Online Opportunity

When picking where to advertise on the Internet, you have to keep in mind various factors.

One is your audience. If you’re looking to sell fishing poles, advertising on a Work At Home Mom website isn’t targeted advertising. You’ll sell some, but your sales won’t be as high as if you’re selling on a fishing website. You must identify your audience before picking an advertising location. Too many new marketers focus on what they’re selling, and not who they’re selling it to.

Another is where the advertisement will appear. Site wide advertisements will get your ad in front of a lot of eyes, but aren’t necessarily the best place. Even with a targeted audience, not everyone in that audience is ready to buy your product. Ideally, you want a page that reflects some problem that your product can solve, some need it can fill, or at least a proven willingness to purchase.

Pages that address the particular problem or need that your product solves or fills are a great place to advertise. If you’ve chosen a product that has a broad appeal to your target audience, then there will be pages like this on nearly every website devoted to that audience. If you’re having trouble finding those pages, then maybe you’ve picked the wrong target audience, or the wrong product for that audience.

A nice middle ground is to advertise on the Thank You page for other products in your niche. That will get your product seen by people who have just finished buying another product in the niche. You can often make these sorts of advertising arrangements directly with the website owners.

A less targeted alternative to working directly with website owners is ThankYouAds.com. It’s basically a traffic exchange for ads placed directly onto Thank You pages. You have a limited ability to select the niche by choosing one out of twenty-two categories for your ad. So it won’t be as targeted as picking a specific Thank You page to advertise on, but is better than just a random exchange. My preliminary testing with this service doesn’t show a good enough conversion rate to justify using it, though, so it could be that some members are not displaying the ads on their Thank You pages after all.

Like most things online, you can invest your time locating appropriate pages on target websites and making arrangements with the website owners, or you can use an automated system that converts your traffic into views of your ads. Investing your time will always yield better results, but the automated systems give you the benefit of hands-off operation.

Ultimately, you have to decide how much of your time you’re willing to invest in your online business.

The giveaways started this week at the 12 Days of Christmas site.

So far, I haven’t been too impressed with most of the giveaways, but one in particular is quite good. Ian Traynor donated Web Protect Pro and Webmastery Magic. Both are software tools that provide useful utilities if you’re selling anything online.

Web Protect Pro provides a tool for generating cloaked links that live on your server. You don’t really need that if you’ve read my DIY Link Cloaking post, but the tool makes it a bit easier than editing your own PHP files. Web Protect Pro also includes a utility for putting your email on a page but keeping spammers from getting it, and a way to protect the folders that contain your product files (the ones people are supposed to pay for before they get).

Webmastery Magic is a utility that allows you to generate fancy navbars and other navigational aids for websites you create, without knowing much HTML. You don’t need this if you’re using something like WordPress to create your sites, but if you’re creating standalone sites this could help.

I’m a sucker for software, especially free software, so I’m pretty pleased with this package. The rest of the giveaways so far are the normal run of ebooks on Internet Marketing. If you feel like you need ebooks to learn Internet Marketing, click here to get some for free instead of paying for them.

I’ll keep you all posted on other gems that show up during the giveaway.

You’ll see a lot written about how to learn and succeed as an Internet Marketer.

At the most basic level, there are skills you need to learn as an Internet Marketer to be successful. Some technical skills, some social skills, some marketing skills. The trick is learning those skills before you give up in disgust, having spent more money than you can afford.

Here’s my guide to learning Internet Marketing.

1) Stop buying ebooks! Ebooks provide information, and information is useful. But not all information in ebooks is reliable. Some are just plain wrong, some are outdated, some are just trying to get you to spend money, and some are great, but you have to wade through a lot of ebooks to figure out which is which. You can get the same mix of reliable and unreliable information for free by reading the various Internet Marketing blogs.

There’s an underlying assumption behind buying ebooks that an ebook can teach you skills. It cannot. An ebook can provide information that you must interpret based on your current skill set. An ebook could lay out the best marketing tactic in the world, and if your skill set isn’t there yet you won’t understand what it’s trying to tell you.

Plus, the average person who wants to make money online spends between two and five thousand dollars each year on products designed to help them, until they finally decide that they can’t make money online after all. Spending that sort of money when you aren’t making anything yet is not sound business.

2) Stop joining systems! Systems are designed to make money for the founder, plain and simple. Ethical founders will try to work systems so they’re at least not too bad for the members, but systems generally work by funding early joiners from the fees of late joiners.

Joining a system shows an assumption that someone else can do the work for you so you don’t have to build skills. But you usually need the skills to get referrals to the system.

If you can’t make money online without a system, you won’t be able to do much of it with a system.

3) Experiment! If you’ve spent money on an ebook or read an interesting technique on a blog, try it. It doesn’t matter if you’re not entirely sure how it’s supposed to work. Let’s say you read about creating a Squidoo page to drive traffic to an affiliate link. You’re not too sure about Squidoo, or how it gets traffic in the first place. Just create a Squidoo page!

Stop trying to understand the complete roadmap of how things are going to unfold from start to finish. The process of doing and then analyzing the results will teach you far more than any ebook or system.

4) Find a mentor. If you want to spend money to accelerate building your Internet Marketing skills, find a mentor. Mentors will provide advice tailored to your level of skills and your interests. They won’t do the work for you, but they’ll give you direction and motivation. You’ll do the work, trying their advice, seeing what works and what doesn’t.

5) Create products, don’t buy products. Product creation is how you make serious money online. If you’re not sure what sort of product to create, work with your mentor. Everyone knows enough about at least one topic to create their first product on that topic, and after that the process of product creation gets easier.

6) Network! This is the true secret of Internet Marketing success, the one that most people avoid like the plague. After all, if we’re doing business online doesn’t that mean that we don’t need to interact with each other? If I can become an affiliate at the push of a button, why do I need to network?

Networking is where the real deals are made between Internet Marketers. So called “joint venture” partners give each other far higher commissions on product sales than they do to affiliates. A good JV partner will promote your product in exchange for you promoting theirs. You might collaborate on creating products.

Building a good set of JV partners is critical. The gurus are gurus largely because they all support one another’s products.

Patience is a virtue when learning any skill set, and Internet Marketing is no exception. Be prepared to put in the time to learn what you need to learn by experimenting, and you will eventually succeed.

Update: Thanks to mis-scheduled posting, this didn’t actually appear on the day after Thanksgiving…sorry about that, but for the sake of the post, pretend it is, and enjoy the weekend all over again.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States, and it’s traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year.

It’s also the day when anyone who hasn’t already decorated for Christmas does. So it’s a good time to mention the 12 Days of Christmas Internet Marketing giveaway.

This is something that Mark Hendricks does each year, where he convinces other marketers to give away original ebooks and products. Then for each of the 12 days before Christmas, you can log on and download your gifts for that day. Mark also donates 25% of the profits he makes on the project to charity.

What’s that you say, “How does he make profits if he gives away free gifts?”

Well, along with your free gift in the member’s area, you’ll also get links to special discounted items and other deals. You don’t have to take any of those to get your free gifts, but if you do Mark’ll get a commission. So giving away the free gifts is a way to get people to look at the money making links.

The gifts officially start appearing December 1st. More will appear every other day after that, until Christmas. To get you started, Mark has seeded the member’s area with a free gift of his own, six audio recordings of the Internet Success System Master Mind Teleconferences he runs.

Click here to sign up for the 12 Days of Christmas giveaway.