The Pay Per Click Marketing Game

 By Jim Sansi

As an advertiser you're probably tired of playing the bidding wars by being forced into paying
top dollar for good keywords. This is particularly true in when advertising
in highly competitive markets while having to deal with click fraud and junk
traffic that hardly converts or is barely profitable.

The good news for advertisers is that there are lots of new players in the pay-per-click
arena with large and divers enough networks of sites that can deliver a good
steady amount of traffic to your sites. Here is a quick look at some of the
alternatives.

The richest man in the world, Bill Gates has entered head first into the traffic business
with the launch of the Microsoft adCenter. Although adCenter
is quickly becoming popular among former AdWords and Yahoo users and driving
up prices, you may still be able to place ads in some markets with good results.

One of the lesser known pay per click networks is a company called GoClick. GoClick
is cheap, incredibly cheap for most

keywords. However this is offset by the fact that the quality of the traffic
from GoClick isn't the greatest since they place ads on game or other sites
that may not be relevant to your ads. However if promoting products with mass
appeals like health and wellness GoClick can certainly provide good results.

StumbleUpon is proving to be a good source of cheap yet somewhat targeted traffic. The secrete
to StumbleUpon is a toolbar that users install that keeps tracks of the types
of sites they visit, then when an advertisers site is displayed it is targeted
to the users preference of site. With keywords starting at five cents per click
and the ability to deliver thousands of visitors every day

StumbleUpon is quickly proving to be a leading source of inexpensive and profitable
traffic

So that covers a few of the better alternatives for PPC advertising. It is also very
important that when starting a promotional campaign for a brand new affiliate
site or sales page to not buy any traffic. This can become incredibly costly
without leading to any kind of results.

For new sales pages or affiliate link you can use other forms of free traffic generation
like article marketing, forums or social bookmarking sites to test the waters
and see how well the offer converts into sales. Once tested and converting well
then delve into the PPC arena.

---

At http://www.articlelistcourse.com
find the best methods to super charge your article marketing efforts...
Guaranteed!

 

 

Niche Marketing Tactics to Make Money

By Karl Augustine

 

Niche Marketing: Tactics to Use To Make Money With Niche Marketing

Niche marketing has always been a key any success in marketing but lately it has
become quite a prominent force in the online marketing world. Many books, manuals,
courses, and web sites have been developed that focus on niche marketing. It
is easy to find solid resources on the Internet that can teach you how to make
money with niche marketing.

Niche marketing online is a distinct segment of Internet marketing and is the quickest
way to get maximum exposure if you know how to leverage the search engines to
draw attention to your niche web site.

There's many things to learn to be successful and profit from niche marketing and your
USP (Unique Selling Proposition) will dictate exactly how to plan your attack
to successfully market to customers in your niche.

If you plan to use niche marketing to draw visitors to your web site, here's a
few tactics that you can use to make money:

Niche Marketing Tactic #1, "Research"

Fully utilize all of the research mechanisms that you can find in order to make sure
that you truly understand your niche and all of its nuances.

This requires understanding what tools are best to use so you can understand what
your target niche market does day to day, where they spend their time online,
and what makes them tick from a personal and business perspective.

Niche Market Research (http://www.nichemarketresearch.com)offers free reports and
articles to help you make the most of your research time.

Niche Marketing Tactic #2, "Define your paying niche"

Clearly define who will make up your niche market and make sure that the people in that
niche market are willing to pay for the solution that you provide to their problems.

A niche is a clear subset of a larger category.

An example of what a niche market is not: "People who want to learn how to
shoot better scores in golf."

In this example, there are far too many people within the main category (golf)
to make this a true niche. Virtually everyone who plays golf will want to play
better and shoot better scores so this wouldn't qualify as a niche, much less
a category worth pursuing.

An example of a niche market: "Women who play golf who want to learn how to
drive the ball longer and straighter."

This would be a niche because it clearly defines and segments who you'll cater to
and why they would need your service.

After clearly defining your niche market, you should make sure that they are willing
to pay for your services. The easiest way to determine this in the online world
(other than using common sense) is to find web sites that may be close to, or
even in your niche, and see if those web sites charge a fee for their services.

In addition, you should look to see if there is a reasonable level of competition
between those web sites.

If you see more than a few sites listed on a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) that
cater to female golfers for a fee, chances are the people who are your target
customer will pay for your services for solving their problem - women who can't
consistently hit long straight drives in golf.

Niche Marketing Strategy #3, "Choosing keywords and domain names"

Research and choose your keywords carefully so you can acquire the best domain name for
your site. Niche marketing most often includes maximizing the way search engines
work to make sure that your web site gets listed n the first page of the SERP's
from your chosen keywords. Your domain name contributes to getting those first
page results.

Go to Digitalpoint's keyword suggestion tool and type in keywords that you feel
people would use to find the product or service that you offer within your niche.
Look at the number of searches performed per day for those keywords and review
the other keywords listed.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Type the keyword phrase that you think best suits your USP's target customer into
Google and assess whether or not you can reasonably compete with the sites that
are listed on page 1 of the SERPs.

Can you get a page 1 ranking knowing that you'll have to compete with the sites
already listed?

Repeat the process until you have decided what your main keywords will be for your
product or service within your niche.

Those keywords should be in your domain name and preferably, they should be your entire
domain name.

Example: if you've concluded that 'blue widgets' best suits your USP and you feel that
you can compete for page 1 listings on the SERPs with the sites that come up
on page 1 for the keyword 'blue widgets', then a good domain name for your niche
marketing site would be 'bluewidgets.com'.

Niche Marketing Tactic #4, "Posting keyword rich articles or reports throughout
the web"

Niche marketing doesn't differ from any other online search engine marketing, posting
relevant content is the best way (bar none) to get the right type of traffic
to your niche site.

Writing keyword rich articles or reports and posting them to high traffic web sites
is a great way to make sure that you get maximum exposure within your niche
market. People will use your keywords to search for information about the topic
that they have interest in, and they will come across your web site on the search
engines results.

Niche marketing caters to a distinct and select group of people who need what you
have to offer. If you define your niche properly and make sure that your ability
to solve their problem is something that they will pay for, you will have established
a "money maker".

Utilize the search engines to make it easy for your niche market to find your service
or product. Niche marketing is the easiest way to be successful on the Internet
if you do the proper research.

---

About The Author: Karl Augustine -Publisher, "Starting Smart!" *Learn SEO -
Top 10 listings http://www.9mistakes-online.com/nichemarketing.htm

 

 

AboutPress Releases

by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Staff Writer

Internetor not, business or non-profit, what is your biggest problem? Is it knowledge
of the business, management ability, financial strength, or what? You must
have prospects to come to your establishment and buy or use your products and
services. Even a non-profit has to have traffic that will use their ideas and
services and donate money to keep them going. So the question is, “How
do you reach your target market and get prospects to visit and buy or use?”

If you watchTV news and morning shows you see every day an author pushing sales of a book
or an inventor selling a unique product. These people are featured in interviews
which do not seem like sales pitches, but that is exactly what they are. The
same thing happens in newspapers and magazines. All of them have sections featuring
the latest lines in every area of interest like business, gardening, hunting,
and all the other special interests. Have you ever wondered how the TV producers
and print media journalists “discovered” these wonderful new books
or products?

Most likelythe TV producer or newspaper journalist received something called a “press
release.” There are two kinds: one is sent to TV or print journalists
and the other may also be sent to these people, but it is really intended for
the Website or product “target market,” those potential prospects
who are most interested in whatever you are trying to sell.

Nowlet’s talk about how your reporter, journalist, or potential customer
might view your press release. Right away be aware all these people are overworked
and deluged every minute with this stuff. They are looking for something they
can develop into a story or that will help them as nothing else will. Notice
the TV interviews and written articles about these new items. Do they appear
as advertisements? They don’t even look anything like an ad. They are
crafted as news interviews or news stories, and that is the form you must use
for your press releases, otherwise, if they even smell like hype or sales, into
the trash can they will go!

Here is some information you must know to use press releases effectively.

What is a press release?

A press release is a written statement intended for editors, journalists, reporters,
Internet prospects, and others who might draw attention to the release subject.
This document must have no hype or sales material. It is intended to portray
the item in question as something that has a story that can be written up and
reported as news in a favorable manner.

What does a press release look like?

The HEADLINE is used to get the attention of journalists and prospects. This is
so important it deserves a bit of explanation which is best described by Peter
Bowerman in The Well-Fed Self-Publisher. Bowerman cites a headline used to market
a book about magic. The initial headline was “New Book: Tricks With Your
Head” which brought ZERO response. A change was made, “How To Stick
A Fork In Your Eye (And Why You’d Want To ...), which resulted in more
than 150 interviews and more publicity! Do you get the point about headlines?

Contact and Dateline goes at the top of the release with the release date, your name and
address, e-mail, and telephone numbers.

Introduction is the first paragraph in a press release that generally gives basic answers
to the questions of who, what, when, where and why. To get anyone’s attention
in our over-hyped world you must always express BENEFITS as opposed to FEATURES.
To define benefits effectively, you also need to develop the USP (Unique Selling
Proposition) for your new project.

The Body contains further explanation and background about your product that are
relevant to this news release.

Boilerplate is generally a concise "about" section, with more information on the
company or individual issuing the release.

After the boilerplate you MUST include the Close symbol, “XXX”, without
the quotation marks. This is simply an accepted convention but you must use
it or face the trash.

After the Close symbol comes Media Contact Information which may be the same as in
the Contact section at the top of the release. It could also contain separate
public relations information.

Here are some ideas about what to include in your release:

Always include any unusual or unique element that makes the release newsworthy.
You are trying to supply information for a story so you want to tell about something
different from all other information out there.

Look for ways to connect your information to holidays or special events because these
times will tend to lend more exposure and interest for your release.

Try to include human interest elements in your release as well as awards and disagreements
or conflicts that tend to separate your promotion from all the others out there
competing for attention.

Your release should be built around short, simple sentences and paragraphs. If possible
limit your document to 300 words and one page. Be sure it does not sound like
sales or marketing; you want to make it news that is deemed worthy of a story,
interview, or prospect’s action.

Why do you need to use a press release?

Sales don’t happen on the Internet unless potential customers visit your Website.
That means they need to learn about it, click on a link, and visit your site.
A press release can be easily submitted all over the Web in ways we will discuss
below. Remember that is this is a wonderful vehicle for broadcasting information
about your latest site or products to enough places where people will see it
and act to your advantage.

Where can you get a press release?

You will need to write it yourself—not too difficult if you follow the suggested
format above—or you can hire a copywriter to do it for you. There are
many of these on the Internet and you may even find one living near you. In
either case you will have to provide the necessary information. You will need
to separate the real benefits of your company from feature hype and promotional
sales information. The idea with press releases is always to present a news
story of real interest to your readers or viewers rather than just marketing
copy.

Don’t forget that prospects and reporters are very much alike with regard to press
releases. They don’t care anything about helping you; they can hardly
help themselves. They are sick of being worried all day every day by public
relations people. All they want is for you to offer something different they
can use to benefit themselves. All your copy should be written with these things
in mind. So give them a really good story.

Now we have arrived at how to use your press release.

Remember the reason you developed your release was to get customers to your Website or
store location, if you have one. Most of you use the Internet almost entirely,
and you should consider it as part of your marketing plan. This makes it necessary
to do what you can to optimize it for search engines (SEO). To do this, always
include keywords from your Website and appropriate links. You do two things
here: people are more likely to find you during a Web search, and your search
rankings will tend to be higher.

You can find many sites that will broadcast your release all over cyberspace; many
of them are free. Find them by using an advanced Google search here and enter
“free press releases” without the quotation marks. Below are a few
I picked; all of them have an Alexa rating below 100,000. If you need more,
you can certainly find them. Some of these require registration, but it’s
free, so go ahead and use them:

ClickPress
is ranked 75, 852 by Alexa. This Website maintains a searchable database available
to media sources worldwide. They have several inexpensive programs that physically
distribute your releases.

Free-Press-Release.com
is ranked 19,834 by Alexa. They claim being the Number 1 press release distribution
service since 2003. Additional distribution services are available for a fee.

I-Newswire.com
is ranked 56,926 by Alexa. This company has strict policies against press release
spam, which means releases that are no better than sales letters. They also
have a Featured Release program and other extra services for a fee.

PRLeap
is ranked 21,077 by Alexa. The company says over 24,000 businesses use their
services. They provide RSS services as well as normal release distribution.
Other services with higher placement are available for a small price starting
at about $10.

Pressbox
(UK based) is ranked 51,637 by Alexa. Based in London, this service offers a
searchable database to many journalists and public relations groups.

PRLog
is ranked 47,346 by Alexa. This site serves over 40,000 RSS feeds and all its
services are free.

Creatinga press releases is not such a formidable task, and just about anyone should
be able to follow the instructions here to get their message out. If your releases
are successful, you will get a lot more traffic to whatever you are trying to
promote. Remember, the word “promote” is not exactly correct because
it implies a sales message. Never use such a message in your release; you want
to provide input for a popular news story. Try a few of these and see what happens.

---

Yank is a home-based entrepreneur and freelance business writer living in Hurricane
Alley, North Carolina, USA. His Website is http://www.alternate-choice.com
and you may contact Yank at mailto:newideas@alternate-choice.com.

 

How to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

By Nelson Tan,

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket
science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here
to tell you--the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking
for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your
business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites
through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing
your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers
to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your
page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed
to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure
out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look
at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely
see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the
title bar on your home page.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that
appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings,
the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords
or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access.
Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important
keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings
of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more
than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next
to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines
generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating
graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords--the
words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your
site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your
design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve
a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search
engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML
and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight
a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will
not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster
to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine
rankings.

Next we come to what is called metatags. I know this sounds like something out of
science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that
metatags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only
have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search
engine will use metatags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with metatags, you must access the code. To
do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select
"source". This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code
that created the page. If there are metatags, they usually appear near the top
of the window. For example, a metatag would read: meta name="keywords"
content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to
put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little
boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely
important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use
link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality
of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine,
the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In
the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites
that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link
popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and
requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires
checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking
to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it
also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet Marketing
campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try
taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your
rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing.
Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers
will be directed your way.http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/197819/nelson_tan.html

Four Ways, How to improve your marketing skill

By Erny Setyawati

Many successful home based businesses got started by people surfing the Internet,
just like you are doing now.

As you may know, Internet success stories had changed some one all of the world
mindset who takes business on line activity

Ah, technology! Between computers, mobile phones, pagers, fax machines, and
Internet, people just like you are running their entire business from home on
a computer. And when they travel, they take their office with them thanks to
the laptop computer.

When a business is so mobile it doesn't matter where you are, they'll probably start
calling it a 'mobile-based business' instead of 'home based business.

For most, this kind of freedom is priceless. Now, all depends of you, will you
take these opportunities? Selling on the net! It is not so simple that we imagine.
You should have your own website; this is primary capital because Web sites
exist for essentially two purposes. The first is to provide information. The
second is to sell. If your purpose for being online is to sell products or services,
but you don't have tons of sales experience to fall back on, this article is
for you! Many of Internet Marketers are failed to sell their product and gained
leads.

If at all you are interested in making more sales and increasing profits from
your online business, do yourself a huge favor..., you should follow these advices.

1. You should contact enough people with your offers.

They have to be convinced in order to buy. Make sure your words include the
FACTS they need to make a logical decision. Prospects buy on emotional impulse
but if they can't defend their purchase with logic you'll lose the sale.

2. You should have a newsletter or mailing list of your own.

Start an ezine for your web site. When people read each issue they'll be reminded
to revisit your web site. They'll see your product ad more than just once which
will increase your orders.

3. You should have enough leads / prospects for your business.

Promoting your business and selling product and services, leads / prospect is
an important role to have. There are many ways to gain many leads , by placing
advertisement in Ezine or banner exchange. However, many new ezines offers for
placing advertisement in low cost and free ad.

4. Follow up your lead / prospects.

Give them motivation and advice to follow your guidance. Generally give advertisement
of your new product and service and converting enough prospects into paying
customers.

Today, there are many businesses on line offers special software how to manage
your leads / prospects, so less time doing your daily chores, and less time
building your business.

---

Erny Setyawati is the Web Master of http://www.baliglobalmarket.com and the Publisher / Editor
of Bali Global Market Ezine. The Newsletter is full freebies, articles and free
advertisement for member. You are tired of spending money for advertisement
and need responsive subscribers. Join us today and let's me spread your product
and services to our subscribers. Let's visit free at: http://www.baliglobalmarket.com

She is also Successful Internet Marketer and Team Leader, let’s visit
and sign up for her tutorial free, http://www.tinyurl.com/9jogf