Google Goggles for Adwords

Not long ago Google began penalizing advertisers with certain links and pages. They claim that the links and advertisements that were provided did not provide adequate information and were nothing more than spam.

What exactly did Google do?

They increased the fees of advertising in the Adwords program to the point that it wasn’t really profitable to use the advertising if all you were doing was pushing people to a splash page and then redirecting them to the actual sales page.

Yep. That’s right. They penalized affiliate marketers for doing what they do best. Creating traffic for a product where they gained a commission.

It would be nice if Google actually penalized other forms of marketing in the same manner but they didn’t.

It also affected may other legitimate websites. Some to the point that it made advertising with Google extremely difficult and expensive.

A new tool, Google Goggles, tries to help SEO Specialists and website owners by providing a tool to mimic what Google sees and rank your pages accordingly. Hopefully increasing your chances of lower advertising fees by showing you what to improve or change.

Not only does it allow you to know in advance if your campaign will be a stinker, or a goose that lays golden egg. It even makes specific suggestions as to what to tweak, in case it determines that your campaign won’t fare as well as you had hoped to, so you can, in actuality, still make it profitable right there and then! - Google Goggles

I can’t say for certain that this tool will be the end of “Google Slaps”, but it definitely can’t hurt to give it a try if you are using Click Bank for your affiliate marketing.

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Stop Using Ebay and switch to Craigslist!

That’s right. Stop Using Ebay and other auction sites!

I know this is contrary to what I have previously posted about so keep reading to learn more.

Why should you keep paying more and more for just listing on auction sites when you can post on Craigslist for free.

Yes, you did hear me right… Craigslist is free!

Change your tactics for selling online. Start selling on Craigslist.

Keep your Ebay account. Keep up with your auctions. If what you are trying to sell doesn’t go very good on Ebay, try out Craigslist to see if it will sell there. You are not going to lose anything if you do but a few minutes of your time.

Of course, like Ebay, there is a method to the Craiglist madness. It isn’t just post it and they will buy.

There are some things that sell better than others. There are techniques that grab the most attention. How you close the sale is different as well. There are many things that make selling on Craigslist a bit different than selling on Ebay.

Learn how to maximize your rate of return on your advertisements. Or just learn how to find deals that you can turn around and sell for even more later on. Something you can no longer do, in many cases, with Ebay.

Check out how to do all of this with The Ultimate Guide to Buying and Selling on Craigslist.

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Want to browse the website with your mobile?

You can now access this blog though your mobile phone. Just point the browser to Http://www.themoneymakingwebsite.com/wp-wap.php

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Bum Marketing

Every day people use the internet to make money. They all do it in different ways. Many of them use paid advertising, mailing lists and other methods to generate traffic to their product or website. While others use free services such as forums and blogs.

Those who use these free services are using what is called “Bum Marketing”. It is the cheapest form of traffic you can manage to get for your product.

There are several ways to get “Bum Marketing” to work for you.

Forum Signatures:

Probably the least effective method of marketing you can use but you can actually get some links. Most forums allow you to add links to your signature. This allows you to place your Clickbank link or link to your product within your signature that is seen in each post you make.

Some forums will generate more traffic than others. It is best if you place your link in forums that go along with the niche you are trying to promote. The more you participate, the more your signature will permeate the forum.

Social Websites:

There are several social websites out there. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Squidoo and more. All of them are free. It just takes a bit of time and a email address to get your own social page. If you already have one then it would be just a matter of writing a bulletin or blog post about your product with a link to the product itself and send it to all of your friends.

While most of the social websites are not designed to sell a product or direct people to another website, you can do this with Squidoo. They want you to make pages to sell your products. They want you to make pages to direct people to your own website. They even rate the pages you create. The higher the rating the more people you get to see your Squidoo page. Obviously this leads to more people either purchasing your product or visiting your site.

The other sites depend on how many friends you have and how many might click on your profile looking for something else entirely.

Blogs:

Two major blogs you can use are Google’s Blogger and Wordpress. Both give you the ability to create your own blog without having to come up with your own website or domain. Creation of an account and Blogs is quite easy. Both offer templates that you can use to customize the blog with or you can come up with your own template.

Just make a good strong post about your product. Try not to make too many links to your product. Both Blogger and Wordpress search for and shut down Blogs they deem blatant advertising(spam). Convince your readers that they need to click on the link to proceed to your Affiliate link or product and make a purchase.

Articles:

While it might sound easy to create an article it is not always so. Some articles take a bit of thought. Especially if you have specific rules that you need to adhere to in order to get it published. You want to stick to those rules so that it will meet the standards that are required and so that people who are searching for content on their websites will pick up your article and publish it on their website. Obviously the better the article the more people will use it for content.

Many article publishers would rather you do not place many, if any links to your product or affiliate site in your article. Some will allow you to place those links in your signature. Either way it is probably best to just place a link to one of your Bum Marketing sites instead of directly to your affiliate link.

There are several places you can submit your articles. EzineArticles and GoArticles are two of the better places to get your article published. There are also websites you can subscribe to in order to get your article published to literally hundreds of article websites.

An example of an approach to Bum Marketing would be to find your niche that you want to promote a product on. Something you might know quite a bit about. Visit Clickbank or your other Affiliate for a product to promote. Create a Squidoo lense for your product. Create a blog on either or both Blogger or Wordpress. Remember to make any links to your Squidoo lense site. Not your product.

Lastly, you would want to write a good strong article to promote your product and either point to your Squidoo lense or to your Blogs and publish it on EzineArticles first, GoArticles second then maybe your list of article directors third.

If you would like to know more about Bum Marketing or how to use Squidoo Lenses to your advantage you can check out Sherry Han’s Bum Marketing Course and Squidoo Queen . Both are great resources.

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Choosing a Web Host

Having a Webhost is fairly important. You can’t do much online without a web site of your own.

Free Webhosts:

Free Webhosts are very basic. You will have to expect to be very patient with free Webhosts. Many of them have problems with keeping websites going. They will usually make their money by placing advertisements on your site. Some of these advertisements can slow down the loading of your site.

Also the sheer number of sites they have on a single server will sometimes cause pages to load slow.

If you plan on having a website that has a good bit of traffic, you will want to avoid this type of host.

Paid Shared Hosting:

This is the way to go for starting web businesses. Find a good shared host.

There are many of them out there. If you can go with just the minimum, you can come away pretty cheap. Usually less than $10 a month.

Shared hosting, like the free hosting, is shared with many different websites. That is how the host can make their money. If there are a few websites on the server that are pretty active, the performance can degrade to the point that it takes awhile for your pages to load.

If you find yourself using quite a bit of bandwidth and your pages are taking a few seconds to load you may want to upgrade to a different server. Your Webhost should be able to do this for you fairly easy. Sometimes you can just move to a Semi-Dedicated host. Other times you may want to move to a Dedicated host.

Semi-Dedicated Hosting:

Semi-Dedicated hosting has all of the advantages of the Shared hosting. It also has the added advantage of Semi-Dedicated hosting is a limited number of websites on the server. The only disadvantage to this is that it is also serves pages of websites that have the same problem you do. Traffic. Lots of it.

Moving to a Semi-Dedicated server is not always an improvement.

Dedicated Hosting:

This is the most expensive and time consuming type of hosting. It is also the best way to assure that your web site remains working and the pages load fast. If you have more than one web site this is the point that you can consolidate all of your web sites onto one server depending on how much traffic they draw. This can help you reduce your costs depending on how many web sites you have.

With all of these different ways to host your site, you have some important things to consider.

  • Storage Space
  • Bandwidth
  • Database
  • Support

Almost all hosts will offer you unlimited Databases, Email accounts, Ftp Accounts and Sub Domains. They do this because they know you will not use very many. So those aren’t too important to consider.

Take a look at the storage space and bandwidth. Some hosts will try to make it appear they are giving you more than others by changing it from Gigbytes(GB) to Megabytes(MB). This will make it appear that you are getting an amazing amount of storage and bandwidth. Most of the Webhosts know that most sites will never use this much.

In many cases, if you actually do use the maximum amount of bandwidth allowed, you may be violating the Webhosts Acceptable Use Policy(AUP). Generally because your website is using more of the processor than is allowed. Causing other sites hosted on the server, and probably your site too, to slow down to an unacceptable level.

Destin Webs hosting can provide you with the quality hosting you will need for a successful money making enterprise on the internet. Feel free to check it out. I have a personal motivation to keep the host going as many of my sites are hosted with Destin Webs.

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CommonSense Search

Have you got a URL that you just don’t have time to develop quite yet but you don’t want to just park it or stick some old static web page on it? It is possible to earn a little bit of money off of the website with some tools you already have all combined into one website.

Combine your Adsense and Amazon Associate accounts into one website and get some results with a targeted audience.

With CommonSense Search, you will be able to create your own AdSense search engine. AdSense ads are thoroughly integrated with search results, and are virtually indistinguishable from them! Most users click on the first three search results, and don’t even notice that hey are AdSense ads! This results in extremely high click-through rate - over 20%! With such high CTR, your income will skyrocket like never before.

You can even define the keywords used for this search engine to use so you can customize it to the url that you purchased for later sale or just to keep around and draw traffic. You could even integrate a banner manager to go along with it and display banners to your other websites.
I recommend it for a short term website that you plan on developing later on. Keeps you with a possibility to earn a bit of additional revenue with very little work. Get it here.

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Free Download - eBay Workshop Collection 2007

I have a valuable freebie for you today.

It’s from Worldwide Brands, the creators of OneSource.

They have the world’s largest database of genuine wholesale suppliers and every year, they hold workshops for eBay sellers on how to find wholesale products for their eBay business.

They recently compiled all of their 2007 eBay workshops into one eBook.

The workshop titles included in the ebook are…

* From Hobby to Home Business

* How to Compete in a Crowded Market

* What is the difference between Liquidation, Closeouts, and Surplus

* Understanding the Basics to Importing Physical Products to Sell

* Building Supplier Relationships is Very Important Especially for the Holiday Season

You can download it for free here:

Ebook

It’s a great book and I’m sure you’ll get a lot of value from it.

Also, if you sell on eBay or plan to in the future, OneSource is a great place to find wholesalers and drop shippers for your eBay auctions.

And there are 2 big reasons you should become a member of OneSource today:

The first reason is right now, they are running a $30 discount to a lifetime membership to OneSource. The discount only lasts until the end of November. It’s the lowest price you’ll be able to get a lifetime membership to OneSource.

Click here to get the full details on OneSource and get the discount:

OneSource

The second reason why you should get OneSource is wholesalers have begun offering steep discounts on their products. They are trying to get inventory out of their warehouses before the end of the year, so they won’t have to pay taxes on the inventory.

That rarely happens this time of year.

But, with the combination of the housing and mortgage market, the low consumer confidence index and wholesalers overestimating retail sales, wholesalers are looking for a way to liquidate goods immediately.

It’s a great opportunity to stock up on items to sell right now and for the first quarter of 2008. But you need to take advantage of this now.

This window of opportunity closes on December 31st, 2007.

Chris Malta, the founder of Worldwide Brands, explains how you can take advantage of this rare opportunity and buy low from wholesalers and sell high for nice profits in a brief audio.

You can listen to his 8-minute audio here:
Audio Clip

Enjoy the free eBook and the audio and I’ll talk to you soon.

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Optimizing your website

This is probably the hardest thing you will do while creating your website.  Optimizing it so that your search engine ranking will be the highest it can be.

Many companies make a living doing just that.  Optimizing websites for people who can’t figure out how to do it or just don’t have the time.

Of course, there really isn’t all that much information freely available on how to optimize your website.  Nor is there information on what the search engines are looking for when they crawl your website to rank it to begin with.

One of the main things that everyone agrees to now is that the content of your website actually plays a large part in where you rank.  Especially on  Google.

One of the things that people do to help their page ranking is to place meta tags in the header section of the website.  It used to be that you found a bunch of keywords you wanted the crawlers to use and you would place them in the meta tag keywords.

I’m happy to oblige, at least in the case of the meta keywords tag. Now supported by only one major crawler-based search engine — Inktomi — the value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. - SEW

But there is consensus that the description tag is still worth it’s while.

You might want to take some time to look at SearchEngineWatch.  They have some good articles on how to optimize your site for crawling by the search engine bots.

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Online Malls

Online malls are the poor man’s shopping website.

Basically it is a website that someone else has set up and is advertising as a “Mall”. This is a great idea if you want to do it.

Let me tell you how you can do this as well.

In a previous post I discussed Content Management Systems(CMS). You can also set up your own online shopping website with OsCommerce.

Download the open source software from OsCommerce and install it on your website. If you need a website, we can provide one here for a small fee. Just contact us and we’ll give you the details.

Once you have OsCommerce installed(really easy instructions to install), You just have to figure out exactly what you want to sell.

Don’t worry about inventory. You won’t need it in most cases.

Don’t forget to set up your paypal account. You may also need to get a business license since the next link will take you to a website that has Drop shippers.

Most drop shippers will require a Tax Id. You can’t get that without going through the IRS. But that process has been made really simple through the government as well.

Alright, so now you have basically everything you need except inventory.

The website you need to go to next is called World Wide Brands. This website deals with Drop Shippers and Wholesale dealers.

What exactly is a drop shipper? I talked about this quite a bit on another post.

OsCommerce has a module you can plug in and create an affiliate system.  This will help you by getting other people to advertise your mall for you.  Sure you have to advertise it yourself but if you get enough people, all you need to do is set up an automated system where they will advertise for you.  You do the quick work.  Calculate the affiliate fees each month and send them a check if necessary.

It all sounds really complicated but it really isn’t.  You can even specialize your store towards a specific area of the market.  Then make other malls that do something similiar but specialize in another market.

This all gets back to advertising and traffic.  The more advertising you have, the more traffic you get.  The more traffic you get the more money you make.

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How to get JV Partners to Maximize your Sales

Its no secret that JVs (joint ventures) and
cross promotions are one of the most productive
ways to make high volumes of sales on the
Internet.

Today I want to talk about why they work so
well, and how you can make the most of them to
explode your online income.

Traditionally, JVs are most common between two
people who have created a product and are
selling it online. But that needn’t be the case
and I will tell you shortly of a way in which
you can get all the benefits, traffic and sales
of a JV without even having a product of your
own.

But first lets look at the principals of it:
What actually happens in a JV cross-promotion?

Webites promote other websites for two main
reasons:

1. To earn income from commission sales.

2. To pay, or earn, favors.

The first of these you might expect, the second
is more intricate.

You see, when you’re running an online business,
your options and your growth are restricted if
you try doing it all on your own.

Sure, there’s pay-per-click advertising, article
marketing, traffic exchangers, and a variety of
ways you can draw traffic to your site by paying
for it.

But nothing beats personal recommendation.

Its human nature: We all prefer to buy through
personal recommendation than by enticing
advertisements.

And JV’s, or cross-promotions are all about
personal recommendation.

The only thing is - as every super-affiliate
knows - even if you’re offering attractive
commission rates, the site that’s getting
promoted always gets more out of the deal than
the JV partner who’s doing the promoting. Look
at this comparision:

The JV partner doing the promotion gets:

1. A ‘notional’ favour from the site it
promotes.
2. Commission payments, hopefully paid in good
time but always at the discretion of the site
owner.

The site being promoted gets:

1. Lots of new list members
2. Lots of Sales
3. Lots of recognition

Which would you rather?

Can you see now why the benefit isn’t split
evenly in a JV deal?

This is one of the reasons why it is more
difficult than many people think to get JV
partners promoting for you.

No matter how attractive your commission
percentages are, you will always be getting more
out of the deal than your JV partner. Especially
if your landing page is a list-building squeeze
page.

But there is an option available. Especially if
your aim is to build a list.

You could run a MyViralSpiral site.

MyViralSpiral is a webserver script that gives
you a complete solution for building a list and
a business online.

One of its features is that it turns the above
JV example on its head to provide more of a win-
win for both parties. Here’s what you can do
with it:

As a listbuilder, you can offer a squeeze page
for your JV partner to promote. He then sends
his list to the squeeze page, where they sign up
to your list. Then, this is when it gets
interesting:

Your JV partner can decide which offer page his
signups are directed to after signup.

Gone is the traditional method whereby once his
leads have signed up to you they’re yours, to
direct wherever you like. With MVS, your JV
partner can choose what to show them *after*
they’ve joined your list…

It might be to his own product, or an affiliate
link somewhere else - or he may choose to use
his affiliate link for your product (in keeping
with the normal method).

The point is, your JV partner has more say about
who benefits from his promotion and how. And
that kind of power makes all the difference when
it comes to getting others to promote for you,
and build your list.

This is one of many characterisics of
MyViralSpiral that make it well worth a good
look if you want to start building JV
relationships.

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