Content: Identifying key issues, especially challenges and problems within your industry and offering a solution to those questions builds your reputation as a problem solver. Experts are those with expertise at solving problems.

It also builds goodwill and encourage reciprocity and a “pay it forward” mentality from those who have benefitted from your advice (which leads to a viral/linkbait effect if they distribute/syndicate your content).

Content was one of the major issues that I discussed with veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of Revenue magazine, Lisa Picarille, for this week’s Friday Podcast. It’ll appear on Friday.

One of the easiest ways to brand yourself is by starting a blog and start putting out quality content.

One major issue I have with bloggers, especially affiliate marketing/internet marketing bloggers is a tendency to excessively sell ad-space or run banners on their blog. If more than half the screen real-estate is dedicated to ads/banners, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Are you more interested in making money, or providing information.

Looking at your signal-to-noise ratio (content vs ads) and maintaining a 80% content : 20% ad ratio will create a great user experience. Going beyond a 50% content vs 50% ad ratio is pushing the limits.

Guest author and guest post: If you’ve established a reputation and are seen as credible, take the next step to approach the top 10 channels/outlets in your niche and offer to guest author on their site – whether it’s a news site, a content aggregator or a blog.

If you are known and the site publishes guest posts, you stand a good chance. If not, it’s back to step #1.

In the affiliate marketing context, specialist magazines like FeedFront which comprises an online and print edition can provide great visibility.

Public speaking: Speaking at industry-specific events and related events are a good way of getting your name out there. It’ll also help put you in touch with potential partners.

I know some marketers are reluctant to go this route because of a fear of public speaking. If so, start small as many of these events have small group discussions or breakout sessions. If addressing a couple of hundred people sends your heart rate pounding, you might volunteer to be a discussion leader for a small group session.

Networking (and following up): Whether you’re meeting people online, or at a face-to-face event, you’ll build up a network of contacts. The challenge that holds people back from more effectively leveraging on their connections is a failure to follow up. When was the last time you got an email or card within 24 hours of meeting someone?

If there’s a contact that could help you build your business, be sure to stay in touch, ping them when you have something relevant to discuss and the relationship will naturally develop.

Author a book: This may sound difficult, but if you’ve ever had a 2 or 3 hour conversation about a particular topic, that content you shared would easily fill a 200 – 250 page book.

On the average, speaking and consulting fees increase between 50-100% after you’ve had a book published (physical books, not e-books). So it might be worth the time and effort.

Build a community: Finding like-minded individuals and organizing them into a community is a good way to network, share expertise and work on joint projects together.

Finding someone to step up and set up a social network or forum is the major challenge because everyone is “always” busy. Instead of waiting for someone to take the first step, why not step up to the plate?

Integrity: This is the big one in my opinon. Do what you say. If you say you’ll do something, even if it’s as simple as sending out a list of bookmarks, you should do it. With the anonymity and virtual distance created by the internet, it’s easy to make a lot of promises and not keep any of them.

Instead, stand apart from the pack and followthrough.

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For tips on building your online business, check out the InternetMarketingCookbook. For blogging tips, visit Secret Blog Weapon.

Enter the “Related Blogs” plugin, an otherwise somewhat useful plugin that works like a “Related Blog Posts” plugin, except that it will point outside the blog to other blogs in the blogosphere, attempting to fire off a trackback in the other blog’s comments section in the process.

While writing a content-filled post and looking for related blogs using relevant keywords/keyphrases can provide value to the reader and help create an inter-blog conversation, merely throwing in high traffic keywords into the plugin and accompanying that with little or no blog content does not create any value for your readers.

Take a look at these examples:

The example above shows the classical layout of a MFA (made-for-adsense) blog with a Google adsense block, followed by content below. In this case “content” was generated by doing a keyword search for related blogs containing the keywords “affiliate id”, “special thanks” and “CBS affiliate” among others.

In another example:

Attempting to cast the net far wider, this splogger decided to republish content containing the phrase “home business”, “finance”, “education” among others.

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While these methods of “blogging” might get you the odd click and you might think that the claim of making $0.10 a day from 10,000 automated blogs is the path to internet riches, you’d probably be the fool laying his hopes on a pipe dream.

Instead, you’re better off building a blogging business that is based on a solid foundation, can provide consistent and sustainable income.

Some of the ways to achieve this are:

• Ensure that your niche/topic is something that has appeal to internet users: – use tools like Google News, Google Trends, Google Insights – your interest in Imperial Stormtrooper battlesuits, movie props or World War II medals might have a great audience out there.
• Be willing to become an expert in your niche: This might involve shuffling over to the bookstore or library and finding books relevant to your topic and becoming an expert/authority. If you don’t know your subject matter, how’re you going to write about it?
• Find or create a way to monetize your niche: Everything’s a hobby until you find a way to generate income from it – unless you live near a couple of really great soup kitchens. If you can’t generate sufficient income from advertising or affiliate marketing, consider producing your own books, courses, products to serve that niche. In the automative industry, you could find workshops willing to do small scale production runs of your products if you have a ready audience.

For more tips on building a blogging business, you can also check out Secret Blog Weapon.

Choice of niche:

Obviously an important choice which will affect your daily/weekly routine for at least the next couple of months. It’s never a good idea to go into a vertical/industry solely by the perceived high payouts or bonuses you’re being offered.

Choosing a niche based on your affinity and interest seems to work for me, and I don’t feel that passing up on a number of “lucrative” niches has hurt me.

Working the Grind

Any vertical will have a period of “grinding” or what gamers refer to a period where you have to go through some repetitive, potentially painful effort. Any site will require more than its share of TLC, especially in its early stages. If you’ve outsourced help or an employee to take care of this mundane stuff, it helps, else it’s about 5-10 hours of setup and optimization if you choose to do it yourself.

With that, here’re an accelerated blueprint to get your niche site up.

Competitive Analysis:

Key in some general keywords/keyphrases specific to your niche, take a look at competitors and affiliates through the search engine results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other tier-2 search engines. Also take a look at results from Ask.com, Wikipedia, YouTube, Squidoo, Hubpages to get a comprehensive view of the landscape.

Use tools like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast to assess these sites and their site authority.

Keyword Research:

While keyword spy tools are all the rage, it’s a little too tempting (and could be a potential downfall) to believe that SpyFu, Keyword Spy and other tools will “do all the work” for you.

Instead, going to a back-to-basics approach with free tools like Google Trends, the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, Microsoft AdLab, will give you insights not just into the keywords, but the searchers intent.

Do realize that search volume does not always correlate to buying intent. Someone searching for “Rhianna gossip” may not be as keen on “Rhianna ringtones” and making that mistake can be costly.

Site Setup and Optimization:

WordPress still continues to be my CMS (content management system) / website builder of choice. HTML editors require too much effort to build stuff, and other CMSes require too much time to configure and aren’t as search engine-visible.

The current trend as I’ve seen is moving away from flashy, resource-heavy sites and moving towards functional websites with easy navigation and ease-of-use.

Go for a simple 2- or 3-column blog template and if you can stump up the budget, Thesis is a good option. (read my product review)

Creating and publishing content on a regular schedule helps, especially if it’s geared towards human readers, rather than merely keyword-rich content.

Take note that you will need to work through the grind, even if you’re using PPC, but eventually it will pay dividends.

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If you’d like to access some blog marketing strategies, you might like to check out my Secret Blog Weapon system.

Take a look at the signs of the impending apocalypse, once proud A-Lister bloggerati have taken a hiatus, stopped blogging, or are pummelled over the twitterstream into irrelevance. Is blogging, once the circa 2006 golden boy of mainstream media, now it’s whipping boy?

More importantly, is anyone going to read more than the 140 character limit imposed by micro blogging platforms like Twitter?

Are we destined to become a SMS/text nation?

Gee… I hope not.

But anecdotal evidence shows that bloggers are updating their Blogger and WordPress blogs left often, meanwhile they’ve racked up hundreds, if not thousands of twitter updates within the space of a few month.

From casual observation, the mantra seems to have shifted from “I’m blogging this” to “I’m tweeting this”.

It’s a valid observation too. If you’re busy talk-tweeting for an hour every day, that’s an hour taken away from think and composing your next blog post.

The paradigm shift might be this: From an isolated position of having to plan and write a blog post in isolation and interacting with readers through the blog comments later, it’s shifted to a model of firing a question into the twittersphere and using a combination of @username and direct message responses to have a real time chat – Twitter is kind of like the bastard child of IRC and forum discussions in my opinion.

So yes, Twitter is here to stay (at least till the inter-continental wifi-enabled telepathic communication becomes ubiquitous).

Where does that leave blogging?

I believe blogs and twitters can and will continue to co-exist. There’s only so much that can be said in 140 characters. The modus operandi involves including a URL together with the short, pithy update. And blogs more than adequate fill that space.

If anything, twitter has replaced email marketing as a traffic channelling mechanism, and blog traffic has been picking up.

Not to mention having made a couple hundred more blog friends through the enabling technology of Twitter.

Believe or not, 140 character tweets will likely sit side-by-side with 400 word blog posts for some time to come.

In the meantime, new bloggers are still purchasing copies of Chris Pearson’s Thesis WordPress template and streaming into my Secret Blog Weapon program.

So all’s well on the blogging front.

Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”

That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).

What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.

I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?

If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?

Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?

Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.

Even if the blogger doesn’t wipe the comment off with a click of the “delete” button, who’s to say that any reader will click on your link, even if the anchor text is “SoCal Beach Bunny”?

Social media is a double-edged sword, you can easily establish yourself as the leader in your space through the power of blogging and participation in community sites and forums.

At the same time, if you are facing a serious credibility challenge, web 2.0 can be equally ruthless in exposing every blemish, scar and imperfection in your “social media” campaign.

Although I don’t fully agree with Jason Calacanis’ arguments that the Internet is being polluted with affiliate spam, I do think of my blog as my virtual home and like to “curate” or censor out the junk that doesn’t add value to the blog reading experience.

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For ideas on building a sucessful blog-based business, check out my Secret Blog Weapon program.

Though it’s a social medium, success in Web 2.0 is ultimately about building a long-term relationship (personal or business) with your readers and your community. And that’s going to pay handsome dividends.

Anything else and you’re just fooling around.

Here’s the episode of Market Leverage TV (3rd Nov 2008):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZTMddmvDk[/youtube]

Dina and I had an extended discussion on internet marketing strategies, including projects I’m working on:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCp123sdvHo[/youtube]

You can check out:

• Market Leverage affiliate network
• My new blog training program: Secret Blog Weapon
• Affiliate Summit West (Las Vegas, Jan 11-13, 2009)

From self-professed “Law of Attraction coaches”, to being able to gain mastery over the secrets of life, it just seems so easy and just a $19.95 shipping and handling charge away.

The essence of the Law of Attraction, though it seems somewhat hokey and new age-ish especially after being given the quasi- or even pseudo-scientific spin by para-scientents (ie: not quite “official” scientists) has its basis in books like Wallace D Wattles “The Science of Getting Rich” and Napolean Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” (although Napolean died poor…).

The major problem I have with the whole “Law of Attraction” movement is its emphasis on “thinking” and somehow attracting wealth, happiness or whatever you want to attract to you.

If it smells a little like the internet wealth programs which promise to make you untold riches while you sleep, or those weight loss programs which help you lose weight while you sleep or watch TV, you’re not too far wrong.

The fact is that success at anything – whether it’s closing a major business deal, building a successful internet business, or forming a relationship with a significant other – all require effort, and learning. There’s no 300 page PDF which will guarantee you success.

If that were so, we’d all be internet millionaires within 30 days of having started, wouldn’t we.

Here’s where I think the Law of Attraction is useful – as a starting point.

If you have a mental picture of where you want to be, who you want to be, what you want to be, you’ve taken the first step in becoming success. This is also where the heavy lifting will beging.

I get emails from aspiring bloggers who write:

“I like your blog, and I want to make a successful living from my blogging. I’ve spend hundreds of dollars buying books on blogging (ebooks and physical books), and I started a blog, but I haven’t been successful yet. Help!”

With some further probing, I find that they’ve been blogging a total of 3 weeks and have a trickle of traffic coming to their blog, and generated a total of $0.27 from Google AdSense after publishing a total of 5 blog posts.

Your actions determine your results.

Though the wishful thinking aspect of the law of attraction can give you a temporary bump in your motivation and maybe even spur you to write a blog post, or two, or three, it’s the ability to continue taking consistent, focused action that will give you results.

It’s one of the reasons why I spend a considerable amount of time developing the blog training system which I launched last month, and for a number of the motivated new and intermediate level internet marketers out there who’re looking for a system to follow and scale up their internet income, the Secret Blog Weapon could hold the “The Secret” to your internet marketing success.

While it may seem impressive to earn $1,000, $5,000 or even $35,000 a month from your blogging efforts, I feel that the raw number can be a crude way of judging the “success” of your blog and will not be as meaningful as using other metrics.

A more significant statistic is to determine your average revenue per unit (ARPU) or income earned per visitor.

For example, if you have 100,000 visitors and your blog earnings are $5,000 and you compare it against a smaller blog with 35,000 visitors and earnings of $4,000. Which is better?

Let’s skip the superficials $5,000 versus $4,000 for the moment and look at ARPU. For the large blog, ARPU is $5,000 divided by 100,000 or 5 cents per visitor, while the smaller blog’s ARPU is 11.4 cents.

The smaller blog is twice as effective at generating income as the large blog and though it trails the large blog in terms of total readership, I’ll go one step further to say that assuming you’re not a casual or hobby blogger and you’re blogging as a business, the end goal should be income generation, rather than the “generating eyeballs/impressions” game that was prevalent in year 2000 with dotcom mania.

If anything, sustainable blogs are going back-to-basics, focusing on a solid business foundation and continuous growth – all supported by a sensible business model and sustainable income generation.

If the pieces are in place, you have the makings of a profitable blog business.

For more blogging strategies and tips, check out Secret Blog Weapon.

Jeremy Palmer sent a twitter update that often discussed “Duplicate content penalty” has been refuted by Google in a recent webmaster central blog post.

So the word from big G! is:

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you weren’t already aware, a wordpress blog creates “duplicate content” just because of the way the pages are structured.

A “domain-name/page-1/” and “domain-name.com/blogging/2008/09/10/todays-post.html” might contain the same content. Unless you’re willing to spend a little time setting “no follow” tags on sections on your blog, you are already publishing duplicate content on the web.

I’m not overly disturbed that I might be “slapped” down by the search engines for this duplicate content and think the time could be better spent on growing my business instead.

Where a blog can stand out is to provide “value” to the content publishing process.

It’s been mentioned before that a genuine review (rather than scraped/republished content from other sites) will generate more sales, because it blends the visitors needs for accurate and useful information, together with your attempt to monetize the site.

Secondly, moving from a purely automated/mechanical approach to SEO and linkbuilding to a social traffic-based approach can yield great dividends for your business.

Blogs, in particular, are a great way for existing businesses to ramp up their marketing efforts and for new marketers to get their foot in the door.

For more resources, check out the Secret Blog Weapon.

In the last 2 years, since I’ve been growing my internet business, two key steps:

1) posting quality content and

2) achieving authority status in the niches I operate

have played a key part of my success.

Successful, long-term blogging goes beyond just harvesting the most popular and/or profitable tools from keyword tools and bashing out keyword-dense content.

It should also encompass planning skills and management skills to be able to publish original, quality content a year, two years or longer down the road.

What most marketers may not realize is that following a step-by-step system can greatly reduce the amount of effort needed to blog prodictively and effectively.

The Secret Blog Weapon coaching program I’m launching today is a result of more than a year’s worth of research into the most relevant topics and techniques new and experienced bloggers need to have at their fingertips, together with a system designed to either kickstart your blogging efforts or bring them to a new level.

What I’ve done my best to achieve has been to:

• Identify critical skills that bloggers need to possess (and develop them if they don’t already have them)
• Organize your blog effort around a proven system to maxmimize your results
• Create a system to build a brand and effectively use this brand to build your business

You can find more details about this comprehensive 6-month program at: SecretBlogWeapon.com

I’ve had experience in construction and I’ll use some building analogies here.

New marketers tend to build like houses (ie businesses) in a pre-fabricated fashion. They tend to use templates that a thousand other website owners are using, tend to use the same cookie cutter techniques that’re mentioned on blogs, forums, ebooks, (even high-end coaching programs), yet their results are below expectations.

What’s happened?

I call this the “DryWall” or “SheetRock” mentality.

When I lived in a rural Ohio, I rented a duplex for $275/month. The house was nothing to write home (literally) about, being a wooden frame with drywall (essentially a higher grade plaster-of-paris that kids use to make ‘clay sculptures’) on the inner and outer wall and with fiberglass stuffed in between as insulation.

In the summer, the heat went right through the walls as if they weren’t there. And in the winter, aside from the biting wind and the snow, we got almost the full effects of the cold Ohio winter.

How’s this relate to internet marketing?

New marketers will build their businesses like a pre-fabricated house – assemble a wooden frame, hammer some drywall together, slap on a quick coat of paint, and start doing business.

Although this might work well for some quick cash, it doesn’t help you in the long haul because the weak foundation is going to hamper your business building efforts.

Instead why not take a look at the experienced marketers?

People who build a house for the long term will take the time to dig trenches in the ground to lay a foundation, cast a concrete slab for the flooring, lay bricks for the walls and erect a roof. This process takes time, especially for the foundation to set and doesn’t yield immediate results.

The difference in your approach to building your business has a impact on your business business lifespan and not just short-term profits, but long-term profits.

A business is built either for ‘quick cash’ (banking on a trend like the Iron Man movie or the Star Wars: Clone Wars movie), while a long term focus is on building an entertainment portal or niche-focused blog.

In the last year, I’ve shifted my focus to building more long-term businesses (although I still have a few “quick cash” niches).

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve spent the last year working on my blogging project: SecretBlogWeapon.

And the major problem is that many new bloggers have a “more is better” mentality.

Their blogs up as a dumping ground for too many unnessary plugins, icons, and “Top Blog site” tags.

You are a “Top Blog” because your readers come back constantly to check the content.

You are a “Top Dog” when other bloggers point at your blog posts as a resource for their readers to check out.

So if you’re guilty of abusing the social WordPress plugin (which allows readers to bookmark your post at popular social bookmarking sites) in the following manner:

or even:

So if you choose it, don’t go hog wild and display 20 services. Plug 3 services, or a maximum of 5 if you have to.

StumbleUpon is good, so’s Digg and Reddit.

There’re even worse things you can do however, and that’s to icon dump to services like blog reader services in the following manner:

OR:

OR:

OR:

If your mission was to annoy your readers with garish icons, it only serves to cheapen the look of your blog.

It’s fine to go overboard for the first month or so, but if you look at your blog statistics, you’ll have a fair idea of the profile of your blog traffic and refine your blog accordingly.

Leaving everything on your blog and not making the necessary adjustments reminds me of my visits to my bank’s cash withdrawl machine. It prompt me to select from the offered languages of “English, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil (an Indian dialect) and Malay” every time I insert my bank card.

You’re think that after withdrawing cash at least 1,000 times in the last 10 years, the machine would’ve learned a thing or two.

So the lesson is to increase the usability and blog design to optimize traffic, and as a result up your monetization efforts.

Leaving your blog in its ‘status quo’ position is easier in the short term, but it’s bound to hurt you in the long run.

If you’re new to blogging and eager to enhance your skills, be sure to check out this tool.

So I thought this would be a good opportunity to review how some of the bloggers have done since launching their blogs.

Here’re 3 bloggers who’re using the system:

• SimCooks.com

California-based Yich’s food and cooking related blog is about 4 months old.

Check out her blog for lots of pretty food pictures and good content too.

In that time, she’s developed quite a following and the search engines like her content too, having raised her blog from a PR0 to PR4 during the recent PageRank update.

SimCooks is Alexa-ranked 299,000, though I’d imagine that her audience profile might not generally install the Alexa toolbar, so her uniques are likely much higher.

• DesignGuruRyan.com

Australia-based designer Ryan Jackson has also been using SBW for about 4 months (SBW had a closed door launch in May 2006). He focuses on web design.

Besides myself, Ryan counts Tiffany Dow, who’s worked with several of Internet Marketing’s top guns and Traffic Generation specialist and Warrior Forum regular Ross Goldberg among his clients.

Ryan’s rated at PR3, Alexa 151,000.

• RisingIMStar.com

Singapore-based “Tofu Lover” (yes, a weird way to brand yourself) is a new Internet Marketer and focuses on blogging, SEO and traffic generation.

His blog has gone from PR0 to PR3 in the last update and the domain is about 4 months old too. He’s Alexa-ranked 149,000.

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• How effective is SecretBlogWeapon?

What’s useful about SBW is because it’s a foundational product, it will ground you in the basics of setting up a themed blog, having a plan in place to optimize your keywords and WordPress installation. You also get basic traffic generation tools and plugins.

SBW isn’t intended to cover the flashy technologies which in my opinion just detract from the reader’s interests (and you can already read my blog for newer developments in the blogosphere).

But where its goal is to ground someone who’s been mucking with a blog without much effect, or not got the results they were expecting, SBW delivers the goods.

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Back to Joe’s comment “I was just curious if you know people in america who have had success with this because foriegn search is different then american seo.”

SBW is a foundational product, so whether you’re in the US, Europe, Asia or Africa, it’s equally effective.

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On another note, I don’t think there’s a major difference between “foreign search” and “american seo”, except for the contextual ads will be geotracked and appropriately served.

Having said that, although I’m Asia-based, have a look at my traffic geo snapshot:

As you can see, the US is responsible for the majority of traffic (roughly about 60%), with Singapore responsible for another 30%. Aside from the other Asian country Malaysia, the top countries include Australia, Canada, the UK, France, and the Netherlands. Hence, outside of the US and Singapore, the geographical profile is fairly diverse.

Up till mid-Jan 07 (15 days), I’ve had more than 3,300 uniques.

Only 4% of my traffic originates from the search engines. Not because I’m terrible at search engine optimization (Just about all my pages are indexed), but rather, 96% of my visitors come because I’ve been using social traffic generation strategies.

If you’ve arrive here because of a link in blog comment, a forum post, or from a social networking site, my social traffic strategies are working.

It’ll be an area I’ll be looking at in the next couple of months.

But in the meantime, if you’d like to get a leg up in your blogging efforts, check out SecretBlogWeapon.com.

If left unchecked, it could lead to the situation another of my contacts faced.

They quit their regular job to focus on Internet Marketing. Just working on it for long hours every day, sometimes 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But yet their results were underwhelming to say the least. And close to a year into Internet Marketing, their savings are severely depleted.

Let’s look at some of the issues that will stall your plans toward achieving that Million Dollar Day (that’s where Internet Marketers strive towards earning $1 million in a single day, a la John “Traffic Secrets” Reese, Jeff “Product Launch Formula” Walker and others.

• Treating Internet Marketing as “Autopilot” or “Passive” Income:

Here’s the best analogy I can think of. When you’re starting a barbeque (using coal or charcoal), you’d typically need to work hard as heck in the beginning stage, to generate a spark, light up some tinder and start heating up the coals until they reach a critical point.

It’s usually takes sometime before the coal hits the critical point where it spontaneously ignites and continues burning on its own.

Having started a barbeque about 2 days ago, the coals took the better part of half an hour to get started. But once we got them alight and burning, they burned through the night.

Likewise in Internet Marketing, I see newbie Internet Marketers spend maybe 10 hours setting up a web page.

The blog or website might generate a couple of sales.

The newbie get totally psyched, they get onto one of the Internet Marketing forums, post a whole bunch of posts about how they made their first $10 or $20. Everyone’s giving them the forum equivalent of ‘high fives’.

They make some proclamation that they’ll quit their day job if this keeps up.

They might even start giving advice.

And on more than a number of occasions, you see a follow up message that goes along the lines of I’m giving up on Internet Marketing because:

• Sales have sputtered because the Internet Marketing product wasn’t really all that good
• Even if it was a good product, everyone had already been selling it and it had reached its “sell by/expiry” date
• All the big Internet Marketing gurus are the only ones that can survive because they’re the ones with 500,000 people on their list.

Honestly, I think these are just excuses.

It’s too easy to take credit when things go right, but as you’ve read from my previous posts, it’s really what you do when the chips are down that you prove your mettle.

My thoughts on these objections:

• The product is not good/not effective: All knowledge is neutral and their value lies in how you apply that knowledge. A $9.97 product like Secret Affiliate Weapon can be as powerful as a $997 product. Here’s the kicker: If you are investing in a $997 product, you are more likely to be more committed to reading it and applying it. With that logic SecretBlogWeapon would be more widely used if it was priced at double of what it costs now.
• Products reaching a sell by/expiry date: Knowledge doesn’t exactly have an expiry date, though there are many unmotivated (lazy if you want to be 100% truthful) people out there who want things to be presented in a step-by-step manner. Ok, that adsense website template is less effective now. But what if you adapted it to a blog? Or a forum? Or a Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla? Would it work? It might, but you will never know unless you test it out.
• Only the gurus with huge lists can make a living from Internet Marketing: Just in case you haven’t figured it out already, the big guys started out as small guys, facing the same issues as everyone else. Where they broke out from the pack was either they never thought of themself as a ‘small guy’, but as gradually evolving into a ‘big guy’. You are the sum of your thoughts and how you think of yourself will determine the results you get.

Some of these findings are related to a product I’m currently working on that is intended to help successful Internet Markters breakthrough to the next level. Or if you are a new Internet Marketer, it will give you a flying headstart in the game.

Stay tuned.

ps: If you have questions related to starting up, or moving to the next level, include them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Adam’s known for helping my buddy, millionaire entrepreneur Adam Khoo, launch his Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires product.

Take a look at this:

Adam Wong clocked $9,000 in 2 weeks through his internet marketing efforts. Although I believe it’s a revenue figure, the net profit would be close to that because it’s Adam Khoo’s digital product at: Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires.

I was talking to Adam Wong the other night and he was asking about traffic generation strategies.

I believe traffic hasn’t been difficult to generate provided you have a traffic plan.

Jo Han and Ewen gave a great presentation at their Unstoppable Traffic workshop a couple of weeks ago and will be releasing a DVD set soon, but in the meantime, I’ll be doing a short series.

Traffic generation is, unfortunately, related to Search Engine Optimization. I don’t particularly like spending inordinate amounts of time figure out the optimal keywords, staring at keyword lists and spending all day insert meta and other HTML tags into my blog post. So I’ll cover the organic aspects of traffic generation.

• Onsite Traffic Generation:

Blogging, hands down, is a great platform to begin with, compared to creating a static website.

Between Blogger/Blogspot and WordPress, I hear that Google just loves Blogspot and gives preferential positioning to blogger blogs in the SERPs (search engine results pages) (Though no one has exactly come out to say this publicly.). It probably helps that Google owns Blogspot.

I like WordPress though, because the plugins such as Popularity Contest, help level the playing field and give your blog a level of functionality and benefits that Blogspot blogs lack.

I plan to author a series on essential WordPress plugins that I’m using that should be in every WordPress bloggers arsenal.

If you are looking at profit-oriented blogging, be sure to check out SecretBlogWeapon.com for this amazing tool by blogger Gobala Krishnan. It incorporates a niche research guide, SEO optimization specifically for blogs and traffic generators.

• Offsite Traffic Generation:

By targeting blogs and forums in your target niche (such Internet Marketing, golf, dog grooming, wedding planning), you can go outside of your blog and prospect for high targeted and relevant prospects.

For the Internet Marketing niche, I head to:

Blogs:

• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker (Shoemoney.com)
• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net)
• Derek Gehl (Internet Marketing Center)
• Super Affiliate Ewen Chia (SecretAffiliateWeapon is a great resource)

Forums:

• DigitalPoint (forums.digitalpoint.com)
• Internet Marketing Singapore
• Conquer Your Niche
• And my own DigitalKeiretsu forum

My belief is that if you provide original content (even in a blog comment!) which:

• provides value to the reader
• deepens the conversation
• provides resources to relevant posts or websites

You will be viewed as a good contributor.

As you demonstrate your knowledge and competence, you can expect visitors to your site.

Traffic generation is simple, isn’t it?