Ping Crawl - Will It Boost Your Backlinks?

September 1, 2008

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I’ve just installed a very interesting plugin developed by Eli at BlueHatSEO and Josh Team. Essentially, the plugin searches Google for blogs related to your tags, links to them under your post and then pings back. Hopefully, I’ll see some benefits in link popularity over time.

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Do You Have A Financial Goal?

August 23, 2008

Lot’s of people aspire to making a full time living online. Many people see Internet Marketing as a means of supplementing their incomes. Other, and I fall into this category, are looking to boost their portfolio so that they can retire from full time working completely.

One thing that many people fail to think about is setting clear financial goals.  Let me explain why it’s important…

Unless you know just how much income you need to make, you can’t possibly know how many sales you need to make each day. If you don’t know your sales target, you won’t know how much traffic that you need.

So, let’s assume that you want to earn $30,000 a year.. a reasonably conservative target. Let’s assume that the $30,000 is after all your overhead costs such as hosting, autoresponder, domain name renewals, etc.

$30,000 is the equivalent to $82.19 per day.

Now, we have a clear daily financial target, we can work out what we need to do each day to achieve it.

Let’s assume our income is derived from Adsense, then to make $82.19 per day you will need approximately ten sites each making about $8.50. That level of income would typically require around 300 unique visitors to each site each day. 3,000 visitors per day from organic search results will require a fair investment in link building, content development, article writing/distribution and other promotional activities. However, once that initial work has been completed, it will require very little maintenance work.

If, however, our income was coming from affiliate marketing, the typical price was $37 and we were earning a 50% commission we would need only 5 sales per day to achieve our target. The average sales conversion rate is reported to be 1.87% and, therefore to get 5 sales we would need to generate 268 unique visitors. Again, this is not a difficult daily target, especially if we have our own blog with a regular readership or, better still, a list of subscribers.

And finally, what if we were selling our own product? Assuming we were selling a $37 product and we were paying our affiliates 50%, then similarly, we would need 5 sales. But this time it’s our affiliates who would be driving traffic to our site.

Is that worth thinking about?

Finding Products & Services To Promote

August 21, 2008

To find products and services to promote I recommend that you join the following networks:

Commission Junction

Linkshare

Performics

ClickBank

Pepperjam Network

Azoogle Ads

Direct Leads

Hydra Network

Copeac

Trade Doubler

Zanox

Your application is likely to be much more successful if you have an established, professional looking website. Your credibility will be enhanced if you use an email address on your own domain rather than a free email account. I would also suggest that you describe PPC as your primary promotion strategy. I’d avoid talking about email marketing - they get nervous for obvious reasons!

SWOT Analysis

August 18, 2008

I find it strange that the online business person seldom mentions the favourite tools and techniques used by the offline world for decades. SWOT Analysis is a typical example.

SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favourable and unfavourable to achieving that objective. The technique is credited to Albert Humphrey, who led a research project at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s using data from Fortune 500 companies.

The SWOT Analysis offers you an excellent way of examining a niche market before investing your valuable time or hard earned cash.

By looking at your own, or your businesses, strengths and weaknesses and by analysing the opportunities and threats in the market and external environment, you can gain valuable insights that are often missed by the impatient, or inexperienced.

Here are some basic questions that will kick start the process for you:

Strengths:

• What do you do better than anyone else in this niche?
• What are the top five features that your business offers?
• What is your most valuable personal or business asset?

Weaknesses:

• What would you describe as your biggest weaknesses?
• What activities do you tend to avoid?
• What, if anything, do your customers complain about?

Opportunities:

• What is “State of the art” in this specific niche?
• What are the most promising trends facing you and your business?
• Is there any potential in new technology, social patterns, legislation?

Threats:

• Does the current economy show any negative trends?
• What are the five greatest barriers to success in this niche?
• Do changes in technology or government policy threaten your business?

By reviewing the answers to above questions, together with any additional questions you would like to add, you should be able to identify how to leverage the strengths and opportunities and how to overcome any weaknesses or threats.

Ideal Target Market Identification

August 16, 2008

The person or organization most likely to buy from you
initially, repeatedly and at the highest profit margin.

By profiling our target customer and identifying three specific areas we can identify where we should focus our time and attention.

Interest: Which topics display the highest levels of energy, interest and enthusiasm? What’s the main theme? What are people talking about? What are the biggest problems?

Experience: What do these people have in common? What is your experience in this area? Can you present a credible brand and personality? Do you have the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to meet the demands and needs of the market?

Location: Where does your target audience hang out? Are they accessible? Where will you find the largest groups? Who are the people of influence?

The more you focus your marketing and promotion efforts on your primary target market, the more likely it is that you will get a higher return on your investment.