So you’ve been trying to get your content on the front page of Digg but so far things just haven’t worked out. There’s a few reasons why. I’m going to show you what you’re doing wrong and exactly what you’ll need to change so that your content is a regular on the Digg front page.

Just ask yourself, “what would a front page entry on Digg do for my website and my internet marketing business”?

The business of SEO deals with getting free traffic – and lots of it. I talk about SEO a lot on this blog because it is the single most cost effective way to drive massive amounts of free traffic on a long term basis. Digg however can do a whole lot more than any SEO technique and take your website to a whole new level if you know exactly how to get on that elusive front page.

It’s a short term strategy as far as direct traffic goes, but it’ll go a long way to building a good following of regular visitors to a blog, or – if done correctly – driving traffic to a squeeze page to build your email list, or even CPA offers.

Prepare to Digg-Proof Your Site

With a front page Digg entry it’s a given that your going to get more traffic than your server is likely to handle. Literally millions of people could visit your site as a result of a Digg front page appearance. So before  you go ahead and start trying out these methods you need to first make sure of 2 important things to ensure success.

Content is key! No this is not the notorious ‘content is king’ advice. I’m saying that you need the right kind of content – the kind of stuff that is popular on Digg. That means informative or offbeat content. Humor is another massively popular topic but there are also many others. I’ll be showing you a simple way to find out what is popular very soon.

Just take note that you’re never going to get a blatant pitch or promotion on Digg’s front page so don’t bother trying. Even worse though is that you’ll have burned any chance of successfully using these methods I’m about to teach you.

Instead you should use things like your web 2.0 properties, your blogs, or other mini and review sites. Create amazing content there. Not a sales page though. You need content that delivers a great message, get’s the reader thinking or interacting, or otherwise entertains or informs. Use this content to connect with the Digger but include some links with amazing headlines (anchor text) pointing to your money site and submit that content instead.

Lets say you’re in the weight loss niche. You find a great article on some new or controversial discovery. You could write your own creative spin on that story with a direction to your product and include a passive call to action at the end of the story. For example ” claim your free trial by visiting this website”. Visitors click the link, are directed to your squeeze page, you build your list.

When you get good enough at this you can even direct people right to your CPA offers with amazing results.

The second thing to ensure is that your server is going to handle the pressure of a massive spike in traffic and resources. Many sites have been unintentionally overloaded and died due to the massive amounts of traffic that will arrive on your site from a front page entry on Digg.

Just remember that if the content is not right for Digg, worrying about the server is the least of your problems. So get laser focused on getting the content right first – worry about the server later.

Understanding The Digg Network

No matter how you look at it, Digg is a social network as much as any other. Just like Facebook, MySpace, and all the others, there is a ‘friend network’ where members of the community interact with each other, comment on each others submissions, act upon their peers recommendations (in the form of digg’s) etc. As you can see, Digg fundamentally works exactly the same way as other social networks.

In many ways Digg is very much like the Twitter community. Just as with Twitter, when you interact with the Digg community you have to ensure that you use some amount of restraint and etiquette. And just like Twitter, Digg has it’s power users. In any social network, power users tend to carry with them a great deal of influence. Tapping into that influence is the the secret ingredient with any social network marketing.

Connecting With Digg Power Users

So the key to success with Digg and getting on the front page in fact has more to do with who you are connected to than how amazing your content is. I’m not saying that crap content will make it through all the check points and onto the Digg front page, but you certainly don’t need to be the Huffington Post to make it there.

Average content, that is considered worth digging by just a few of the right people is enough to get your site onto the Digg front page. But like all social networks, the real trick is who to connect with and how to find them. Once you know how to connect with the right people, you’re going to need them to notice you and Digg your submissions.

Obviously there is a lot to discuss here, and I want to make sure this information is delivered to you in manageable chunks. So I’ve decided to break this post up into several parts.

Coming up next I’m going to give you the complete lowdown on exactly how to locate and identify the right people to connect with. Following that I’ll to teach you exactly how to use Digg so that you build a massive network of influential people who will virtually guarantee your content makes it to the the front page of Digg – on virtual auto pilot.

If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so that you don’t miss a single piece of this puzzle.

Image courtesy of Jake Maheu

How To Digg Your Way to The Front Page is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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How did your balance sheet look at the end of 2009? Did you achieve your targets? No matter how 2009 turned out for you, it’s a new year, and with it brings a wealth of new opportunity for those willing to take some risks and think outside the box.

That’s right! So many new and popular markets, and marketing methods have emerged in the past couple of months that show the signs of a bumper year.  Let’s also not forget Google getting even tougher on internet marketers adwords accounts recently, so we’ll need to be in peak performance and stay at the forefront of current trends. But I’m taking the hard work out of it all for you.

I’ve just returned from a relaxing 6 week break – and I’m pumped. I never strayed too far from home, but the opportunity to just relax and enjoy some stress free time with family and friends was too good to pass up. Although, I didn’t totally disconnect. In fact the time I spent relaxing was some of the most productive time I’ve had in the past 12 months, and I’m truly excited about the year ahead.

I should confess that I’m a little compulsive about my business (as you should be too) so even though I was on a break I’ve still been watching the inbox and analyzing data. I even attended a couple of amazing webinars (one that gave me about a million new ideas), got involved in some product launches and all in a very relaxed and not-so-organized way.

I spent a lot of time thinking about new and unusual ways to drive my business and my profits further and as we continue through this year I’ll be testing these new ideas and sharing the results with you.

Now hopefully you’ve also had some time to relax, get your head clear, and get laser focused on your business and personal goals for 2010. If not, do what you can to take some time off – with no obligations. Do it in a way that you don’t feel pressured to be anywhere or do anything.

If you can manage it, try it for a week. You’ll be amazed at just how clear you mind is when you return. A clear, sharp mind is your greatest asset if you want to make it in the world of internet marketing.

I have no doubt this year is going to be a big one – for all of us.

So now it’s time for me to get things moving and add another zero or two to my profit – and I expect to see you right along side of me. Let’s work as hard as possible together to make 2010 a bumper year and make more money than any of ever thought possible.

2010 – The Year of Opportunity is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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With the popularity of real time search, Twitter is fast becoming an extremely valuable SEO tool. In a previous article I discussed 5 Twitter SEO Tips and one reader thankfully reminded us of the important use of hash tags. Today’s Twitter SEO tips are all about how and when to use hash tags to boost your ranking in the search engines.

Hash tags are an integral part of Twitter. A hash tag is simply a way to associate your tweets to any given topic. This makes searching for tweets on a particular topic much easier by grouping those tweets together and keeping them all relevant to one another.

And Google loves relevancy which is why we are now seeing more search results that are coming directly from Twitter feeds. Using hash tags can assist Google bot by telling it that your content is relevant for a particular search term.

So not only will this help you in Twitter’s own search function, but also, and more importantly, it could give you a massive boost for your targeted keywords if you start using hash tags in your tweets.

There are already thousands of hash tags that have been created and you can leverage these for yourself or you could create a new tag if you don’t find anything useful that already exists. A great way to find out which hash tags are popular is TwitScoop. This service monitors trending topics on Twitter. Keep an eye on TwitScoop to discover new opportunities.

Another benefit of hash tags are the thousands of bots that monitor twitter and retweet any content that it finds using the hash tags it monitors. For example using the #SEO hash tag would likely result in your tweet being retweeted by a good number of bots.

This may not seem like much at first, but if you consider that almost all Twitter users are following at least one bot, you can effectively increase the exposure of your content by a large percentage simply by having these bots retweet your tweets. And supposing you’ve posted a link to your latest piece of content, the more retweets, the more back links to your content giving you more authority on that phrase.

Start using hash tags right away to get the most benefit from this Twitter SEO tip and combine this with my other 5 Twitter SEO Tips to ensure that your Twitter marketing and promotional efforts deliver the maximum results possible.

Do you have a different view of hash tags? How are you using hash tags right now? Let’s explore the possibilities together in the comments.

More Twitter SEO Tips – Powerful Hash Tags is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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Would you describe yourself as a dreamer or a visionary?

It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference. Few people really understand what that difference is. Often times intermixing the meanings without giving thought to them. We’ve all heard the terms before. You likely know someone who you think of as a dreamer. The ironic thing is that usually the people who are mocked as being dreamers end up as the visionaries, and those that do the mocking turn out to be the dreamers.

So what is the difference between Dreamers and Visionaries?

Dreamers

Dreamers are usually easy to spot. In fact you probably know a few already, and you could even be one yourself. They are the people who always talk about things but rarely get anything done. They have big ideas and even bigger dreams but they talk in terms of hope and uncertainty.

Dreamers make statements like “wouldn’t it be great if…”, “I’d love to have…” or “I wish I could…” something to that effect.

Dreamers see only the things they ‘wish‘ they could have. That in itself is the defining factor. Dreamers will only ever dream. They’ll hope and wish for all the things that they would like to have but never commit to getting it.

Dreamers are also very good at justifying to themselves and others why they don’t, and never will have those things that they dream and hope for. They’ll make all the excuses in the world why it wasn’t meant to be and blame everyone and everything for their situation.

Dreamers don’t know how to take responsibility, have no goals, and have no belief in themselves or their ability to realise those dreams.

Visionaries

Visionaries are vastly different. When they speak of their dreams they speak with an intent, as if it were a given that they will achieve it.

A visionary never speaks of wishes or hope, only opportunities and deadlines. They speak as though it’s already happened or at the very least just about to. But most importantly they can clearly see exactly what the desired outcome is without it actually having been achieved – Yet!

Visionaries live with an expectation and a belief that no matter what happens, they will find a way to make those ‘dreams’ a reality. If they don’t meet the deadline they simply look at what they can learn from the experience and start again.

Visionaries don’t look at failure as something to be ashamed of. On the contrary they rejoice it and learn from it satisfied in the knowledge that they now know one more way that it doesn’t work. They make a decision to do something and by god they get it done, not matter the personal or financial cost.

I have a top 5 list of my personal favorite visionaries:

1. Thomas Edison
2. Orville and Wilbur Wright
3. Werner Von Braun
4. Bill Gates
5. Steve Wozniak

Who would you add to this list?

Having dreams is a wonderful thing and everybody should dream a little. But if you expect to realise your dreams, use the information here to change your mindset, and your approach and above all, remember that everyone has the potential to become a visionary.

If you can conceive it, and believe it – You Can Achieve it!

Image by Tiago Ribeiro

Do You Have a Dream or a Vision? is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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Over the past few months I’ve written several posts discussing the future of SEO. Were you aware that in the past 18 months Google has made more changes to its algorithms than it did in the previous 5 years? So how will these changes affect your business as we head into the next decade? As usual, when Google and SEO is concerned, nothing is ever clear.

Nor is it ever permanent. But the fact remains that if you want to spend less on advertising, and make gains with more organic traffic, you need to be on top of your SEO game.

A few months back SEOMoz released their annual search ranking factors report and there was some very mixed opinions about what exactly are the biggest performance indicators for maintaining good results in all the engines. But for the most part, much of that information will become somewhat distorted with the sweeping changes taking place in search.

So what can we expect in the coming year and where is search heading in the next decade?

Watch this video (courtesy of Web Pro News) where Matt Cutts gives some brief explanations of some of the most significant changes we can expect. Then read on to better understand these and other important changes you need to make to your SEO strategy in the coming year.

Google Caffeine

As most internet marketers and webmasters already know, Google has been developing and testing some very significant changes to it’s search algorithm. The sandbox, or testing version, was codenamed Caffeine and according to Google, it’s purpose is to allow Google to index sites much faster, but also to improve on the quality of the SERPs.

While there has been a lot of speculation, Matt Cutts has stated several times that this updated algorithm is not likely to be fully deployed until mid January. It has currently only been released in a single data center.

Page Load Time

One of the most important revelation to come out recently is page load time, or the speed of your website. Currently page load times are only considered for Adwords landing pages and have a significant effect on your bid price. However this currently has no bearing on organic search listings.

It looks as though that’s about to change and page load times are going to become an important factor for top ranking in the near future.

According to Matt Cutts, this will be changing next year, and page load times are to be included in ranking factors. In fact, Cutts went on to say that Google has been looking at page load times for some time now and it’s likely that it will become a major factor in 2010.

Take the time you have available to make sure your site is well coded and that your hosting provider can handle your traffic. Failure to do so could see you move from the front page to the last page on Google.

First Link Priority

Something that seems to have gone under the radar within many SEO circles is the recent introduction of a first link priority. This is good news for legitimate webmasters and bad news for spammers. But you need to understand how it works and adjust your deep linking strategy accordingly.

The way it used to work is that every link on a page was counted, indexed, and followed (where allowed). This meant that placing the same link URL on a page many times would distribute page rank, as well as take into consideration all of the anchor text as well as that highly sought after link juice.

The playing field has now changed and this is no longer possible. It’s likely that this change was made to circumvent any page sculpting methods that are in play today. Google is not a fan of page sculpting.

What all this means is that the first link on a page is the one that Google bot will take notice of. No longer can you link to the same site or page multiple times and expect the bot to take notice. It’s now only interested in the first link it finds on a page.

So for instance if you look at the average header navigation menu, most sites have a link to their home page with the anchor text ‘Home’. Since this is the first link that is encountered, any subsequent instances of that url will be ignored, including the anchor text.

This is going to have a major effect on the SERPs for almost all webmasters and you need to be taking action now if you expect to compete.

Snippet Links in SERPs

Saving the best for last, Google is now including snippets into some results. These snippets links are added to your result in the SERPs at no extra cost.

Snippet links (some people are calling them breadcrumbs) can be added to a listing to assist the user to find the most relevant information available on a site.

For example, lets say your selling blue widgets, and you provide free shipping. You listing will show your page title, and description with a link to your page. Inside of your listing though, you may also see another link with your ‘Free Shipping’ anchor text linking directly to you shipping page.

I believe this is going to have a major impact on CTR and user behavior and allow lower placed sites to receive a larger share of clicks based on these snippets of information that was previously unavailable. Let’s also remember that those links attract people therefore increasing the likely hood of a click to your site.

SEO Resources

If you’re still struggling with SEO, and trying to get a solid grasp of how it all works, you should review these posts so that you know exactly how the game is played.

Definitive SEO Guide to Search Engines
3 Steps to Better SEO Performance
Twitter SEO Tips

Conclusion

As you can see there is a lot to deal with. Some action should be taken right now. Other things can be adjusted in the next few months. However you approach this new age of search, be sure to take action sooner rather than later and secure your position in the search results.

I’d like to know how you think these changes to search will effect SEO as a whole, and how you will take advantage of this changing of the guard?

SEO Update – How To Optimize for 2010 and Beyond is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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The most important aspect to running any successful business is your ability to deliver. But in this competitive market, you need to be doing more than everyone else if you want to stand out from the crowd. When you do finally make the sale, you still have to deal with buyers remorse. There are some simple ways you can virtually kill refunds and cancellations dead just by making one very simple change to the way you do business online. In the process you’ll be creating customers for life.

Almost all purchasing decision are based on emotion. You get a little emotional high when you’re in a sales process that’s doing it’s job. We all do it and an effective sales process should be designed that way.

We get all excited about this new product that is about to make our lives so much easier. But once the sale is complete, that excitement dies away, the high quickly becomes a low, and buyers remorse sets in. This is the most critical part of the sales process for any business because it’s at this time that you can expect those refund and cancellation requests.

But there is a simple way to overcome buyers remorse and ensure that your customers not only feel good about their purchase after the sale, but provide them with enough reasons to justify the purchase to themselves when they’re staring at their credit card statement the day after.

Over Deliver!

Provide far more value to your customers than they had ever imagined.

Giving bonuses is not new. It’s common practice with most promotions these days. But giving them in style, with a huge announcement, and without expectation. That’s the stuff that creates fans rather than customers. Sure you should use some bonuses to capture the sale to begin with, but continue to add value after the sale and your fans will love you.

Try this. Don’t tell the customer about your hidden bonus until well after the sale, for example, on the thank you or download page. Or if you’re capturing emails, you could send a follow up email announcing the bonus. This works especially well if you wait about a day after the initial sign up. It also gives you a great excuse for sending the email in the first place.

Obviously you want to make sure that the bonus is a great match for the product that they just bought and that it enhances the original purchase and adds immense value to it.

Simple Ways to Add Value

You can do all sorts of things like adding free products, reports, software, a discount to a membership, a discount coupon, or anything else you can think. Just make an effort to surprise your customer a short time after completing the sale. Leave them with that feeling of confidence in their decision to purchase from you. You will almost guarantee that your refund rates drop in half.

Most people will be so impressed, not so much by your bonus, but the way it was delivered, the excitement of recieving far more than they’d expected, and the positive experience of dealing with you.

Use this simple, zero cost technique that to immediately combat buyers remorse, minimize your refunds and cancellations, and build a large group of raving fans who are now more likely to buy from you again in the future.

So are you brave enough to try this out on your next promotion? I’d love to hear how it works out for you.

How to Keep Customers for Life is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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Affiliate marketing is a tough game. Getting started and actually making money online is difficult enough on its own. Using the right tools though can not only save you time but also save you money. Today I am going to show you how you can use 2 free WordPress plugins to cloak, redirect and track all of your affiliate links in 2 simple steps.Of course there are several premium plugins that you could buy to do all of this for you. But honestly, why would you pay for something that is already available for free?

Now I don’t want to suggest that the premium plugin is not a good product. On the contrary they are often great products. I just don’t see the sense in paying for something when, with a little creative effort you can accomplish the exact same result, with the same amount of effort, and spend no money.

SEO Smart Links + Redirection = Cloaking + Click Stats

One of the challenges of affiliate marketers is to make sure they are not being cheated out of commission payments by people stripping the affiliate ID from your affiliate URL. The other big challenge is getting accurate statistics about your ads and offers.

This guide will show you how to get creative with your plugins, to do more than was ever intended with them, and save money along the way.

WordPress Plugins That Help Affiliates

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress plugin that takes any keyword or phrase and automatically converts it to a link. It was originally designed to provide a simple method to deep link to posts and pages within your own site. Using any word or phrase you can automatically create a link and point to a related post or page on your blog.

This all happens without the need to write out that url every time the keyword appears in a post. However SEO Smart Links can also be used to create dynamic links in your posts that point to your affiliate offers, using your own unique affiliate url.

Say you were promoting a Twitter ebook and you wanted every post that used the word Twitter to link to your affiliate page, you simply add the keyword, and your affiliate URL. Then each time a post uses the word Twitter, Smart SEO Links will create links to your offer.

As I mentioned there are several premium plugins designed to do this for you. These premium plugins have 2 main advantages over SEO Smart Links;

1. Provide on the fly cloaking of affiliate link URL’s
2. Provide click tracking on each dynamic link it creates.

Using the free WordPress plugin Redirection, you can achieve the same result. In other words, you can cloak and track with just a few mouse clicks. Redirection not only allows you to do the obvious, create a 301, 302, or 307 redirection without a redirect script, it also allows you to cloak your affiliate links as well as track clicks.

Go ahead and install both plugins then come back to this guide for the setup procedure.

Scenario

In this scenario I am going to be targeting the keyword windows and use my (fake) affiliate url http://microsoft.com. I’ll be cloaking the destination url with http://incomesinternational.com/windows.

Each time the word windows appears in a post, SEO Smart Links will create a link that points to http://incomesinternational.com/windows and when a user clicks the link Redirection will take to the Microsoft home page an track the click.

Step 1 – Create a Group

I like to keep things tidy so the first thing to do is to create a new Group in Redirection. Open your WordPress dashboard then click Tools, then Redirection. Once the screen is loaded click on Groups.

Choose a name for your affiliate link group and add the new group to Redirection. Ensure that ‘enable tracking’ is selected. In this example, my new group is called Cloak.

Step 2 – Create Keywords and Links

Now we are going to setup the keywords we want to target and convert to our affiliate links. Open Settings > SEO Smart Links. Take some time to get familiar with this very simple plugin. Be careful how many links you allow to be converted per post or your site could easily end up looking spammy.

Scroll down to the Custom Keyword section. This is where you add your keywords and cloaked URL. Add a new entry for each keyword or phrase you want to create links for. In my example I’ve added the keyword windows and the destination URL of http://incomesinternational.com/windows

Step 3 – Create a Redirection

Now we head back to the Redirection configuration page. From the main page, Redirects, select your group in the drop down list. In my example I’ll select Cloak, then click Go.

At this point you’ll see an empty list. So lets put in a new affiliate link.

In the section Source URL enter the cloak URL. You do not need to add the domain. So for my example /windows is all that’s needed.

Target URL is where you’ll enter your unique affiliate link. In my case it is http://microsoft.com. Once you’ve filled in the values click the Add Redirection button.

And that’s it! Your posts will now be automatically populated with your affiliate links wherever your keywords appear.

Don’t forget that you can review the clicks for each of your links from the Redirection page by selecting the group that you created. Clicking on the number in the Clicks column will show you a complete log of who clicked, and when.

You are now ready to replace all of your html or php redirects with this much simpler method of cloaking and tracking you affiliate URL’s. And why stop there, add the cloaking method to your banner ads or anything else you want.

Did this post help you? Would you like to see more like this? Tell me about it in the comments.

2 WordPress Plugins to Save Time and Money for Affiliates is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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What are the 3 ingredients that ensure you make money online? Most people who start out trying to make money online fail. It’s a sad but true fact. But it doesn’t have to be that way. More than 90% of people who start out with the idea of making money online, will give up within just a few months. Knowing the 3 ingredients to successfully make money online will help align you with that 10% who make it.

Forget the hyperbole that you’ve read on this subject on other websites. The fact is that it’s not easy to make money online. But it’s not impossible either. For ever person who succeeds, 9 others will fail. Often times it’s because they were either unprepared or not properly informed about what it takes to build an online business that gets results.

You can spend hundreds, even thousand of dollars buying programs that intend to teach you how to start and run your own online business to make money online. Over the years I’ve spent literally thousands, yet I found that most of these programs and courses while full of great detail, forget the 3 most important ingredients of all.

These are the fundamentals of a successful internet marketing business, and interestingly they are in fact no different to traditional offline marketing fundamentals.

Understand Your Market and Give Them What They Want

Before starting any marketing or business building activities, you need to spend some time getting to know your market.This has and will continue to be the biggest challenge to any form of marketing. Get this part right and you can virtually start printing money.

First of all you need to find out if your product is going to satisfy their desires. The easist way to make money online, or offline for that matter is to give people what they want. The only way to do that effectively is to find out everything you can about your market. It’s going to be far easier for you to provide a product that people are lining up to buy when you know exactly what will get them into that line in the first place.

Look at your product and then start using some of the free online tools to find out everything you can about your potential customers. What do you know about them? Where do they hang out online? What drives them? What are their fears and what problems are they looking to solve.

These are just few questions you need to ask yourself about the product you want to promote. Be creative and see how far you can take this. The more you know about your market the easier it will be to match a product to them that they will be knocking down your door to get hold of.

Let Others Promote – Leverage Your Network

You’ve heard the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Well it’s never meant more than it does now. As an internet marketer you need to be networking. Building a large network of associates who are willing to promote you and your products is essential for success.

This network of contacts and associates has the ability to springboard your efforts and help you to spread your promotional message far and wide.

Take the time to utilize all of the different social media avenues available to you and get connected with other people who might be able to help to promote you and your products. But remember to take the time to connect and get to know these people.

Manage and develop these relationships to accelerate your online success.

Embrace Your Competition

No, I’m not kidding. The chances of finding a niche that has not yet been represented and has no competition is virtually nil. Often new internet marketers will run from a niche simply because it looks too competitive. You’re shooting yourself in the foot by running away like this. And your leaving money on the table for someone else to take.

Competition is a good thing. Competition tells us a number of things about the niche, and the market. It tells us first of all that there is a market. Competition tells us that people in that market are buying products. It also tells us that there are enough people buying that marketers are making enought money from that market to pay for promotion.

Using free tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, Trends,  Insights for Search and others can quickly expose the competition and allow you to find the niches that are easily dominated.

The Bottom Line

No matter which model of internet marketing business you chose, Arbitrage, Blogging, Search Marketing or Pay per Click, the fundamentals of marketing don’t change.

The more you know about your market, the more your build your network, and the more you understand ways to dominate your competition, the more success you can expect to have with your internet business.

What do you believe is the most important ingredient to successfully make money online?

3 Ingredients to Make Money Online is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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Do you use the Google tool bar? It was once regarded as the weapon of choice for Search Engine Optimization specialists. It was also regarded as a great way to show off your popularity. How the times have changed. No one actually takes much notice of the tool bar PageRankâ„¢ anymore.

Well almost no one.

Why Should I Care?

You might be one of the many people who don’t use Google’s toolbar, have no idea what PageRankâ„¢ is, or you might not care either way. But if you’re a reader of my blog then it’s fairly safe for me to assume that you are learning how to make money online.

Understanding the relevance of PageRankâ„¢ and how it affects your own website or blog is going to become more important to you as you gain more visitors and readers, and attempt to monetize your site.

PageRankâ„¢ Died a Horrible Death

PageRankâ„¢ comes in 2 flavors. There is the PageRank that Google assigns on fly when each search query is performed. Let’s call this algoritm PageRankâ„¢. This kind of PageRankâ„¢ is used to determine who get placed where on a search result page.

The other flavor is know as Toolbar PageRankâ„¢. The system worked by assigning a number from 0 – 10, based on a series of factors that Google doesn’t share. The higher the number, the more green you would see in the bar and the more auhtoritative your site was considered.

But the system was always flawed. Mostly because of the delay, or lag.

Toolbar Page Rank has always been a long way behind what the algorithm PageRankâ„¢ reported. What this means is that today, the algorithm may have decided that your site is a PR4, but your toolbar would still show a PR0. This lag meant that the toolbar was effectively useless because the data it provided was inaccurate.

PageRankâ„¢, as it was originally intended, was designed to give folks a quick, birds eye view, of how important Google thought your website and pages were. Those days are long gone. Or are they?

PageRankâ„¢ for SEO Eggberts

I want to take just a quick moment to clarify something. Everything that you’ve read here so far actually only relates to anyone who is learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Google’s tool bar PageRankâ„¢, in SEO terms, is simply a novelty.The only real use it has is assisting you in finding sites that would be good candidates to get links from. Other than that, it provides no real value or insight to speak of.

TIP: If you talk with any SEO expert who starts discussing PR numbers with you, then you know they are a eggbert rather than an expert!

The Other Side of PageRankâ„¢

Okay so is there another side to this PageRankâ„¢ thing that I need to know about? Of course there is. After all I didn’t write this post for nothing. So let’s get into the nuts and bolts of it.

Now we know that PageRankâ„¢ is a flawed system and the tool bar doesn’t help or even provide accurate data but none of that matters to you. The internet marketer. The infopreneur. The up and coming guru. But why?

Advertisers! That’s why.

On most websites and blogs you have 3 main monetization strategies available to you.

1. Promote affiliate products
2. Contextual Advertising – like Adsense
3. Sponsored Advertising – like banner ads or reviews

If you’re only promoting affiliate products or your own products on your website then none of this will matter much to you. But I’d challenge you to find me a blog or site that promotes more than a single product that doesn’t use at least contextual advertising like Adsense or Chitika.

However as an affiliate you should be aware, particularly for CPA offers, that your probably not seeing all the available offers because your site has a low PageRankâ„¢.

Advertisers still consider PageRankâ„¢ to be an important factor in making the decision to place advertising on your site. Of course the savvy advertiser already knows that they should be looking at much more data than PageRankâ„¢. The reality is however that many advertisers simply look at PageRankâ„¢ and make a decision from there.

In fact some advertising networks, particularly those that offer cash for comment (paid reviews) won’t even display your site to an advertiser if your PR is below 3.

Another big advantage to a higher PageRankâ„¢ is that the contextual advertising networks will often pay the highest bid amount possible for the privilege of displaying contextual ads on your site or blog.

Finally there are the sponsored banner ads. Usually these advertisers will care more about your monthly unique visitors than they will about your PageRankâ„¢ but…there are still advertisers who will pay much higher prices to advertise on a site with 2x the PageRankâ„¢ and half the traffic.

God only knows why, but that’s the way it is. If you want more advertising dollars, the PageRankâ„¢ is still very important to your bottom line.

Group Discussion

Do you think PageRankâ„¢ should carry as much weight as it does for advertising revenues? Have your say in the comments.

Is Google PageRank Still Important? is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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Have you ever bough a product online with a promise to teach you how to make money online from thin air? I know I have. For more than a decade the sharks, charlatans, and shills have converged on the web waiting to grab your cash. Did the product you bought live up to its promises? I guess not or you wouldn’t still be looking for ways to spot a scam. But now you can fight back.

I’m not the type of person to point fingers or cast judgment, but if you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet, particularly if your looking to learn how to make money online, you’ll have seen some of the these crook’s websites.

My favorite example comes from one of the most well know and prominent internet marketers out there. A couple of years back he released what the sale letter described as the answer to anyone’s prayers. He was selling (name changed to protect the innocent – if any exist) an online business in a box.

It all sounded so great. No prerequisite marketing knowledge, no website, no list, and no product required. And get this. It was all free!

Anyone could be forgiven for thinking “I’d be mad not to take up this offer”. But that’s exactly what the sales letter was designed to make you think. Like the saying goes though, “if it sounds too goo to be true, then it probably is”.

And it was!

Would you like to know what you got with your business in a box. Are you eady for it … ?

NOTHING!

Seriously. You got absolutely nothing. The box was completely empty. This marketer was simply building his email marketinglist. He offered to provide you with, and show you how to start your own internet business from nothing. So I guess it’s fitting that you’d get nothing either.

Well Okay that’s not completely accurate. You did get an affiliate link of your own with some banners to advertise the business in a box. The idea was that all you needed to do was promote this scam and you’d get paid if they ever bought any of his other products.

So it was a twist on the relatively common affiliate marketing model but, it did nothing to teach anyone how to make any amount of money or start any kind of internet marketing business. Although there was a lesson in scamming in there so perhaps that’s something.

Oh I almost forgot. You also got the honor of recieving some of the most spammy marketing emails in existence.

But what about all those other promises? Simply put, it was all hype, false promises, and without any intent to support the customers. In this case the only consolation was that it didn’t cost anything more than a little bit of time. But there are still thousands of other products that do cost good money, and deliver about as much value as this empty box.

Fight the Scammers at Their Own Game

The best way to fight those con-men, is to take away what they love most. Take away their profits and they have nothing.

But how do I take profits away from these internet con men?

Simple! Learn how to spot a scam. It’s actually not that difficult. Once you’ve learned how to spot an internet scammer, your B.S. detector will be running on overdrive and you’ll never buy another dodgy, overpriced, false promise, get rich quick scam ever again!.

In almost all cases, if you spot any of these things, take my advice, and run like the wind!

1. Guaranteed!

Why does this one go first? Because it should be just so obvious. No doubt you’ve seen this on a sales page. But the truth is that in life, nothing is guaranteed except death and taxes. Well there is one other thing. We’ll be always guaranteed to have scammers.

2. No Website Required

OK so maybe it’s somewhat true that without your own website you can make money online. The catch with this one though is that no one tells you just how much money, work, and effort will be required to get your new business off the ground without a website.

3. No List Required

Hold on one second. Don’t ALL the guru’s tell you that “the money is in the list“? HELLO!

4. I’ll Hold Your Hand

OK common sense should have already told you that this is clearly s scam. What this actually means is “I’ll show you all the steps that I think you’ll need to know about, but I won’t be there to help you if things don’t work out as planned”.

5. FREE Access

While it’s a great sales and marketing model, the fact is that when it comes to online products, nothing is free (except in a few rare cases). The free offer certainly helps to boost sales, and often comes with some type of trial period. If it’s a genuinely good offer then this is a great way to attract more sales.

More often though, free trials are simply the entry point to the sales funnel where, once inside the funnel, you’ll usually be forced to buy something else in order to get the free access you were promised. Or as one prominent tried and got a lot of flack for was offering a product for free and in fine print telling you that you just signed up for a monthly subscription that will be billed to your credit card.

Keeping an eye out for these tell tale signs will save your sanity, and your wallet.

Have you ever bought a product that didn’t make the grade? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

Top 5 Ways to Spot an Internet Scam is a post from: Incomes International - Affiliate Marketing Tricks Tips & Advice for Beginners.

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