Internet Marketing and Advertising Methods- A General Overview

There are many ways to get prospects/visitors to visit your advertised site or offer. I’ll list down and explain some of the best methods of online marketing, and point you to some sites/places where you can find more info. The below mentioned methods, all require effort and patience, some more than others. Many are free, while some cost a little money.

Although you can do very well marketing or being an affiliate of some programs, without having a website, but having your own website will certainly benefit you in several ways. It is worth the time and effort put in it. One of the most desired things a webmaster has in mind is getting their website listed on Google or one of the other top search engines. You may think that just submitting your URL to the search engines and sitting back, waiting for a flood of visitors, will be enough. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Well, if you do this, you’ll probably get listed in all search engines, but what good will it do to you being in the 100,000th page of google or yahoo’s search results, when most people don’t even look past the second page?

The best way to get to the top of search engines’ results in my opinion, is to start getting other websites to link to your website. How you can do that? Well, the two most common ways are by writing articles and/or doing reciprocal linking. You also have to know some basics of Search Engine Optimization Techniques (SEO for short). To learn more about SEO, click here.

Driving satisfying traffic to your website won’t happen over anight. You might have to wait a little while for the search engines to deliver your traffic. While you are at it, why not use some free Traffic Exchanges to start getting visitors right away. Find out which are the best traffic exchanges to use, and how you can start getting visitors to your site within the next coupla hours, here. Traffic Exchanges may also be very helpful to you if you still don’t have your own website. A traffic exchange is a type of website on the Internet, which provides a service for webmasters to exchange of traffic. It is similar to the autosurf concept with the exception that usually traffic exchanges use a manual rotation (if they use auto rotation, then they are actually an autosurf). If traffic exchanges involve money, they never promise a certain profit over a certain time but rather truly focus on the advertising, generally structured in a way that income will exceed what they promise to pay out. Traffic Exchanges can be VERY effective if used right… learn more about traffic exchanges here.

Traffic Exchanges along with posting in Safelists may be the two most easy to use/free form of advertising to go by if you are just starting out, and are on low budget. Basically, a safelist is a group of people all willing to receive each others promotions via email –in the hopes that their promotion will generate more business. In other words, safelists are many, many “marketers” that have agreed to receive each others email. The drawback is that everyone is trying to sell and no one wants to buy. Some do buy, however, and that’s your market. You just need something that other “marketers” will want or need. Currently, there are many tens of thousands of members to various safelists, and some are more effective than others. Find out the top rated safelists to advertisein here.

Now that your website is having visitors, how do you keep them coming back again and again? The best way to do that is by Building  an Opt-in Email List. This is one of the MOST IMPORTANT marketing methods that most advanced marketers and even some non-advanced prefer, and is a great way to ensure that your visitors will come back again and again to your site to view your offers. Find out how to start your own opt-in email list here.

Posting in Forums and Classified Ads Sites is another form of advertising, that is great for beginners. It doesn’t require you to have a website, but you still have to follow some rules & tips I outline here.

Another form of advertising, that is somehow considered an advanced technique and that’ll require you some more money, is the Pay Per Click advertising (PPC for short). PPC is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Advertisers bid on “keywords” that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells golf balls, he/she would bid on the keyword “golf balls”, hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called “sponsored links” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad. This form of advertising is one of the MOST EFFECTIVE, BUT one should really be careful with it, and test little by little first. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. MSN has started beta testing with their own PPC services MSN adCenter. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50). Learn more about PPC here.

There are many other ways to get visitors to your website/products. I will be discussing other ways in future posts. Right now I guess I need some sleep… so tired and I can’t believe I wrote all of this post in under 6 mins! Have a great day and meet you in my next post.

About “Spamming” and Why you Should Avoid it…

Perhaps the first thing that a new internet marketer should be aware of, before he/she even starts marketing, is something called “Spam”. Spamming is something that should be avoided at all costs.

So what is spamming, and why is it “bad”?

Spam is defined as unsolicited, bulk, electronic mail/posts – it is the Internet equivalent of junk mail. Just about everyone who has been on the Internet for any length of time has received spam.  Sending someone info or mail, that they haven’t required, or posting blatant advertising ads on a certain site/forum that doesn’t allow that, or where they don’t belong, is considered spam. If you are emailing someone telling them your offer, then make sure that they have already requested that info about the offer from you first, maybe by them clicking on a confirmation link for you to send them the offer, in case you are running a newsletter/email marketing campaign.  Also make sure that you have an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of each email you send, so that they can opt out any time they want. Don’t go posting ads in forums or message boards, except where allowed. Most forums allow you to have a signature link at the bottom of your posts, that is attached automatically to your posts. Sigs can be a line long, two or three lines long, according to the forum’s rules. You can advertise in your sig freely. Spamming can take several forms and shapes, but I guess you got the idea here.

Spam costs Internet Service Providers both time and money. ISPs must invest in extra hardware and pay employees to deal with thousands of unsolicited messages. Staff members are put to the task of investigating thousands of spam reports and complaints. Spam increases the load on mail servers and consumes valuable bandwidth. This increase in load overburdens mail queues which lead to delays in sending and receiving mail.

New internet marketers seem not to be aware of this fact…..we’ve all been there, so that’s why I’m telling you here: Don’t Do It! It is immoral, and can seriously get you into legal problems. It kills your online business before it even starts.  For more info about Spam, check out the following links:

http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml

http://www.spamlaws.com/

http://kb.iu.edu/data/afne.html

http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

The Truth Revealed…

My name is Bassam Saeed (Mystery) and I’d like to welcome you to netbizmysteries.wordpress.com…the blog that will hopefully shed some light upon one of the most searched topics on the internet: Home based internet businesses, or online/internet bizs. I started this blog, which is dedicated to internet home business, in hopes of providing useful information and to help people who are involved in, or wish to start any kind of home based internet business.  

 No sufficient income from your current job? Bored of working for old rich people, who control you? Maybe you are a stay at home mom, who wants to work in the comfort of her own home, at her own convenient time….or maybe you just want to make some extra money in your spare time.

If your answer to any of the previous questions is “yes”, then you HAVE to read on. I don’t know if you know this fact, but: REAL EVERYDAY PEOPLE like you and me are making good money from the comfort of their own homes.The main problem with a TYPICAL JOB (offline job) is that when you stop working, the income stops. Self made millionaires or any group of the wealthiest out there, DO NOT trade hours for money. They know that you MUST tap into RESIDUAL income and LEVERAGED income.

“What is a RESIDUAL INCOME BUSINESS?” RESIDUAL income is income that keeps coming in month after month, year after year, from work you do just ONE TIME. Like recording a song ONCE then getting paid EVERY time it is played. LEVERAGED income is earning money through other people’s efforts. Those two factors are what should be focused on when selecting your internet business opportunity. Luckily for us, the internet is a very good source for opportunities that have these two factors…it is packed with them…be it real estate investing, stock market investing, affiliate marketing..etc. You name it and you’re sure to find something that matches your needs and provides these two factors.

I’m sure you’ve come across those fantastic “get rich quick” schemes, claims made by people about themselves making tons of money, AND how they can show you how to do the same and make lots of money too. We’ve all seen the pictures of their big houses, ferrari cars, happy faces, them bathing in their luxurious jaquzzies, travelling around the world, chilling in the bahamas/hawai each month and having fun! Wouldn’t you love to be in their places? It CAN be done….

BUT….
The Bad News Is: I can tell you right now that 99% of these people are total frauds! You may have fallen prey to one of these scam artists, selling you their latest get rich quick programs. Me too. I’ve bought so many of these programs that the mere fact of trying to recall and count the exact no. of them, still gives me a headache. I used to be an easy prey, and would fall for them over and over again. Finally, after several disappointments I got fed up and said to myself: “THAT’S IT!”… I decided to get to the truth of this fascination we all have about the get rich quick programs, and find out if there were any LEGITIMATE programs to make money online.

I was astonished with what I discovered….if anyone tried contacting the owners of those programs, posing maybe as an investor instead of a new wannabe member, he’d know what I mean. I quickly realized that these so-called get rich quick programs were totally useless, and a waste of time. And the owners knew it, yet they were laughing all the way to the bank!

Surprisingly, while sifting through all of these scam websites, I was  able to locate only FEW that actually ran legitimate businesses. The owners were everyday people like you and me that found a way to make extra money working from home on their computers. Their membership areas were impressive with a good amount of quality information on how to make $100-$200 per day on your computer doing very little work. I even chatted with a few of their customers in several online forums, and they verified that they were making extra money through the sites. It was like I found a few diamonds in the rough. But don’t take my word for it, you can visit them later yourselves (they are listed below), and see what you think. Most of them anyway, may no longer accept new members and are seriously considering either shutting down or raising their membership fees, because they are getting so many new members by word of mouth referrals, the staff can’t handle, as they are dedicated to providing excellent service to each member.  Anyway, if you decide you are interested in any of the listed below programs, I advise you to join quickly.

Well, my search has finally come to an end. I have to say, I was very disappointed with most what I’ve found, and I strongly advise you not to take chances joining any programs other than the recommended few, nor waste your money on any tools or resources before you read my review on them. I’ve already tried a heck of a bunch, and only a handful proved to me to be useful and reasonably priced. Watch out for my next post: first post on my step by step marketing guide.

                                                                               Mystery

Here are my reviews of the sites I mentioned above:

Site1

Site2

Site3

Site4

Site5