2012 – Can You Still Succeed Teaching Internet Marketing?

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Alan

Well, here we are, another year has just begun. I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions, but have you made any promises to yourself about what you intend to achieve this year? Did you do as well as you wanted to last year? If not then I suggest that you really decide that you are going to make a success of this IM thing this year – promise me?

Ok, can you actually still make a good living by teaching Online in the Internet marketing niche itself? This seems to be a perennial debate in the IM world.

Now the naysayers will come up with things like, it’s a very crowded niche with lots of competition, lots of products already out there and that you’ll find it very hard to compete against the main players who are already out there with well-established reputations.

Those on the other side of the fence will say that because it’s a huge niche there’s plenty of room for many more players.

Now, I would also add to the above that some of the big players have gotten pretty complacent, they’ve already made lots of money and they have become lazy and don’t try too hard anymore. On that basis, you might not find it too hard to get a foothold in this space.

Most of the big names in the Internet marketing space might still offer coaching programs but lot’s of people who’ve signed up for these have ended up disappointed when they find out that it’s actually going to be some junior staffer who’s going to be running the coaching calls they’ve signed up for and not the big name ‘guru’ they were expecting.

Seems to me that there’s some space opening up here. It doesn’t look to me like there’s very much competition here at all right now – at least not from one way of looking at it.

Specifically, there’s a gap in the market for people who are prepared to work with the complete beginner who knows that he wants to start a business on the Internet but really hasn’t got much of a clue even as far as the basics go.

And that, my friends, is exactly where your opportunities lie.

Why can’t YOU become the go to person in the IM niche for the beginners (and more and more of them are coming online with each passing day). Why can’t you be the one that coaches them to success?

What’s that? What can you possibly teach someone about marketing online when you’re not much more than a beginner yourself?

All you actually need to know is a little more than the person you’re training – if you know more than they know and the more you know is what they want to know then there’s no reason you can’t teach them.

In simple terms, you just need to stay one step ahead of the person you’re teaching to be in a position to offer them ongoing coaching.

So, how are you going to get this Internet business of yours going in 2012? Are you going to go into some obscure niche with hardly any competition – but only a few customers too? You’ll likely find it very hard to make money in a niche like that.

I think you’ll likely be much better off going into the IM niche where there are thousands of new prospects coming online daily who don’t know who the supposed experts are.

You can position yourself as an expert, create a few products to sell, and those newbies will soon start seeing you as an expert because that’s what you’ll look like to them.

If you’re prepared to work with people personally, offering coaching at reasonable prices, I don’t think you’ll have a problem finding customers.

Just think about it. If you want to earn a decent living online, even become rich then I think if you can position yourself as an internet marketing expert by becoming well-versed in at least one of the sub-niches of IM, you have a very good chance.

The demand is massive and it’s not too difficult to learn enough to teach others.

I think you should go for it.

 

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Content Marketing In 2012 And Beyond

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Alan
As we come towards the end of 2011 I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the best ways to take my Internet marketing business in general and my niche sites in particular forward into 2012 and beyond.

I’ve been paying particular attention to the ‘beyond’ in the sense of building a business for the long term. I certainly believe that everyone should be focusing on the long term business models rather than looking to make a quick buck short term using strategies that you just know are not going to have much of a shelf life. I really think that it’s a lot of wasted effort to be putting your focus on the current ‘big thing’ knowing only too well that this will fizzle and die leaving you searching for the ‘next big thing’ to focus on and repeat the process over and over again.

The changes that Google has made to the way it ranks Websites this year have gone over and above mere algorithm changes that are happening all the time. There has been a definite spelling out by Google of its philosophy in terms of how it sees it best to serve up Websites in its search results that will be genuinely useful to its users in terms what they have asked for by putting in their keywords in the search box.

The philosophy that Google has laid out for all to see this year perhaps more clearly than ever is really nothing but commonsense when viewed in the cold light of day. Google has basically simply said that to best serve it’s customers it needs to be providing only listings of quality Websites with genuinely useful information in it’s search results.

So, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you wish Google to list your Website prominently in the search results for its respective keywords then that Website had better be a quality Website.

Which brings me to where I believe you should be focusing in your Website building going forward. I believe you should be concentrating on building what are generally termed ‘authority’ sites. These are sites that tend to be quite large with lots of quality content i.e. genuinely useful articles that a real human being would learn something from.

The site talked about above is the exact opposite of the sites that I don’t see faring anything like as well going forward that is the simple, focused on one keyword, small number of pages (or even single page) sites that are generally built to earn money solely from Adsense or to promote one affiliate program or one item.

The days of building hundreds or even thousands of Websites with the aim of earning 50c to $1 per day from each of them are numbered as far as I can see so I think your focus going forward should be to build a few, high quality sites preferably in areas where you have an interest (because you’re going to have to come up with a lot of content for them and devote a lot of work to them – which is clearly going to be easier if you have a genuine interest in the subject matter) and really build these sites out by providing a lot of great quality content for them and preferably build a list in the niche and develop your own products of an informational kind (text/audio/video) to sell to your customers and have several different monetization streams on them e.g. contextual advertising, selling products (informational or physical) that are your own or related affiliate products i.e. where the aim is to build a long-term business around the niches you choose to focus on.

I’m currently working on an information product that will be designed for people who have a multitude of interests and find that a conventional job or a single business don’t entirely fulfil them. I will be suggesting this product that they come up with their top 4 to 6 areas of interest and build a substantial Internet business around each of these by developing quality sites and quality products in these markets. I strongly suggest that this is the business model that you follow going forward for your IM endeavors.

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The Best Internet Marketing Business Model

Posted on July 24, 2011 by Alan

I’ve been at this Internet marketing game for quite a few years now (12 to be precise). So I’ve tried quite a few ways of marketing on the Internet. I’ve found ways that work and ways that don’t – and ways that work better than others.

I’m consistently asked what I believe is the best way to build an income-producing business on the Internet. The answer I give is not necessarily the easiest way to start making money on the Internet, but it is the one that’s consistently stood the test of time and is, in my opinion, the very best business model if you want to build a serious longterm income Online.

The business model that I recommend is to create your own information products and sell them to your own list of customers.

Ok, so you have to work out a few things first like what niche you’re going to go into (I suggest that you stick to the big ones – Internet marketing, weight loss, dating and relationships, health, hobbies and interests with a fanatical following).

You’ll need a freebie to offer people via a squeeze page and an email autoresponder series to build rapport with your list of subscribers and also to sell them your products from.

You should concentrate on creating products that your subscribers have already told you they want to buy – yes, it can be as simple as asking them. You can also get some good quality product ideas from reading the discussion threads in forums where your target market gathers.

In this model you direct all of your traffic to your squeeze page – this keeps it simple, you’re not directing your efforts into too many different directions. The best way of generating traffic for this particular strategy is still article marketing – this is a great medium for positioning yourself as an expert in your niche and starting to build the kind of rapport with people that is crucial to your success.

You then just need to keep working this system and adding new products – backend products that increase in price i.e. by offering some high end coaching, for example.

Obviously, there are some more details it would be useful to have to flesh out the bones laid out above and I will be giving you more information on all aspects of this business model in future blog posts, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, to give yourself a good basic grounding in several different important aspects of IM, check out my free library of ebooks here:

http://www.alanallport.org

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The Ultimate Internet Marketing Secret

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Alan

What is the ultimate Internet Marketing Secret? Now, I know I’m going to disappoint some of you, but I have to tell you that there are no Internet marketing secrets. There are just things that you don’t know about Internet marketing.

But they are all in plain sight (if you know where to look), they are not secrets.

Of course, plenty of people want to convince you that there are IM secrets – mainly because they want to convince you that without these ‘secrets’, you’ll never make any money Online. And guess what? They can give you these secrets – for a price of course!

Don’t get taken in by this. These ‘secrets’, such as they are, will tend to be ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, short-lived techniques that you can put a lot of work and effort into and then find this work can be wasted as they cease to work anymore. So I suggest that you stay away from ‘secrets’ and stick to the proven, tried and tested, stood the test of time methods to build a business with a future.

So, how do I suggest that you build an Internet business that’s going to stand the test of time? I suggest you do it by doing what’s actually worked best for me.

And that is:

Create your own information products, build an email list to sell them to and promote them by article marketing and blogging. You can then supplement your income by promoting related affiliate products to your list too.

Having done this in various niches myself I’m now starting to put my focus into the Internet marketing niche by developing my own IM training products.

So if you would like to build an Internet business using the above business model then stick around because I will be revealing all in due course.

As a starter you should check out the FREE Internet marketing library I make available by clicking here, ‘cos that’s the kinda guy I am!

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Deceptive Email Subject Lines Leave A Bad Taste

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Alan

Now I know we’re all marketers and we obviously are schooled in a few psychological tactics to get people to open our emails – we aren’t going to sell very much if we can’t even get people to read our emails, after all.

But I really don’t like some of the tactics I’m seeing more of in recent times. You know the ones:

Email subject lines like:

‘You’ve made a sale’
‘Here’s your $50 commission’

And from addresses like ‘support@somedomain.com’

I’m also seeing subject lines giving me a login and password for sites I’ve never signed up for.

Obviously the reason for all of this is that marketers know that it’s getting harder to get people to open emails and they’re trying to pull every trick in the book to get you to open theirs.

But that’s just the problem – they’re tricks and I don’t like to feel that I’ve been tricked.

So when I do open them and find out I’ve been duped, how likely do you think it is that I’m going to respond positively to the message?

In fact I’m usually searching for the unsubscribe link pretty damn quick – and I don’t feel I’d be alone in that.

If you’re a marketer I don’t think you’re going to be doing yourself any favors by indulging in these borderline unethical email tactics.

If you want to get a good grounding in the basic principles of Internet marketing download your FREE IM library here.

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Do You Still Believe Those ‘One Click’ Marketing Software Promises?

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Alan

I’m sure everyone has received those emails by now – the ones that seem to be coming thick and fast these days…. Offering you the prospect of a bajillion dollars just from clicking one button.

Right, we all know how likely that is, huh? But the fact is that this marketing tactic of holding out the prospect of easy riches must work or these sleazy marketers wouldn’t continue sending those emails right?

I guess it’s a fact that a significant portion of the human population falls into the categories of desperate and greedy – because surely those are the two categories of people who would respond to these clearly hyped up and cloud cuckoo land offers.

If you’re inclined to be taken in by this sort of stuff I guess the best advice I could give you would be that old stand by: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – and I’d be inclined to substitute ‘definitely’ for ‘probably’ in that statement.

Let’s get real, all of us with our sensible heads on would dismiss the claims in these emails and the sales pages they point to as complete and utter rubbish.

Now, automation does have its place. It’s definitely not a bad idea to try to find software that can automate some of the more mundane and repetitive marketing tasks that we all have to deal with in our Online businesses. Although, having said that, I’m more and more trying to simplify my business and get back to basics with it and do most of the jobs, including the marketing ones, by hand.

I’m much more likely these days to use outsourcers rather than software for a lot of the grunt work.

My advice to you is that no matter how desperate you are to get an Internet marketing business off the ground and into profit as quickly as possible, do not get taken in by the hollow promises of instant riches from push button software. If you do, the only people likely to get rich are the peddlars of this rubbish.

Build a business using tried and tested longterm tactics and you won’t go far wrong.

To get a good grounding in the basics of Internet marketing, check out the free Internet marketing library available by clicking this link.

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Internet Marketing – Keep It Simple

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Alan

Most people seem to want to over-complicate things. Simple just seems too… well simple I guess.

But is complicated really the way to go? I don’t think so. I’ve always enjoyed simple Web pages. Web pages that are minimalistic in style and just give me the information that I require without blinding me with a lot of over the top graphics that get in the way – and certainly distract me.

So, I’ve decided, as a marketing test, I’m going to be keeping it minimalistic and simple for my next squeeze pages and sales pages.

And the ebooks I’m putting together are definitely going to be following the same principles too. I’m just going to be designing them to impart the information I want – nothing fancy – they’re going to look pretty plain.

That’s how I like it, and I hope my customers will like it too – we’ll see.

Life’s complicated enough, I don’t want my Internet marketing stuff to be complicated too. I want to be able to do as much as I want to myself without having to learn a lot more complicated formatting and graphics stuff.

It feels quite liberating right now to have gotten that off my chest – I’ll stick to it for the foreseeable future and report back in due course with details of the success or otherwise of the strategy.

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Start Your Internet Marketing Career Properly

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Alan

There are a huge number of different ways to start an Internet marketing business. A lot of different ways are discussed on this very blog.

One of the very best pieces of advice I could give anyone who is attempting to create a fulltime living Online is to pick a way of doing business Online that resonates with them in some way and then follow this way to the exclusion of anything else – at least until you’ve proved one way or another whether it’s going to work for you and allow you to reach the income targets you’ve set.

If you’re really serious about getting a fulltime income together from your Internet marketing endeavours then I would strongly suggest that listbuilding should be a primary focus of what you do.

Now, I know that if you’ve been Online for any length of time, and have listened to the advice from a number of different marketers, then that piece of advice is not going to have been unique – you will have heard it many times before. But that in itself should tell you something – that it’s sound advice that you would be well to heed.

So, with that in mind, the very best thing that you can do is set up a squeeze page offering a freebie of some description that would be of interest to your target market – an ebook, email, audio or video course etc. in exchange for a name and email address.

The sole focus of your marketing efforts should then be to drive traffic to that squeeze page with the aim of building your email list as big as you can.

Your sales funnel would then consist of an email series that you build up over time that focuses on providing good information for your subscribers along with a few sales message selling your own products or affiliate products interspersed with them.

That email list that you build will become the central hub through which you communicate with your customers. As time goes on you can certainly add a Website/blog into the mix – a good idea is to put your site/blog in a folder ‘behind’ your squeeze page so that your squeeze page is effectively the home or index page of your Website with your blog or html Website providing some inner page ‘substance’ so that, over time, you can get your site indexed in the search engines and not just be a one page site that you’ll find hard to get indexed.

To set up this type of sales funnel type business Online you’ll need a domain name, some basic hosting and an autoresponder account. All of this is very cheap compared to a traditional offline business but most definitely has the potential to bring in a substantial fulltime income if you work at it diligently and choose a big enough market to work in.

Don’t over analyze, just learn enough to get this system started, put something up Online as quickly as you can and learn the rest as you go.

To give you a good grounding in the basics of Internet marketing, check out my free ebook library by clicking here.

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Is Affiliate Marketing The Ideal Business Model?

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Alan

First of all, a definition. Just in case you don’t know, affiliate marketing is the selling of other people’s products for a commission on the sale price.

The best part about this for the affiliate is that they have no order fulfilment to handle and no customer service issues either – they are all handled by the merchant. Your job is to send traffic to the merchant’s sales page.

But, despite what some people might say, earning money from affiliate marketing is not necessarily easy.

If you want to ptofit from it, you have to treat affiliate marketing as a real business with its own set of unique techniques. So, if you’ve never tried this form of marketing before, you’ve got some stuff to learn.

It’s also a fact that irrespective of the exact market sector you go after, you’re going to have a lot of competition from other affiliate marketers.

If you intend to be successful with affiliate marketing you must promise yourself from the outset that you are in it for the longterm and that you’ll stick at it no matter what challenges you face.

If you go into it with the belief that this is some sort of ‘get rich quick’ scheme, then you are really setting yourself up for a fall.

As with any business, you’re going to have to put in a lot of time and effort before seeing any really tangible financial rewards.

Learn as much as you can right from the outset and be prepared to continue that learning right the way through your Internet marketing career – things change fast Online and you’re going to have to keep up to speed.

You need to work out whether you’re trying to earn a fulltime living from your affiliate marketing activities, or whether you’re just looking for a supplement to your income from other sources. Whichever, it’s not going to happen overnight.

You have to be determined and aware of the challenges so that you won’t be discouraged when results don’t come instantly.

So, is it all going to be worth it? Well, I can tell you that many people have indeed managed to make a very decent income thank you very much from affiliate marketing. They’ve managed to kick their boring jobs into touch and earn the kind of income that dwarfs even CEO-level salaries. There is absolutely no reason why you can’t join them.

To become a successful affiliate marketer there really is nothing you have to learn that any averagely intelligent human being can’t.

If you keep it real and work diligently and intelligently towards your goal, there really isn’t any good reason that you can’t make a success of it.

See these free internet marketing ebooks for the best starting information to get your new career off on the right footing.

 

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Google Algorithm Changes – What Does Farmer Mean To You?

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Alan

Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, if you inhabit the Internet marketing world (and I guess you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), you must’ve heard about the latest changes the Big G made to it’s search algorithm on February 24 2011.

There’ve been a ton of forum posts and Webmasters blogging about negative changes to the way their pages are ranking for their main bread and butter keywords.

So, has it been universally bad? No. If you read the follow-up forum postings and comments on relevant blogs you’ll see that there are lots of people stating that their rankings either hadn’t been noticeably affected, or had even seen improvements in their rankings.

The above seems to be clearly suggesting that there have been winners and losers in this latest Google shakeup. Now, although this particular change by Google seems to have been one of the more major ones, you have to remember that they are apt to be making these changes on a regular basis and will no doubt continue to do so – it’s just the nature of the beast. The Internet is a dynamic medium that’s always in a state of flux and Google has to reflect this to survive.

You have to think of this from Google’s perspective. They’ve worked very hard to get to be the dominant search engine that most of us go to by choice whenever we’re looking for information Online. But they can’t just sit back safe in the knowledge that it will always be so. It will only remain so if the general perception of Web surfers remains that Google does a better job than any of her competitors. Google is well aware that a new kid on the block could spring up to teal her crown at any time – heck, Google WAS that new kid on the block not so very long ago. I was on the Internet pre-Google. I can remember a time when AltaVista was my search engine of choice. When did I last use AltaVista? Can’t remember, but it was years ago. Google knows it has no divine right to always be no1 search engine. It has to continually work to keep giving its customers what they want, and only if it manages to do this will it retain those customers.

What do Google’s customers want? You can ask yourself that question. You use Google for your Internet searches, right? When you do a search it’s pretty obvious what you want – you want the most relevant search results to be presented to you at the top of the list of search results returned by Google in response to that search. So clearly all of the changes that Google makes in terms of which Web pages it ranks for specific Web searches and how high it ranks them is all designed to make them better and better at giving relevant and accurate results to their customers.

How often in the past have you searched for something specific using Google and been angry at the wasted time you’ve spent wading through spam pages that managed to get themselves ranked for keywords that those pages provided absolutely no useful information on whatsoever? I bet this has happened to you many times, it certainly has for me.

Now ask yourself whether the content you’ve been providing falls into this spam category. If it does and you’ve seen your rankings fall as a result of the latest Google update, can you see why a lot of Internet searchers would be glad?

If you’ve been relying upon PLR content that you’ve not made any attempt to rewrite to fill out your Websites then I think it’s a strategy that you’re going to have to rethink. If you’re relying on poorly spun, gobbledegook articles to get backlinks to your money pages, I also think you’re going to have to think again.

For me, this latest Google change does herald a move away from the kind of content that really offers no discernible value whatsoever to anybody, content that is purely designed to try to achieve Google rankings to make money with clicks on Adsense ads or affiliate links.

They may still be some way from achieving it, and it’s clearly very much still an ongoing battle (and always will be), but Google is simply trying to provide the most relevant, valuable, information to its Web search customers for the search queries they type in, So, in simple terms, if you put a piece of content out there on the Web that you know is a piece of garbage that would provide absolutely no value whatsoever to anybody consuming it, you really mustn’t expect Google to index it.

That last paragraph just about gives you my take on what you need to do to make sure that your Web properties and all of the content you put out there linking to them gets and keeps traction in the search engines. You should be checking all of your content and asking yourself the question – ‘Does this content provide valuable information to a Web surfer who’s looking for help and advice on the key phrase targeted by it?’ And if you answer no to that question I think you should think twice about posting it anywhere Online.

Look, we can’t stop these changes happening so it’s really no good bleating about them. We have to accept them and work with them.

Longterm, if the Web is to survive, it has to be a repository of good quality, valuable information so, if you want to be able to ride out all of these inevitable changes from Google without really having to think about them or worry about them too much, you really should focus on providing the very best quality information you possibly can in whatever niches you operate in and trust that that will never go out of fashion – because I don’t believe that it will.

And the very best thing that you can do to make sure that your entire business model cannot be taken down by Google, or any one single entity come to that, is build a list. You keep being told ‘the money is in the list’ don’t you? Think about that in this context and I’m sure you’ll begin to see the light, if you haven’t already. With a list you have more control over your own traffic and become less and less dependent on third party sources sending it to you. And that has to be safer in the long run.

If you want to read about what all the fuss is about from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, you can do so here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

For some intelligent commentary by Internet marketers giving you some more details and insights, check out these:

http://www.potpiegirl.com/2011/03/my-theory-on-the-google-algo-change/
http://www.insidenichebot.com/ninja/the-google-shift/
http://www.mikeliebner.com/search-engines/google-algorithm/

And if you want to see what all the fuss is about from people who’ve been negatively impacted, try this:

http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html

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