How To Make Money In Recession

The hot topic this week is the GLP IPO results which is connected to global logistics properties, the overseas warehousing unit of the Government of Singapore Investment Corp (GIC), which launched its initial public offering (IPO) at $1.96 a share to raise as much as $3.9 billion.

While many investors are going to buy some shares in this company, it may not be the best investment since it is not a REIT and therefore not obligated to pay out dividends of up to 90% of their income.

Since this is one of the largest IPO to date, it would be quite easy to make some quick cash if you sell off your shares during the first few days of the trading.

While IPO investing made some people rich, it is quite risky as it involves large amount of cash and there are much better ways to make money with little investment.

You can find out how I made $1000 in just a day using free resources on the internet.

Guest Post By: Cian, A wealthy affiliate Member

As I tried to think of a topic to write about, one of my most favourite songs of all-time, The Masterplan, written by Noel Gallagher of Manchester group Oasis, starts playing on one of the music channels. Whilst having nothing to do with online business or internet marketing, it somehow or other strikes a chord with how success can be achieved online.

Because basically you do need a (master) plan to see the results you desire. You can’t, as the ever anonymous “they” say…”wing it”.

And at the core of every Masterplan is the concept of high level leverage, that unquantifiable resource that can can quite literally blow your mind, and increase profits ten fold without you wasting extra hours upon hours in front of a computer screen.

In a nutshell, leverage is that which enables us to get to our goals in the fastest time possible.

More often than not it revolves around the concept of not trying to do everything yourself…and seeing the bigger picture.

All the traffic generation methods like SEO, article marketing, ppc, video marketing, social media etc, are without doubt valid ways of getting relevant visitors to your site, but if you’re doing it all by yourself then you are wasting a LOT of time in the grand scheme of things.

After all, time is our most precious resource and we have to utilize it to the maximum.

For instance…

If you’re an article marketer and are seeing profits…then maybe now is the time to outsource your article writing exploits so you can grow your traffic levels at a faster rate.

Or if you’re a PPC (the most sustainable form of obtaining traffic) marketer, but hate the time it takes to create your landing pages…why don’t not make use of one the plethora of website designers out there so that instead of building one landing page a week you have half a dozen being generated daily for pennies while you chase the top dollar.

And as for SEO, hiring a professional (once due diligence is carried out), is probably one of the best investments I’ve ever made, as it releases you from the sheer mind numbing-ness that it brings.

With a shift of mindset you can start obtaining mass relevant traffic as effortlessly as possible!!

Remember folks, for growth to be attained, we more often that not must go outside our comfort zone.

So what else can we leverage? Here is just a brief sample.

(a) High Paying Affiliate Programs

How about making use of profitable affiliate programs? Instead of breaking our backs to achieve a $20 commission on a clickbank product, what about going about products that reward you as much as possible for your efforts. For instance, one great high paying program is the JamesAllen.com affiliate program in the jewelry niche, with usual earnings being $210 per sale. In most cases it takes as much effort to secure the sale of a $20 item then it does a $200 one, as price expectations differ in every market you encounter.

(b) People.

Why do everything by yourself when hundreds, if not thousands of people will do it for you as your affiliate? This is the enviable position a product owner can find herself/himself in when being at the top of the food chain. While work does go into support, product management/improvement, development/programming, affiliate management, up-sell/down-sell/continuity implementation, the opportunities are incredible, and if you have an affiliate army behind you, taking care of traffic generation, you can focus on converting that traffic into sales and building your business even further.

Alongside affiliates, you can also broker JV deals with the “big dogs” in your market and network with other knowledgeable folks (the experts).  All this fits in with the aim of slashing learning curves, making more profits and creating GROWTH.

And finally, you can leverage highly qualified individuals that have the skills which you need to succeed. Whether it be product creation, website design, opt-in reports, graphic design, video creation etc, someone else can take care of it, thus removing all barriers that may have stood in your way to success

(c) Profitable Websites.

Any profitable website has a great potential for a lump sum payment. Generally speaking a website can be sold for 10-12 times its monthly revenue, so if you buy an established website, increase its inherent value (ie. employ a few marketing techniques) then you can take advantage of this rule as it were, for a handsome pay day if you so desire.

(d) Autoresponders

Building an email list is a prerequisite these days as it allows you to convert generally at a much higher rate MULTIPLE times. Through building a relationship with subscribers by offering value, support and peerless recommendations you will see your affiliate and/or your own product earnings sky rocket.

So in conclusion, don’t focus on doing everything yourself. Create your plan, offset as much as possible when you can (without reducing quality of output) and you will see results coming in much much quicker. You may have to initially do it all by yourself before you can invest, but remember money is not the only thing you need to get what you want.

Bartering (offering one service in exchange for another) is a way to get what you need to grow without paying. For instance, if you need a website designed, offer instead of cash, to write articles for the designer, or anything that will benefit him/her which is in your realm of capabilities.

So with that being said, start thinking big and

PLAN.  FOCUS. LEVERAGE. GROW

Live Forever,

Cian

Click Here To Join wealthy affiliate University

I have decided to do this Empowerment Mentoring Review, which is a coaching program by Les Brown and Paul Martinelli which themselves are highly successful in life and have made their millions, not because they are lucky, but because they have invested tens of thousands of dollars and many years to improve themselves and getting mentors to guide them.

So you are thinking that both of them are the “one in a million” kind of success and that type of success cannot happen to you right? Seriously, i feel the same way. Whenever, I heard someone have made a million dollars or have achieved their dreams, I tell myself they are the extraordinary people and I can never be them.

I learned about Les Brown after reading his best seller book “Live Your Dreams”, I felt so charged up, because Les Brown himself came from a much worst background than me and was at one time washing toilet and cutting grass before becoming what he is today. And he show me so  many people with humble background have become successful today only because they have found themselves good mentors.

Reading books, attending seminars and listening to tapes and videos are a good start to improving your mindset, but it can only do so much.  The Empowerment Mentoring coaching program will give you the extra push to overcome your limiting self-belief.

The energy you get from the empowerment mentoring is awesome and is definitely contagious and you can’t find from any other seminars or programs.

I believe you have benefited much from the videos alone and now is your chance to turn your dreams into reality. And of course, if you want to be wealthy, go for wealthy mentors like Les Brown and Paul Martinelli because they have already been there and done that.

Click Here To Join Empowerment Mentoring By Les Brown

Many of you are having issues with Google Adwords, so I am going to start off by stating the obvious:

“Google Adwords is frustrating the hell out of a lot of people”.

Reports on the web indicate that well over 100,000 Adwords accounts have been suspended, many for unethical activity that was taking place. However, many accounts were deleted though they were following the Adwords guidelines.  Google does have the upper hand in any situation and within their “terms of agreement” they state that they can basically remove any account they like.

Over the years Google has held a stronghold in the search market with close to 72% of the search market share.

Then came along Bing in 2009.  MSN Search was becoming very difficult to brand for Microsoft as a search engine and it simply was not at the cutting edge of search technology.  They had to do something…so they started off by a new name and new look (which I happen to find very appealing).

Bing also ramped up their search engine development team, coming up with some great new ideas, some of which Google was caught “copying”.  This could be because the Google user satisfaction surveys produced horrible results which sent Google back-peddling and seeking out the reasons why other Search Engines were able to penetrate their audience.

Sure, Google owns Android, but the core of their business is search, and 95% of all the money they make is from search.  If the people using their search aren’t happy, then they go elsewhere.  If users go elsewhere, they have less traffic to monetize via their search, less brand integrity, and lowered brand awareness.

The biggest hit so far has been to “affiliate marketers”.  If you are reading this, chances are you are an affiliate or at least know about affiliate marketing.  Google Adwords has really clamped down on people that are promoting products that they don’t own…

But why smack around your top advertisers (affiliates)?

I have my personal views on this, but I do think that there is two sides to this story.  Many affiliates out there have been promoting “scam” related products/services in Google Adwords for too long.

What has been happening is that the people that have been subject to these sort of offers and have been ripped off have contacted Google personally, complaining that they were ripped off by the search engine.  Some of the most famous scams are the “Get paid to write Google Ads” and “Acai Berry” trial offers.   There are also others, but these are the most prominent.

Yes, I do agree with giving these advertisers the boot and I do think this should have been done much earlier.

However, what Google has done is bundle entire industries and sets of advertisers into groups.  In many cases they assume if you are promoting a money related to “making more money” or “losing weight” or Clickbank products that you are a scam.

We all know that there are legitimate products and services out there within these niches…but advertisers are being suspending simply for trying to start campaigns within them.  I know many people that this has happened to, I have seen a lack of support from Google.  In essence, a lack of explanation that leaves the suspended advertiser standing around “wondering” what the heck they did wrong.

I hear a lot of “why me” and “what did I do”…and if you have found yourself frustrated and in this position, you are not alone.  Google is shutting people down for no reason (well, their reason is that they don’t need a reason).

Think of it this way.  If a supermarket were to find out that one brand of pizza was making people sick, they would remove that pizza from their supermarket right.  Fair enough.

However, if they followed what Google has done, they would remove all pizzas from their supermarket and maybe even the ingredients that go into the pizza, not giving their customers the ability to buy pizza anymore.  Does this sound logical?  You can come to your own conclusion…

Have you looked at the Google results lately?

Where have all the ads gone.  What happened.  Are people no longer advertising in Google?  Trust me, they are trying.  Search terms that once had 40-50 advertisers under them now have less than 5…and in many cases ZERO.

This is really unbelievable and although it is presenting a lot of frustration to advertisers that have been slapped, it is also creating a brand new opportunity.  We are currently implementing some strategies that have proven successful with Google’s new changes…and have floundered with some techniques that didn’t work (although were 100% ethical).

One thing we do know, this has to be costing Google a lot of money.  Like any good business though, their have a long term vision. They will sacrifice money now if it will mean longer term success in the future…and with the renewed competition (Bing/Yahoo), they have become a bit more serious about retaining their once invincible market share.

So here we are in mid 2010.  Things are starting to change.  Bing has gone from a 9% to almost a 13% market share.  Bing and YSM are sharing technology and joining forces…they are becoming a QUARTER MARKET SHARE entity.

Big things are happening and there are big shifts that will be altering the way we market through 2010/2011.

What I think might happen?

I fully believe Google is going to continue losing market share.  You see, when advertisers, affiliates, and Internet marketers get frustrated and pissy, it can cause a ripple effect in not only how they advertise, but what search engines they will use.

I mean, if Google without reason takes you out of their advertising platform, why should you continue earning them revenue by using their search.   Why not perform your own searches within an engine like Bing or Yahoo…which produces equivalence in quality.

Then I think Google is going to realize that their advertisers were an integral component of their business model and will start becoming more flexible on their advertising rules and regulations.   They aren’t going to allow illegal activity or the promotion of unethical products/services, however they may not be so quick to pull the “suspend” trigger on high quality accounts.

When marketing companies start creating their marketing agendas, talking about alternatives to Google, and start using different search engines themselves, it is going to have an outright negative effect on Google’s market share.  They are going to lose a bunch of it and I can honestly see that Yahoo/Bing combo taking close to 40% of the overall searches in North America within the next year.

Many Alternatives to Google are opening up…

Many companies and marketers are already starting to move a large component of their advertising budgets outside of adwords.  Many large websites are moving to their own advertising platforms (that is, run their ad placement technology in house) and there are social networks like FaceBook that are really starting to understand and deliver great advertising solutions.

Not to mention the Bing/Yahoo merger, which undoubtedly will have an impact on paid search.

And finally, for those “customer centric” folks, I ran a test?

I sent a question to the Bing advertising team this week just to see what sort of response I would get.  People are getting used to “canned” answers, no explanation, and in many cases rude responses within Google, so I wanted to see how the support was elsewhere.

Bing sent me a personal 12 paragraph response from a personal rep in a brand spankin’ new account.  I do have another account that has been around for some time, but I just wanted to run a test on a newbie account to see how they would act.

Someone took 30 minutes out of their day to respond to me.  Now that is how you treat an advertiser…or a client who runs your business.

We grew our business at WAU by actually responding to people and putting our clients first, so I fully understand and believe in the personal interaction model.

I am not picking a winner in the search world right now now, but we all know who the leader is now and exactly what they have to lose if they continue making radical decisions.  I could be way off in even saying “radical”, but in my honest opinion and from some of the feedback i have received, a big shift is about to take place in the paid search world.

Let me know what your thoughts are…leave me a comment, rant, suggestion, or question below.

Kyle
wealthy affiliate Co-Owner

PS. My ultimate decision.  I have switched my daily searches to Bing for the time being.

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Guest Post by: Sylviane N., a wealthy affiliate Member

If you are a reader of this blog this can only mean one of two things. Either you have already started to build your affiliate marketing business or you are thinking about it.

If you are still a the stage where you are wondering if this would be for you or not or if you have just started in the affiliate marketing venture, you need to have knowledge of the steps that you should betaking to go from point A to point B. From the time you are just starting as a complete newbie to the time that you are becoming an accomplished affiliate marketer.

I know that when I first started to get involved with the online money making venture there were a few things that I wished I would have known. If I had it would have saved me a great amount of time and money.

With this article I want to share with you the fundamental steps that you should be taking in order to reduce as much as possible any waste of time, money and energy and be productive in order to reap the rewards of affiliate marketing as fast as possible. By following these simple yet fundamental steps you will be going from point A (being a newbie) to point B (being a successful affiliate marketer).

Step 1 – Making a conscious decision

This might seem to be obvious for some, but making a conscious decision about becoming a professional affiliate marketer is very important. The reason why it’s so important is that if you do not take this seriously enough you will never have the will and persistence needed to make it in this business. You will be more like an observer or an amateur, not taking action. You will never feel strongly enough that you need to take steps and put them into action. And finally you will never convince yourself strongly enough that you can do it, and eventually you will drop out of the all thing in a just a few weeks or few months if you’re lucky.

If you are at that stage right now you need take steps to get fully involved in your affiliate marketing business. You need to take it seriously and make that conscious decision. You need to tell yourself things such as, I want to be able to quit my job. I want to make money online and I will do all it takes to get there. Some people have done this before me and some will after me. If this is to happen in my case it is all up to me. I am the master of all my decisions and I control all the results that I am getting, good or bad.

Two – Deciding where to learn your craft

You won’t find the knowledge you need to have to run your affiliate marketing business in any school or college. However, you will still have to learn the basic steps to be able to pick a product and start promoting it. In some cases you might even have to discover that you can actually do this all together.

I know that I didn’t even know this when I first decided to make a living online. What I mean is that I didn’t even know that I could sell product as an affiliate for free.

At this stage you need to look for a program that will be able to teach you what options you have and how to go about it to be able to build an online internet business. Some of these options are free, and as a newbie you probably will be very happy to know this. I know I would have.

It is crucial that you do find a way to learn about affiliate marketing before making too many mistakes that could cost you. This will protect you from getting ripped off wasting money with gurus promising you that you can make money with a click of the mouse. Once you’ll know what affiliate marketing is all about you’ll know that this is not so. Yes, there is going to be some work involved.

Three – Focusing, learning and taking actions

Once you’ve found your affiliate marketing education program, it is time to focus. I have found out in my few years of experience in this internet online business while helping newcomers, that lack of focus is one of the biggest issues for many.

Focusing on the task ahead and only on that will help you progress more rapidly. If you don’t focus your attention will be divided and you won’t be able to get anywhere specific. When a runner leaves the starting line his focus is on one thing and one thing only, the finishing line. At this point he is not thinking about the next race; if he did he would be sure to lose this one. See where I am coming from here? Focus on the assignment of the day, one assignment one day at the time. Avoid anything that would distract you from your daily goals.

I know learning is not a sweet to the ear kind of word for many people, but there is no better word to explain what you will be doing before you can make money as an affiliate marketer. You are going to have to learn the steps, the techniques and the process that all successful affiliate marketers have learned and applied to be able to get where they are.

Trust me learning is not a bad word; it’s just what the process from going to point A (not knowing) to point B (knowing) is called. Most times you won’t even feel the learning process at all, just like most of us don’t even remember how we learned to read. You will digest this knowledge one day at the time.

Once you know enough, it’s time to take action. This is not the time to be over thinking things and get yourself in an overdrive analytic state which will freeze you into not taking action. All the reading and analyzing will not get you any cash into your affiliate account, but action will. You don’t have to know it all and it doesn’t have to be perfect. You will get better as you go with practice and time.

There you have it. The three steps that I have learned to be fundamental for an affiliate marketer and that you need to know and take if you want to be able to get from where you are now to where you want to be as a marketer. Now, let’s take those steps into action.

Sylviane N.
A wealthy affiliate Member

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Guest Post by: Louise M., a wealthy affiliate Member

As an affiliate marketer, measuring your improvements is important, comparing what you learn with what you apply, going through your to-do list daily… But these objective improvements aren’t everything. They prove you’re on the right path but they unfortunately don’t guarantee success. The way you treat the affiliate marketing “game”, how you position yourself has a real impact on the results you’ll get.

If I had to make a list of the top 5 qualities of the successful affiliate marketer, having the right mindset would definitely come first. No wonder why the big boys in business have strong personalities and inspiring success stories. They have “that little something”.

Experiencing a mindset shift as an affiliate marketer isn’t as abstract as you may think. It’s real, it’s tangible. The mindset doesn’t only define the way you think but also the actions you choose to take.

The bad news is: It’s not given by God, it’s not a super power nor magic and it’s not effortless.

The good news is: It’s a decision! And you can take it now. It’s almost like a shortcut because it puts you on a different level, a higher one. It implies bigger/faster results and more responsibilities too as you’ll become a real entrepreneur first in your mind and then “for real”. But, as Spiderman’s uncle said: “With great power comes great responsibility”. Indeed, failures are part of the ride and you’ll always be the only one to blame.

Exciting, right?

Ok, we can agree that this introduction can be pretty blurry for those of you who don’t have that “success mindset” yet. So I am going to break the mindset shift concept into 3 parts where I will explain what the mindset changes I’m talking about really imply in terms of action. And we know money comes from actions, not wishes.

From acting inside the box to interacting outside of it.

Knowing the steps to take when starting affiliate marketing isn’t the hardest part. There is loads of information out there. Getting a clear picture of how it works and picking a good training program is important. When you start, you’re taught to put each task in different boxes. Sure being organized is important, keeping things simple is essential, but seeing it as a whole can greatly help you. Having a path to follow doesn’t mean you can’t go beyond the path’s limits, twist it a little, bring something more.

When tasks are not connected to each other, they at best only provide the results you’re expecting.  This is cool, but they rarely exceed that expectation. I’ll take backlink creation as an example and blog commenting in particular.

If the tasks you have to do aren’t connected to each other in your mind you may end up doing this:

• write a trivial blog comment (because you want to create 15 a day and don’t have time to write more than “cool post, thanks for sharing!”)
• send a preformated link exchange request to 10 bloggers
• send a preformated guest post request to 10 bloggers.

It’s time-consuming and less effective than if you decide to “care” about such interactions. Indeed such tasks are just interactions with people.
When I started blog commenting, I decided to take it seriously and write very few blog comments per day (4 actually) but write good, relevant, different comments.

Here’s what happened…

After writing a blog comment on a PR4 blog (my blog has no page rank and was brand new), the author of this blog visited mine, commented on it, sent me an email and asked me if he could add a link to my blog on his blog (no real benefit for his blog) and invited me to guest post on his blog anytime. That’s it!

Ok, maybe there’s a bit of luck here but I worked for this and it exceeded my expectations. I didn’t have to ask for link exchange or guest posts, the author of the blog I commented on just asked me! And it didn’t happen just once.

What this illustrates is that this business, just like any business, is made of people and you have to interact with them. Contact people, ask questions, congratulate them. I often contact companies just to say thanks for their competent customer service or something I find great about their business and you have no idea which doors interacting with people online can open. Be curious, open, and dare. It’s always worth it. Your personality, your potential has value in this online business. You can use it and you should.

Also, keep in mind that the people who can teach you the most in this affiliate marketing business actually base their business on helping others. It’s the core of their business, the mean by which they eventually sell things. Observe how they work, question their strategies, interact. This leads us to another important part of the mindset shift which is the relationship with your prospects/subscribers/customers.

From selling to connecting

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I hope you enjoyed last week’s Part 3 edition of the Oyster Marketing strategy on selling.  Today I am going to talk about the 4th an final stage of the Oyster marketing technique, the pearl.

This is probably the most exciting for me to write about because it is the most mysterious.  Is there that hidden pearl online…or in Internet marketing terms, is there a secret that only a few high stakes marketers even know about?

Are there secret niches? I wonder.

What about secret keywords. Hmm…keywords that make people millions of bucks. Keywords that only certain people know how to find.  I wonder…

I am going to look into this and discuss my personal thoughts on IF there are secrets online, and if so, where do you find these hidden gems.

Before I get started, I want to quote the very first Oyster Marketing Strategy post that made the initial reference to “the pearl”.

Pearls are very rare and in fact, in my 4 years working in the oyster business, I only came across one…and it wasn’t the ideal pearl shape (perfectly round).  I guess you could call this kinda lucky (that I found one that is).

A pearl is VERY rare in the wild and….

….pearl is equivalent to hunting for something that is not there or very hard to find…or an illusion in attempt to earn a MASSIVE PROFIT.

The pearl is what most people look for, yet the fewest people ever find.  I compare it to someone looking for the “secret to success”…when in fact, the secret is that there is NO SECRET (if that makes sense).

So really, what I was saying is that:

If you are looking for some sort of Internet Marketing Secret, you are either going to grow old and grey doing so, or you are going to find something that appears to be a secret, but in actuality it is an “illusion”.

Being in the Internet marketing world for 8 years now, I have a seen and performed a lot of strategies that have worked, and on the same token, many that didn’t work.  In no way were they secrets, rather “techniques”.

I mean, if there was a secret, nobody would tell you right (unless they are really bad at keeping secrets).  Secrets are something that are private…stuff that isn’t revealed.

Do We Know of Any Hidden Internet Marketing Secrets?

Carson and I have never sought out secrets and we refrain from using the term altogether because the truth of the matter is, we FOCUS ON TECHNIQUES.

Any successful investor, any successful restaurateur, any successful Internet marketer, or any successful business person will tell you that they achieved their success not because of secrets, but because of the hard work, testing, implementation, and techniques they applied to their business.

I can honestly tell you that I don’t know any secrets.  In fact, anything that I do know I have and will continue to reveal to you as a blog post and ultimately, to all the active members at WA.   That is why Carson and I created WA…

So, all this talk about no “Internet Marketing Secrets”, but how do you succeed online if there are no secrets?

What really is Internet marketing?

Think about this for a second…

Hope you didn’t have a mental jammer there.   Internet marketing is the act of marketing something online.

Duh.

But seriously, it is the “interaction” between a consumer and a product/offer.  If you, as the marketer, can connect these two distinguished dots, you can succeed.

A consumer starts with a keyword.   A product/offer ends with an affiliate program, some sort of actionable offer, or a product that you own.

To understand the online world, let’s first look at the offline world.

Say you want to sell a hot dog…lots of hot dogs.  Where would you go looking to sell this hot dog.  Would you go looking inside a mall?

Maybe.  But there is a lot of competition there.  Ideally you want to position your hot dog stand in a place where people want your product.

Where is that?  Some place that you would find hungry people that like hot dogs.
Example: A baseball field.  Hot dogs sell well there.
Example: Outside a night club when you get all the hungry drunk people craving food.
Example: At the park where hungry business people go for a walk at lunchtime.

Now, with offline business there is a lot more trial and error to find your magic formula…or your pearl.  Remember, a pearl is not a secret, it is a well-defined technique.  In the online world, things are MUCH, MUCH easier.

Yes, you heard me say that.  We as Internet marketers have things easy.  Does this mean IM is easy? No.  But selling a dog training program online is a hell of a lot easier than trying to find the best place to sell a hot dog in New York City.

Why is Making Money Online Easier than Offline?

And the reasons why…HYPER-TARGETING.   Keywords.  Analytics.  ONE BILLION PEOPLE (with buying power).

This is where it gets really cool.

Want to sell a dog training program?  Target the keyword dog training program in Google.  You can pay for this if you like, or you can work to get your website naturally listed using article marketing and SEO techniques.

In the offline world, you would be a happy camper if you could attract only people looking for your product and only pay for these people.   I am not happy with selling my dog training product to someone looking for a dog training program though.

They are not serious enough.  These are the “window shoppers” of the Internet.

Now, in the case of dog training, I would probably seek out people that are more serious.  People that are looking for even more specific dog training.

People searching terms like:

“how to get my dog to stop digging up the lawn”
“how to get my dog to heel”
“German shepherd training commands”
“help me get my poodle to behave”

Now these people are serious.  They are the people that are in the stores, asking the clerks questions, and a tip or a piece of info away form buying something (or performing an action).

That is where you come in as the Internet Marketer.  That is where the pearl lies.

Looking back, I have had keywords that have converted for me every day.  Single keywords.  Sometimes a SINGLE keyword would make me $100 per day profit.  This is because I did a little digging…a little research, and a little marketing.

A few of the most important techniques I have learned:

• Be relevant
• Choose a niche that is interesting to YOU
• Don’t sell chocolates to a dieter (research your audience)
• Take continual action (do stuff, don’t just read)
• FAIL why don’t ya

Yes, I did fail lots.  Carson and I fail all the time still to this day.  It is part of growing and part of the reason we can find those Pearls online.

Here are some of the biggest failures I have ever had as an Internet marketer:

• Lost $10,000 on a keyword that I accidentally bid $10 instead of $0.10 on.  Google wouldn’t give me a refund.
• Got lazy and didn’t update a site for 6 months.  When I did updated it, the profit explosion was insane.
• Didn’t get into email marketing early enough in my IM career.  Would have many lists (personally) that were likely to exceed several 100,000 people
• In my 2nd  year marketing, I had two months where I let my affiliate marketing business go and had 2 consecutive months that were not profitable. (Note that these were followed by some of my best months ever when I got my butt in gear.)
• I spent 10 months building a site on the side that I never ended up earning a penny from because of a shift on the Internet.

I guess you could say I found out some UN-secrets.  If there were secrets that nobody wanted to know about, I found them out quickly and regularly.  However, I took them all in stride and realized that for every 10 failed campaigns or every 10 mediocre keywords, I was going to find the pearl.

Once I attained the pearl of wisdom (a well defined technique) I was able to reproduce it.  For example, once I found out (back in the day) that people liked review pages, I built them over and over.  This made me heaps of money (although the way you review products/services in 2010 has drastically changed).

To me this is not an Internet marketing secret.  This is a technique.

You agree?

If your answer is yes, you are a good person.   You will find success online just knowing that you have what it takes.

What if you think there is still some crazy secret out there that will make you a business mogul?

If you fit into this category, don’t worry…we are still friends.  I know you have likely been misinformed because there is so much misinformation out there.

Businesses claiming they can make you millions over night.  Internet marketing firms claiming that you can run your business in autopilot without investing any initial work.  Guru’s preaching to you that you need to buy their hidden information (crap) in order to survive in this NEW Internet.

ALL BULL PEOPLE.

Again, remember, if someone has to sell you in the glitz and glam, the hype, the sizzle not the steak, chances are it will not work.  And if it does work, chances are it will only be temporary.

The pearl in the sense of a secret does not exist.

But the company that manufactures the pearl does.  That company can be you.   Hunting for something seems ridiculous.  Creating something that builds the exact same success (finding a pearl) seems like a sound idea…and one that I am going to full-hearted-ly suggest to you.

I know you will succeed online if you stop seeking out the Internet Marketing Secrets.  Instead, look for and build upon the pearls (well defined techniques) that you know lie out there.  We teach those and we know that there are endless ways you can get at them.

This concludes the Oyster Marketing Series.  I hope you all have enjoyed these blog posts and as always, your feedback, comments, questions, and contributions are welcome.  Post them below.

Take it easy.  From one oyster marketer to another.

Kyle
wealthy affiliate
www.WealthyAffiliate.com

Click Here To Join wealthy affiliate University

I hope you all enjoyed Part 2 of my Oyster Marketing Strategy last week where I discussed the “Shell“, or how to nurture a customer along a path in which they become a POWER CUSTOMER (aka, repeat buyer).

Today, I want to discuss the “meat”.

“Oysters tend to vary in size and although the biggest oysters fetch the most money, the smaller oyster are in much higher demand.   There are many more markets for small oysters because of their popularity within the restaurant business and “smoked” oysters business (canned).”

So really you have a couple of options:

(1) Target a broad niche in which you know people are selling tons

(2) Target a unique niche in which you know there is always wanted demand

I guess it is working within a long tail (more niche) versus a short tail (more broad) here.   Many people tend to naturally go towards very broad markets when starting out.  They choose the “small’ oysters, ie…the obvious products that they know sell because there are droves of other people selling it.

Something that would qualify as a broad niche would be “get a 6 pack”.  Sure, this is not as broad as weight loss, but it still tips the scale in my opinion on being a first rate, easy-to-think-of niche.

One thing that people fail to realize is that the Internet has opened up an absolutely ridiculously massive amount of products, keywords, and tiny little niches.  Gone are the days of going to your local record shop and choosing between 10,000 artists on the shelves and here are the days of being able to sift through 1,000,000 artists through online digital stores.

This represents 990,000 new products, new brands, and new marketing opportunities within one niche alone.

Another example of this is MOVIES.  Think of all the movies.  Think of all the foreign movies, independent films, and movies that simply an offline movie store cannot afford to keep on their shelves.

That market is massive.  I am not saying this is the best starting point for someone online, what I am saying is that the Internet has created the longest tail of niches…in pretty much every aspect of marketing.

One last example before I move on here.  Look at dieting.  Back in the day you would have been limited to just a few options.  An ab roller infomercial product, a health club membership, some special pill out of a magazine, or a diet plan that was advertised on TV.

Now, there are 10,000’s of dieting products available online.  Anything from “lose weight for you wedding guides”, to “online dietitians that will create you your own diet plan (for a fee)”.

For those that think outside of the box and choose to sell to smaller niches (sell the large, less-wanted-but-less-competition oyster meat), there is great opportunity.

But people tend to go so dang broad when starting out?

Is this a good idea?

What are the positives and negatives of tackling broader markets?

On rare occasion I see new marketers “going niche”.  This is how I recommend everyone start out…but very rarely do new marketers choose something really “niche”.

These are typical starting point markets that newbies choose:

(1) Dog training
(2) Make Money
(3) Lose Weight
(4) Learn Guitar
(5) Learn a New Language

These are the niches they should be starting with:

(1) Puppy Potty Training
(2) Make Money With WordPress
(3) Lose Lower Back Fat
(4) Learn how to play Nickelback Songs
(5) Learn how to learn spanish before vacation

These are examples of a longer tail niche.  These are also much more specific “problems” that people have and if you target them with targeted help…you will be much more successful.

Think about the state of mind of someone typing in “learn how to play guitar” versus “learn how to play nickelback songs”.  The latter is a much more targeted visitor and one that is further along in the customer lifecycle (something we explain in depth within wealthy affiliate).

Some people ask how I come up with a niche.  What would constitute and really unique niche for me? That leads me into…

How can I find a niche on my desk?

Well, probably something like…

Oh god…

I am thinking…

[I just popped 2 ginkgo biloba and drank a cup of coffee]

Ah, there we go.  Got one.

Tie Accessories.

Where the hell did I pull that from?  Gingko baby….

No seriously, finding these smaller, more unique niches is a piece of cake.  I looked on my desktop for some inspiration here and low and behold, there sitting from a lunch-time snack today was a “twist tie”.

Sure twist ties are a niche, but you are either going to have to have an “in” at a grocery store, or you are going to have to sell a 100 gazillion of these things to pay your house off.  Instead, I grabbed a word out of it.

“tie”

I know there are clips on the front of ties.  What I learned though is that there are other accessories with a quick search in Google.  Tie bars, pins, tacks and chains.

This is a very small niche.

But it has…

Limited affiliate competition.

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OK, as many of you may already be closely aware of, we have recently launched a new WordPress site creator called WordPress Express.

This system has quickly become the “tool to have” within the Internet marketing world.  You can literally create sites like this one….

http://craftycontent.com

In the snap of the fingers.  Less than 40 seconds for the actual creation, another hour for the content.  Anyways, enough about that…

Today I want to talk about how to make money with your WordPress blog.  Unless you are a pure hobbyist, creating content without a plan to generate revenue form it is senseless.  With your WordPress blogs, this should be no different.  Making money should always be one of the primary considerations.

In order to make money with your wordpress blog, you need to consider the main factors which lead to success:

(1) A blog people want to read
(2) Relevant and Unique Content
(3) A way to make money from your traffic

Below I am going to explain these items in more detail…and when you are done reading, you are going to know exactly how your WordPress sites can lead to a solid make money venture.

How to Make Money With WordPress: Don’t be boring!

There is nothing worse than reading lame content.  People tend to like reading things as though you are having a conversation with them.  This is what is known as “conversational speak”.  For example, the way I am talking to you right now is much more engaging than if I were to refer to you in technical terms.

Lame speak:

“People online make money with their WordPress blogs by an affiliate program that matches their content.”

Conversational speak:

“If you really want to make some money with your WordPress blogs, you need to consider who your customer is.  For example, say I am “Joe Blow” looking for a solution to get rid of a mole on my forehead.  What sort of program would I be looking for?  What sort of products will remove a mole and is there anything that is natural that can cover this up without me having to consider surgery?

Answer your potential customers’ questions or they will mozy along to a site that does.”

Write interesting content and people will actually read it.  If people want to read a technical definition of something they will go to Wikipedia.   Help people understand stuff and relate to things by talking to them as though you would your mom or your best friend.

How to Make Money With WordPress: Writing Should be FUN, relevant and unique!

People tend to have such a tough time “writing”.

Here is the common stuff I hear every day:

“I suck at writing Kyle”.

“I don’t speak English well enough to write something good that people will like”.

“Kyle, I don’t know what the heck to write about.”

None of these are good excuses…well I guess they are OK ones, but I have never been a fan of excuses with the pure purpose of procrastination.

Here are my answers:

I suck at writing. No you don’t.  If you can write on your friend’s FaceBook wall or you can text your boyfriend, you have enough skills to write something.  The key is choosing something that you are interested in and the rest will come naturally.  Choose something you are passionate about on your WordPress blog and the writing will become easy.

I don’t speak English well. Yes, you do.  Whenever I get people telling me this, they go on to explain in 5 well written paragraphs how they don’t know English!  It is almost comical.  If you can write to me telling me you don’t know English well enough, then you DO KNOW ENGLISH WELL ENOUGH.  You only get better at a language by practicing! You only get better at writing by practicing!

What the heck to I write about? What I recommend is that you create yourself a list of at least 25 topics that you can write about.  This will be the starting point of your blog and your first set of posts and articles.  It may sound like a lot of work, but if you create 1 or 2 blog posts per day, you could have 25 pages or posts up in a matter of ONE month!

Here is an example list of 17 topics if you were going to create a blog about….hmmm….Raw Food Diets.

Potential Posts/Pages:

• Raw food festival
• Raw food health expo
• best raw food diets
• is eating raw foods safe
• spring vegetable raw foods
• find raw food retreat
• raw food diet results
• raw food diet plan
• eating raw nuts & seeds
• the benefits of eating raw vegetables
• healing benefits of raw foods
• what color vegetables should i eat
• what is a raw food diet
• how to get fat from vegetables
• lose weight eating raw foods
• best vegetables for protein
• raw food diet recipes

How did I come up with these topics.  Simple.  I first got a small list of ideas by going into Google and typed in “raw food diets”.  I browsed the web, the news, and the blogs to come up with some ideas.

Web: http://www.google.com
News: http://news.google.com/
Blogs: http://blogsearch.google.com

And I used a Q & A site, Wikihow:

http://www.wikihow.com

Then I plugged in some of these “themes” into the keyword tool at WA.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/tools/kw_research_home (have to be a member to access)

If you are not a member of WA, you can use the Google keyword tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Expand upon these topics and get some more ideas.  Also, if you are interested in a topic or a niche, you should spend some time doing some “involved” reading.  It will enhance your writing, your connection with your audience, and also give you a ton of blog post/page ideas.

There are ways to turn your content into huge amounts of traffic through SEO practices, but I am not going to explain that here.  Reason being, I just created a 15 lesson tutorial at wealthy affiliate explaining all of this!

How to Make Money With WordPress: Making Money From Your Traffic

The most effective ways to earn a significant amount of money from your WordPress traffic are:

(1) Affiliate Programs

There are many types of commission structured affiliate programs, but amongst the top are are Cost Per Sale and Cost Per Acquisition.  The most common is CPS which is usually commission % based, which includes networks like:

• Clickbank.com
• Linkshare.com
• ShareaSale.com
• CJ.com

But there are also many networks know that pay per action.  For example an action could be someone filling out a form, taking advantage of a free offer, or filling out a survey.  Many affiliates are making a ton of money with both styles of affiliate programs, leveraging their WordPress blogs to do so.

I recommend that if you aren’t already part of them, you seek out these top networks for affiliate programs that are relevant to your “niche”.  Many pay very well and will be a nice inclusion on your WP blog posts.

(2) Google Adsense and Content Networks

Adding Google Adsense or adding ads from other ad networks to your blog can be a great way to earn money.  If someone clicks on the ads that are displayed on your page, you earn money.   We recommend using Adsense for this, but there are other ad networks that work well.  They include:

• Infolinks.com
• Chitika.com
• Kontera.com

(3) Selling your own STUFF

There are many ways that you can sell your own products and services (or info) online.  If you have tangible products or used goods, you can use the following to sell them:

http://ebay.com
http://paypal.com

There are built-in plugins in WordPress that allow you to easily incorporate your eBay listings into your blog or to add a Paypal Payment feature on your blog.

Say you have a bunch of info on something and you think others would find it valuable and pay for it.  Maybe you know a lot about golf, maybe you know how to get rid of acne naturally…people pay for this stuff.  Create a PDF, and then put it on the Clickbank network as a merchant.

http://www.clickbank.com/sell_products.html

You can then turn your blog into a sales page and store for your product!

————————————-

These are just a few ideas of ways you can make money from your WordPress blog.  It all starts by knowing how to write interesting content.  Then it comes down to being able to come up with more unique content to write.  Then you need to offer something on your site that earns you money.

Again, I have just created a 15 lesson tutorial on “how to make money with WordPress” within WA on this, so if you are a member already, get access to this by logging in.  There is a link right on the dashboard.

For those of you that aren’t members yet and want to earn money online, I invite you to join us at wealthy affiliate.  We would love to work with you and help you achieve your goals.

Hope you enjoyed this post!

Kyle
wealthy affiliate
www.wealthyaffiliate.com

Click Here To Join wealthy affiliate University

Whew…

Sorry, I just got back from a journey through success using this “thingy”!

What kind of success you ask?

• One where I built a website in 32 seconds.
• One where I built a site that Google is already french kissing.
• One where I built a site where I don’t need to know a lick of programming.
• One where I got listed in Google in under 12 hours.
• One that will change the way I do online business.

What is this?

OK…before I get into what this “thingy” is, I want to explain how the Internet has changed, and how it has not here in 2010.  I also want to give you a vision into what is probably going to take place in 2011 and beyond for us marketers.

Lastly, I am going to explain how I think I can help you out, save you time, and earn you a lot more money.

We cool?  Alriggggghty.

How the Internet Has Changed!

Since late 2009, the Internet has made a major shift.  Google has shifted.  PPC has changed.  SEO has changed.  Affiliate marketing has changed.  The way you are allowed to represent your own “voice” has changed. Article directories has changed the way they allow people to do business.

With so many changes, how do you overcome this to create success online.

First and foremost, you need a website.  This is a scary word for MANY people, but it is the truth.  Google will not touch your “direct links” with a 10 foot pole, YSM and Bing don’t really like you if you don’t have a website.

This is a good thing for those of us that “did things right” to begin with and bad for the lazy cats out there that simply direct linked…not because it was the right way, but because it was the easy way to do things.

A website has always been the best medium to offer people information, help them, and ultimately pre-sell any affiliate product or your own product.   So I can honestly say that without a website now, your chances for success are shrinking by the day.

Moral of the story.  YOU NEED A WEBSITE!

OK, you have a website.  Things are peachy right?

Not entirely.

I don’t want to be the grinch that stole your early x-mas, but just having a site is no longer enough either.

How you create your website now matters!

To understand this, you need to understand people.  I think you will find this very easy to do because, well, you are a person.  You need to also understand how Google has built their business and exactly what they truly care about.

Google does not care about advertisers.  Sure,they bring them billions of dollars per year…but without “PEOPLE” using their search, they would not have a business.  And for every person that decides to use another search engine for their daily searches, Google loses money.

There will always be advertisers, but there will not always be users unless Google understands and creates a quality user experience.

In order to create that experience, they push us marketers around based on their findings.  If they want a relevant landing page because they feel that it is going to give their users a better search experience, guess what?…they are going to make you create relevant landers.

If they find multi-page sites attract the best experience, they are going to make you do that.

If they like current and regularly updated content, guess who has to abide…YOU, the advertiser.

So let’s be clear here.  Google does not give a rats about you.  They only care about you when you are a searcher.  Their business is search, not advertising.

So how do you master creating websites for success?

Become yourself.

Yeah, really.  If you are marketing to someone, look at your site your pages through their eyes.  What makes a good site and what do you enjoy about good sites.  If you typed in “make my dog breakfast”…what would you want?

You would want a site on how to make a dog breakfast…maybe some recipes, maybe links to some cool breakfast bowls, doggy blankets, and as a bonus, a guide on how to make your dog walk on it’s hind legs if you bought something.

If you visit your site through a “visitors” eyes and you like the experience you are receiving, then chances are Google will like it to.  Be honest with yourself…or better yet, get a friend or family member to review your site for you.

So there you have the big bad Google.  In a nutshell…do what they say.

What about article marketing directories?

As for the article directories and the other aspects…they just follow Google’s rules.  So if you see a top level change at Google, you are likely to see a ripple effect down the chains of command.

This goes for a lot of the other Internet entities out there.  When Google makes a swift change to their algorithm, it causes a broad knee-jerk reaction across the industry.

Everything is not so bad though

In spite of everything I have said, many principles have remained the same and will remain the same going forward.

For example, relevance is the “rock” that allows campaigns to run profitable for years.  I still have campaigns running from 2005 that I have not touched and team “make life difficult” at Google have not slapped.

There are also articles that still are ranked from years ago.  There are blogs that have been up under terms like “make money” since 2007.  There is some interesting things that we can take from the “longevity” aspects of my business and others that will lead to your long term success.

I guess what I am saying is build your site for PEOPLE from the get go.  Don’t be a trend follower and use the latest black hat technique.  If you rely on these techniques, your business is always in jeopardy and one little shake up at Google and your business has collapsed.

To build these “PEOPLE” sites, sites that will last, sites that will succeed, and sites that will have longevity I would recommend nothing else than WordPress.

WordPress sites are great because they follow the RULES that make a site good for SEO, PPC, Email marketing, Articles, and ultimately appeal to Google.

These are:

(1) Easy to add Content
(2) SEO friendly (tags, page titles, directory structure, sitemaps, etc)
(3) Multi-paged and relevant content

These are the core principles of a quality website and will equate to success.

A example of a site I just created

Here is the website that I built using our latest system at WA.  This is a WordPress driven application that allows you to create as many blogs as you like.

The Website: CraftyContent.com
Total time taken to set-up this blog: 32 seconds
Total time to write the content: 1 hour
Total natural search listings: 10+
Total plug-ins installed: 6 (comes with each install)

Within one hour I have a pretty nice looking site, with content, and already attracting the search engine spiders.  How cool is that?

An absolute newbie could set something like this up using WordPress Express, our latest and greatest system included in the wealthy affiliate membership.  Once you have that site in place that Google will adore, the sky is the limit…now I can focus on making money from this site.

Next blog post I am going to discuss some of the techniques you can leverage to earn money from your WordPress Express sites.

Have a great day!

Kyle
wealthy affiliate
www.wealthyaffiliate.com

PS.  I would love to hear your feedback.  Please leave your comments below.

If you would like to get Instant Access to WordPress Express, CLICK HERE!

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