Defining What It Means to Be an Internet Marketer

There’s no PhD you can strive for to be in the Internet marketing industry. You have to learn as you go – on your own – soaking up information along the way.  The first thing you need to know is what it means to be an Internet marketer, because it isn’t always clear to everyone.

 

            Let’s start with what Internet marketing is not.  It’s not being a con artist. It’s not being a spam king.  It doesn’t just mean selling on eBay or having your own website and products.

 

            In reality, Internet marketers can pick and choose from a whole host of options available to help them make money.  Your opportunities are virtually endless, and include one or more of the following:

 

• Selling digital downloads (information products like eBooks)
• Promoting other people’s products for a commission (affiliate marketing)
• Selling on eBay or other auction sites
• Running a membership site
• Selling your online services (writing, graphics, etc.)
• Owning a website that sells dropshipped or wholesale items

 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Being a newcomer to Internet marketing, you might be worried that you don’t have anything to sell.  That’s okay – most people don’t start out with anything, and you never have t stock a tangible inventory if you don’t want to.

 

Internet marketing creates no gender or age boundaries for you.  There are teenagers who have launched multi-million dollar companies as budding Internet marketers whose ideas sprung to life and catapulted them to instant success.

 

You don’t have to do anything unethical or shady to succeed at Internet marketing, and in fact, launching a respectable business with a solid reputation is the secret ingredient that will allow you to hatch an empire on the ‘net to fulfill all of your dreams and those of your family.

Don't Let AdWords Get Out of Control

AdWords can be a very difficult thing to master.  A lot of people have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars before they learn to make a profit.  Some people are never able to become profitable, and give up after losing a considerable amount of money.

 

In order to have the best chance at being profitable, you have to learn to be extremely vigilant about your campaigns.  You have to monitor them carefully, and always end campaigns that stay unprofitable for a long period of time.

 

One of the first things you should monitor is your CTR.  If your click through ratio is very poor, your ads will cost more.  It will take more money for the same number of clicks your competitors might get if they have a better CTR.

 

If your CTR is too low, you need to tweak your ad.  You need to look at the text your competitors are using, and attempt to make it better.  Try to get inside the minds of your visitors, and think about what they’re looking for when they search for a particular word or phrase. 

 

Use AdWords’ split-testing setting to test multiple versions of your ads, and use the best ones.

Keep an eye on your quality score (QS).  If your score is too low, then you need to do a few things to get your quality score up. 

 

The higher your QS is, the less you’ll have to pay for your clicks, and the more profit you can potentially make. The quality score takes several factors into account for its ranking algorithm, and Google doesn’t release the details of every single one. 

 

They give you a little general advice, but it’s not really enough for most people to dominate AdWords right out of the bat.  After a lot of experimentation, many experts have come up with some guidelines than can help improve your quality score.

 

Make sure you have each campaign’s keyword phrases on the landing page itself.  Don’t use the keyword “golf carts” if the word “carts” doesn’t appear anywhere on the page.  That could bring your quality score down. 

 

Your landing page shouldn’t be a single page with no internal links.  Google doesn’t seem to favor single page landing pages.  Add links to relevant products, articles related to the niche, or pages such as a privacy policy, terms of service, and a contact page.

 

Keep your campaigns to a few highly related keyword phrases each, such as one for the product name only, another for long tail phrases, and a third for more broad keywords.  You should make sure you target those keywords in your ad. 

 

If you have “golf clubs,” “golf bags,” and “golf club warmers” as your keyword phrases, you should try to use at least one of those phrases in your ad.  You might have something like “Golf Clubs, Bags, and Accessories” in your ad.  The words people search for will appear in bold in your ad, so the more you have in your ad, the more likely it is to be clicked.

 

Finally, you should carefully track conversions.  Make sure you have a way to track which traffic came from AdWords if you’re sending traffic from more than one source.  Conversions are ultimately the most important factor in the success or failure of your AdWords campaign.

 

Digital Download Dollars

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or a product owner, you get to choose how much you get paid to promote something. As a product owner, obviously you set the price. As an affiliate, you seek out products that have a good commission.

Digital downloads usually have a much better payout than tangible goods. Of course, if you’re promoting a high-ticket tangible item, you might make more – but it could be harder to sell to the general public, too.

A digital download is a text, audio, or video file that buyers can download instantly onto their hard drive and access immediately. Instead of waiting until tomorrow afternoon to run to Barnes and Noble, they log in at 3 o’clock in the morning when they can’t sleep and download a book on the topic they want.

A tangible book that costs $14.95 in a local bookstore can sell for $49 and up on the Internet as a digital download. As an affiliate, your commission will probably be higher, too.

If you promote a tangible book on Amazon that costs $14.95, and you get 7% of that, you’re only earning a little over a dollar. But that $49 digital download – an eBook about the same topic – offers you 50% commission, giving you $24.50 per sale!

It’s not hard to see which one pays better. As a product owner, you can create eBooks to compete with tangibles. You’ll charge a lot more, but you’ll be able to pay your affiliates a lot for their efforts, too.

If you’re not a writer and prefer a different type of product creation for your digital download, you can choose to create a series of MP3 files – audio tutorials that teach your topic to a paying audience. The public loves information they can digest on the go using their iPod or other electronic gadget.

You can also use a tool like Camtasia and create video productions as your product creation tool of choice. Some people prefer to watch a lesson rather than read it. With both audio and video digital downloads, your price point can go beyond the borders of what text info products can pull in.

Combine all three media elements and you may be poised to market a high-ticket digital download that takes in upwards of $1,500 for a single sale – something affiliate marketers will jump all over.

Do You Have to Have Money to Make Money?

The short answer is, “No.” You can effectively launch an Internet marketing career without a single dime. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection, which does cost money, but we’re assuming you have those two components already.

Many a marketer has gotten his or her start as an affiliate marketer. Aside from shuffling around in your attic to find something you can sell for a profit on eBay, affiliate marketing is your best bet for a zero-dollar start-up business in the Internet marketing industry.

All you need is a free ID that you can get on PayDotCom, Amazon, Commission Junction, LinkShare, or ClickBank (to name a few), and the ability to learn about free traffic sites and you can begin generating an affiliate income without investing a penny of your own money.

That said, it’s best if you save a few dollars here and there to invest in some tools that are going to make your Internet marketing efforts a whole lot easier. For instance, you could sit around and brainstorm for five days to get a list of keywords – or, pay for a one-day subscription to WordTracker and harvest thousands of keywords in less than an hour.

You could also use nothing but web 2.0 social sites that are free, such as MySpace or Squidoo, to host your content and affiliate links. Or, you could pony up the $9.95 one-time fee for a domain name and $6.95 a month for hosting and have your own business presence on the ‘net.

You can also spend days and weeks searching for information about how to do a task that will help you make money as an Internet marketer – such as how to master pay per click advertising.

Or, you can invest in a step-by-step guide t shorten your learning curve. What most marketers suggest is to take a look at your budget and see what you have to invest. If you have to start out with nothing, go for it – but set aside a few of your profits to pour back into your online efforts.

Everything you’ll invest in is built to ease your workload and hasten the procedures, so your income will increase faster and with less input from you as you learn to wield these tools in your favor.

Getting Indexed Fast in Google

A lot of people seem to think it takes weeks (or even months) to get indexed in Google, but that’s just not true. Almost anyone can get his or her site crawled and indexed in two weeks or less - sometimes you can even be listed in the Google index in as little as a few hours!

There are several ways to get indexed quickly. All of them involve getting links to your site on other sites that have high PageRank, or sites that are updated often and get crawled frequently by search engine spiders.

You don’t have to pay to do this. There are plenty of ways to get these types of links to your site without paying a penny. One of the easiest ways to get indexed quickly is to ping your site. You don’t have to own a blog to ping your site at places like pingoat.com or Pingomatic.com.

Just add your site’s name and URL, and leave the RSS feed link blank. (It’s not necessary.) Sometimes this technique alone can get you indexed in a day or two. Next, you should submit your link to various social bookmarking sites.

These sites get crawled several times a day, so they can be a very good way to get your own site crawled and indexed quickly. You should get an account at all of the major bookmarking sites. Don’t miss StumbleUpon, Digg, Furl, del.ico.us, and Slashdot.

Press releases can be very helpful in getting your site crawled and indexed quickly. Most of the more popular press release sites have good PageRank, get crawled often, and can even get your press release posted on a number of different sites that borrow news from the PR directories. Sometimes it can be worth submitting a press release simply for the ease and speed of being indexed.

Article marketing is another way to get indexed fast. Submitting an article or two can also help you get backlinks, better PageRank, and targeted traffic to your site. A lot of article directories have very good PageRank, so it definitely has benefits other than just quick indexing.

Blog commenting can be a very good way to get indexed quickly. You’ll need to find blogs that don’t have the “nofollow” tag, because blogs that have “nofollow” won’t let search engines crawl the links anyway.

This is debated by SEO experts – some saying the “nofollow” tag doesn’t even matter, since some search engine spiders ignore them anyway. Others claim you might get a small amount of traffic from the blogs themselves, but “nofollow” blogs will do nothing to help you get indexed faster.

You should also make sure you do all you can to maximize the ability of spiders to crawl your site. You should have links that are easy to find and follow, use text links instead of only image links, don’t use Flash or image maps unless you also have text links for spiders to follow, and make sure you keep your site as clean as possible. Having too many links on your main page can confuse spiders, and your site may not be indexed properly.

Forums often get crawled on a regular (daily) rotation since the content is updated often. Popular forums have had posts on their site show up on Google just minutes after they’re posted! It’s very common for posts on very popular forums to be in Google in under 24 hours. Posting a small link in your signature on some of these forums can help you get your site indexed quickly.

Finally, you can exchange links with other webmasters in your niche. Not only is this a great way to build backlinks, but if their sites get crawled often, you’ll be adding to the chance that your site will be crawled and indexed quickly, too. Link exchanges won’t penalize your site, either – unless you amass too many, too soon – so stick with organic growth (a few a day) and it won’t put up any red flags for the search engines.

Simple Cybersecurity Measures for Individuals

Most people in the civilized world these days use computers. The devices are not just accessories and equipment aiding academic studies. Computers are made to connect online, which in turn could facilitate actual and basic transactions. You could shop, bank, pay bills, transfer funds, reserve tickets, conduct businesses, and do just about anything you need to do online. Cybersecurity would help make you secured and safe all the time.

Because there is money across the Internet, defrauders, thieves, and burglars now focus on online crimes. Online transactions are mostly using credit card accounts, debit cards, and Internet accessible bank accounts. Thus, expect hackers and attackers to strive their best to be able to access your sensitive personal information. You might not know it but as you use your personal computer today, you might already be exposed to several Internet security problems.

How are cyber crimes committed? Usually, hackers, intruders, and attackers design and deploy computer viruses, computer programs, or software to penetrate into systems that are aimed at searching computer systems for important personal data of users without proper authorization. Viruses are rampant. They spread like wildfire and most infected computers are not identified. Thus, as you use your computer for basic online transactions, your information might also be tapped by unscrupulous cyber criminals.

Some viruses are spread through using removable hardware like discs and flash derives. Some are propagated through opening attachments in suspicious email messages. Some are most dangerous as they are automatically coming with pop up screens when you enter or open specific Websites. Downloading unsecured data online could also be a culprit. If you want to take instant cybersecurity measures, you should resolve not to get viruses from the abovementioned venues and occasions. However, you may find it difficult not to be exposed to computer virus risks.

Aside from refraining to avoid the mentioned risks, it would also do wonders if you purchase effective anti-virus programs. There are specific products that provide protection against common computer viruses. Some have protection against spread and vulnerability to malicious codes, also known as malwares. To provide you better and more options, there are many virus protection brands and products available across the market today. Their proliferation makes cybersecurity rampant and more competitive these days.

Speaking of being competitive, many anti-virus software are now made accessible to most individuals. Cost is a primary issue because not all products are affordable. The best and most effective protection is of course premium priced. If you could not afford to purchase such software, you could opt for the more affordable ones. There are even brands and products that are offered for free. All you have to do is to be patient in finding them.

You should constantly have your computer system checked. As an added protection, it would be better if you would install or activate firewall protection naturally imbedded in your system. You could also hire services of computer and IT experts to help you ensure your total online and computer protection.

Cybersecurity should never be neglected. In fact, it should be accorded with utmost importance. These days when security across the Internet is getting more serious, it is just appropriate if you would aim not to be victimized by cyber criminals and cyber threats. Cyber crimes and risks could be avoided if you know how. Explore options.

Cyber Security Regulations

Assalamualaikum and hello...
today topic is about cyber security regulation.
Cyber security is meant to protect personal and work-related data and information stored in our computer and personal websites. With the increase of individuals, organizations, and members of the community falling prey to cyber crimes and security attacks, there is an increase in demands for more measures to be taken.

Alarmingly, the number of people getting affected cyber security attacks is increasing. According to a research by Panda Software in 2006, 1 out of 5 e-mail messages that corporate servers receive are spam and 1 out of 20 is infected with malware. Consumer Reports released a report in 2006 showing that United States consumers would spend $7.8 billion over the last two years for computer repairs and replacements because security attacks like malware and viruses.

Security attacks like these do not only costs an individual repairs, businesses, organizations and the national economy could suffer losses. In 2005, cyber crime led to a loss of whopping $130.1 million, all because of viruses, unauthorized access to computer systems and personal and financial information theft.

There are numerous measures that should be taken by the government to help resolve cyber crimes and attacks. In the United States, there are different legislations in the executive and Congress level that are meant to protect computer systems and other medium of information technology. This is called cyber-security regulations.

Cyber –security regulations is to make sure that companies and private institutions would be using or protecting their systems from any cyber attacks like viruses, worms, phishing, denial of service and unauthorized access.

The United States Chamber of Commerce said that there are about 64 % of small businesses that are getting protection for their systems to protect their customer’s financial information. While there are about 72 % of businesses expressed concern about security of the company’s assets and information.

In the United States, there are cyber-security regulations, for both federal and estate governments. For federal government cyber security regulations, they focus mainly on specific industries and fields, healthcare, organizations, financial institutions and agencies that work with systems and information. Unfortunately, this regulation do not reach and cover computer related industries like Internet Service Providers (ISP).

Additional to this, the federal government is also trying to resolve issues of cyber security breach by allocating more funds in research and programs directed to research better solutions and recommendations for improving cyber security. The government is collaborating with members of the private sector.

Meanwhile, states are forming their own methods of dealing with security attacks. An example is the regulation passed by the California State in 2003 called Notice of Security Breach Act. Different states have followed the example of California and created their own anti-breach regulations and standard procedure.

There has been an ongoing debate about cyber security regulation. There are people who comments that creating a regulation is not the answer and not enough, what is needed is better defenses against hackers, viruses and similar threats. The regulation is said to restrict industries to develop programs and software that would boost cyber security. Aside form this, businesses also fears that having the regulation will cut back their healthy profits since they would meet more limitations and would cost them more.

But inspite of regulations and software that could protect your computer and systems, still the best way to boost cyber security is preventing any attacks from happening in the first place. There are easy tips that could be followed to avoid cyber attacks from happening.