http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/feed/ http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/ Daily articles, free tools and industry updates for affiliate marketers. Fri, 3 Jul 2009 11:00:04 +0200 Fri, 3 Jul 2009 11:00:04 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/email-marketing/Email-marketing2 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/email-marketing/Email-marketing2 Take a look at your email marketing materials. Does it look like spam mail? If it does, then other people will also see it as spam. This perception hampers the success of your email marketing campaign. Spams generally are perceived as unwanted, unsolicited emails, flooding your inbox and overwhelming you with information you don’t need, you don’t want and you could only care less about. It’s annoying and would usually take up so much of your time in sorting and deleting each of them out of your inbox especially if your service provider doesn’t have spam filters or would ask for payment to have spam filters included in your email subscription account. In the early days of email marketing, most email marketers would take advantage of existing lists and fire away zillions of emails without even thinking of its quality and worth. They employed this strategy mindlessly hoping they can earn a buck or two by either pure chance or simple luck. In time, the respondents of these emails became wiser and cynical towards email marketing and have developed a subconscious habit of deleting emails coming from people they don’t know. The first thing you should consider if you are thinking of email marketing as an option for your online business is the list. A good quality list is well targeted, specifically to your internet niche market. The best way to get this kind of list is to have an opt-in in your website where people who are genuinely interested about your products or services could sign up for your newsletters, advertisements, and other email marketing collateral. These are already your warm online leads. Do diligent follow ups and subtle but firm prodding for them to get your online product. Include an option for your subscribers to ‘Unsubscribe’ from your mailing list should they change their minds about your product. Give them the choice and the control over the whole situation because spams in general will not give them this kind of option. Most importantly, work on the content of your materials. We all know that content is every thing. Make it interesting, catchy and would easily capture the attention of your targeted market. Appeal to their emotions and work your way through. Formulate your spiel carefully. Avoid the usual clichés, outdated and obsolete sales pitches and boring lines. Set up a real situation and inject the benefits and advantages of your product in that certain situation. Do subtle and strategic online products promotion. With these in mind, you can launch your email marketing campaign and see how your target market would react. Closely monitor your open rate as well as your click through rates. Employ different strategies and put them to test and see which is the most effective and then perfect it. You can even have a patent for your style so that others will not copy or steal it from you. Email marketing is a very effective and cost efficient way to promote products online. Just make sure your materials don’t look like spam or else its destination would be certain. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Thu, 2 Jul 2009 09:55:49 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/internet-marketing/plagiarism-online-article-writing-submission http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/internet-marketing/plagiarism-online-article-writing-submission Plagiarism kills creativity, resourcefulness, integrity and honesty to name a few. It’s like smoking, we know its bad but people still keep on doing it. Online plagiarism is very common in article writing and submission for website promotion. Internet marketing, though very vast, is still a very crowded market. People involved would usually employ this strategy just to get ahead of their competition. Modern scholars would actually debate on the true meaning of plagiarism. The ways and methods to plagiarize have changed tremendously through time and with the existence of new media to publish written works. In internet marketing it is known as ‘mosaic writing’, ‘patch writing’ or ‘piecemeal writing’. It’s done by either copying the entire text of a particular published article or combining bits and pieces of different articles to come up with a supposed ‘original written work’. Plagiarism is a true disappointment for us as well as to freelance writers who do actual research to come up with even just short but original write ups and finding out it has been hacked to pieces and added a helpful dose of rephrasing and rewriting and claimed by someone else as their own. Luckily, there are ways to combat this shameless act. Upon learning that your work has been plagiarized and published by someone is to contact the site owner and raise the issue firmly and plainly. Site the particular phrases and paragraphs you believe to have been copied. There are online plagiarism checker tools available to use to identify these cases and you might as well include the report in your formal complaint. Also include a specific time frame for them to take the necessary action and inform them accordingly of the consequences if they fail to act right away. If no action has taken place still, contact the site’s host and state your specific complaints backed with documents to strengthen your claim. Ask them to remove the particular site for breeching and violating the copyright laws and your intention seek help from search engine giants like Yahoo! and Google for the Infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You can also seek out the site’s advertisers, partners and links and tell them they are supporting a webpage that publishes stolen written works. Join blog sites and online forum discussions disapproving this act and include in your posts their URLs. They will lose their credibility and eventually people will stop visiting and would spell the end of their lives in internet marketing. For me personally, I do not see the need to plagiarize others’ works just to get ahead. This is downright dirty and shameful work. You can come up with excellent articles by just reading something everyday and doing a little bit of research. The internet offers an endless source of information readily available for everyone who has access to it. It’s just a matter of keeping a conscious effort to get educated and learn something new everyday. This is not hard work; it only requires dedication and a serious commitment to excel without using hanky panky tricks and shameful means. Bear in mind that internet marketing is based mainly in trust and confidence. One fatal mistake you make can spell the end of your career. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Wed, 1 Jul 2009 10:04:09 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-media/use-Twitter-to-promote-your-internet-business http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-media/use-Twitter-to-promote-your-internet-business In my previous article, I discussed how social media can be used to drive people to join a common cause and achieve a certain goal. Now I will discuss briefly how to effectively use Twitter to promote your internet business through exemplary conduct and behavior. As we all know, Twitter is a huge community that spans the entire world. It is made up of people, famous and not so famous, rich and not so rich, and so on. It is a social media that allows people from all walks of life to communicate, get in touch with and just be, well, social. I am an active Twitter user myself. I find these short 140 character messages helpful in getting in touch with my family, friends, and colleagues. With these in mind we have to be very particular with the way we interact with everyone else. This is what they call ‘Twitequette” – how to behave properly in Twitter to help you achieve your desired goals in marketing our products using this medium. The first thing we should avoid is talking about ourselves incessantly and obsessively in our Tweets. We are not movie stars, singers or celebrities. People follow us and our blogs because of its interesting content and not us. It’s comforting to know that people take interest in what we have to say or what’s in our minds instead of our looks compared to celebrities. Our followers may find interest in our ways, our language, culture or our lives as a whole. That’s the reason why they subscribe to our blogs or follow our Tweets. Talking too much about yourself might turn off your followers and tag you as a self absorbed nut with worthless blogs and Tweets. On the other hand, automatic postings in scheduled times might get people thinking you are a spammer. Automatic Tweets are OK but do it sparingly. Answer each Tweet manually, this will give your posts a more personal and intimate appeal to your followers. I mean who would want to follow a program or robot spammer anyway? Twitter only allows 140 characters per post so you might as well think carefully what to put in there. The content of your Tweets should be directed to your online products. Your online marketing strategies should be embedded in your posts to get the message across your followers. In doing Twitter, you are actually building relationships and at the same time building your online network. As I’ve said, Twitter is a highly interactive online community huge enough to accommodate every existing niche market, a two-way street where people follow you and you follow others. This is how you build your online networks. And through these interactions you are able to pass on valuable information, do online products promotion and evaluation. Another thing is to put your real picture and not some random graphics. This will make you more human and believable. Also avoid mindlessly posting your sales pitch and overwhelming your followers with it. Study your followers’ behavior and how they would react when they encounter online promotion or advertisements. With this knowledge you can revise your style and come up with a sales pitch that could easily hit the bull’s eye. Twit regularly and re-Twit interesting and note worthy posts. Communicating: this is the very essence of Twitter. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:32:29 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-networking/full-capacity-of-online-social-networking http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-networking/full-capacity-of-online-social-networking 13th June 2009 marked the beginning of the turmoil in Iran. The announcement of the results of the June 2009 presidential elections brought forth a melting pot of emotions to the Iranian people. For the first time after the 1979 revolution when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, people came outside, marched to the streets to join the Green Revolution, telling the whole world what they felt. Students, men from all walks of life, and surprisingly the women, who in the past were always cast aside, came out carrying protest banners in green, expressing what the call the blatant assault on the very freedom Allah has given them. Protesters marched to the streets carrying nothing but their faith and the desire to let the voice of the people, their voices, be heard. Suddenly BBC reported a strange static disturbance from the radio and television feeds from Iran. A news black out covered the whole nation disconnecting them from the rest of the world in an attempt of the government to quell the building tension and to pacify the surging crowd using force, intimidation and oppression. Media men from international news organizations were arrested, their cameras and video footage confiscated and destroyed. Nothing about what’s going on in Iran can get out. Suddenly students taking refuge in libraries and schools found a way to get help, by using online social networks. They uploaded amateur videos taken using their camera phones to YouTube, giving the rest of the world a glimpse of the on going violence and atrocities to the Iranian people. They Tweet 140 character, short messages to Iranians all over the world, re-Tweet it over and over again until it created a storm of sympathy and a call for the intervention of the United Nations. The United States government asked the social media networks to cancel their scheduled maintenance just to keep the updates coming in from Iran. Unbelievably, news feeds to the Western media came from blogs, forums and videos. Once thought only as an innocent teenage diversion, online social networking now completely changed the face of human history. People stay connected and messages passed easily through online social networking. The people who tried to suppress the news underestimated the power of this ingenious yet highly effective media and failed miserably. Iranians came out, calling for truth, justice and liberty. They came in droves, filling the streets of Tehran all with the help of online social networking. The same thing also happened in the Philippines with the help of SMS messages in the second EDSA revolution. In just minutes, thousands of people answered the call and went out to show their sympathies. This is the very finest example of what truly is the full extent of the capacity of online social networking. If used in a positive way, its can surely arrive in a positive outcome. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:35:32 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/audio-streaming/Effectively-using-audio-in-online-marketing http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/audio-streaming/Effectively-using-audio-in-online-marketing Here’s another way to add a little spunk to your website: Audio. Effectively using audio in online marketing could be quite a challenge but if done properly, this can give your website an edge over your competitors. Audio, particularly music has a hypnotic effect on us. Have you ever thought of those times you are eating and a fast paced song is playing over the radio and before you know it you finished your meal in no time? Same with shopping. Malls and department stores also employ the same strategy to induce impulsive purchases to their customers. Well, let’s not go into the details of that one, instead I will site specific examples on how to effectively use it in internet marketing. In your website, you can have an audio file to welcome visitors. This is both intimate and personal. You can connect with your audience and at the same time give them a feel like you the website owner, is giving them a personal tour. You can also use this in your navigational system, leading them specifically to where you want them to go. Include a one liner saying something about yourself, an introduction to your internet business and the reason for its being. Be subtle if you’re thinking of adding your sales pitch or else you will leave a bitter after taste to your audience. You can also use background music while browsing through your website. Include and optional button to either have the background music or not. Your visitors could be in a library or simply want to browse through your homepage quietly. Audio is an excellent medium to give out free online tutorials about certain topics in your niche. You can trade these tutorials with email addresses or subscription to your newsletters. Clips of interviews or testimonials of well known people can help in online product promotion and can give exposure and credibility to your homepage. Certain ‘How to’ tutorials are also helpful since people can just download it and store them as MP3 files and play it later at their convenience. Aside from this they can also share it to friends and colleagues, thus giving your website added exposure. Making audio materials to market is very cheap. You don’t need to shell out huge amounts of money to create them. You will only need a quite room and a microphone to record your print copy. The transcribed copies can also be printed and you can also use these as added marketing collateral to your products. Embed these files in your website either for them to click on and listen right there and then or for quick and easy download. Having audio in marketing your business is cheap, user friendly and interactive. This will allow you to communicate intimately and directly to your customers. You appeal on a personal level. It’s an excellent tool to include in your online marketing plan. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:37:51 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/security/kids-safety-on-the-web http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/security/kids-safety-on-the-web Yesterday I talked to you about our kid’s safety on the web. I must admit that as a parent myself, it’s inevitable to worry a bit about my kid’s safety online. My business, being internet-based, leaves me very little room to isolate my son from it. I mean to say, my son is growing up. He sees me working on my computer most of the time so it would be quite ironic that I will forbid him of using the technology that has been bringing food to our table. Thinking about kid’s safety online all the time can be burdensome. If we keep thinking about it, eventually we might become slaves of our own fears. I don’t want this fear to consume me. Thus, I came up with my own ways on how to ensure a safety online experience both for my business and for people that I care for. Of course, we need to have the best virus protection software that should protect our computers and our online transactions from viruses and other destructive spywares. If you have a business on the net, then you have to be very particular in protecting your business transactions especially if you have an e-commerce site. Some internet shoppers are also hesitant to make a purchase in websites lest they would be robbed of their credit card numbers or bank account numbers. Your customer’s safety online should be a priority. You have to get the best internet security program for your websites and your computer system so that hackers won’t be able to harvest personal information from your database. Furthermore, we should also tell our children not to give away personal information on the net especially when they are not sure about a particular site or a particular person they meet only on the web. I’m sure you have heard of several internet-related crimes that happened due to kids giving away their personal information like home address or phone numbers on the net. If you have properly oriented your kids about guidelines on their safety online then most likely you will be spared of such bad and even horrifying experiences. I believe that as responsible parents, we should take extra precautionary measures to ensure their safety online and avoid such unwanted incidents to happen in real life. Being busy is no excuse. We should be watchful of our children these days. For all you know, some dangers may be looming and just waiting for the right time to cause havoc in your peaceful life. Oops, I don’t mean to scare you. Only that, It’s always better to be safe than sorry, right? About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:09:47 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/security/safety-on-the-web http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/security/safety-on-the-web I have a kid and soon enough, he might just be as internet savvy as I am. Children these days are very quick to learn and their skills in adapting to technology seem to be faster than the Road Runner. I’m quite sure that most of you reading this right now have children too, or nephews and nieces who will need to be protected from the “evil” side of this technology and be guided in their internet usage. We are all busy with our daily list of things-to-do so we need to ensure the kids’ safety on the web. Aside from the online security programs that we install on our computers, there are countless other ways to make sure that the young ones are able to maximize their learning on the net and at the same time, enjoy internet usage. Perhaps I presumed right away that all of us are net savvy. There are actually other people who are not too familiar in using the net and their children are more familiar than them. This should not be the case. If the kids’ internet usage is more frequent than the adults’, you may need to catch up with them. Meaning, you need to practice on how to navigate the web and familiarize the sites that they often visit. How do you expect yourself to monitor your kids’ internet usage if you yourself are not familiar with the technology? Once you are way ahead of the kids in terms of knowledge about the web, then you will be able to explain to them how they should use it properly for their benefit. You must also teach them what sites to visit and where they could possibly find the information that they might need. Familiarity with the internet will show the young ones that they can’t fool you. You see, communication proves to be very important here. But don’t act as if you are prying to your kids’ personal lives too much. You can always talk to them in a natural manner and get to know about what they are up to online. Another thing that you need to keep in mind, you have to practice what you preach. Let me be more specific here, if you have forbidden visits to porn sites, you have to make sure that you don’t visit these sites, too. To get the best results from your kids’ internet usage, your presence is needed. Unfortunately, there are an increasing number of misguided kids who are abusing internet usage. Don’t worry there are always solutions, I started with a few today. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss other means to a safer web browsing. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:58:04 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-submission-services http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-submission-services You surely have been getting a daily dose of news on this flu pandemic for the past months already. The disease, though not that fatal, has been spreading in many countries around the globe. Despite the fact that it has below one percent mortality rate, it seems that in many countries even here in the US, people had been in a sort of “panic”. With the constant news on televisions and internet, who would not be alarmed anyway. Don’t worry, I won’t feed you with any more news that might cause you to panic as well. The reason I brought up this issue is to show you how viral can media be and how they can actually make people react on the news that they are giving out. If we try to equate that to the internet marketing industry, we also have our own channels and techniques on how to make people react to the information that we are giving out online. I’m sure you will agree with me on this one that if you want to create a sort of “pandemic” online, social bookmarking is your way to go viral. Social bookmarking submission has become a major part of an internet marketer’s daily life. A staple activity for us actually because we all know that our sites have been enjoying the benefits. Manual bookmarking is a thing of the past with all these social bookmarking submission services. Thanks to the availability of tools that allow us to automate this activity and social bookmarking submission services that make tagging and submitting faster for all of us. This is for free. We don’t spend a single cent to promote our website in these networks actually. However, with the increasing desire to submit the most number of web page to hundreds of networks, many internet marketers have considered the option of getting social bookmarking submission services. You may be using a special software that allows your web pages to be submitted instantly to as many sites as possible. If you employ the services of a social bookmarking submission company, there will be specific individuals (human beings, not robots!) that will submit your pages and tag your submissions accordingly. Tags are very important because by using it you will be able to attract the right people to view your pages. Properly tagging your submission can enhance your popularity in these networks. I have known a few marketers who have taken tagging in stride and rushed in submitting their pages. They ended up scratching their heads, wondering what could they be doing wrong. In getting a manual social bookmarking submission service, you just have to make sure that the people who will be doing it for you know very well how to use the right keywords in making tags. Keep in mind that people who succeed in social bookmarking submission are those who do not only use the right tags but also those who give importance to giving our quality contents. Great contents with the right tags? Expect your popularity to shoot up in a jiffy. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:22:44 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/internet-marketing/real-online-opportunities-to-earn-money http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/internet-marketing/real-online-opportunities-to-earn-money Internet marketing has opened a whole new lifestyle for countless people around the world. Imagine waking up in the morning, you make your coffee, and sit down in front of your laptop in your very own kitchen and start earning money right away… without even taking a bath or leaving the house! Internet marketing has allowed people to be more in touch with their personal lives. Thanks to the available technology that has made communicating with anyone globally a breeze, living the authentic life is now a reality. With the conventional 9am to 5pm work shift, we drown in schedules, deadlines, our boss’s tantrums, traffic and the works. We have been so engrossed in making money to provide for our families’ material needs that we forget to work on building relationships with them. With internet marketing, anyone can be their own boss. Work at your own pace, if you don’t get something done, you don’t worry about it. You can always go back to work whenever you feel like it. You decide what’s important and what’s urgent. You run your own schedule and change it at the blink of an eye. Appointments can be arranged at your most convenient time and place. Days off and vacations are no longer in your itinerary. You can take a day off from work anytime. Spend more time with your children, your wife or partner. End the guilty feeling. For moms and dads, daycare is a thing of the past. They can watch their children grow and be there in their milestone moments. Say goodbye to the suits, ties and dress codes. Save on gas and help the fight against global warming. Working at home means having the time to cook dinner on time and eat with your family. You can stay in bed as long as you want to or have lunch with your friends without rushing to go back to the office. Home based businesses allow people to focus more with their relationships and have a richer fuller life. Not to mention the monetary aspect of it all. Internet marketing when done properly can provide a stable and a steady income for anyone. You can still keep the low paying job you love without worrying if you have enough money left to pay for your dues. Successful internet marketers get to enjoy life more. Traveling is never an issue. They can go as they please with their laptops with them and still keep up with the latest online marketing trends. Make revisions with their internet marketing strategies while enjoying a leisure trip. Indeed, internet marketing has made lives better. Bear in mind though, before you can actually enjoy these things you have to put in a significant amount of study, online marketing research and patience into your business for it to prosper. For all you know, I’m writing this blog while enjoying a Mediterranean cruise with my family. Cheers everyone! About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:06:17 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-media/Facebook-marketing-products-through-Facebook http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/social-media/Facebook-marketing-products-through-Facebook 60 million users in United States alone, 150 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, half of which visits everyday. Impressive statistics right? These are the latest numbers provided by ComScore.com on Facebook. The Facebook phenomena has swept across the world. Nielsen and NetRatings made studies on the population hooked on Facebook: 50% of its United States users are female, 60% has had college education, 14% are non Caucasians, 34% are professionals holding various posts from executive to technical, 12% are full time students, and 12% have families or children with ages under 16 years old. With these available data, internet marketers now have the idea on which strategies to use effectively in doing online marketing. If you have plans of marketing products through Facebook, your marketing plans should be made around these figures but careful consideration that these social media demographics will change in the next 8-12 months. You only need to understand the whole system, how it works to benefit your business. Understand how groups meet, their rhythm. Most importantly identify the needs of the users. It relies mainly on sharing information, communicating through wall comments, pictures, videos, and encouraging activities found on the discussion board. You can also create applications similar to what users are already comfortable doing like sharing of ideas and experiences with a bit of humor in it. Don’t forget to get the feedback of users after doing the online product launch. Facebook marketing is about communication, interaction with your target niche is the key to find out what’s inside their minds. It is more that just giving out advertisement or promotions about your product. It is a new and innovative platform that allows you to directly market your ideas, products or services and get a firsthand account on its outcome. Learn to come up with catchy and provocative status updates for people to notice you. This will encourage opinions and interaction among your group. Dish out zesty bits and pieces of information every now and then to break the monotony. Use images to further enhance your marketing collateral and site credible sources or known people to back up your claims. Tell your followers the advantages of your products and offer honest and sincere articles about them. Word of mouth alone will help promoting your business. They say Facebook is new, a novelty. In time people will eventually lose interest or a new social media phenomenon will rise. But while its here might as well take advantage of the heat of the moment. Maximize the full range of the marketing scope of the Facebook to help your business. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:08:05 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/forums/Forums-ways-to-market-products-on-line http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/forums/Forums-ways-to-market-products-on-line Why do people visit forums? When I was just starting my internet business, I was in constant search to find ways to market products on line. Always keeping a conscious effort to find venues where I can introduce myself, my website and my merchandise, I first stumble upon forums. For the next few weeks, I started joining discussions focused mainly on my online goods and their target niche markets. Aside from this, I also joined other forums just for the heck of it, wanting to learn how other internet marketers promote their products, familiarizing myself with the different internet marketing strategies employed. I was then introduced to the wonderful world of forums posting. On line discussions vary. You can actually find hundreds of forums tackling virtually ever topic there is. But on the more serious side of it, forums provide an excellent venue to promote your website and market your products. The first thing you must do is to look for a well populated and directly related forum to your product or niche. You need to register to be able to join the discussions. Don’t forget to include in your signature a direct link to your website. This is the easiest way to direct free traffic to your homepage. Just be patient and religiously share ideas in these discussions to establish yourself as an authority. In time you will find people asking your opinions and your thoughts on certain things on your niche. You can easily refer them to check out your website and your products. Internet marketing is about trust and confidence. People will come to you for solutions and answers. Aside from this, you can make your forum posts as a learning tool. There is an innate desire for people to learn and you should capitalize on this thought. People in these discussion sites are intelligent. Underestimating them with mindless advertisements and promotional materials will do you no good and you might be banned permanently from posting. Directly selling your products is a fatal mistake. Forums posting is a direct way to get intimate with the other bloggers who are also experts in your niche. Active participation and creating the need to converse will give you the idea on how to come up with the appropriate sales pitch. As I’ve mentioned in my previous articles, forums and blogs are the most effective way of product evaluation that will help you in products enhancements and give you an idea on what products to launch next. It offers honest and objective reviews of your products as it provides bloggers the anonymity and autonomy to say his exact thoughts without the influence of the outside environment. We can loosely translate forum marketing as a give and take relationship where no one is in the losing end. Both parties should benefit from it. A forum is a great way to meet people, study different point of views, opening your mind to other things and widening your own horizon. In every endeavor you go through, always have a mindset that you can learn from it. Same goes with forum marketing. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:08:41 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/site-promotion/Article-writing-website-promotion- http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/site-promotion/Article-writing-website-promotion- Never underestimate the capacity of good, finely written articles to promote your website. Article writing is the ideal way of website promotion for new internet marketers working on a tight budget or limited resources. Now, how can you come up with excellent articles? You have to start article writing by investing time in doing research about your products or services. Get intimate with them. Put them to test. Nothing beats a first hand account of how something made an impact on the writer. Never fear to give out honest opinions pertaining to the quality of whatever it is you are promoting. Your honesty will help you gain their trust and confidence just like Oprah Winfrey. Oprah said she would never endorse something unless she has personally used it and can attest to its quality and value. Then put it into writing. Write articles pointing directly to your product. Be brief, concise and precise. Provide useful information and realistic reviews. Educate your readers, offer accurate, verifiable and exact information written in a clear manner. Never forget to pay special attention to your grammar, tenses and the quality of your sentences or else you will lose credibility on the matter. Carefully include searchable keywords to help boost your SE rankings and website traffic generation. The content of your articles should be written in a way of giving information and at the same time offering a solution pointing to your product or services. The main reason in the first place that we read is for us to learn, to discover new things and to offer solutions to whatever it is that’s bugging us. You can also quote experts on your niche market to further strengthen the claims or beliefs you have. At the end of your article, provide a resource box with your name, contact details and a direct link to your website. Then promote your articles by submitting to free online article directories for publication. Look for article directories with specific and well targeted niche categories and at the same time directories that are already popular with a steady volume of traffic and high ranking. You can easily get highly targeted prospects and backlinks for your homepage thus, improving your search engine rankings. Article writing is an excellent way to market your business online, letting the world know about the wonders and benefits of your products. If done correctly, article writing will give you and your website the credibility and the reputation it so needs to cement your place in your niche. You only need to have patience and time to achieve this. Article writing is the internet marketers’ primary tool, his bread and butter when it comes to website promotion. Write at least ten articles weekly and submit it do different directories through out the web. Before you know it, your homepage is showing in SE searches, moving slowly, steadily and surely to the top. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:57:08 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/domain-names/Domain-names-drive-traffic-to-your-website http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/domain-names/Domain-names-drive-traffic-to-your-website Traffic is the internet marketers’ bloodline. This is what keeps your online business alive. There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website but to their detriment, some internet marketers forget the importance of their domain names in driving traffic to their homepage. It should open doors for new opportunities for your business. So let’s go back to the basics. Choosing a domain name is like picking a name for your baby. His or her name will have a life long impact in his growth, development and the impression of people around them. Same is true with your website. Your domain name will give your business its own identity and a unique mark. The appropriate domain name will help in maximizing the influx of traffic to your homepage thus, giving your products or services the exposure needed to convert them to sales. Here’s my piece on what should be done to maximize the use of your domain name in your online business. First is to have your website content SE optimized. This will give you an idea on what keywords to use. Include these keywords in your URL as much as possible. SE will index you easily this way. Make sure your keywords are directly related to the products or services you are promoting. Don’t put in irrelevant keywords just to raise your rankings. Then register multiple top level domains (TLD). You can use your imagination and let those creative juices flowing in creating TLDs and who knows, you might get lucky and these domain names are not used, you can sell them for a buck or two. Seek out domain packages that include very popular TLDs. This will give you traffic from people’s typo errors in entering website addresses. Go for .com extensions as this is the most common and often used extension. Use sub-domains (SD) if your homepage has other fields of interest. This will save you money instead of buying a completely different or additional domain names. Also by doing this, you can also add additional keywords which is essential in SE indexing and other marketing purposes. SDs will also help you organize your website. A well organized and efficient homepage navigation system will make browsing through your website a breeze. Make your homepage easy to memorize or would strike an instant appeal to the average reader. It should also be easily written and not too complicated. A well made domain name is also essential in off line website promotions. It is of utmost important to plan your domain strategically and finalize it early on. By doing this, your marketing campaigns will run smoothly and with ease. Consider long term goals as well, may it be expansion or shifting to other products or services to promote. By doing the things I mentioned above, you are guaranteed of not just traffic but organic and targeted website traffic. Keep this steady stream of visitors and you will have conversion and eventually growth to your business. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:37:51 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-marketing-tips http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-marketing-tips It has been a few weeks since you launched your product online and you are off to doing your PPC campaign already in order to direct more people to your sales page. Based on my personal experiences in promoting various products in different markets, it can absolutely be costly if you are not aware of the very basic search engine marketing tips. PPC campaign can be costly because you only spend your money on campaigns that are not bringing in the results that you are expecting for your online business. And yes, sometimes even veteran online marketers have to be reminded of the basics in doing a successful PPC campaign. One of the foremost things that you ought to do is to monitor the performance of you pay per click ads. Check out what particular keywords are getting more relevant clicks because they are most probably worth keeping. While those ads that seem to be dormant have to be aborted as soon as possible so that you will avoid paying for a PPC campaign that is ineffective. Furthermore, I would recommend that you devote a little bit of your time to track your traffic sources. This will give you a clue as to where most of the bulk of your sales is coming from. This information may be a bit trivial to some marketers, but if you really want to maximize all information that you can get from a PPC campaign, then by all means make use of it. For all it’s worth. A PPC campaign also needs to be tested from time to time. This is especially true if you have launched several different campaigns. Knowing and keeping those that deliver results is your main goal here. One mistake that many other marketers commit is the fact that after they have launched a PPC campaign, they fail to monitor it, to do some testing, and to tweak it when needed. This I discourage you to do. If you are experimenting on a particular ad, you test it first. If the response from your target market is good, then you carry on with it. Testing will also help you determine which particular ad is getting a high click through rate. Any internet marketer knows that CTRs are very good basis on whether your prospective customers are interested in what you have to offer or they don’t simply care about it. Be more active in your online marketing activities by taking the necessary steps to be better at what you do every time. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online. Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:45:30 +0200 http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/blogging/Blogging-importance-of-blogging http://www.affiliatedistrict.com/blogging/Blogging-importance-of-blogging The importance of blogging for your internet business is immense. This is your way of building rapport to your readers and at the same time a perfect venue to promote your products more intimately. Blogging is also the cheapest and the easiest way to generate organic traffic. Couple it with patience and good website content, blogging is a sure way to drive people in droves. Just make sure that the content is aimed directly to your product or your homepage. It is also essential in online contact building. More contacts mean more free online advertising and promotion for you. If you have excellent products or services, there’s nothing more effective and efficient than ‘word of mouth’ to promote your website. As I’ve mentioned in my previous article, blogs and forums offer the most honest and objective product reviews. Use this medium for your future plans for the business when it comes to products enhancements or what products to launch next. Blogging will enable you to know the trend of the market and will provide you with the latest pulse and mind set of your potential customers. Now, the main question you might have right now is how to come up with fresh, interesting blogs everyday. Very simple: your own thoughts and personal conversations with your friends, colleagues or the conversation you strike up with a complete stranger in a bar or any public place. This will give you sufficient ideas for your blogs. Even an innocent conversation with a child can give your fresh snippets. Just have a pen and paper ready to jot down blog-worthy notes. Park at chat rooms and take note of interesting questions raised by members that would fit on your niche market. Everyday correspondence from your friends and family will also give you ideas for your next post. You can also record your conversations, it maybe trivial and mundane to the most lofty topic and play it over when you get home. Ponder at these thoughts and sure enough you can come up with interesting, funny and witty posts. As internet marketers, we have to tap every resource we have. Blogging is a big help in traffic generation, converting warm leads to sales in your own target market or niche and letting the world know you exist. Its free, you only need patience and come up with excellent content to drive traffic into your website. This is also important in keeping the bond between you and your followers, keeping them abreast with the latest developments or promotions your business is offering. Keeping close and constant contact with your readers will build a special relationship between you and them. Think of them as your friends and give them special attention through your blog. They are a big help in website or products promotion. Make blogging fun and exciting to and keep them coming back. About the author. Menno Spijkstra is a successful underground Internet Marketer who has been online for many years, selling his own products in many niches. Menno now decided to share his knowledge and experience through this site, AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free weekly newsletter and learn how to make real money online.