internet

Archive for December, 2011

One of my top tips for anyone starting out online or setting up a business is to put together a sound marketing strategy plan. But before you do this, I want to let you in on one of THE most important internet marketing strategies you will ever learn.

Keyword Research – Keyword Research is the most important foundation of any business in today’s markets. be it an online business or an offline business, your internet marketing strategies are going to prove to be the lifeblood of your research and planning when setting up.

A solid approach keyword research will show you in an instant whether there is a market out there for your product or service, and will determine the profitability of your future marketing campaigns.

Sounds like a strong statement doesn’t it?

I’m sorry to say, but it’s true. For those of you who put little to no thought into, OR who don’t understand the high significance of keywords, in their internet marketing strategy, the keyword research you do before getting one single web page up will have a tremendous impact on how well you market to your target audience.

If you’re an offline business (purely shopfront) you will need to consider implementing keyword research into your marketing strategy before you start, as most consumers now search online for their product or service before purchase or physical visits to businesses.

No pressure.

So – you’re probably wondering “why is this keyword research so darned important to my internet marketing Strategies?”

Imagine for one moment that you own a Web Design Company and you’ve been invited to speak at an event.

You turn up, ultra prepared, notes in hand to deliver the presentation of your life.

You step out in front of the 200 or so attendees, everything goes to plan, and you speak ever so compellingly for about 25 minutes.

When you are finished, the crowd claps nicely…almost out of obligation. Everyone leaves their seat immediately, and heads to the hotel bar, leaving you standing their, no questions to answer, no-one to follow up, no exciting after speech buzz to attend to.

The internet is a massive store of information. The amount of information being added each day is also huge. Anybody can add and delete information. By and large, the net space remains unmonitored, because it is simply impossible to keep a watch over each new website, file, directory or link that is added. In this scenario, anti-social elements often act maliciously, adding information that contains deadly viruses, or infecting links and even entire websites with viruses, malware, spyware, and other such devastating material. Such material can damage your computer in a variety of ways, such as deletion of entire folders, corruption of files, or crashing of the hard disk. Further, spyware and malware can access your personal information, and cause havoc with your bank accounts as well as your online identity as a whole. Apart from this, criminal minded people can lure you to give out your personal details online, leading to huge problems for you later on. Given such scary consequences, it is essential that you seek some internet safety tips from reliable sources, before you proceed with using the internet.

One of the best internet safety tips is the advice to put minimal personal information online. This has become very crucial today, given the mass proliferation of dating and friendship websites, and social networking sites. Some dating sites are safe; however, many contain fake users. In fact, many users pose as members of the opposite gender, and even put up a photo and a fake name. They lure you into interacting with them, and get to know you thoroughly. If your personal details are visible to all, or if your account has public access, it becomes easier for them to contact you. Some users fake their identity just for fun, most however, have some sadistic intent, and try to schedule an appointment with you. There is documented evidence of these “appointments” leading to gruesome murders, kidnappings, rapes and other heinous crimes. Moreover, these sites can also infect your computer with malware at times. Therefore, keeping your personal information private, with limited access, and being careful about making friends with strangers online, is one of the best internet safety tips. Such misadventures occur through social networking sites too, however, with the strong popularity and networking capability of the best sites such as Facebook, it has become easier to ascertain fake individuals.

Internet safety tips such as adding and updating anti-virus protection are also popular tips. Anti-virus protection software is absolutely necessary even for computers using Macintosh. The software scans any file or folder you download from the internet, before you download it. If it finds a virus, malware or spyware in it, it immediately quarantines the file, issues a warning and cleans the folder or file. Updating such anti-virus software to its newer and newer versions is necessary in order to counter newer viruses and malware being continuously developed.

I’ve seen it, and I know you’ve seen it also. You click on a website, a blog, or a sales letter page…. and there’s nothing but 100% hype about the product that they’re selling. You will see sites that say, “make money within 24 hours”, or “earn $10,000 this month easily”, or “quit your day job for this money-making venture”. All of this is nonsense.

I don’t know about you, but if you want to make money on the internet, you have to stick to the basics. There are a lot of myths and fables of how to make money “fast” online, but you should know that I have tried all of them out, and 95% of them aren’t worthy of being sold.

In today’s lesson, I want to reveal to you some of the hype surrounding the realm of online business, and how you can avoid the bad advice that you will hear and see online. In fact, here’s the first myth:

1) Making money fast is easy

Now I’ve been doing this internet marketing thing for over 10 years now, I’ve had large mailing lists, and I can tell you that the fastest way to make money online is via advertising. You may get sales, but the cost of getting that customer will be more than what you earned from the sale.

But I do have to make a confession. I can remember writing 5 articles and submitting them to the top 5 article directories, and I got a sale within 3 days of promoting those articles. But this is rare. This was a very small niche, and the market was rabid for this information.

Take this advice: Don’t pay attention to anyone saying that you can make money overnight. You will see it everywhere you go online, but just ignore it, and realize that true success comes from hard work, and building an email list that you can sell to. Here’s another myth that you will hear:

2) The best time to join is now

Actually, anytime is the best time to start your internet business. If the economy is bad, it’s good to start an online business because it can provide you with a secondary income – especially if you lost your job. If the economy is in good shape and people are spending like crazy… it’s a good time to start an online business because a lot of people will have the money to buy things helpful for their life.

So to make things short, anything is the best time to jump start your online business. Don’t let anyone deceive you and tell you that the best time to join is “now”, and that the opportunity won’t be there if you don’t take action “now”. The bottom line is that internet marketing is universal, so for any kind of business that you start online… you will need to know how to market it successfully. It doesn’t matter the business.

These 2 myths that beginners get sucked into are things that you shouldn’t believe, and you should just stick with the basics to get your feet wet in the online marketing game. It’s tough, but with persistence and dedication, you can make it successful for you.

Have you been invited to attend an internet marketing conference or convention? If you want to achieve internet marketing success, you should take the opportunity to attend. It can only help you reach your goals and spark many new, creative ideas, which will lead to internet marketing success. Many times the speakers began their careers in a similar way to what you may be doing at the moment. When you hear about how they succeeded, you may want to follow that path. It could lead to improving both your career and your income. Hearing success stories from people in your field making seven figure incomes can be highly motivating.

When attending these types of events, you will find many internet marketing products being promoted. Before investing in a system to implement your online marketing strategy, carefully compare all the options. Take your time, ask questions of the presenters. It is important that you fully understand the method before you invest. Make a checklist for yourself with everything you are seeking in a product. Once you have returned home, study the program. Make a plan to immediately begin and stick to the schedule you have established to reach internet marketing success. If you run into a problem, refer to the documentation and work through the problem by following the steps outlined for you.

Purchasing products because of promises to get rich quick will only drain your wallet and lead you to waste energy. Make good decisions by doing your homework and researching for what works. Improving your cash flow is possible, but it takes work and dedication. There are products and systems that can help, but don’t believe empty promises. Choose carefully and you will find the right product to help you reach internet marketing success and improve your bottom line.

Once you have found a system you are comfortable with, apply it to your businesses. Continue to follow the program, even after you begin to see your income improve. Don’t stop once you begin to see your income increase. This is the absolute wrong time to reduce your efforts. Keep working and improving and you will see your income grow.

Creating a variety of income streams should be the goal of your program. Constantly changing and adapting to an ever changing market and your target audience is a must to achieve the best results. Each time I attend a conference or convention, I take note of new methods and techniques. I try to apply the ones that make sense for my market. Also, be flexible. You may find things are no longer working. In this case, be willing to make a change. As the needs and demands of a business change and grow, you must do the same thing. Internet marketing success depends on your ability to adapt quickly and promote your product or sites in a high quality fashion.

Despite the internet becoming increasingly ingrained in our culture, excepting engineers and enthusiasts, few people seem to know much about how it works. It is clearly a very complex piece of technology. However, on a simple level, it is just groups of smaller networks that communicate with each other. There are several large companies, which are refereed to as level 1 networks; they handle the bulk of the traffic. The rest of the ISPs – whether they provide their service through cable or mobile satellite internet – communicate with the rest of the world through these level one networks.

There are now dozens of different ways to access the web. However, the one that started it all was dial-up. This uses a modem to convert digital signals (data) into analogue signals, in the form of sound, which allows the data to be transmitted over the phone network.

Comparatively speaking, the internet is a very young technology, and most people can remember dial-up; in fact many people around the world still use it. However, it is a technology on its way out. More people each year are switching to broadband technologies.

Broadband is not a very specific term; it can refer to a number of technologies, and a large range of different speeds (bandwidth). However, the two dominant broadband technologies are cable and ADSL broadband. The first, ADSL, allows data to be transmitted in a digital form (i. E. Not being converted into sound first) over a traditional copper telephone line.

The data does not interfere with the sound on a telephone call, and inexpensive filters separate the data and audio streams at the end point. The benefit of this is that the broadband service can be provided over an existing phone line.

However, one of the main drawbacks is the variable performance. In fact, the further away one lives from the local telephone exchange, the poorer the signal will be. It follows that the poorer the signal is, the slower the connection will also be.

As an alternative to this, in areas where it is available, many people choose cable broadband. Instead of being provided over copper telephone lines, cable is provided over a cable TV network, which may also be many of copper, but is now more likely to be made of fiber optic cable. The very last part of the network – between the cabinet (or multiplexer) in the street and the customer’s home – is often made from copper co-axial cable, rather than fiber. This is why cable TV / broadband networks are often refereed to as “hybrid fiber co-ax” networks.

These two services are now the most common digital communication technologies in the world. However, they require a person to live a suitable distance from a local exchange. For those living in very rural areas, or adventurous people who wish to take their service to a remote place, technologies such as satellite internet are often a good choice.

During my time in the health and fitness industry I’ve been asked numerous times what the best ‘fat burning foods’ are. This is a particularly controversial topic, the more you research online the more conflicting opinion you’re likely to come across. It’s important to establish from the outset that even the existence of ‘foods that burn fat’ is debatable. Most people have heard that green tea has some fat burning properties, and foods that burn fat are spicy, or hot. But what’s the real science behind all this? Are there foods that can really burn fat away?

If you research the topic you’ll find a number of people in the ‘it’s all just a gimmick’ camp. These people are primarily those who believe ‘a calorie is a calorie’, that it doesn’t matter what ‘fat burning foods’ you eat, arguing overall calorie intake is the only important variable at the end of the day. They are to an extent justified in their skepticism. They are also correct to an extent that overall calories are an important element of the fat loss puzzle. However, for optimum body composition, you’re not going to get very far by just concentrating on total calorie intake. It’s also important to obtain calories from the appropriate sources, at the appropriate times.

When actually delving into the controlled scientific research on this topic it’s apparent that some of the reported ‘fat burning’ benefits of specific foods are genuine. For instance, there is a thermogenic effect from spicy foods such as hot pepper. It’s the capsaicin specifically, in the hot pepper, that this effect is derived from. Does this mean we should all start pouring hot pepper over every meal? Well no, not really. Unless of course, you’re a massive fan of hot pepper and already have it on your breakfast cereal. By all means, if this is the case, who am I to stop you?

Unfortunately, while the capsaicin found in hot pepper does increase the thermogenic effect of feeding, the actually impact this has on fat loss is minor at best. There has been a number of studies on the impact of green tea on fat loss also. This should come as no surprise, considering it’s rise in popularity in the last decade. The compound that affects metabolic rate in green tea is called epigallo-catechin gallate (tell your co-workers you’re drinking it for that reason, to get some funny looks). Epigallo-catechin gallate (EGCG) provides a small increase in metabolic rate over a 24-hour period. The downside to this is studies show the amount of EGCG required to produce this metabolic increase is quite significant. It’s around 300mg of EGCG per day. This is the equivalent of around 5 strong cups of green tea each day.

The obvious catch with both of these ‘fat burning foods’ is that the effect they have on fat loss is minimal. Unless you’ve already got all other aspects of your diet perfect, you’re unlikely to see much benefit from their implementation. The majority of people would be better focused on increasing the thermogenic effect of their diet as a whole rather than looking at specific food/supplements as the answer. As with most things, it’s better to concentrate on the broad strokes before the finer details. This translates to ensuring that your diet is primarily constructed from natural, unprocessed foods. All food we eat has a thermogenic effect. This is known as the thermic effect of food. It’s why many diets prescribe you should eat 6-8 small meals per day rather than 2-3 large meals. This keeps the metabolism stoked all day long.

Here’s the key rule to remember when looking at ‘burning fat’ with foods: Different food groups have different thermogenic impact. This means that the thermogenic effect of fat isn’t as high as the thermogenic effect of protein. Indeed, scientific studies have illustrated protein has the highest thermogenic effect of any macronutrient. You’ll have seen many fat loss diets including protein in every meal. Now you know why. It also acts to suppress the appetite. So it’s easy to see why protein is an essential pillar of any weight loss program. Many top level coaches I’ve worked with actually prescribe increasing the level of protein their clients are getting when they are dieting, while simultaneously decreasing the level of carbohydrates, and in some cases dietary fats.