Internet Marketing Blog

As an Internet Marketer in the rapidly changing cyberspace landscape, you’ll want to continually evolve. Free information is everywhere! Ensure your continued progress by reading news in your niche and in online marketing as a whole. You need to be ready to be a sponge looking to sop up knowledge wherever you can so that you don’t become a dinosaur and miss the boat on new and great opportunities.

Places to Get Free Information

Blogs are free and often provide a wealth of information. Subscribe to blogs in your niche and get tips delivered to your email inbox. Look for gurus in the affiliate marketing world to follow. Many will offer a plethora of free information such as e-books.

Free e-books and reports are plentiful in the online marketing world. They’re often designed to get your e-mail address so that they can sell you something later of course, but that’s ok. You should read everything you can get your hands on pertaining to SEO, your own niche and to online marketing.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a great free tool that enable you to tell Google to email you whenever anything gets indexed that has your desired keywords in it. This is a great way to keep on top of something specific and have alerts delivered to your e-mail as they happen or in specified time periods.

Knowledge is equal to power in term of being a guru in your industry. Keeping up on industry news and trends will be vital for your continued and increased online success.

There are loads of reasons to blog and plenty of free blog options out there. Whether you choose to do a free blog or host your own or do a combination of the two is up to you. Today’s post explores the pros and cons of each option. I choose to do a combination of these things for my own purposes mostly because in my early online days, I didn’t realise the benefits of having my own blog on my own domain and didn’t realise just how inexpensive it could be to do it on my own and be able to have just what I wanted.

The pros of free blogs include that there are no costs and that they usually have an easy interface or template for you to use so you don’t have to be at all technical to figure out how to use them.

On the con side, you have no control and they can be very simple so they may not have all the functionality you’re looking for.

With a free blog, there may be some advertising that you cannot control. With a blog on your own domain, you have much more earning potential and power over the layout of the site.

How Much Does Having Your Own blog cost?

You can typically get a domain registered for $10 or less for a one year period and hosting is often less than $10 a month when you want a basic package that hosts a blog. Wordpress is the most popular and most versatile option and you can install it for free. Your own host might even have Wordpress built into your hosting control panel making it that much easier to get up and running quickly.

Benefits of Blogging

In terms of money making potential, blogs can definitely help you. Not only do they do great in search engines because of being continuously updated but they create viral marketing for you because people will link to you in their blogroll and on their site as well. Whether you’re planning to blog for profit or add a blog to your existing site to enhance search engine optimization, you can definitely benefit. If you’re not yet blogging or not yet using this to your full advantage, it’s definitely worth looking into.

You might not be aware of how powerful your signature in community forums can be for SEO, networking and promotion. Not only might they entice someone to visit your website if they click, but they’ll entice search engines as well.

When you sign up for membership to community forums, you generally have a specific amount of signature space that you can add to each forum posting. Some sites will have rules and regulations about number of links as well as how many posts you need to have before you’re allowed to utilise this feature. The great thing is that for every post you make, your signature attaches and forum posts do get indexed by search engines.

Writing a Great Forum Signature

Keyword anchoring can definitely help the SEO for your website or blog. For instance, if you sell computer parts, you might choose to link that word to your site in your signature. Not only will you get visits from interested people who find your posts interesting or who happen to need computer parts but if you get a high number of posts on that forum, each post with your signature link in it contributes to your site’s page rank and your search engine placement for keywords. Don’t write anything misleading in the signature but trying to write an eye-catching signature can help you get clicks.

Should I Change My Forum Signature Regularly?

Some who are looking for the forum signature merely to entice visitors would suggest changing your signature often but others would say that this isn’t as wise from an SEO standpoint because you could lose rankings for your old search terms as the forum may change the posts in archives to represent your new signature.

Whatever you choose to do, it’s worthwhile to know that networking and promoting yourself in community forums online can work for you in multiple ways.

There are a lot of social marketing tools out there for self-promotion purposes and many of them are free. There’s a balance between social networking and online play. Using tools like Twitter the right way could lead to great results.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking tool that you can use to tell the world what you’re doing in 140 characters or less. The reason it’s designed this way is for the mobile user who can receive status updates on their mobile device. You can use it online or through a tool like Twhirl that is installed on your desktop. You might think this is nothing more than a social tool instead of a social networking tool but Twitter can be quite helpful in getting you new subscribers and clients.

When to Use Twitter in Internet Marketing Efforts

You get the benefit of your own followers and anyone on the public timeline watching when you update your Twitter status. When you update your status with what you’re doing, you can insert a URL that shows people what you are doing. By writing an interesting headline and inserting your link, you can entice people to visit. The key to Twitter success is to be interesting, to get involved in discussions and to entice new followers. By doing so actively but productively, you can definitely reap the rewards of successful social marketing.

Social Marketing Pitfalls

The pitfalls of social marketing happen when you get so caught up in the social aspect that it sucks out your productivity. It’s important to set boundaries for yourself especially if you see yourself as wasting time socialising instead of working. It’s a fine balance between social marketing and just playing online so set limits for yourself so you can make the most of Twitter as a useful tool.

One of the biggest challenges there is for those new to internet marketing is determining where to focus their efforts. There are so many things you can do in your niche for profit potential that you might feel a bit like a headless chicken some days. Time management is crucial for success when you’re self-employed either full or part time.

While one of the benefits to being an entrepreneur is the ability to have a flexible schedule, you might find that being too flexible will result in lack of focus, which can translate to lack of results. It’s a great idea to make a schedule for yourself.

Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs

Not only can you use time management tricks like tabbed browsing to check all your sites and statistics but you can also benefit from using free online time management tools to remind you to do things. Google Calendar, for instance, can be set up to help you remember to do things hours, days or even months away from today.

Taking time to dabble in different new ventures might also be something you schedule in. For example, during a particular day of the week you might slot in a few hours to read news in your niche or visit and network in community forums. You might also dedicate a morning a week to building links through article marketing or commenting on relevant blogs.

Routine can definitely help you in your quest to increase your income and build an online presence. Finding balance might not seem like an easy task at first but you can learn to be more productive and organised if you put your mind to it.

Want to learn how tabbed browsing can make you more productive? For one, it can help you multitask and for two, it can help you remember to do things. When you get into internet marketing, you can suddenly find yourself spreading out so thin that you can lose track of what you need to do every day and what you need to keep tabs on. Here is a nice way that utilising tabs in Firefox or Internet Explorer can make your browser actually help you remember to do things.

Tracking Affiliate Marketing Progress

If you participate in several affiliate marketing programs, open them all one by one into a set of tabs. In Firefox, for instance, choose short cuts:

“Shift” + “Ctrl” + “D”.

Then when the pop-up window asks you to choose a name and a folder, you could set up a set of folders with an appropriate naming convention that help you. For example, you could set up something with your links for:

• Commission Junction
• Clickbank
• Linkshare
• PepperJam
• And whatever other affiliate program you work in.

Now, tomorrow when you decide you want to manually check your stats or get new links, instead of having to remember to manually check them all one at a time you can simply click on the appropriate folder in your bookmarks and tell your browser to open them all. In a nanosecond (or two) you’ll find a set of opened windows that take you exactly where you need to go. When you’re done you can simply close all tabs.

Blog Management

If you have several blogs and want to make sure you post every day, you can do the same thing. Open all your blog admin panels in a set of tabs and save them all. Then, when you’re ready to post in all your blogs or do maintenance such as add affiliate links or alter blogroll information, you can easily open every one of them all together.

Tips and tricks to help you maximise productivity are all around the net. Take advantage of them!

Page rank can be something of an obsession with internet marketers of all shapes and sizes. It’s easy to understand why, because the search engine ranking of your site will strongly influence how well you do in the results whenever someone looks up a keyword or phrase which links to your website.

How Important is my PR?

While it is important to keep an eye on it to see how well your site is performing, it shouldn’t turn into something you end up checking twice a day every day. Your search engine ranking changes over time (hopefully for the better) and it does so as a result of what you do to change and develop your site – not as a result of you watching it like you would watch a plant that is starting to grow.

It’s good to develop routines when you start any new internet business, as routines help you to develop good habits and ensure that nothing important gets missed as part of your day-to- day progress. You can check various parts of your business and see how they are doing, and where some extra effort is required you can then look into how best to do that.

Website Development - An Ongoing Effort

As you develop your business and learn more about keywords and SEO and how to make sure that people (and the robots and spiders that Google, Yahoo and others use) find your site, you should find that your website naturally starts to perform better. You’ll also learn tips and tricks along this journey. It takes time for any website to start figuring in the search engine rankings at all, let alone to perform well. No website gets to the coveted number one spot overnight, so be sure you don’t ask for too much when it comes to monitoring the progress of your site. It’s important to realise as well that once you’ve achieved the results you’re hoping for, you’ll have to work to keep yourself from being dethroned.

They say the best things in life are worth working for, and achieving a higher search engine ranking is a learning process that will bear plenty of fruit.

Welcome to SeanSEO.com

I have moved address from my previous Internet Marketing Blog at the Wealth Creation Affiliate website. It was time to take the whole Social Media concept a bit more serious and start providing some consistent, quality content for the readers (you). Considering my next target is to become the number one internet marketer in AustralAsia, I better start putting my money where my mouth is.

My aim is to provide you with a blog that gives you content without the “Big Sell”. That means:

• No Adsense
• No Blatant Ads
• No In-Your-Face affiliate links
• No insulting your intelligence

Blogging should be about giving away quality information online and the readers have every right to click away at any time they get bored. My aim is for you to come back, every day. Let’s hope I can do that!

You will see my latest books that I come up with but they will be available, casually in the sidebar. You will notice that most of the stuff I do is given away for free, anyway.

Every Day Content

Starting next week (June 2008), we will post articles about internet marketing every day of the week. I have joined forces with Dana Prince to make sure the postings happen every day. Enjoy the upcoming articles about SEO, Google, Yahoo, Marketing, Online Business and much more…

I’m Sean Rasmussen and my SeanSEO co-writer is Dana Prince.

We will see you back here very soon.