While I have only been using about 10-15% of the tools features (rank tracker, link assistant, seo spyglass), it has saved me tons of time and with the insight I was able to gather into competition and the evolution of my SEO efforts, I was able to take action that has increased my revenue.

Because my business is ramping up, I am now switching to the SEO PowerSuite Professional edition (paid) as I will be able to access even more features that will save me more time and become more efficient… and that means more money in my pocket.

If you would like to find out more about it, check it out right now because the X-Mas special 60% discount is ending at midnight on Dec. 24th.

See here: http://www.link-assistant.com/news/seo-big-heart.html

Trying to build a successful online marketing campaign in a hot niche market requires expert knowledge in implementing an effective targeted traffic generation method, building an appealing offer and writing salescopy that actually converts a good percentage of your visitors. With too many competitive sites, it is hard to get noticed, hard to rank well in the search engines, and always face the comparison to similar offers from competing websites.

Comes in the local “brick and mortar” business with a storefront or an office in your town. With consumers habits evolving and the internet playing an increasing larger role in people’s search for information, 9 out of 10 searches for a local product or service, such as plumbers, landscaping architects, or electrical supplies, starts on the internet. But until now, small businesses have not caught on to position themselves favorably online to funnel these highly targeted and eager consumers into their marketing process.

As these small businesses are run by entrepreneurs who often have to handle several “jobs” to generate their output (products, services), time is scarce. And most of all, they usually lack relevant internet marketing skills to implement effective strategies.

There are many other ways to combine online and offline marketing methods to create custom business solutions that will help the small business increase their profits. Internet technology needs to be tailored to the small business particular situation to be effective. There is no “one-for-all” solution.

Custom internet marketing solutions can help:

• automate tasks to save you time
• increase online visibility to reach and generate more leads
• educate and pre-sell your prospects to why they should buy your product or service, hence converting more leads into clients and increasing your sales

While there are still great opportunities for local business to position themselves favorably on the internet, this will not always be the case. Remember television in the 1960′s? Companies that started advertising on television then began marketing to mass audiences and positioned themselves prominently in the eyes of consumers. This made it much more difficult for the competitor to gain market-share later on. The internet still holds great potential for local businesses, but as more and more of your local competitors will position themselves online, the harder and costlier it will become for you to grab the rewards internet could offer for a small organization like yours.

If you’re interested in finding out how the internet can help your specific business achieve greater results, call us at 450-538-0922 or email me at florian(at)clearwater-trading.com (replace the (at) with @).

Looking around, though, I must admit that I see more opportunities and “low hanging fruits” in this “industry” than in any other more classic sector.

Obviously, not everyone is going to agree on my point of view, but let me start by explaining the foundation of it:

• every savvy investor knows that you “do not put all your eggs in the same basket” as doing so increases your overall risk dramatically (one event affecting the basket affects all of your eggs: negative performance or even a total crash down).

What does that mean for us here? It means that relying on a single income stream, whether from one employer or one online income stream is not only risky, but I would bluntly say foolish.

“So why does that make Internet Marketing” a better industry during this recession?”

The fact is: you can still implement multiple online income streams without necessitating a PhD, and within a reasonable time frame: you can choose to spend the necessary time to learn the foundations and more advanced strategies yourself, or you can choose to outsource the implementation of your ideas, its up to you… whether it implies selling on eBay, or using eBay to generate leads, helping local businesses to better take advantage of opportunities on the web, promote affiliate marketing offers through various online marketing methods (PPC, email, content websites, article marketing, …) or create an information product and sell it online…. the opportunities are there.

However, knowing them is not enough, and until you take action on them, the fruits will still be hanging low on the trees and no money will start flowing your way. One way to ensure you take action is to surround yourself with people who have similar goals in establishing online income streams. You can find these communities online.

One source where we regularly gather ideas for online business ventures is My Silent Team, a private membership site founded by Jim Cockrum, one of the great internet marketers around. Jim is not only a great caring individual, he steers his members onto dozens of real online income opportunities. With all the business models discussed on MySilentTeam.com, I can guarantee you that you will find at least one that will be right for your situation… the most probable scenario however is that you will find so many great income stream ideas that you will have a hard time making choices…

But MySilentTeam is much more: it is also a great community of individuals who all strive to build one or several online income streams. First I was doubtful about the usefulness of ordinary individuals sharing their experience and helping eachother out to build a small business… but then I have seen it many times on the forums on My Silent Team how people motivate and help each other to effectively set up these income streams… and it works, I am a living proof of it… and like most other people say: “if I can do it, anybody can do it”.

Well, first, you probably know that the word traffic is used in internet marketing jargon to designate a visitor to a given web site or web page.

Targeted traffic therefore is a bunch of very specific visitors to your site or page, people who share a common question, interest, demographic, … this common element is what makes it targeted. Of course, it not only has to be targeted, but also relevant to the “offer” you are promoting. I take “offer” in a very large sense, in its basic form representing what it is you are presenting to visitors on your site. And you want them to take action on this offer, either through a lead capture, a sale, or to get a repeat visit as they find relevant information on your site.

By targeting your visitor appropriately, you not only ensure a good user experience, but you increase the chance that the visitor will take the action you want him to do. This is what we call a conversion.

Not targeting your visitors appropriately is costly: you are basically throwing your time and money out of the windows, as the  likelihood that the visitor is interested in the content of your site is very slim. The cost of having many un-targeted visits to your site depends on what promotion method you use. Any pro-active marketing method that requires that you shell out some budget will certainly be a net cost to you as your conversions will be low to non existent if you do not target your visitors appropriately.

There are many methods to ensure you are driving targeted traffic to your web site.

If you have built up an opt-in mailing list, you certainly have done so around a specific topic. If you now present relevant information to this list, it is targeted. If you start sending this list all kinds of unrelated information or offers, than it is not only un-targeted, it would certainly be considered spam.

If you are using Pay Per Click advertizing in different search engines, targeting your traffic correctly is done through choosing the right keywords. Keyword research is by a whole topic by itself as there are several effective ways to do keyword research to come up with keywords that will convert traffic into conversions. As a general comment, the more the keyword describes your “offer” and the action you want the visitor to take, the more targeted the traffic you will drive with this keyword, and, all things being equal, the higher the conversion rate. Very targeted keywords usually have lower search volume in the search engines, but will result in higher conversions. For example, the keyword “dog training” is a broad keyword for which there is a high search volume. However, somebody typing in this keyword could be looking for “dog training programs”, dog training methods, or many other things. It also does not say for what purpose he is searching. On the other hand, somebody searching for “buy dog training video” is a very targeted visitor and has a much better chance to be converted into a “customer” if our offer is to sell a dog training video.

Another method is to optimize web pages on a specific part of your offer, to make them highly relevant around a common theme. If you combine that with various search engine optimization (SEO) techniques & include targeted keywords that your target audience is looking for, then you can drive targeted traffic through the “organic” search results of search engines.

I am sure you get the idea now… More to come on keyword research & the various online marketing methods…

Simply put, affiliate marketing is marketing others’  products for sale, whether they’re physical products, digital products available for download, or even promoting various offers where the expected result is the capture of a lead.

The affiliate marketer uses various marketing methods to drive traffic to an offer / product with the intention of converting the visitor into a “customer”. That is what we call a conversion.

Before someone can promote an offer, he/she has to apply or sign up with the merchant or through an affiliate network, in order to become an approved affiliate of that merchant or network.

Once approved, the affiliate selects an offer to promote based on his own selection criteria, then sets up one or several campaigns to promote the offer. It could be a Pay Per Click campaign (like Google Adwords), or it could be an email marketing campaign, or both, or any other (online) marketing technique that is allowed for this offer.

This might be a too broad generalization, but having success in affiliate marketing usually involves:

• generating targeted quality traffic through the right marketing channels
• quickly testing multiple campaigns to weed out not converting offers
• optimizing converting campaigns by minimizing their costs and increase the conversions
• ramping up the converting campaigns by scaling them up
• go through the process again for new offers

We will publish more information on various online marketing methods in further posts… so stay tuned.

If you don’t know us already, we are a dynamic Internet Marketing company based in Canada. If you want to know more about our different activities, Click Here.