Internet Marketing Blog

Turning Wealth Affiliate Websites Into Cashflow

Archive for April, 2008

How Open Minded Are You?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

If there is one thing that’s true about internet marketing, it’s the fact that there are more opportunities out there than you could shake a stick at. It’s probably not surprising then that after a while you can feel a bit jaded and start to become a little doubting of all the new opportunities that come along. They say there’s nothing new under the sun – but is there really anything new in internet marketing?

It can certainly be tricky to sort the wheat from the chaff, but it’s worth keeping an open mind because if you don’t you could miss out on something that might change your own internet marketing business for the better. You should particularly sit up and take notice when you see any e-book, product, software item or anything else that concerns a subject with which you are interested (assuming your business is based around a specific theme or topic that is). It could become a worthwhile addition to your internet marketing venture.

The point is that it’s very easy to become complacent

What we should all be doing is taking the time to carefully evaluate anything which seems to fit well with our own business objectives, to see whether it could be something our current customers may be interested in as well.

It’s understandable to become very critical of anything new – hardly even giving it a second glance on occasion – but if we let ourselves become too cynical we risk missing out on some of the biggest and best internet marketing products we might ever be able to lay our hands on.

So ask yourself, how open minded are you really?

Not quite enough perhaps? Even if you are successful at the moment, that doesn’t exclude you from the topic. After all, if you’re successful you either stay that way, or you don’t.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Are Your Free Articles Worth Reading?

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Drive traffic towards your website with free articlesFree articles are a great way to promote your business. Not only do they drive traffic towards your website or affiliate products, they also help to raise your own profile in the internet community. If you write and distribute free articles over a period of time, faithfully and continually, you’ll even become known as something of an expert.


What could be better?

Of course you are not guaranteed to get such a rousing response to your writing; it is up to you to make sure people view it in a positive light. To that end you need to be certain that your free articles contain useful, insightful or revealing information – and ideally all three.

The best way to do this is to start with a plan in mind. Instead of just writing the first thing that comes into your head, try asking yourself this question, ‘How will this piece help the reader, encourage them to maybe read some more of my stuff, and hopefully click through to my website as well?’

A little time spent planning is worth it when you get better results. Ideally everything you write should have a purpose, a reason for being written in the first place. Of course you will want to generate traffic and attract the attention of new customers, but you need to ensure that you have something worthwhile to offer them when they come.

In this sense you are better off writing half a dozen free articles of excellent quality than you are writing a dozen, where the only thing you are really worried about is how many keywords you have put in them. Why not give real value and show people that you know what you’re talking about as well?

If you manage to do this you’ll enjoy far more visits to your website as a result.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Read and Learn

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Don't get too wrapped up in your online marketingDo you ever get so wrapped up in your own business and online marketing efforts that you forget to look around you to see what’s going on elsewhere? It’s easily done, but it can harm your business if you don’t stay in touch with what everyone else is doing. That’s why it pays to stop and smell the roses once in a while.

Take time out from planning your next marketing campaign and have a look round the internet for a while. Let one click lead to another, one site lead to another and one source of information to yet another. You’ll learn from what you are reading and digesting; different ways of doing things might occur to you that are working for other people already.

The internet is never the same two days running

It’s great to stake out your own corner of cyberspace, but don’t ignore what everyone else’s little corner is like in the process. You might just be missing a trick somewhere.

Look out for what other people are recommending, whether it’s a product, a service or a way of doing something. It all goes towards building your knowledge and your experience of doing business online, and it can build your sales and visitors to a more healthy level as well.

You’ll also find you’ll be more aware of new developments in various different areas, and you can easily come across a new ezine that might be worth subscribing to. All the new knowledge you’re gaining will come in handy at some point, whether it’s to help you create a new product or website, or decide which affiliate scheme to sign up for.

So allocate some time to checking out what your competition is doing, and make notes of any good sites you come across. You’ll be surprised how much you can find out when you’re sitting back with a cup of coffee doing ‘nothing’.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Not Getting The Income You Want?

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Who is? We could all earn more if we really put our minds to it. But if you started out in internet marketing to make a decent enough amount of cash to enable you to quit your day job, then it’s understandably frustrating when it doesn’t pour in as quickly as you’d hoped. This is when you need a plan of action if you want things to change – and it starts by looking at what you’re doing now.

First off, how many income sources do you have? You’ll get the best results online if you have plenty more than just one. Set up a website, set up a blog, monetize them both and link one to the other to drive traffic in between them.

How many affiliate schemes are you a member of?

Are you actively promoting them all, or do most of them get lost in the shuffle? It helps if you choose a number of affiliate schemes in the same area of interest, as it increases the chance of people seeing more than one product that they’d like to buy. If you promote them all on one website and provide plenty of extra information for them to use as well, then you’re giving them more reason to revisit your site and buy more in the future.

You also need to be devoting a reasonable amount of time to your endeavours if you want to get up and running quickly. You can’t expect to get started on ten minutes a day and have hundreds of dollars pouring in a couple of weeks later.

Your time will be rewarded later on though, so don’t become disheartened if you don’t see results straightaway. The best way to boost your income is to figure out what you really want to achieve and then concentrate on one thing at a time to see better results – and more money.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Where Does Your Time Go?

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Spend your internet marketing time wiselyIf you know the answer to that one, then you’re an exceptionally well organised internet marketer.If like the rest of us you’re struggling to find an answer, then it’s time to figure out how much of the time you devote to your internet marketing activities is actually well spent. The best way to get your answer is to keep a blow by blow timetable for the next couple of weeks. Write it all down – from the moment you sit down at your computer to the moment you switch it off again. What sites do you visit and why? How long do you spend checking your emails? How much time do you devote to promoting your products and/or services? How much time do you spend looking for new products to add to your current range?

Income From Internet Activities

You might be surprised – and shocked – by the amount of time you actually spend working towards your goal of building a substantial income from your internet activities. Chances are it’s much less than you think.

The first step towards becoming more efficient is to become more aware of how you are spending your time. Make a list of the activities you do that really move you towards a bigger income from selling products and services online, and try and spend the majority of your time on those activities. The more things you can automate the better. If you use an autoresponder, block out an afternoon each week to write four emails that can go out weekly for the next month, for example. They can then be loaded onto your autoresponder in advance and sent out at weekly intervals.

You might be like me and tend to overestimate how much time it takes you to do certain jobs; over time you will be able to plan your timetable much more efficiently as you get the hang of how you work. Just be sure to use the information you glean from your efforts to structure your days more profitably.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Remember experimenting can lead to successWhen was the last time you did anything different in your internet marketing life? When did you last think, ‘Hey, let’s try an experiment to see if that idea I thought of last week would actually bring in more sales.’ When was the last time you added a different way of advertising to your usual promotional mix? We tend to get stuck in a rut so easily that we barely notice it’s happened until long after the event itself. But staying fresh is half the battle in making sure we can earn the biggest amounts from our internet marketing efforts.

The problem isn’t even so much that we get stuck in that rut, it’s that we can’t see that we’ve stopped while everything else is still moving. In short, it’s easy to get left behind… and when we finally realise we’re lingering in other people’s dust, it takes some time to even catch up again, let alone overtake them.

The World Of Internet Marketing

I make a point of spending a few moments every day or so just surfing any interesting sites that are related to my work. I’m probably not much different to you - I subscribe to a few good email newsletters that are related to the world of internet marketing, in the hope that I’ll learn a thing or two every now and again that I can apply to my own business.

Make sure you keep that fresh input of ideas and information coming in – it helps to prevent ‘rut’ syndrome and keeps your brain active. That in itself should give you some ideas to experiment with, but always make sure you continue to push the boundaries of what you are doing, and try new methods and ideas of making a little more (or a lot more) cash from your efforts.

Even if you can only come up with one new idea every day, and only one of those ideas works each week, that’s fifty two new ideas every year that you can set to work to improve what you’re doing and earn more money from.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Giving Away Ebooks

Friday, April 18th, 2008

There is no better way to attract the attention of new, existing and potential customers than by giving away some freebies. Ebooks are ideal for this purpose, as they can be worth their weight in gold if the information contained in them can benefit the reader in some way. They are also easy to send and can be written in a reasonably short space of time.

But they can benefit you in more ways than one too

If you’ve seen those marketers who are forever writing e-books and giving them all away for nothing, you would be forgiven for thinking they must be nuts. After all, they’re not earning a red cent on them are they?

Well… not directly, no.

But by encouraging the world and his wife to pass on that same e-book to anyone they want to, they are ensuring that their name and website address is passed along too. Not to mention any other affiliate links that might be in the text.

In this sense, giving away e-books for nothing can be one of the most effective forms of advertising there is – and you should think seriously about joining the ranks of marketers who are already doing it.

The e-books don’t need to be too long, but they do need to contain useful information. If they don’t say something different, or benefit the people reading them, then there is really no incentive to pass it along to share that information with others.

With time and practice you’ll be able to create freebies in no time, and pass them on to an ever increasing network of contacts that will be happy to pass them along to everyone they know as well.

Why pay for advertising when many of the free methods available – just like this one – work just as well, if not better, and keep working for months on end?

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

How Many Goals Do You Have?

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Every successful person in life has goals. That holds true for all walks of life – not just internet marketing. But internet marketing is such a broad area to get involved in that goals are almost a necessity to keep you going in the right direction.

Let’s face it

There is so much to see and do online, you could come up with a thousand goals and still not scratch the surface of everything you’d like to achieve in your business.

So we need to find a way to actually limit the number of active goals we have at any one time. If we don’t we are liable to get so bogged down trying to keep up with them all, we risk not achieving anything.

The number you should choose depends on how big each goal actually is. After all, if one of your goals is to create and develop your own website next year, that’s a pretty big goal to have. By the time you break it down into several achievable bite sized parts it will be enough to keep you going for quite some time. Anything else would be a distraction.

But if your main goal is to write a couple of promotional articles each week to raise awareness of your business, that won’t take too much time to achieve. It’s a case of keeping up the effort. So you’d benefit from having one or two more goals in this situation.

In short you need to consider what each goal or ambition involves, so that you can develop a plan of action to achieve it. By doing this you will ensure that you don’t have unrealistic expectations, which can only lead to disappointment.

So don’t make the mistake of assuming that more goals are better than just one or two – it really is size that matters in this case.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Have You Thought About Branching Out?

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Once your online business starts to develop, you’ll naturally stick with the things that are working and ditch those that aren’t. After a while you’ll find you have created an online business that is uniquely yours. Congratulations are certainly in order for getting to this milestone, but where should you go now?

The internet is an ever changing place

It’s rarely the same from one minute to the next, as entrepreneurs and webmasters discover and try out new ideas for promoting their wares and reaching more customers as a result.

That’s why anyone who stays the same automatically gets left behind.

You should never settle when your livelihood is dependent on running a successful online business. What’s more, the act of continually exploring and trying out new ideas for earning money online keeps you fresh and alert, and encourages new income streams and developments.

Branching out from your current ventures may seem a little nerve wracking, but it shouldn’t jeopardise what you already do. Look on it simply as a way to explore other possibilities for developing your business in new directions.

Some internet marketers run different websites on completely different subjects, and keep the two apart. Others develop different areas of the same subject and link them all together to strengthen the overall effect.

There is no right or wrong way to run an internet business, provided it is honest, trustworthy, doesn’t break the law and makes money. That’s a pretty large area within which to operate, and it would be a real shame if you decided you weren’t going to branch out in some way.

Even if you don’t feel like now is the time, it’s worth starting to consider ways in which you might like to develop your business in the weeks and months to come.

Once you start thinking along these lines you’ll find it hard to stop.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

New Year, New Business?

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

Living a new lifestyle with a new businessWhen a New Year arrives it’s tempting to chuck out everything in your life that you feel no longer serves you, in order to upgrade to a better lifestyle. But how much of that process is a kneejerk reaction, and how much is actually warranted?

Internet marketing is exactly the same.

If a particular program isn’t performing well and isn’t bringing in those affiliate commissions, you would be forgiven for wanting to get rid of it in favour of trying something else.

But that shouldn’t be the first thing you do. It’s worth holding fire – at least temporarily – to look at the individual situation in more depth, just in case there is another reason for that particular program’s lack of results.

How have you been promoting it, for example? If you haven’t been giving it as much attention as you should have been, then it’s not the right time to get rid of it. While some affiliates seem to be able to make mega sales within hours of testing out a new program, not everyone can make headway so quickly.

How long has it been part of your armoury?

It’s tempting to get rid of everything that isn’t working, but you need to know the reason for it first. If you don’t, and the reason turns out to be something you are doing wrong (or not doing at all) then the pattern will continue to repeat itself throughout all the new programs and businesses you try.

Keep a record of how you promote each affiliate program – where you promote it, what the results are and what kind of return it is bringing you.

Don’t let the prospect of a New Year get rid of things which may just need an extra push from you. The New Year should be a time to reflect and improve – but not necessarily a time to start new businesses when the old one is just as good.

Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008