Spread or Climb - Decide your strategy

Past few months I have been experimenting with two possible internet marketing strategies. One is to go wide and one is to go high. Here are my thoughts.

Going wide:
+ lot of independent sources of revenue
+ possible automation of tasks
- low income

Going high:
+ dedicated project
+ quality of content
+ quality of backlinks
+ high income
- if you missed the niche you are going to regret it
- risk

Online dev platforms experiment continued...

In my first post I outlined six online development platforms and decided to make a test by creating the same page on all of them and see which ranks better.

After ten days have passed, I have some preliminary results. Best to rank for hidden word 'lovtexmes' was weebly site and then the standalone site cutecoco.com.

Best to rank for the whole keyword was cutecoco.com with around position 550 on google (yes terrible).

But there seems to be another contender in this game and the things get really exciting.

Starting a PPC campaign with Adwords and YSM

I have decided to expand my marketing by introducing PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Since I earned a solid amount of money last month I wish to reinvest some of it while learning the new tricks of the trade.

What is PPC and how does PPC work

Basically, PPC works like this. You make an advertisement. This advertisement appears on places you choose, like search engines and websites. You of course have total control of what keywords you want to promote through that advertisement. Then you decide how much you want to pay for one click on your add. This is called the bid. Depending on your bid and other people's bids for the same keyword your ad will be displayed in a better (or worse) position.

Let's say you decide to pay 10 cents for one click. That means it will cost $10 to have 100 visitors to your site. If by conversion methods you can earn more then $10 then you have a profitable campaign and vice versa. When you get it profitable you can reinvest all the money you earn to have more ads for more people until you hit an equilibrium between cost of advertising and money earned. Of course you can improve conversion or find better sources of income for visitors and the game starts over.

Setting up a PPC campaigns with Google and Yahoo

I decided to use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising networks. These are the two strongest networks from two strongest search engines in the world today.

If you haven't signed up with those yet, I suggest you search the net for coupons first. Both networks have them so try searching for "adwords coupons" and "yahoo search marketing coupons". You will generally find Google Coupons of about $50 worth and Yahoo coupons of hefty $100. This is "free money" and you should use it.

Setting up an account with these two providers will still cost you a little money from your credit card. $10 to start an account with Adwords and $30 for Yahoo. But if you take all the coupons you will end up with $190 of ads money to spend for the cost of $40. $190 could relate to around 2,000 very targeted visitors.

That is and isn't a lot. Depending on your niche, you will have to earn more then $200 from 2,000 visitors. Good thing is that's 2,000 very interested people in your product but it all comes down to niche and conversion from there.

How to start a first PPC campaign

After setting accounts with Adwords and YSM, you are ready to create your first advertisements. This will be a purpose of another article, but let me just give you a hot tip. Google has excellent advertising support team and you can basically take it from there. Ask them directly (you will find a link in your Adwords screen) to help you create an advertising campaign that will suit your needs and usually within a week you will get an useful answer and a ready campaign from one of their experts. It pays for Google to spend money helping you, because ultimately you will be spending more money helping them.

Netvestor makes an appearance in New York Times!

Today I am proud to announce that Easy Wii Finder, one of featured Netvestor projects, got mentioned in today's New York Times!

I am very happy about it and it is a welcome pat on a back saying you're doing all right boy ;)

I am even happier that this happened after I successfully resisted "the dark force" as I wrote in this article. A mention in NY Times means so much more to me.

I am filing this under marketing articles as you can see, because that's what it is! :)

Update on projects and more lessons

It's been pretty exciting the past few days. My projects took off and I have been very busy learning about Conversion. I admit this is the topic I know least about so I'll be passing up useful tips for you as I try them out.

Learning Affiliate Marketing

For starters I have signed in to a few affiliate marketing forums hoping to get as much information as I can. I believe "old man's" advice is the best you can get. I still can not recommend any in particular since I've been a member only for few days but you can find a list of them in Top 100 Webmaster Forums.

My main focus has been the Wii Finder. As you can see I changed the site layout and included two affiliate marketing programs - Ebay and Amazon. I offer the visitors the opportunity to buy Wii on either of these two sites which guaranteed have Wii in stock - such is the need for the console that you can't find one anywhere else! Since Weebly does not support javascript per se I only used classical links as you can see.

But here is a little tip I learned about in the meantime. You can use iframes and Weebly's custom html element to display portion of another site that is running javascript. Basically that means that you can even have Adsense running on Weebly! But I have to investigate this further first.

Easy Wii finder and Wii in Stock currently earn 100% of my daily website income which is around $45 at this moment. You will be able to monitor this information on the blog's sidebar from today.

Dark side of the force is calling Luke

One of the things I successfully fought was the temptation to offer "Free Wii consoles" . This is an affiliate program that pays $1.50 just for a visitor to sign up with their email address in hope to win a Wii.

Having in mind that my site has more then 1300 unique visitors daily, you can imagine what kind of money could be made out of it. While I do not know if you can really win a Wii or not, it looks a bit shady to me. Why would anyone sane pay $1.50 for one email address? Well certainly the reason is to promote and try to sell all kind of products and I am afraid of those ugly ones. You know the sort.

So I decided against it and actually it was easy. Just follow "would I do it myself?" rule.

Wake up call: Stop reading ebooks, time for action!

I have a question to ask you at this point in our little journey. Do you consider yourself a serios Website Investor? Have you read all about research, development and marketing? If not go ahead and finish reading those first.

If you did, have you actually put to practice tips given there? Have you researched your keywords? Did you build a site? What was it like promoting it?

Reason I ask you all this is simple. This blog can be read as a one big e-book on Website investing. Like all e-books out there, you will find it useful, you will accept many of ideas and you will learn something new. But it is worthless until you actually do something about it! I want to urge you to stop reading e-books for a while and start doing some live action!

The best way to learn something is by practicing it. If you do not spend equal time in practice as you spend reading theory, you will be simply overwhelmed with information and you won't be able to act creatively. Your creativity will be put to hold, sealed in a corner of your brain. You have all this information at your disposal, yet are unable to find a simple way to start. This can be very frustrating if not prevented on time.

So start today and start small... Research your keywords. If you did, build a site using proper SEO techniques. Apply some of the tips and tricks I told you about. If you did then it is perhaps time to do something about marketing.

Have a great netvesting weekend!

Top list of best Webmaster Forums

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Two best search engine ranking tips I can give you

What we all want is that our site ranks high on search engines for terms that are searched relatively often. This brings free and targeted (people interested in those keywords) traffic to our site.

While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big and complex science nowadays, there are two basic tips I can give you that will significantly improve your website rankings. To more experienced SEO guys they will look awfully familiar as those are two most mentioned tricks in the book, but they alone account for 90% of your rankings. That is the reason I am bolding them.

First tip, is use your keywords as often as possible, as natural as possible. That means put them in titles, bold them, put them in footer and interlink your pages using your keywords as anchor text. However always remember to use natural language as much as possible because what matters the most at the end is user experience. There is no point in ranking first and getting thousands of visitors that stay about 10 seconds on your site.

Second tip is create links to your website. There are several basic ways to create free links to your site and some very interesting ways to create powerful links that I already wrote about. Do not be lazy to do this as content means nothing without exposure.

Using nothing but those two methods I finally ranked first page, second position for Wii Finder project. Total time needed about two weeks.

Easy way to get free PR4 - PR6 links

This is second tip in "Top underrated ways of getting free backlinks" series.

Leaving comments at Blog themes posts

You already know that leaving comments at blog posts will get you free links. But page rank of the posts is usually much lower then PR of main page of the blog so the "strength" of that link is weak. However there are sometimes exceptions, and the inner page of the blog is actually more linked to then the blog itself. This happens with truly amazing blog posts but also there is a little secret I am going to tell you.

Blog theme authors like to leave a link to their theme post page in the theme footer and this makes theme posts very high PR. It is not unusual that blog theme posts have PR up to 6 or even 7 for very popular themes. So leaving a comment on the theme post will usually result in a very strong backlink. As always, be polite, use constructive commenting, leave a feedback on the theme or a suggestion for the author. Remember, you always need to give something in order to receive something.

Wordpress being the most popular platform is best source for finding high PR theme posts. You can browse through hundreds of wordpress themes on wordpress site and comment appropriately.

Some of you might be concerned that comment links are "nofollow". Nofollow is a special html tag that should instruct the search engine that the link has no relevancy and it should be ignored. It is usually used on blog comments and links to other irrelevant material. There are experiments that confirm that Google actually ignores nofollow tag so it does not matter if the comments have nofollow or not. But people are skeptics so here is a tip for those of you too.

There are certain amount of blogs that do not use nofollow tag. These are best found using www.commenthunt.com search engine. It specifically searches for blogs that have nofollow disabled. So here is a netvestor tip, type "wordpress theme download" on commenthunt and instantly find all wordpress theme posts with nofollow disabled. You will find a lot of high PR post pages with comments enabled, and all comments pass PR.

Using this technique you will get a free strong backlink for your site. Assuming that you leave a practical and useful comment (it will get deleted otherwise), the theme authors will benefit as well and the community as whole will benefit.

Read about other top Netvestor SEO Tips and Tricks

Top underrated ways of getting free backlinks

Last time in Internet Marketing for Newbies I explained basic techniques you need to know about in order to start with successful promotion of your site. Now I am going to continue with a series of articles that will focus on using less known methods of gaining high quality links to your site.


Using internet bookmarking sites

Internet bookmarking sites allow you to create an account to manage all your online bookmarks.Of course nothing stops you from bookmarking your own site. That effectively means that when you create such a bookmark and make it public you have just created a free link to your website using title text (anchor text) that you want. This is different from leaving a story post at social media sites because these links are yours to control and you can do whatever you want with them.

There is absolutely zero risk in leaving the links in this way and this is the best, easiest and free way for creating links to your site.

Top 34 Internet Bookmarking Sites

Here is the list of social bookmarking sites you can use to create free links:

de.lirio.us
del.icio.us
ma.gnolia.com
my.xilinus.com
myjeeves.ask.com
mylinkvault.com
www.a1-webmarks.com
www.backflip.com
www.bibsonomy.org
www.blinklist.com
www.bookmarktracker.com
www.buddymarks.com
www.connectedy.com
www.diigo.com
www.ez4u.net
www.faves.com
www.fungow.com
www.furl.net
www.jumptags.com
www.linkagogo.com
www.linkatopia.com
www.linkroll.com
www.markaboo.com
www.mister-wong.com
www.mypip.com
www.myvmarks.com
www.oyax.com
www.rawsugar.com
www.simpy.com
www.spurl.net
www.syncone.net
www.tedigo.net
www.unalog.com
www.yattle.com


Many of these sites will offer you so called bookmarklets, which are links you drag to your browser toolbar and allow you to bookmark a site in a singe click, thus significantly speeding up the procedure for future bookmarking.

So in an hour or two you can create 34 free, relevant, backlinks to your site. This is also one of the fastest ways for your site to get indexed by search engines (forget about URL submission).

There are services that will do the bookmarking manually for you for a small fee, usually less then $10 for a whole lot of bookmarking sites. So if you have few spare bucks to spend and no time to do this alone you can find those services for example at digital point forums.


Read about other top Netvestor SEO Tips and Tricks

How good keyword research beats website marketing

In the previous article I wrote about beginner tips for website marketing. These are all good and tried steps to get your site noticed and indexed in search engines within a day, sometimes even faster.

Here is the interesting part. I made a small site when I was setting up my last project, called easy wii finder. This site was built merely to test weebly as a development platform and as you can see it contains just one image of Nintendo console and a small review which is then linking to the main page of the project.

The site was never marketed using the standard techniques. For past month it received maximum 15 visitors per day, with an average being about 5. Then two days ago site started moving up significantly in search engines. First it had 62 visits from search and that's when I noticed something is happening. Yesterday this number went to a whopping 95 as the site progressed to the first page of results for term "wii finder". (edit: Site currently has over 200 visits from search engines every day)

No additional effort was made for the site, simply it just got there by itself. This proves that search engines need time to check your website and give it some trust. My opinion is that during that time it is essential that there are no ads on the site. In this case, neither content nor promotion mattered. The site has only one paragraph which has not been updated at all. (edit: This changed as content was added later)

The key element in this case was a good keyword research. Choosing the low competition keywords proved essential as the site was able to move faster up until it gained the position it has today.

Interestingly the squidoo page which has almost same keywords and much more content and promotion still haven't picked up in search engines proving so far my point that squidoo is not trusted by google and should not be used for purposes of website investing.

I will be monitoring developments and keep you updated.

Internet marketing for newbies

It is time to learn some basic website promotion skills. After you have done your research and development, it is time to let the world know about your content. Here is how to start:

1. Tell your friends about it
2. Participate in related Forums
3. Use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit
4. Comment on related Blogs
5. Exchange links with other related Websites
   
6. Submit your site to Web Directories
   

If you have lot of friends online, it would be a good idea to notify them about your new site. Specially if some of them would be willing to contribute or help. This will help add more content to the site and you will have more time to concentrate on marketing and conversion.

If you do not have many friends who can spread the word, you can use other, so called 'social' tools, on the Internet. Online forums are one of the oldest forms of Internet communication. You can find forums about your niche, sign in and participate in discussion. Many forums will allow you to have a signature where you can link to your site. Better forums will allow you to put a rss feed from your blog to your profile, so every time you post n the forum your latest article will be promoted.

Social bookmarking sites became very popular in recent years. They will provide you with instant promotion and, if you have really interesting content, with instant traffic. Since this is only an introductory article I will not go in depth with using with using these services, but I will only recommend one site called SocialMarker.com. Basically it will allow you to submit your site to a number of social bookmarking services in a very accessible way.

Commenting on related blogs is a way to make a network of friends. You should find blogs that are related to your topic, judge that the author is very passionate about it and then read as much of their's content as possible. That will give you an idea about how the author is thinking about your mutual topic. This will allow you to get in the discussion with them which will become an opportunity to point out your own site with related content. Just always be sure to be polite and not intrusive. Think what kind of comments would you like to have on your blog and write appropriately.

Exchanging links with other related sites is like planting seeds for the future. When you find a site or a blog related to yours, you might want to ask the owner to exchange links. Making sure that you have good content first is crucial. Also choose only sites that you are comfortable linking to, as that will reflect on your future ranking. Try to use sites that are similarly ranked as yours. If you are just starting best bet is to search for other new sites. When I said planting seeds, it can happen that the site you exchanged links with becomes very popular in the future and you get a share of that popularity.

Submitting your site to web directories is usually a dull process. Web directories made a lot of sense in 1990s when search engines where non existent and in order to find something you went to a web directory and browsed through an interesting category. Nowadays web directories become more and more obsolete and their value is in it that you get a free link to your site. number of visitors that are coming from these directories is usually very minimal.

Using link to your website in forums and social bookmarking sites is the fastest way to have your site indexed by a search engine. You should never submit your site to search engine, always use this natural way. It is not uncommon to have your site index in a mater of hours using methods described in this article.

If you want to learn little bit more about these techniques check this article. If you think you are ready for some more advanced techniques then proceed to this article.

Earning money with zero investments using Website Investing methods

How to make money with zero investment? It is an old question. Thanks to Internet, making money opportunities are in abundance.

I want to share my experience in how to earn money on Internet using only free tools and services through a process called Website investing. I will show you methods and techniques that I learned. And we will learn together in this netvesting adventure.

The whole Website investing process can be split simply into fours separate steps:

1. Research
2. Development
3. Marketing
4. Conversion

Research is a part where you search for a 'niche' for your new Website. Niche is a term, made of one or several keywords, describing your target market. Like for example "shoe making". Your want to find a niche for which you have little or no competition on the Internet, while there exists a general interest for it (people search for it in the google). Finding a good niche is extremely important.

Development is a part where you develop your website around your niche. We need a development platform and content. Good content is very important because you want users to read about something useful which will help you get better rankings with search engines like Google and Yahoo. You will develop content using free website creator services, such for example is blogpsot.com the home of this site. I have not paid a cent to have this site, I do not pay any bills and I do not have to worry about server problems. I only have to write. Everything else is taken care of. There are a lot of other sites like this all about you will learn in website development related posts.

Marketing is a phase where you let the world know about your content. Purpose of this step is to generate traffic (visitors) to your site. The more usable and original content you have the less you will have to worry about marketing. Still you have to make an initial move. Social networking is very popular tool for letting others know about your content. There are other tools like forums, directories, word of mouth etc. The crucial thing is to have content worth talking about or recommending. Key to remember is if you wouldn't recommend your new site to your friends , then don't expect others will.

Conversion is where all the visitors "convert" to earnings. It is all called monetization. It is somewhat a rough word, but it describes process from a monetization perspective. In practice about 200 visitors are needed to make one sale. Interestingly it does not matter what you are selling. If you are selling a sticker for $2 or a diamond ring for $2000, it will still need about 200 visitors to sell it. Chance is people that look for stickers will have around $2 to spare and people looking for diamonds will have $2000. That's an interesting fact that needs to be remembered.