What Does It Mean to be an Internet Marketer?

There’s no PhD you can strive for to be in the Internet marketing industry. You have to learn as you go – on your own – soaking up information along the way.  The first thing you need to know is what it means to be an Internet marketer, because it isn’t always clear to everyone.

Let’s start with what Internet marketing is not.  It’s not being a con artist. It’s not being a spam king.  It doesn’t just mean selling on eBay or having your own website and products.

In reality, Internet marketers can pick and choose from a whole host of options available to help them make money.  Your opportunities are virtually endless, and include one or more of the following:

• Selling digital downloads (information products like eBooks)
• Promoting other people’s products for a commission (affiliate marketing)
• Selling on eBay or other auction sites
• Running a membership site
• Selling your online services (writing, graphics, etc.)
• Owning a website that sells dropshipped or wholesale items

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Being a newcomer to Internet marketing, you might be worried that you don’t have anything to sell.  That’s okay – most people don’t start out with anything, and you never have t stock a tangible inventory if you don’t want to.

Internet marketing creates no gender or age boundaries for you.  There are teenagers who have launched multi-million dollar companies as budding Internet marketers whose ideas sprung to life and catapulted them to instant success.

You don’t have to do anything unethical or shady to succeed at Internet marketing, and in fact, launching a respectable business with a solid reputation is the secret ingredient that will allow you to hatch an empire on the ‘net to fulfill all of your dreams and those of your family.

Why Mini Sites Make So Much Money

Visit almost any restaurant, and you’ll see evidence of the increasingly common belief that bigger is better. Fast food restaurants zealously encourage their patrons to upsize their drinks and fries, and upscale dining establishments pile food high on their customers’ plates.

Many websites have taken the “bigger is better” theory to heart, too. Superstores like Overstock.com and Walmart have websites consisting of thousands upon thousands of pages. And they are doing quite well for themselves.

When there are so many large sites online, it may seem futile to try to get a piece of the pie. The average person doesn’t have the time or money to set up such an operation, let alone maintain it. But you don’t have to. A mini site can flourish in a land of Internet giants.

The reason mini sites work is because they do not directly compete with the big guys. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, a mini site simply seeks to do well in a small niche. In this case, smaller is better.

The most successful mini sites go after a small but underserved niche. They find a need that isn’t being filled, and they fill it. This puts them into a position to get better rankings in the search engines, because the keywords that people would use to find their offerings are not often targeted by webmasters of larger sites. With some good SEO, they can get targeted traffic at very little expense.

Once the visitors are at the mini site, the sales letter grabs their attention and, hopefully, convinces them to make a purchase. Those who are on the fence may sign up for a newsletter or free course. This provides the opportunity to maintain contact and persuade them to buy later.

A mini site can hold its own, even with millions of other web pages online. You just need a good niche, a quality product and a strong sales pitch.

Ready to learn more about mini sites??  Sign up for my newsletter at http://mikecollinsmarketing.com to receive your free Mini Sites Explained report.

7 Tips for Increasing Conversions

Today’s article is written by guest author Joel Ohman of DomainSuperstar.com.  Joel offers some serious tips for increaing your website’s conversion rates…

Unless you have a website that you operate purely for your own enjoyment without any type of interactive or profit incentive then chances are you are like me in that you are constantly looking for ways to make your website convert better.

Many people associate the term website conversion with a sale and often that is exactly what it is but a conversion can really be anything at all. For all intents and purposes a website conversion is when the website visitor does what you want them to do. This could be buying a product, subscribing to your RSS feed, joining your newsletter, clicking on an advertisement, downloading an eBook, or any other number of things.

As the owner of a domain name tools website and close to 1,000 other domain names I am constantly tinkering with little things to try and help my websites convert better. Here is a list of 7 tips for increasing conversions:

1. MDA – The MDA or Most Desirable Action is something that you should always focus on for each of your websites. Your graphics, page headers, page copy, and everything else on the page should be focused on persuading people to do this most desirable action. A common mistake for many webmasters and internet marketers is to offer too many unrelated offers on the same page and effectively confuse or even annoy visitors to the site.

2. Tracking – Even before you start to get a lot of traffic to your site you should install and use tracking software. Free website analytics software like Google Analytics or Stat Counter is more than enough for most new sites. Advanced software packages like Hit Tail, Click Tale, Crazy Egg, and others can add some additional value once your site really begins to take off. Pay close attention to metrics like bounce rate and visitor paths to determine why visitors are leaving your site. Are visitors arriving at your site from a search engine and not finding adequate information for the keyword phrase that they typed in? Can you add more detail to some of your page copy to encourage visitors to stay longer on your site and give you a better chance to funnel them towards your MDA?

3. Domain Name – Your domain name is a strong signal to website visitors and can either help or hurt your credibility. If you design and sell website templates online then which domain name would visitors think is more trustworthy: 123-online-websitez-templatez.net or websitetemplates.com? Obviously, websitetemplates.com is the better choice. Choosing a strong keyword domain name can position your website as the authority site for that niche.

4. Design – Do you have a site that looks like it was designed in 1989? A clean and professional design can go a long way to make your website visitors feel safe inputting their email address and other personal information on your site.

5. “Realness” – Adding an about us page, a contact us page, a privacy policy page, terms of service page, having a physical address and phone number listed on the site, and other indicators of company legitimacy and “realness” will do wonders for increasing conversions.

6. Testimonials – Adding testimonials to your site either on a dedicated page or on a sidebar can reinforce positive beliefs about your site/company/service/product and can also work as a force for positive peer pressure. This is especially true if you can manage to get some testimonials from high profile people in your niche.

7. Testing – One thing is for certain when it comes to increasing website conversions: constantly testing conversion is critical. No two websites are exactly alike. Different things work for different websites and different niches. Maintain an open mind and constantly test what does and does not work for you.

Hopefully you enjoyed these 7 tips for increasing conversions. What additional tips would you recommend?

Internet Marketing Tips – Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

There’s one mistake made by one would-be internet marketing genius after another. They spend months or years learning the ropes of online business and then they finally hit upon a method that works for them. having found their own little formula for success, they start repeating the process over and over again.

Before they know it they have a whole network of sites plugging away earning them steady money day after day. They figure as long as they continue building new sites their income will continue to grow.

Its really a good plan and you would do well to follow it. But, they’re missing out on one key concept that could wipe out their entire business overnight.

Diversification.

Relying too much on any given method or third party site is a recipe for disaster. You need to diversify your streams of income to protect your business from the unexpected. Just think about what would happen if:

You built hundreds of AdSense sites and blogs only to have your AdSense account terminated.

You submitted hundreds of articles to EzineArticles and a virus attack wiped out their databases and all your articles were deleted.

You’re earning big commissions promoting a popular affiliate program that suddenly goes under.

Your highly profitable Pay Per Click campaign nosedives after Google raises the minimum bid for your keywords from 15 cents to ten dollars.

If this article teaches you nothing else, please understand that you need to diversify yourself so if one revenue stream dries up the others will keep you afloat. If you put all of your eggs in one basket you may just end up with a basket of broken eggs.

I Told You IM Is Easy!

One of my favorite blogs to read is run by Josh Spaulding.  Josh is a really bright guy who always has interesting insights and ideas.

In his latest post he pretty much summed up the main concept of my blog: Internet Marketing Isn’t As Difficult As It Seems!

Josh points out that people tend to make things out to be more difficult than they really are…often because that’s what they’re led to believe by experienced marketers who know better (but who want to cash in on your confusion by selling you the next big thing!)

If you don’t already read Josh’s blog, I strongly suggest you check it out and subscribe to his feed.

What to Expect from IMIsEasy.com

Since this is a brand new blog I figured it would be good to set some expectations.

I don’t expect to be posting every day…I have too many other things going on and I’d rather write one or two high-quality posts per week instead of 7 mediocre ones.

As far as topics go, anything related to making money online is fair game including:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogging
• Passive Income
• Product Creation
• Pay Per Click
• Copywriting
• And more…

I’ll also recommend products that I use and find helpful, and review books that will give you the knowledge you need to succeed. 

And that’s not all…you’ll also get lots of free reports and tools to help you build your online empire.  So stay tuned because there’s a lot of great content coming at you…