Category Archives: Internet Marketing

Monday Question: What’s A Good Niche To Get Into?

Starting this week, I’m kicking off a series of answers to readers questions which will appear every Monday (hence…the “Monday Question”).

Here’s this weeks question: “I’m a new Internet Marketer, which Internet Marketing product do you suggest I start promoting as an affiliate”

My answer: You should pick the area in which you have the greatest affinity.

Note that the most successful Internet Marketers will brand themself in a specific manner, with one identity, for example, you might have:

  • Joel “AdSense” Comm
  • Mike “Viral Marketing” Filsaime
  • Chris “Super Affiliate” McNeeley
  • John Carlton “The Marketing Rebel”
  • Michel Fortin “The Copywriting Doctor”
  • Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse
  • Gary Ambrose “Viral Listbuilder”

You hardly come across someone who brands themself as a adsense/PPC/eBay/super affiliate/seo/product creator for a reason. You lose credibility because most will not believe you can master so many specializations just a couple of months into the industry.

You might have a few Continue reading

Business Lessons From Hong Kong Disneyland

Fresh from our trip to Hong Kong, my family had a great time in Hong Kong Disneyland (especially my daughter Bianca). Internet marketers can take a few lessons out of Disney’s book in their online business.

The Art of the Pre-Sell: Stepping into the MTR (mass transit rapid) subway station at the Sunny Bay station, we got onto the train bound for Hong Kong Disneyland. The folks at Disney have decked the train out with small bronze statuettes of iconic Disney characters, and the regular plastic seats in the cabins have been replaced by plush velvet cushioned-seats.

As you step out of the station, the PA (public address) system starts playing tunes from various Disney cartoons like Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs, and other cartoons.

Internet Marketing application: In your site design, strive to create an emotional experience for the visitor. Music can be highly evocative, as can be appropriate images. Since royalty-free music and low cost photo stock can be purchased inexpensively, there’s no reason why these tools shouldn’t be used.

Disclaimer: I hate “branding” type commercials and ads just as much as the next Internet Marketer. You should consider how music and image elements can be used in a “direct response” context, rather than in a pure corporate branding context.

hong kong disneyland golden mickeys

A Multi-sensory Experience: The theme park featured a number of live performances, and with the added zing provided by technology, featured 3D effects, smoke, confetti, fireworks and other pyrotechnics. These effects served to heighten the emotional experience and create memories that you can see, hear and feel (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) for months and perhaps years to come.

The best part is Continue reading

My Hong Kong Trip And Your Internet Marketing Business Audit

I’m prepping to head over to Hong Kong to join the wife and family and take a couple days off with the family. I remember when I was actively trading in stocks, I was like a crack addict, constantly checking the value of my portfolio, hitting the refresh button every 15 seconds to bring up updated prices, or waking up at 3am to check how mid-afternoon trading was going on the Singapore stock exchange. Sure I made a couple of thousand dollars during my vacation, but on hindsight, it sure lowered the quality of the vacation (or quasi-work trip/vacation).

But hand on a second. If you’re constantly checking in on your business, you’re missing the one element that separates a business owner, from a sole proprietor: freedom of time.

If you’re constantly tethered to the office via your cell phone, crackberry or laptop, you don’t have much more freedom than the investment banker or management consultant camping in their office.

The only difference is that you’re probably sitting in front of your computer in your boxers, or catching the occasional movie at 3 in the afternoon.

What you need to have a successful business is its ability to operate without you.

If you’re newer at this, the business can probably Continue reading

A Tale Of 3 Young Malaysian Internet Marketers

Three young Malaysian Internet Marketers are raising funds for air travel and accomodation to the US to attend an Internet Marketing seminar, to achieve this aim, they’ve put together an Internet Marketing product firesale.

vince tan melvin ng gobala

(Left to Right: Vince Tan, Gobala, Melvin Ng)

Dubbed the “7 Day Super Firesale”, Malaysia-based Internet Marketers, Vince Tan, Melvin Ng and Gobala Krishnan have put together 100 products on topics ranging from product launches, blogging, traffic generation, product creation and product marketing.

If you’re a new Internet Marketer, you will find a number of these products can be very useful in helping you better understand some of the fundamentals of Internet Marketing. Granted, you can probably get most of this information from high authority blogs, forums, Wikipedia, Ask.com and Yahoo! Answers, but I think the value you’ll get is from having the information aggregated at one central location.

If you’ve been doing Internet Marketing for at least a year, and are generating a comfortable income from your efforts, you might Continue reading

$0.41 Backlinks To Build A High Authority Site? And Internet Marketing Innovation

Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue has an innovative strategy to get one of his sites ranked within the top results on Google for the highly competitive term “Bingo” and affiliate marketers can take a lesson or two or three from Keiron’s case study.

In “Easy method of gaining quality backlinks and building a database of users” Keiron has bypassed the traditional strategy of asking webmasters for backlinks or a link exchange, in favor of a premium giveaway.

bingo pen offer

The pens costing 20 pence (or about $0.41) each are a viral and guerilla method to gain a backlink.

He’s also engaged in using press releases to distribute his message/content and some viral marketing on forums has occured.

As the marketing is done partially offline (through the delivery of the pens), you’ll get the link love from a backlink, compared to a 2-way link.

At this point, some readers might be thinking “why didn’t I think of that?”

A key reason is many Internet Marketers are overly focused on:

  1. Technology: Trying to signup for some automated bookmarking/viral software that’s just been released.
  2. Following the advice of a guru who’s had a successful campaign (Note: once something has been done successfully once, it’s difficult to repeat it verbatim with the same level of success. Those familiar with Economics will know it as the law of diminishing utility).

Likewise, “value creation” is a buzzword in corporate circles, but to get more out of it requires people to do more than sit in a circle on Friday afternoons, chomping on doughnuts, sipping cappucinos, talking about improving work processes, but never doing anything about it.

I used to conduct entrepreneurship training focused on business building skills in the Singapore schools. It was particularly frustrating to sit in on meetings where it’d take 2 weeks to figure out who’d be a project manager and who’d form the team.

Then they’d be offer to conduct “research” for a couple of weeks and finally decided that there were too many obstacles, so they needed to find some other project (or niche in Internet Marketing speak).

They’d then bang into some other challenges in the midst of their “research” and give that up too.

Which kind of reminds me of what many new Internet Marketers do.

They start out with AdSense publishing, then maybe make a switch to eBay auctions. Then they decide it doesn’t work, and before you know it, they’d made a full circle of adsense publishing, affiliate marketing, product creation, online auctions, PPC arbitrage, CPA marketing, and somehow come to the conclusion that “nothing works”.

Is it due to the “Honeymoon effect“?

Maybe.

And it feels like old ground is being covered, like Continue reading

The Affiliate Marketing/SEO/SEM Link Carnival

Social Marketer Michelle MacPhearson probably best known for the Badder Adder MySpace friend adder has tagged me in this link carousel which originated from Alex from howtospoter.com.

— copy and paste the Reciprocal Review Carousel and instructions below this line —

Reciprocal Review Carousel idea is based on a few simple yet effective link-building and blogging techniques I have learned:

  • Build value of the blog by creating a helpful link from within content.
  • Provide value to community by doing a review on a blog you personally like.
  • Link to YOUR blog has exact anchor text you want and helps you boost Google Rankings.
  • No more than 30 outbound links from any page to prevent penalties for link farming.
  • Viral effect of the link – as more bloggers participate, link to your blog with YOUR anchor text, coming from quality content post will spread.

Here is How to participate:

  • Copy the entire text between the specified lines.
  • Create a post on your site and put at least one paragraph explaining how you joined the Reciprocal Review Carousel.
  • Paste the text you copied into your post.
  • Remove the Bottom Review and At the Top add your own review with a link to a site reviewed, at least 2 sentences about the site and a note – Reviewed by: Your Anchor Text. Link your anchor text to your site. Here is an example:

WordPress Web 2.0 Guide is a blog providing very useful information on building your very own Web 2.0 portal based on WordPress. Detailed instructions and howto guides make it possible for anyone to create a sparkling and engaging blog and join the community of like-minded individuals. Reviewed by: WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-er

Sites Reviewed:

  • Carsten Cumbrowski has one of the more exotic backgrounds among Internet Marketers, having moved to California from Berlin, Germany. Having a solid background in SAP ERP software, Carsten is one of the heavyweights in the CPA Marketing/Search Engine Optimization industry, as a blogger over at Revenews.com and is an editor at the SearchEngineJournal. His personal blog, Cumbrowski.com, comprehensively covers Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, SEM/PPC and Web Development. Carsten also maintains a comprehensive list of podcasts and has promised to add my “Friday Podcast” to his listing (once I figure out how to syndicate my content effectively). Carsten is also headed for Affiliate Summit East in Miami and I’m sure he’ll propagate this carnival once he gets a chance.
  • Andrew Wee writes and podcasts about affiliate marketing at WhoIsAndrewWee.com. He’s an absolute pro at keeping up with tech trends (and how to make moolah from them) as well as getting noticed FAST in the marketing/blogging world . He’s one to watch and follow by example. Reviewed by: Michelle MacPhearson, who likes teaching knuckleheads about Social Marketing Online.
  • Peter Lenkefi writes about Web 2.0 marketing strategies at Web2Center.com. He has some killer videos over there you should check out along with a ton of good information on blog marketing and various “new media” promotion tactics. Reviewed by: Link Building Maniac, Jack Humphrey, for the Friday Traffic Report
  • Andy-Coates.com is an original creator of Viralink concept and a blog publishing information on Magic, Personal development and blog development. I have found a wealth of information on getting your blog noticed and generating the traffic for free. Reviewed by: WordPress Web 2.0 Guide
  • FitForFreedom is well-established blog where you can find multitude of information on achieving financial freedom. Blog is run by Marco Righter and his writing style greatly adds to the value of information he provides. Reviewed by: Alex
  • Secure Your PC For Internet blog run by Colin and provides essential information everyone accessing internet should know. Identity theft is becoming more and more of an issue and by visiting his blog you can minimize the risk of being compromised. Reviewed by: Alex
  • VI-SU blog is all about WordPress, AdSense, SEO and Internet Marketing. Although mostly written in German I have found that using Continue reading