After all, building your website may have seemed like a huge challenge, but if you only get 10 people to visit each day, you are going to be a long way from making a cent (let alone a living) from your internet business. 

There are many methods of generating traffic both free and paid, but a key step to getting that traffic is understanding the keywords your target markets use to seek out information on what you have to offer.

If you have followed the system over at Information Markter'sZone you will have discovered and/or developed products that not only target a specific customer type, but have built your online business around a desire for information – to be, have, do or become something or someone they are not today. 

You know how easy it is to swim downstream in a river versus upstream right? 

Finding the right keywords that match the desire your prospects have in their minds when they hit the internet is 3/4 of the battle in making money on the internet. 

Ok, so you have identified a list of keywords and turned those into a larger list of long-tail keyword phrases using tooles like the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool – what do you do next?   

Now that you have a list of 500 long-tail keywords, how do you turn those into traffic?

What I typically do with a new list of long-tail keywords is to categorize them into groups by root keyword, then test a few out of each category using Google Adwords – the purpose is to find out which groups of long-tails will offer the best return on investment. 

While this does mean spending $50-$100 in Adwords advertising, it also means you can save weeks/months of work and 1000's of wasted dollars in the future because you quickly determine the keyword phrases that MOST impact your marketplace and bring in the highest sales ratios for you.

The entire system for keyword research, testing, and optimization is one of the most powerful and sought after training sessions on InfoMarketer'sZone

Why?

Well, you could spend the next year developing content or throwing money away on the 500+ long-tail keywords you identified as possibly interesting to your marketplace, but in my experience – there are 10-20 that always well outperform all of the others. 

Why not find them FIRST, then focus your effort on marketing around those keywords so you can bring in lots of traffic AND more important, lots of customers?

I can start off with a list of 500 or more long-tail phrases this way and within a week or so get a good feel for the top 10-20. Then, I begin to generate content optimized around the priority list – articles, blog postings, backlinks, youtube video descriptions, etc…

Consider taking this smart approach to getting traffic using long-tail keywords and watch your internet business profits soar.

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Why?

In short, more and more people are spending increased time on social networking sites.

Inside Information Marketer'sZone we share some of our own successful methods for using social networking sites to market information products – ebooks, reports and books.

While the use of social networking tools certainly demands a different approach – an approach that puts networking front and center with promotion being much more subtle through the use of stories, case studies, and innovative ways of giving away free content.

How much is social networking growing?

Pew Internet & American Life Project just released their latest update tracking American consumer use of social networking – while all social networking continues to increase, Twitter is especially noticable.

Social Networking Growth

Close to 1/5th of the population are estimated to use Twitter.  While that may be true, the more powerful aspect of Twitter are the smaller, but voracious group of power users that have become addicted to Twitter and arguably trust it more than their email or search engines.

If you haven't jumped on to Twitter, Facebook or Youtube yet, then get yourself onto these social networking sites so you can begin to build a following and understand how to become a presence on these tools as a marketing tool.

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Ok, so you have your latest product and choose to use Clickbank to help sell your product on the internet, now how do you get traffic to your new web page and begin generating sales, and more importantly, profits!

Clickbank will allow you to process credit card orders right from your own website and even enters your product (after your first few sales) into its Marketplace where 10's of thousands of hungry affiliates look for hot products to promote – for a small commission you can have them promoting your ebook or infoproduct for you and putting money in your bank account.

But still…there's that niggly little fact of getting traffic to your website.

What should your first traffic generation steps be?

Ah, this is where the FUN really begins.

1. Start by blogging about your topic and building traffic to your page with links back from your blog to the sales page. You can get started with your own Wordpress blog for virtually nothing – perhaps investing $45-$97 in some graphics to make your blog stand out and Google just loves seeing relevant, dynamic content rewarding you with some good rankings on the search engines where millions of people search for products and information everyday.

2. Yes – do some initial advertising. Run some paid Adwords ads to direct traffic and test your page.  With a $100 investment over 2-weeks you can get a very good sample of how your website will perform and more important, keywords that will convert so you can target them with free content generation and SEO

3. Begin to write articles and submit them to Ezine Articles - though this will take a few weeks to get accepted these days and take some additional time to begin generating traffic, it is still well worth the effort as a means to getting traffic to your new webpage

4. Go after affiliates proactively. I like to start with a couple until I know my sales page is converting at a decent rate.

Next, go full bore and seek out productive affiliates. Look for high authority sites, blogs, newsletters forums, etc…in your niche. Contact the owner and offer a review copy of your product first – let them see what you have and then approach them about being an affiliate only after you have them hooked on your product (saves a lot of time approaching people with affiliate offers cold)

Be prepared to adjust your website – almost nobody gets things right on the first try.  Use the first few weeks to test combinations of ads, website headlines, offer, pricing, and keywords that attract potential buyers.  When you find a combination that works, scale it bigger.  When you don't, continue tweaking and try again until you do.

Making money on the internet with your own website and information product is as much science as it is art – by getting early traffic to your site you can make the process of finding the right combination of marketing faster making profitability that much closer for your internet business.

To help, you can tap into the powerful resources available within the leading information marketing resource and support site on the internet – Information Marketer'sZone

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There are constantly ideas that present themselves  as tremendous opportunities – where people just HAVE to have the answers.

Or there are those topics that I just can't resist, where I have a personal passion and line that up with a market desire for information.

But really, November is the perfect time to buckle down and really get to work on producing your own non-fiction report, ebook, book, or information product that you will market online.

Not only does November action mean enjoying the returns in the New Year, but November is also a month before things get crazy around Holiday season in December, and set you up for the peak buying season online where the biggest sales and profits for book buying on the internet is between December and April.

May can be good too, but after that, most internet information publishers begin to see a steady decline in sales over the summer and a ramp-up again in the Fall.

What motivates you and will get you writing a book?

• The idea that you can augment your current income (and eventually surpass it) by working once and selling your book for months and years to come?
• The thought of becoming a sought after "expert" in your chosen marketplace?
• The prestige and attention that comes with having released and having sold 1000's of copies of your own book, ebook or course?
• Having the very unique and powerful ability to touch the lives of tens of thousands of others with your knowledge, assistance and written word?
• Knowing that you can carve out a completely new profession where YOU control your effort, time and earning potential – without having to take orders and sit in useless meetings all day?
• Or maybe you just find writing extremely enjoying, even relaxing – or you really want to take back control over your work environment and work from home at a real job where you control your own products?

The likelihood is that more than one of these is behind your interest in writing a book…but make sure you know which one is the BIGGEST reason.  Tapping into the WHY will carry you through the next few weeks as you get serious and actually release your first ebook, book or infoproduct in November.

Hundreds of others are already doing it using the Blueprint System and Private Mentoring of Information Marketer's Zone - and the results are staggering!

I just finished answering a few questions from one of the members as she launches her "dream" ebook about helping people with addictions.

Another member recently launched his ebook about the financial industry – based partly on his experience, but mainly put together using the system outlined inside InfoMarketer'sZone on how to pull the questions out of ANY market and create an outline for your own highly successful infoproduct.

Are you ready?

Will you be writing a book in November?

If not now, then when?

To help you save massive amounts of wasted time, frustration and investment – follow the Blueprint you will find over at InfoMarketer'sZone and by the end of 2009 you will have your own information product forsale earning you profits online.

Will you take the challenge?

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Yet the most successful ebooks, books and information products don't stop with only managing to inform our readers, instead marketing your book depends heavily on your ability to inspire, offer hope, empower and improve the lives of those who pay money for our info products.

Why does someone who already owns 10 books on improving their public speaking go out and spend $47 for a new course on how to improve their public speaking?

In this training system for helping anyone create their own top-selling information ebook or book from home in as little as 6-weeks, we share a blueprint and uncover stories about normal, everyday people with full-time jobs becoming wealthy information marketers by marketing their own "how to" ebooks on the internet.

It is NOT just to learn about techniques or to be informed of what they should do — it IS about inspiring them with a system, set of steps or techniques that have worked for others and can work for them too.

Do you have an experience, knowledge, or training in your life that you think would help offer someone else hope, inspiration, empowerment or help them overcome a challenge in their life?

It could be raising a first child, dealing with a difficult teen, overcoming addiction, traveling to a certain inspirational location, overcoming a health challenge, helping an older relative, improving someone's career or financial situation, or thousands of other topics that people seek assistance on each and every day.

Learn more about turning just one of these ideas into your own online business profit center through quickly putting together an ebook, course, report or training program that taps into the emotional desires of hungry information seekers.   You'll find details of a simple, powerful 6-week system here.

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When you develop a site to market your business, promote your ebook or information product or gain traction in your marketplace as we outline in our 6-Week Information Product Profits System, a common question is how MUCH content do you have to develop.

Now that comment comes from the seeming link between large sites (lots of content, lots of pages, blogs, articles, etc…) and how that site ranks within Google (commonly expressed as "authority")

It is true that often (but certainly not always) sites that you find at the top of the search engines for a given keyword phrase tend to have many pages…but is it the number of pages only that is the factor here?

According to this video by Google spokesman Matt Cutts, it is not purely the number of pages that is important to gaining authority and thus the traffic rewards of being indexed and listed higher on the Google search results…it is certainly more complex than that…

OK, makes sense that Google wouldn't blindly reward sites or pages based on the numbers – that is too easy to abuse and really doesn't fit with the ultimate intention of Google to index and rank sites according to their relevance and usefulness to the search intention.

But, there is a very real possibility that size does matter and here's why…

As Matt tells us in the video above, it is how, how many, and from where inbound links are made to your content that matters a great deal to Google.  So, the question becomes, does a 1000 page site that has (over time) gained natural inbound links to 500 of those pages outrank a site of 10-pages where there are 500 inbound links to 1 or 2 of those pages?

While yes, the page that has the 500 inbound links on the 2-page site may (??) rank higher than any single page on the 1000 page site, chances are that the 1000 page site will have a better chance of having all of their 1000 pages indexed and overall, through smart internal linking brought about by good site organization, will rank higher on pages that have a very low number of incoming links.

In any case, there will be much more traffic distributed across a much broader set of keywords which will end up targeting more of your audience in the end…always a good thing for growing your online business.

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Since then, that product has earned me six figures in profits with less than a few hours of work each year to keep it up to date.

Since then, we have repeated that process dozens of times with reports, courses, manuals, ebooks and other information products. 

If you think about it, writing between 5-10 pages each day, you can have your book completed in as little as 1-2 weeks with a third week focused on editing your book and setting up your online business. 

Yes, there are many small steps on the road to operationalizing your internet business – we cover that in detail as part of the 6-week Information Profits System inside Information Marketer's Zone - but getting your product written, having your own book, ebook or report really can be finished in just 7-14 days. 

In order to make it easier to sit down and spend 1-hour each day to write your 10 pages, it helps if you have the following in place:

1. Researched your market, uncovering a gap where you are confident that your topic will be desired and will sell
2. Outlined your book, ebook or infoproduct in terms of major chapter sub-topics and a subset of questions within each chapter
3. Have clearly marked the questions you can answer right away (with your own experiences, knowledge or opinion) versus those that require additional research so that you can spend a few days developing content that you are missing
4. Write freely using a conversational tone – avoiding "on-the-fly editing" that continually confuses your brain stopping the free-flow of information

Having your own information product to sell online is one of the best ways to build your internet income – it all starts by writing 10 pages at a time.  Are you set to write your next 10-pages today?

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In other words, if you only get an hour or two each day to work on your business, should you be spending some of that valuable time on building your Twitter following or should you be spending it on something else?

Now THAT is a great question – especially since it demands that we understand what is MOST important to our online marketing businesses.  Now we market many things online, but one of the most important parts of our business is marketing information in the form of ebooks, books, teleseminars, home study courses and membership sites – so we are going to take this from the perspective of someone like you who is looking to grow an internet business based on marketing their own information products.

So, where does Twitter fall into the mix

• First, before you begin hitting the Twitter airwaves, you MUST plan your attack.  What I mean by that is you need to understand what business will you be in?  Who will you target, what challenges and desires for information will you fulfill and roughly with what types of products.  Notice, you do not yet need to have your finished products, but you do need to understand who you are targeting and what you will likely offer them in the future to get the most out of Twitter
• Second, you want to have a website – and not just any website.  What you want is a landing page that is designed to both inform your visitor, but mainly to capture their contact information in exchange for something you give away.  What could you give away?  It could be a 5-part email course, a 5-10 page report, an ebook, a 20-minute audio interview (someone may interview you or you may interview an expert) or anything else of immediate value.  This should target the positioning you decided on in Step 1.  Now you have a place to send your Twitter following and you have a reason to send them there - something of value for free
• Third, you want to send some initial traffic to that page through one or a combination of paid advertising (Adwords is a good place to start), article marketing and a blog.  You do this to get traffic flowing to your landing page and test it's ability to change visitors into subscribers. 
• Fourth, arm yourself with at least 40-50 keyword phrases that effectively target the hungry consumers of information within your marketplace.  Inside Information Marketer's Zone we outline different systems that will guarantee that you locate and isolate the best ROI keywords for your marketplace.  Why is this important?  Simple – you want to sprinkle these through your different Tweets on Twitter – more and more people are finding twitter activity based on search, when they search for your keyword terms, you want them to find you  and link up because these are the exact individuals that are most relevant to your Tweets and can be convinced through interaction to visit your website and hopefully become customers.  NOTE** This is the key part of twitter that nearly everyone doesn't get!
• Fifth – now you can enter the Twittershpere, pick a username that relates to your market, setup your profile to include your important keyword phrases and a call to action (to get your free giveaway with a link back to your landing page) and start Tweeting.  What you want to do is tweet a few times each day, but also proactively seek out twitter discussions around your keywords and begin to post helpful responses, that way you can build up a very releavant following quickly.  Every 5th or 6th tweet you can include a link back to your landing page or to blog postings that are designed content around links back to your landing page. 

Using this approach to building a Twitter following makes good business sense – we have used it to build thousands of followers that do come back and read our blog, become subscribers and customers. 

If you use it properly around the system we outline above, then yes, Twitter is worth the effort for information publishers who market online. 

By the way – if you want to exchange thoughts on this or want to be kept informed of new tips, techniques and strategies on internet marketing, social networking and information publishing – follow us on Twitter by going here and hitting "Follow"

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Write Your Own Ebook Fast

If you wrote your own ebook, would it sell?

How many of us have a deeply held desire to write a book, but are somewhat scared off by the time and rather daunting process involved in trying to get your book into the top 2% that actually get published?

Yes, it would be terrific to get picked up by a top publisher, handed a huge advance and asked to go away in 1-year and produce a book that ends up selling like crazy…but honestly, that sort of scenario is about as likely as winning the grand prize in a lottery. 

Yet, rather quietly, hundreds of thousands of others live out there dream of writing a popular book, being able to quit their job by kicking off an entirely new and fulfilling career path where they are their own boss. 

How did they do it?

By writing their own top selling, self-published book or ebook that sells like wildfire. 

For sure, not every ebook or self-published book ends up a success story.  In fact, many members of Information Marketer'sZone arrive after struggling with one or two books to figure out how to turn a past challenge into a successful selling ebook. 

The key is to understand how to target hopes, dreams, and sometimes fears that your marketplace has tapping into a flood of irrational desire leading to a feeding frenzy over your newly launched ebook or book.

Ok, so you may be wondering, why will people within a very competitive marketplace be willing to hand you $27, $47 or more when there are already hundreds of books on that topic in the marketplace. 

In other words, why would they buy an ebook that they find of yours online?

1. First, ebooks are incredibly easy and quick to produce which means your treatment of a topic can be much more timely and relevant than other books in the marketplace.  When you write your own ebooks, you don't need to work through agents, publishers, printing companies (unless you want to expand to a print edition that is), distributors, editors, and so on… A tpyical book will take a minimum of 8-months and often much longer to hit the market.  One of the biggest advantages ebook writers have is to tap into red-hot market trends and dominate that market earning very substantial profits, selling thousands of ebooks where you get to keep between 75%-90% of the selling price. 

2. E-Books are fast and easy to setup for selling and delivery online. You can update them quickly and easily; they do not require a second print run. All you need is to go into your original creation and modify the text or graphics. Because of this flexibility, E-Books can change as you get input from your market.  An extremely powerful system we teach within InfoMarketer'sZone is the concept of "iterative ebook writing" which simply means that your market helps you expand and make your ebook better leading to more sales, more products, and more profits. 

3. E-Books are quick and easy for your market to get. When a potential customer wants to find the best way to train their dog, chances are that they jump online and research that market first.  If you market properly, yours will be one of the top sites they see and if you do a good job of capturing their attention with your headline and book title, they will favor buying your ebook where they can begin reading it within minutes than doing further research and either heading to the bookstore or ordering from an online bookstore where it will take a week or more to get their purchase. All you have to do is download it from a website, and viola! It's on your computer or ebook reader ready to use. 

4. E-Books can be interactive. This is one of the most unique and specific qualities that E-Books offer. You can add surveys that need to be filled out, order forms for customers to purchase your products or goods, sound and video that draw your reader into the virtual world of your E-Book, even direct links to relevant sites that will expand your E-Book outward. In fact, a great way to enhance the price and value of an ebook is to mix in some of these interactive or multimedia aspects allowing you to market your ebook as a "training system", "workshop" or "course" where you can move from a $27 price point into a $97 or even $197 price point – some of the highest paid Information Publishers  use these systems to become high six and even seven-figure authors online. 

5. E-books have a low barrier of entry.  What I mean by this is that you can research, write, package and sell your ebook online for very little cost.  In fact, you could be earning money with your own ebook for under $100, with a little extra investment (less than $500) you can enhance the presentation and marketing of your ebook and still see a payback to profitability within 1-2 months of ebook sales.  Go the traditional publishing route and you could discover that you end up spending thousands of dollars in both book publishing and marketing costs…huge advances for authors are extremely rare.

6. With your own e-book you can package your information as a "system" to stand out from the crowd.  Boooks, by and large, present their readers with a broad range of very general information which is ok, but has a limited cap on their selling price.  Traditional books are capped at about $47 while most fall into the $27-$37 range and the author only keeps between 5-8% of that selling price, but by packaging your own "system" that targets your niche market you can easily ask double that asking price and get to keep 3/4 of the selling price for profit. 

Are you excited yet?

If you have ever thought of writing your own book, then you should be.  We have lived out our own dreams of writing and publishing our own books over the last 6-years and have helped thousands of others do the same.  Writing your own ebooks is a way to begin living your dream to write a book right away…starting this very minute. 

To help you along, we have developed a thorough, effective self-publishing ebook writing system over at this information marketing resource site to help you get the most out of your time and effort and ensure your first (or next) ebook writing project is an enjoyable and profitable one.

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By starting your own blog, configuring it properly, choosing the right keywords and using the system we explain within InfoMarketer'sZone, you can be generating thousands and thousands of unique visits within just a few weeks.

Traffic is nice, but it is what we DO with the traffic (or more specifically what we offer of value to those people who visit our blog) that is key.

Many new bloggers (and some pretty experienced ones too) start by smearing their blog full of ads in the hopes of turning eyeballs into dollars.

Not exactly the best way to monetize your blog traffic.

A better way is to begin capturing opt-in subscribers who give you their email address in exchange for something of value – a course, report, ebook, or some other specific information.

How do you add an opt-in box to your Wordpress blog?

Simple:

Step 1. Open yourself an account with a quality, reputable and professional autoresponder service - our choice after more than 6-years of great service is Aweber. This allows you to manage your list, handle signups, unsubscribes and control the messages and promotions that send to your subscriber list over the coming months

Step 2. Put together (or get through Private Label Rights or public domain material) a valuable, relevant giveaway for your visitors.  You will notice on this blog, in the upper right corner we give away a 7-part course developed for our visitors.  You could also package a 5-10 page report, directory listing, audio recording, screen capture video, ebook or dozens of other valuable giveaways for your subscribers.

Step 3. Next – you need to create a form for you blog that will allow your subscribers to sign-up to your list and get your giveaway.  You can either generate a form out of your autoresponder (Aweber does this in just a few minutes) and paste that code into a text widget within your Wordpress admin panel or you can use a Newsletter widget within Wordpress which then takes your autoresponder email address and creates the form for you.  You simply enter the title, text and email address and viola – you have an opt-in subscriber form.

Step 4. Where Do I place a subscriber opt-in form on my Wordpress blog?  Good question – we have tried our opt-in form on the top left, right below the banner, as part of the header and at various positions on the right columns.  After a good deal of testing, the current position at the top right of the blog is working best for us.  Notice, position is part of the battle, but having a solid offer with an attention grabbing title and perhaps some graphics can make a big difference to signup rates.

You may start out having an extremely low signup rate – something well less than 1%, don't be discouraged, on average blogs get more traffic than other pages on your site (lots more if you set it up and maintain it properly) but conversions may be lower than other pages where the traffic is pre-conditioned or better targeted.

All of that said, if you follow these steps, within a few weeks you should notice that subscriber opt-ins from your blog far exceed other pages on your site and your list building campaign will be given new life.

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