Internet tips and technology

By the time you read this, a new President of the US will have been elected. A lot of people have been asking, especially over at one of the forums I attend, is if the election is going to affect your business. Well, the short answer to that question is yes, but not for the reason that you think. Truth is, because we don’t live in a bubble, everything that happens affects your business. The key is not letting the outside factors affect our business adversely. And yes, that IS within our control. In this article, I am going to try to explain.

Let’s take a very specific example so you can see what I’m talking about. Let’s take the housing market. right now, because of all the things that have gone down with the bad loans and the falling prices, we are in a buyers market. That means, if you’re trying to sell your home and get anywhere near what it is REALLY worth, you’re going to have a hard time. However, this is an opportunity for somebody who maybe has a method for selling a home in a buyers market. Think he won’t clean up if he can show you how to sell your home for the full value?

When gas prices were rising, we saw a lot of products come out about running your car on alternative fuels. In addition to that, we started seeing hybrid cars come out. Again, an adverse condition made it so that a market in another area opened up. As unfortunate as it may be, one person’s misfortune is another person’s opportunity. The key, as far as YOUR business goes, is making sure that you minimize the misfortunes and maximize the opportunities. How do you do this? You do it by taking a look at what’s going on in the world and seeing how you can capitalize on it.

Some say this is a mercenary way of looking at things. I say it’s business, plain and simple. As long as what you’re doing is legal and ethical I see nothing wrong with capitalizing on any situation that happens to present itself because of factors that are beyond our control.

So, will the elections affect YOUR business? You better hope they do.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

By: Steven Wagenheim

It seems to be the number one complaint from Internet marketers…not enough traffic. Well, I’m going to give you truths about traffic so that you understand why you’re pulling your hair out of your head, and then I’m going to give you some tips to increase your traffic at almost no cost to you at all. Sound good? I thought it would. Let’s attack this monkey.

Okay, here is the real truth about traffic. You can’t get 10 pounds of ham out of a 5 pound bag. What do I mean? There is only so much traffic you’re going to get from any one form of promotion. Let’s take Google, which is the biggest search engine on the Internet. Did you know that Google only reaches about 50% of the Internet population? It’s true. So, if you relied JUST on Google for your traffic, you’d still be missing out on half the Internet population. And other forms of advertising don’t even reach that many people.

So what’s the answer? The answer is that you need a coordinated effort to reach the maximum number of people that you can possibly reach online. What does that mean? It means you have to take advantage of everything that the Internet has to offer…and trust me there is a lot out there.

For starters, you can write articles and submit them to article directories. These directories can bring you massive exposure, especially if you’re in a niche that doesn’t have a lot of content available on it. Ezine Articles is probably the top article directory online and can bring you hundreds of visitors each day if you have a good article and a resource box with a strong call to action.

You can also make use of all the web 2.0 sites that are around today such as Squidoo. Squidoo lenses are very popular, especially with Google. Many times you can get a lens indexed by Google in just one day. And if you continuously add content to that lens, it will gain in popularity within Squidoo itself and get you even more traffic.

Video is very big today. And there is no site bigger than YouTube for uploading videos. Simply create a Powerpoint presentation with audio voiceover giving away some information pertaining to your niche and upload it to YouTube. You’ll see visitors immediately as YouTube is one of the top ranked sites in the world. Naturally, videos of yourself will be more effective, but they’re not mandatory.

Just these few things alone can bring you massive amounts of traffic, and we haven’t even touched on pay per click, solo ezine ads and other very effective forms of advertising. The point is, if you want to get massive traffic to your site, you have to use it all because no one thing is going to do it for you.

That is the REAL truth about traffic.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

By: Steven Wagenheim

One thing I have learned from my five years of Internet marketing (as of this writing) is that you can’t set things in stone. You have to be open to new things. The Internet changes so much that if you get yourself stuck in a rut, you might find many things simply passing you by. This article isn’t going to deal with theory. It is going to give you some actual examples of my own life where I kept my options open and because of that, my income increased incredibly.

My first big breakthrough came when I was doing nothing but affiliate marketing. I was doing okay, but I realized that my income wasn’t really increasing the way I would have liked. I knew there was something missing. Then one day I got an email from a friend of mine who knew I was frustrated. He asked if he could call me and asked for my number. I figured I had nothing to lose so I gave it to him. Long story short, he told me that if I wanted to get to the next level as a marketer, I had to create my own products. So I did. My income quadrupled that year.

My second big breakthrough came when I was told by yet another friend of mine to begin to frequent a particular forum. He said it was the top one on the Internet and if I acted professionally while I was there and really helped people with the knowledge that I had, they would react in kind. Well, my income for that year more than doubled from my previous year, mostly because of the friendships I made at this forum. I would have never even considered hanging out at a forum to improve my business. That would have been a big mistake.

I am not venturing into my next thing. I have stumbled upon a business model that many people have found to be extremely profitable if worked at the right way. With my knowledge of Internet marketing, I know I can make this business model work and add yet another five figures to my monthly income without putting too much time into it. Had my mind not been open to the possibility of doing something different, I would have simply ignored this opportunity.

The point is, had I not recognized opportunity each step along the way, I’d probably be making the same amount of money I was making 5 years ago and not getting anywhere. Instead, by keeping my options open, I am earning a six figure income and on my way to being financially independent.

Keep your options open…You never know what’s going to land in your lap.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

By: Steven Wagenheim

Well, by now you’ve probably heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Maybe you saw the video of the kid who got 10,000 people to draw pictures of sheep for him. Maybe not. Well, if Mechanical Turk is a foreign concept to you, fear not. This article will give you the five cent tour, but more importantly, will show you how to use Mechanical Turk as a form of marketing. This may be the cheapest publicity you ever got in your life. Or, it may be the biggest waste of money since they made 8-track tapes. We’ll see.

The deal with Mechanical Turk is simple. You advertise a service you need to have done and offer to pay people a ridiculously low fee for people to do it. This guy offered two cents to each person who would draw him a sheep. He got 10,000 people to do it and it cost him $200. Now, the money wasn’t for nothing because if you saw the video, you saw what this kid did with all these photos and right now he’s got a web site that is pretty popular. Think he won’t be able to monetize it?

This is all well and good, but how can we, as Internet marketers, make use of something like this? Well, off the top of my head I could think of a few things. One would be to offer two cents to each person who will post a link to our site on their web page. It would take them all of five minutes, at that. Imagine how many backlinks we would get if we offered to do this? However, there is a problem with this scenario. If we get that many backlinks that quickly, the search engines won’t take to kindly to this, so actually this isn’t a good idea. However, if we limited it to a small number, say 10, and made this offer once a week, for 20 cents, we’d get 10 backlinks to our site each week. Naturally, you’d want to specify that the site has to be related to our niche.

Now mind you, it’s 7:52 in the morning, I’m half asleep and the above idea was right off the top of my head without really giving it much thought. But can you imagine if you sat down and really thought out a strategy for using Mechanical Turk? For a very low cost, you could significantly increase your web presence and send your business to another level. All it takes is a little imagination.

Is Mechanical Turk a fad? Maybe…or maybe it’s here to stay and something that’s going to become every Internet marketer’s dream. Honestly, I have no idea. I do know this much. One kid did make something of this and accomplished something that wouldn’t have been possible without it. So before you dismiss this as a fad or something that has no value…sit down and think about it.

It just may be the one thing that your business needs.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

By: Steven Wagenheim

Internet marketers think the whole world knows what they do and how to do it. This is the kind of thinking that limits what you can do with your own marketing. Do you really want to know how to make a ton of cash with Internet marketing? Then take your skills offline. What do I mean? Keep reading this article and you’ll understand exactly what I mean. It’s going to open up a whole new world for you.

I’m talking about local businesses. You may not know this, but the average local business has all it can handle just running its business. They do the conventional advertising such as newspapers and phone books, but for the most part, when it comes to the Internet, they don’t have a clue. Worse than that, they don’t want to have a clue. They simply can’t be bothered. This is where YOU come in. YOU can be bothered for them. How? It’s really very simple. I’ll outline the process and you take it from there.

Take any niche that you can find offline and go to Wordtracker to see if you can find any long tail keywords for local businesses. For example, let’s say you’re thinking of approaching restaurants in your area and you live in NJ. You might want to try looking up “restaurants in NJ” to which you may find a ton of searches. I know I have. The beauty if, these searches are also broken down into specific cities. This way, you can approach a restaurant in a particular city with your data. Show them how many people are looking for restaurants in their city on a daily basis. Explain how with a web presence, these people could find YOUR business.

When you approach these business owners, you need to do is carefully, especially if they don’t know you. That’s why it’s always best to start with your local home town and the businesses that you yourself frequent. Restaurants are great. They can always use a couple hundred extra customers a month. If you can show them the potential growth by sharing the search stats you’ve dug up, they’ll be more likely to do business with you. What kind of business?

This is the work part. Basically what you’re going to do for them is keyword research, article writing about their business and finally putting up a simple web site featuring their product, whatever it is. You’ll include a phone number and other ways to contact them. You’ll set up a mailing list form. In other words, you’ll do the same thing that you would do to promote YOUR web site, only for an offline business.

Can this be profitable? At $1,000 a web site and $50 a month to maintain it, it can be very profitable. Yes, it will take some leg work but in the long run, it will be the easiest money you ever made, especially if your efforts bring these people more business.

Give it a try. You might be surprised at the results.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

By: Steven Wagenheim