9 Internet Marketing Mistakes -- Must Watch!

Great series from Arnie Kuenn:

Internet Marketing Mistake #1: No Strategic Plan.



Internet Marketing Mistake #2: Paying for "Guaranteed Top 10 Ranking"



Internet Marketing Mistake #3: 1 Bazillion Visitors Guaranteed!



Internet Marketing Mistake #4: Sending Email to 15 Million Prospects



Internet Marketing Mistake #5: Submitting Your Site To 150,000 Search Engines



Internet Marketing Mistake #6: Not Doing Thorough Keyword Research



Internet Marketing Mistake #7: Relying On Join Ventures



Internet Marketing Mistake #8: Not Building A Prospect List



And last but not least.. Internet Marketing Mistake #9: Believing You'll Make A Fortune With Google AdSense



So in summary, learn and live!

Whats All The Buzz About?!

Y'all probably heard about this, right? I mean, you guys living under a rock, or what?! :)

Seriously, there's a huge huge buzz on the Internet about a new system for generating quality traffic, and it does not require use of CPC systems like Google Adwords. I won't bore you with all the details, I'll just let the videos speak for themselves:

Video #1: Intro to Brock Felt and Buck Rivzi



Video #2: They explain a bit about their system:



Video #3: Brock explains his "Success Formulas":



Video #4: Brock and Buck explain how to choose the right broker:



Video #5: They put it all together and conclude with a "BluePrint For Success":



So if you watch this, you'll see why these guys are so hot they burn the chairs they sit on... Seriously, they're master IMs and you can learn a ton by just watching their videos.

Next post, I have several surprises for you.

Where It All Started!

OK, so for the first video post, let's look at where IM started. This is a super-extra rare video of the first ever IM conference, in 1994 in San Francisco. It includes an appearance by Mark Andreesen, who went on to found Netscape.



The conference was organized by Ken McCarthy, whom I had never heard of before. Lots of hot-air hype for sure, but it sure was prophetic.

Monetizing: CPM, CPA, CPC

This post is about how to make money from your traffic.

Let's say you have a site with some useful content, like this site (LOL). Here the content is about IM, and this would be useful for someone looking for information on the newest and hottest IM schemes. Your content can be about whatever you care about or have expertise on. Let's say you have a site about breeding Daschunds, a breed of dogs (that's all I know about them, honest). And you have a few hundred visitors a day that come to your site, to read the latest news about Daschunds.

Now the question is how do you make some money from those visitors. The simplest way is to place some ads on your site, and that will pay you uncounted riches, and you can live happily ever after just writing the news about Daschunds. Right? Not so fast, buster! You have to know what kind of ads to place, where to place them, and what strategies to use to make money off of your traffic.

First some terminology: your site carries the ad, so you're the carrier. The ad is placed on your site by an advertisement agency, usually a company that contracts with carrier websites to place ads. The last party in this equation is the person who creates the ad, the publisher.

Ads are classified according to what the publisher pays for. There are three major flavors:

• CPM -- Ads that Cost Per iMpression. An impression is an instance of the ad being shown to a surfer. CPM ads usually pay a fixed amount of money per impression, like maybe $0.02 or $0.05. Typical ads of this type are banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc.
• CPC -- Ads that Cost Per Click. A click is when a surfer on your site clicks on the ad and goes to the publisher site. You get paid a percentage of what the publisher was charged by the ad agency to place the ad on your site. The major players in this type of advertising are Google Adsense, Yahoo Publishing Network, and Microsoft AdCenter.
• CPA -- Ads that Cost Per Action. With these ads its not enough for the surfer to click on the ad and go to a publisher's site, the surfer must actually complete some action in order for you to get paid. Typical actions are filling out a form, or agreeing to receive an email.

OK now let's talk about risk. As in.. Who is holding the risk of losing their shirt with each of these methods of advertising.

In CPM, the publisher takes most of the risk, because they pay for impressions and have no guarantee that the traffic you send them (as a carrier) is suitable for their product. If your audience is Daschund afficionados, it's probably not useful to try and sell them cat food! Of course the ad agency is also taking some risk, that their customer will be unhappy with the return on their investment and not renew.

In CPC, the risk is distributed about evenly between the publisher and the carrier. The publisher pays for clicks and has to convert those surfers to customers. And the carrier may not get paid at all if noone clicks on the ads, because they are irrelevant to the main topic of the carrier's website. The ad agency is taking a small risk of dissatisfying their publishers and carriers, but really, carriers and publishers have only themselves to blame for low returns.

In CPA, the carrier takes all the risk. The carrier only gets paid when the traffic she sent to the publisher converts into an action that the publisher is willing to pay for, for example a sale, or an email registration. No sale means no payout. The publisher and ad agency take virtually no risk.

The most lucrative method of advertising, for the advertising agency, is CPC. With this method, the agency takes no risk, and just serves as a middleman between the publisher and the carrier. No surprise, then, that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo (and many many other companies) concentrate on this method of advertising.

Google Adsense is the dominant CPC agency, by a large margin. The reason is that Google did not just create a middleman facility for placing ads from publishers with carriers. They actually built a marketplace where the pricing is dynamic and responsive to the value that publishers and carriers get out of the ads.

OK so now which ads are suitable for your site? That depends on the traffic and on your goals, and of course on your audience. If you have a niche site loaded with topic-specific content, like the Daschund site we used as an example above, I'd go with a CPC agency, especially Google Adsense, that takes into account your content and will place relevant ads.

If, on the other hand, you have a site that is general, you should probably try a CPM approach. There's no use targetting the ads to a specific audience, because your site is a compendium of all knowledge of the human race, and that encompasses a lot of sub-topics :) So its very unlikely, continuing the example above, that any one specific surfer is interested in Daschund grooming, for example. Better to use the screen real estate on your page for general banner ads, maybe someone will click.

CPA ads are only going to pay out in very specialized situations. For example, suppose you have a carrier site that reviews dog foods, and you have a glowing recommendation on your site for, let's say, Purina Dog Chow (I just made up this brand name, apologies if it really exists). Then, a CPA ad for receiving a free sample of Purina Dog Chow is a good match for your site, because surfers will have read your review of this dog food, and hence theyre very likely to complete the action required by the publisher.

In general CPA is good only for authority sites, sites where people go to get expert opinions on specific subjects. They dont work at all for user-generated content sites about niches, such as forums, because it's equally likely that someone will post a negative review of Purina Dog Chow and there goes your chance that anyone will complete the action that the publisher demands.

Another important consideration is what format the ad is in. Most CPA and CPM ads are banners, pop-unders, pop-ups, and floating blocks. These types of ads are "aggressive" and do not blend well with your site's flow. While they still work to produce a payout, generally the click through rates are below 0.05%. It's a mystery to me why CPA and CPM ad agencies do not offer text ads that blend well with your site. Presumably such ads would generate a higher click through rate, as is the case with text CPC ads like Google Adsense ads. Ads that appear as an organic part of your site's text look more natural, appear to be more authoritative, and are much more successful in getting the surfer to click.

A final word: consider combining two or more of these advertisement approaches on your carrier site, to cover all possible ways to make some return from your surfers. For example, place Google Adsense ads within the text of your site and banner ads at the top and bottom of your pages. On an exit page, when the surfer is leaving your site anyways, you should place an aggressive banner ad; who knows, some surfers may click it. Nothing to lose, since the surfer is intent on leaving your site, right?

Thats all for now,

The IM GodFather

First of all...

Yeah, of course! First of all, you're probably asking yourself: What is IM?

Internet Marketing, or IM for short, is a flourishing field of e-commerce, where the product is schemes to use the internet to market products. This sounds super-meta-hyper-sophisticated but really it's not. There are several major segments of IM, and most IM products use several of these segments to create a successful sales campaign:

• E-mail marketing
• E-book marketing
• Forum marketing
• Long-form sales letter marketing
• Video marketing

We're going to concentrate here on video marketing, which is the newest and hottest form of IM. Remember, the product being sold here is schemes for using the Internet to sell concrete products. So the product is usually information, and can be delivered in various forms, as described above. The product will contains systems or formulas for various aspects of the process of selling your own product, divided generally into:

• How to generate traffic so you get customers to sell your product to
• How to convert that traffic into sales
• How to find good products to sell if you dont have your own product
• How to create your own product
• How to sell someone else's product effectively

So there you have it! :)

The IM GodFather

Welcome

Hello there! You're probably here because you're interested in Internet Marketing, IM for short. Well, you're at the right place. What I'm going to do here is very simple:

• I'm going to show you videos of Internet Marketing gurus, embedded right here in the page.
• I'm going to review those videos and discuss what works and what does not.
• I'm going to provide you with news about IM in general, trend analysis, and industry gossip delivered with a tang of healthy skepticism and sarcasm!

So without further ado, let's hit the road!

The IM GodFather