hard to sell you anything. The affiliate promotions I try and peddle to you are going to be very ineffective because you're going to know exactly what it is you want and need at this particular point in your business. And if what I send you doesn't meet that need - you'll simply ignore it.

And that means I make less money, and you keep more of yours.

So let me repeat: don't create an internet marketing strategy or plan. Stay confused and undecided. Make it easy for me to persuade you to change your mind about what you were about to do.

Basically, hop, skip and jump to my agenda. Don't bother with your own.

-----

Just in case there's someone out there who's not getting this (and there's usually at least one!): I'm being ironic.

You MUST at all costs have a strategy and plan in place, otherwise you'll never get anywhere with your business. (And if you really are concerned that I won't be making enough money after giving you this excellent advice for free - I thank you sincerely for your consideration and suggest you simply donate to my Paypal account!)

In the internet marketing world we are constantly being bombarded with promotions and offers: it's just the internet marketers doing their job in the internet marketing niche.

No problem.

Except that those of us trying to build our businesses are subjected to the most intense and professional barrage of promotions anywhere on the planet! And that can be a BIG and EXPENSIVE distraction.

To help you, just keep this simple idea in mind:

The promoters try their hardest to get you into their agenda: they provide free eBooks, email courses, videos; they get you thinking their way; they prove that their way works.. you get sucked in to THEIR agenda.

Watch out for this. Spot it early.

And then re-establish YOUR agenda and commit to following THAT instead.

Don't be suckered in!

To read more about this, see my Laser-Focus Shield.

Alex

Technorati Tags: internet marketing planning, internet marketing promotions, internet marketing strategy

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

One of the top pay-per-click experts, Perry Marshall, has nothing but praise for Google and how they have made their free keyword research tool even better.

"Google now has one of the coolest features they've put in AdWords in a long time.  They now report search volume for keywords."

At the same time, Perry lays into Yahoo and how they handled Overture and their current PPC system:

"Any business plan so utterly STUPID as to abandon one of the best loved keyword research tools on the entire Internet....  and build such a royally bureaucratic PPC system as Yahoo has... ...Deserves to have their ass kicked by Carl Icahn, shareholder mutiny, hostile takeover by Microsoft, or whatever other grim fate befalls them."

Come on Perry! Don't sit on the fence. Tell us what you REALLY think!!

If you've not looked at Google's keyword research tool recently, look at these screen-shots of Google's keyword search volume feature that Perry put together.

Technorati Tags: adwords, Google, ketword research tools, Keyword Research, keyword search volume, pay-per-click, Perry Marshall, PPC

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!