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8 Common Mistakes of Internet Marketers

Internet Marketing
on October 24th, 2009 by - No Comments

If you wish to be a successful Internet marketer you will want to avoid these 8 mistakes:

1. Failure to prepare properly. Many Internet marketers are simply lazy and will not make the effort to prepare properly. Refrain from being overly anxious as if you’ll miss the boat if you do not market your website immediately. Use however many days it takes to setup all the appropriate advertising accounts and advertisements properly. This will make your administration more efficient and enable you to fly through your schedule tasks effortlessly each day. The net result is that your marketing efforts will be far more productive than if you were to take a haphazard approach.

2. Failure to implement an advertising strategy. You must have a plan with well defined goals if you wish to have positive marketing results. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Do not try to recreate the wheel. Find out what successful people are doing and do the same. Regarding goals, write them down. When you achieve a goal mark it as “completed” and replace it with another. By doing this very simple step you can monitor your effectiveness and progress.

3. Failure to be professional. Some of the ads on the Internet are of embarrassingly poor quality. Be professional in your business approach and in the design of your ads. If you lack the ability to produce professional ads then find a resource that can. The quality of your website and advertisements is a reflection on you. Also, when dealing with customers always be courteous and professional even when they are not. If you are professional you will shine above the rest and earn customer confidence.

4. Failure to implement and adhere to a disciplined schedule. If you don’t have a realistic schedule in place then you will not be disciplined in marketing your ads properly. Consistency not volume is the key to success in marketing on the Internet. A schedule allows you to be consistent and also forces you to be disciplined. The Internet is not a “get rich quick” environment. It takes hours of dedicated and consistent work. You must be committed to putting in the time if you wish to have good marketing results.

5. Failure to utilize the right tools. There are some very innovative tools on the Internet to make the operation of your business more efficient. Many of them are very affordable and they will save you from having great frustration. Some marketers take the approach of being a “penny wise and a pound foolish.” In saving their pennies they are losing out on making the bigger dollars. Don’t ignore the many tools which are available.

6. Failure to build a downline. Your downline is the cornerstone of your business. A downline is your customer list or they can be referrals that join certain advetising programs through you serving as an affiliate. Verious advertising sites offer you some type of compensation for bringing them referrals. Don’t ignore the value of these referrals. Some Internet marketers are so anxious to advertise their product they fail to have an understanding of the bigger picture. A big downline can save you money in your advertising and enbable you to advertise more effectively. When soliciting always get the email address of your customer for future solicitations and sales.

7. Failure to track ads. Much time is wasted on unproductive sites and ads. If you’re not tracking them you will continually work in ignorance. You must have a measure of what is working and what is not. Is the program that you are participating in yielding the desired results? Are your ads well written and effective in drawing customers? You will never have the answers to these important questions unless you track your ads. You can waste a great deal of time on poor advertising programs and bad ads if you never track the results.

8. Failure to understand the advertising medium. You must understand how each type of advertising program works if you’re going to be an effective marketer. Whether you use pay-per-click advertising or membership driven sites like safelists, traffic exchanges and text ad exchanges all have their own personality. Not only do you need to understand the mechanics of each but also the general personality of their membership.

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What Does Your CPA Practice Have in Common With the New York Yankees?

CPA Networks
on October 24th, 2009 by - No Comments

We talk about businesses being teams, but it’s rare that I meet an owner of a CPA business who really trusts every member of his or her “team” to do what they should do, all the time, whether the “boss” is in the office or not.

Sports teams can’t work that way. When the members of any athletic team are focusing on their individual tasks, they have to trust that their teammates will do their jobs, too. If the pitcher is busy supervising the outfielders, he can’t do his job. In order to be able to focus on your job as leadership, then, you need to have staff you trust.

You want staff that you feel confident interacting with your clients if you are going to create a successful CPA practice. So they have to be top notch, both technically and from a customer service standpoint. I will often receive comments from my clients about how wonderful my staff is and in this article, I will impart to you a few of my strategies that have worked well in my CPA practice when it comes to staff recruiting and retaining.

1) The first one is to design an ad that clearly articulates the type of team member that will best fit your organization. In this ad, describe the character and attitude of the person. The important thing to keep in mind is to hire for attitude and train for skills. When I meet with a candidate, I follow a list of questions I’ve created that gives me visibility into their personality and their way of thinking. I talk to a lot of CPAs and I find that they haven’t prepared adequately to do the interview so they are flying by the seats of their pants during the interview. You want to be so prepared that you are not fumbling for questions; instead you are engaging the prospective candidate to understand their attitude.

2) Hire slow, fire fast. I have been guilty of breaking this rule more times than I am proud to admit but its good advice that I came across a number of years back. Most business owners fire slow.

They think it will get better. I read one study that said that the average firings take somewhere between 6 and 18 months after the business owner knew the employee was performing poorly, consistently non-compliant and negatively affecting others. A lot of harm is done in this period of time due to not firing the poor performing employee faster.

Along the lines of my advice to CPA practitioners to fire fast, I encourage them to hire slow. Have a second person interview the candidate. Don’t rush the hiring process. Check references by asking probing questions and LISTEN. CPAs can be poor listeners.

3) The other one is; don’t expect what you don’t inspect. Have weekly meetings to go over work duties and assignments. I have systematized my office where I now work three days per week. On one of the days that I come in, I spend half a day for staff meetings and go over administrative matters. I meet with my CPA and my Senior Manager to make sure the work is being produced within the pre-established standards.

Also, and this is important, keep your eyes and ears open when are there. Listen to the way your staff members talk to clients. I also like “mystery shopping.” What that means is you have someone call the office pretending to be a prospective client. Hear how this person is being handled. I can guarantee you that you will not be happy with the way they are handled. It’s your job to identify what needs to improve and to provide the necessary training.

4) Celebrate small victories. Reward staff for being on your team and helping you to take your practice to the next level. When the staff goes the extra mile, I will publicly praise them….sometimes send them something to their home like a fruit basket. We celebrate birthdays, and we have two parties every year, one after tax season and one during the holiday time. You want to have fun and I see that running a successful CPA practice is a team effort to give the client the “ultimate” experience.

Follow the strategies I have identified in the article and you will see your CPA practice attaining new levels.

Salim Omar, the CPA Marketing Genius, is a practicing CPA and founder of the Genius CPA Marketing System, the step-by-step system that shows you how to attract more clients to your CPA practice and increase your income without working more. To receive your FREE Audio CD titled “12 Marketing Secrets – How To Attract Quality Clients”, visit CPA Marketing Genius
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Making Money With Clickbank

Affiliate Marketing
on October 24th, 2009 by - 10 Comments


My thoughts on the ClickBank affiliate program. See my top money makers: http://blog.2createawebsite…

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SiteBuilder Elite.

Adsense
on October 24th, 2009 by - No Comments

Create Content-rich Websites With The Click Of A Button. Monetize With A Variety Of Income Streams Including Google Adsense, Amazon, AdBrite, ModernClick, Kontera, Chitika. All Created Pages Have RSS As Standard. Add Instant Content. Sites SEO Optimised.

SiteBuilder Elite.

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Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

Affiliate Marketing
on October 24th, 2009 by - No Comments

Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

What exactly is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It’s also true that affiliate marketing is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and have a career on the Internet.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is selling products on a commission basis. You own a business that advertises and sells products for other companies. You may have a product of your own to begin with or not. The things that a successful affiliate marketer must have are:

Your website is the jumping off point of all your marketing efforts. So the first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. You must build a user-friendly website, which will attract your prospects and motivate them to click on the links to the products and services you are promoting and make a purchase. There are companies whose business is building websites that you can hire to build one for you.

You must find products to sell, you must be able to determine whether there is a demand for those products and if people will actually buy them.  You may either have your own original product or products that are made by others. Which ever way you go, you must believe in the products.

It will be necessary for you to become an adept advertiser and be able to tell whether the advertising you are paying for is producing more income for you than the advertising is costing you.

It is necessary that you have good mathematical skills. You will need to be able to track your sales and determine profit, as well as, see to it that your suppliers are paid in full and on time.

You need the full and unwavering support of your family so that you can devote the time and energy necessary to launch your affiliate marketing business.

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Reverse Phone Detective.

Affiliate Marketing
on October 23rd, 2009 by - No Comments

1 Ranking For A Reason!* Search Boxes, Creative, Optimized Order Form, And More! An Affiliate Program That Actually ‘gets’ Affiliate Marketing. Check Out: Http://www.reversephonedetective.com/affiliates.html.

Reverse Phone Detective.

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Google, please clean up Google News

Affiliate Marketing
on October 22nd, 2009 by - No Comments

Google News is a strange product. On the surface you have some great features and a useful service but when you scratch the surface and use the search box it’s like stepping back in time.

The entire Google News service is built around the fact that an editor has to manually approve every news source before it goes live. So why is the system full of terrible content and press releases?

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalised interests.

Unlike the normal search results where the algorithm is in control Google News could clean up the entire system with probably a weeks work. All they would need to do is search for the top few hundred commercial keywords and look through some of the stories being displayed. The spam content is very obvious and nobody in their right mind would let half of the sites pass a manual review.

Google is basically giving spam sites and people who syndicate press releases a free ride in a product that requires manual review before the sites are allowed in. It makes no sense at all.

Check out the results for SEO and read some of the stories. Is this the sort of great newsworthy content that people from Google actually read?

I see an Indian SEO agency with a press release and a recruitment agency posting job adverts.

If you agree that Google News is full of spam leave a comment below or via Twitter.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Google, please clean up Google News

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Google Analytics adds loads of new features

Affiliate Marketing
on October 22nd, 2009 by - No Comments

We know that Google has been investing heavily to take Google Analytics from being the best free analytics product to the best enterprise product and the first of the new features are being announced this week.

Fantastic features such as engagement goals, improved custom variables, intelligence to alert you to sudden changes in traffic & configurable alerts when you get traffic spikes from certain sites are now included.

For full details read this post and the official Google announcement.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Google Analytics adds loads of new features

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10 Proven Applications For Social Media

Affiliate Marketing
on October 21st, 2009 by - No Comments

social-media-applicationTenured digital marketing professionals have been applying social media for end business and marketing objectives for years. But what is clearly valuable to some is still a mystery to many.

Whether you’re a marketer trying to get buy-in for social media from the top or a small business owner wondering why you should bother, knowing high impact applications of social media are helpful. If you’re looking to build relationships with connected, influential individuals (and what business isn’t?) then it’s no longer a question of if you should engage in social media, rather it’s the how and the why.

If you’re wondering how, a great starting point is viewing TopRank’s social media roadmap presentation. But let’s take a step even further back and consider the why: directed application of social media can accomplish some seriously valuable objectives.

Following are 10 tried and proven applications of social media:

1. Change the conversation in your industry, even if you’re not at the top
The social web is the great equalizer, in that good ideas permeate a niche in as close to a democratic fashion as you can get. Certainly those with a following and a strong reputation can spark whatever conversations they want. But in reality anyone with ideas worth sharing can impact the global conversation. Influence is multi-directional and frequently occurs horizontally or from the bottom up.

2. Reputation management
As noted in our post on B2C Marketing and social media, social media allows you to go direct to consumer with your news. If you’ve got a megaphone to your fans – such as a popular blog read by your entire industry – you can counter pesky rumors floating around about your brand with a simple post backed up with the real facts.

3. Build your tribe
Seth Godin has popularized the notion of having a tribe – aka a following or community – interested in seeing you succeed. Social media does not make this easy, rather it makes it possible at scale if you’re actually worth following.

4. Organic PR generation
As Lee noted in answers to social media questions, TopRank’s blog generates anywhere from 10-20 quality organic PR placements monthly. Some months this can be much higher. By participating as a contributor to the social web and consistently adding value, organic PR is a byproduct. This is possible for your brand too and shifts your PR from the infinite treadmill of push to the natural growth of pull. This strategy is scalable, authentic and let’s you be yourself – what’s not to like?

5. Use social as part of your SEO strategy
At TopRank, we’re big on the SEO and social media intersection. We frequently help clients uncover opportunities embracing the fact that both SEO and social are intrinsically linked. Being white hat SEOs, it’s a crossroads we’re especially fond of.  Social content plays such as linkbait are tactics the engines publicly endorse, the engines thrive on the addition of fresh content and social media participation forges relationships with others likely to link to you as those relationships strengthen.

6. Listen to key stakeholders
The wide array of social media monitoring tools available make listening to the topics you’re interested in a snap. Get the right setup in place and you can have your finger on the pulse of your niche, learn frequently articulated pain points and deliver solutions that truly resonate.

7. Become a David to your industry’s Goliath
Social media lets you tell the stories you want to tell in an unrestricted fashion. If you’re a brand willing to step outside the box, it is possible to position yourself as the David to your industry’s Goliath. And if there is one thing social web users across niches love, it’s an up-and-comer that’s organized around openness and being social.  That was a huge part of Zappos’ strategy and reason for their success.

8. Social proofing
We’ve previously discussed the importance of social proofing and its application as part of your online marketing growth strategy.  Social media allows you to attain directed social proofing for use to accomplish specific business objectives. Whether you want to inspire comments/ratings about a new product and leverage that for marketing materials or share compelling metrics such as the popularity of your community publicly to inspire even more growth, social media application can play a large role in establishing your brand’s social proofing.

9. Attract talented, passionate employees
Participation in social media shows the human side of your company and in time it shows your brand’s true colors. Bearing your company is truly remarkable and communicating that to the world, this will attract attention from quality employees. And with hiring paradoxically harder in a downturn, yet no slowdown in demand for A-list employees, social media can position your brand as a better choice for top talent.

10. Become a media company
In a previous post on influencing the social web we mentioned the fact that every company is now a media company. It’s something many others have noted, a great example being Techdirt. They’ve fully embraced this – their popular blog with more than 600,000 subscribers is easily their launching point for complementary services. Mike Masnick, Techdirt’s CEO recognized this so much he even state it directly: advertising is content, content is advertising.

Conclusion
The 10 potential applications of social media listed above are merely a primer to get you thinking.  There are far more than these 10 – the use of social communications tools are limited only by your creative and technical know-how.

As a marketing professional or business owner, realize that at its core social media is not Twitter, Facebook or any single tool despite what your peers are buzzing about. It’s merely the opening of communications and connections through technology. And the buzzwords, tools or tactics are meaningless without end applications/strategies in mind.

What applications of social media are you applying for your business or marketing objectives?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. |
10 Proven Applications For Social Media |
4 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Affiliate Expansion – Tap Into International Markets

Affiliate Marketing
on October 21st, 2009 by - No Comments

Tapping into international traffic can be relatively inexpensive because few affiliates and merchants know how to best capitalize on it. There are large, identifiable international markets to target online that aren’t nearly as competitive as the US market is.

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