I have a few autoresponders going and one of the great things about an autoresponder is that it is truly a set it and forget it type of internet marketing work. You set up your autoresponder and then let here run for a few years.

If you have been on any of the internet marketing gurus lists you have probably seen that all you get is a bunch of pitches for products but that is not the real way to run an autoresponder, instead you are supposed to build on the reason why people subscribed in the first place. I remembered that this week when I bought a simple report and got placed on a list. I got a pitch but not before I got 4 or 5 personalized and really short messages asking me how I had used the report that I had bought and a couple of testimonial from past users.

The real idea is to establish that the buyer or subscriber to your list made a good decision and get them to build more trust in you as well as their decision. I remember listening to an audio from Armand Morin a few years ago where he talked about this and at the time all I could think of is sell sell sell to the people that would eventually join my list.

Now that I have a big list and lots of people signing up I have them go through 10 messages in 20 days learning with a few non pushy affiliate links. Now I make sure that in between pitches for products I always have a few messages that are teaching new principles. I think that I have a good relationship with my list and I have built that through non pitching 20 day process and then adding these pitches later after my opted in new friends have trust in me.

Are you willing to do this? I know a lot of people do not do this at all. Almost every autoresponder message that I get is from people selling me something and I am sure it does not work out well per 1000 emails at all., I bet they get nearly no sales without building any relationships whatsoever. Make sure that you trust your people well and they will buy from you in the future.

One of the things that has made the most difference in my success is that backlinks that I have gotten from article directories. I use the following article directories extensively:

EZineArticles
Go Articles
Hub Pages

I may have had a lot of success in the past with articles but I have to say that I will go and write an article and then submit it and not do anything for a while. The real problem is process and here is a new process that I have created and am taking advantage of this weekend

Writing article titles – Come on all we really need to write a lot of articles is the titles and then we will in fact have something to flesh out. To do this I just created a bunch of text files and then renamed them with a proposed title eg:writing articles that bring customers.txt. There are two things at work here. First is the title that I will use that is keyword rich (no research just what I would like to use) and secondly it gives me a focus for 400-500 words of content.

Writing bio boxes – This  has always been a problem for me. I write articles and have a bio box but they are all over my computer in little text files so what I have done is added one text file and added all my bio box text including hyperlinks to the one file so no matter what I am writing about I have a bio box right at my fingertips.

Writing articles – I use the tried and true method of one or two intro paragraphs, 3 or so bullet points with expansion, and then a closing paragraph that will really pull it all together. This is all I need to get 400-500 words.

Is this the same thing that is holding you up? We all know that if you break down the income that you make you can probably make a good income on just writing a bunch of articles like this very one. So far this article itself is 397 words. I bet you could do lots of these as well, am I right?

Just as a recap here are the reasons that I use Micro Niche Finder

To find popular searches in a niche

To find amount and strength of competition

To find new niches

To find popular keywords for today

Plus there are lots more features. I will do a complete review as soon as the new Micro Niche Finder 5 is released. For now enjoy the trailer

I have always been worried about anything to do with bots as most bots like Googlebot are used to index things and are of no use to me at all. Anyway I saw posts one to many times I guess and I looked into it. It ends up that Socialbot is a program that simplifies posting to web 2.0 social sites like Digg, Reddit, and about 30 more sites. The two great reasons to post to these social bookmarking sites is to firstly get traffic, and secondly to get more backlinks to your sites.

One of the scams of backlinking is that many of these sites have a no follow tag on all links so the backlink does not count at Google but there are also many that do count and are do follow.  Socialbot 5 should help us with this by having more speed, more on this later though.

Well in getting more of these “bots” I have come to learn that Big Mike and his team have actually built in better features into the newer bots. I have to say that once it is setup I can submit a page to the 30+ sites in about 10 minutes or so with the only work for me being entering captcha codes.

The newest version of Socialbot coming out is slated to be Socialbot 5.  I read a post last week saying that the testing is done and the new version is going to be out in a few days. Apparently Socialbot 5 will have multithreading built in. Multithreading in Socialbot 5 will allow me to probably cut that time to submit a page to all the sites to about 5 minutes or probably less.

I am also hoping that Socialbot 5 adds more sites so that I can spread my pages around even more.

The thing is, to succeed with article marketing, you do not have to follow every rule that is out there. Sometimes, all it takes is a little knowledge of the major rules, and you are almost all the way there. Before you embark on an article marketing campaign, memorize these five major rules and use them to guide your marketing efforts.

1. Keep it relevant.

The aim of a marketing article is to create forward traffic for your website. Sometimes all that takes is a slight contextual relevance, while other times it requires a highly detailed article. Some niches are naturally more specialized than others, and require a far more relevant article in order to generate traffic that converts into sales.

Whatever your case, make sure that your articles are relevant and informative. You are far more likely to create sales with an article that gets readers in a buying mood, so get that relevant information in there and get ready to convert readers into buyers.

2. Do not commercialize the body of your article.

Save promotion until the end of your article. The aim of your article body is to inform readers and get them interested in the content that you are dealing with. There is a place for promotion in an online marketing article, but it is closer to the end than it is to the beginning. Fill the body of your article with ultra-relevant content, and bring in commercialization in your conclusion and resource box.

3. The resource box is key — use it to your advantage.

Your resource box gives you a chance to change a standard, somewhat boring article into a powerful promotional tool. In many ways, the resource box is more important than the article itself. Put it to good use by incorporating one or two good, ultra-contextual links to your product websites and sales pages. With the right information and layout, a good resource box can turn a failing article into a mass-sales opportunity.

4. Do not sell, just pre-sell.

Leave the selling to your sales page. Your promotional articles should achieve one thing: have readers click through to the landing page. You articles are not sales tools — your landing page is. Focus on getting the reader interested through pre-sales, but do not try and convince them to buy in the article itself.

5. Do not forget to research keywords.

Keyword research is just as important for a promotional article as it is for an SEO-powered website. Whenever you are embarking on an article marketing mission, go out of your way to ensure that your keywords are worthwhile. A simple five-minute scan with Google Keyword tool is often all you need to determine if an article is worth writing or not.

If you have a home based business or internet business what are you doing to keep up with the changes? Here is one source of information in the midst of all the chaos http://askstevenhippe.com

Getting traffic has always basically built on the idea that good content finds it’s way to the people looking for it. If you have the best weight loss page it will get lots of traffic and if you have a terrible page it will get no traffic no matter what you do.

At the same time the best article that is of no interest to anyone will still not get any traffic. So be sure to write to a market that is big enough.

So here are a bunch of methods and sources of traffic.

Squidoo Pages – Squidoo is a popular site. Just make sure that you are not writing spammy enough pages and add all of your backlinks to your related pages

Hub Pages – A type of article site that will give you lots of traffic as long as your personal rating is at least 75% and your article is over 50%

Ezine Articles – Everyone knows Ezine Articles. Articles with backlinks rank high in Google and are good for backlinks

Article City – Another great article site although not as popular as Ezine Articles

Go Articles - Article site that allows direct affiliate links

Forum Posts – Post quality stuff on forums and you will be building trust with new possible readers

Comments on other blogs – Again a way to build trust with possible new readers

Comments on your own site – Keep the community alive. It is up to your re-commenting

Submit site to directories – Not as good as it used to be but sites and articles can be submitted to directories for both backlinks and traffic

Google Searches – The biggest source for most people for traffic. If Google loves you then you will get the most traffic from this source. Search engines are still the king of consistent traffic

Autoresponders – Your list can being you a lot of traffic if the like you and they see a link to content that they are really interested in. Be sure to get yourself an autoresponder quick and get it cheap.

Other Sites of your own – Put links on your other related sites. This is great for traffic as well as well as backlinks

Social Networking – Digg, Reddit and a ton of other speicalized Web 2.0 voting type sites can give you 1000’s of visitors in one day but none the next. Great spurts of traffic but terribly competitive

Social Bookmarking – Delicious is the best example of bookmarking traffic but there are many others as well

Linkbaiting to other sites – If you write great linkbait you will find other sites linking to it for traffic and quality backlinks

Returning visitors – Visitors through your RSS feed are great for getting traffic again and again

Adwords – Spending money on your money sites may work if your message is effective and your keyword terms are exact

Buying Links – Sites are always looking to sell links and this can help on a monthly basis if that sites traffic is very close to your sites vision.

I will post more as I think or find other sources of traffic. Good luck and think hard of the ways that you can get traffic. That is what it is all about for making money online.

The SEO Book by Aaron Wall is a wide ranging book that is put together to teach you how to optimize your website to get more visitors by ranking high on the search engines.The Search Engine Optimization industry (SEO) is a very competitive industry as well as one full of the riff raff of the internet promising thousands and even millions of visitors and often offering old outdated information as well as very dodgy advice that can get you banned from any and all search engines if you put it into place.

Over the last few years I have read literally thousands of pages of information about how to build a better site, how to rank well in search engines and how to make more money online. In the early days most of the people selling or giving away information were truly saints, they gave good info and they gave it free. Over the last three years or so the SEO market has definitely changed as the money is bigger and optimizing for search engines has become more complex and changes on a regular basis so it is tough to keep up with.

This is where Aaron Walls Search Engine Optimization Book comes in. Aaron Wall first created the SEO Book in December 2003 and has constantly updated the book to keep up with changes. If you buy the SEO Book you get all of the changes. The SEO Book seems to be some kind of a labor of love to Aaron Wall as the updates are always coming, this os real commitment. Currently the SEO Book is 214 pages as it keeps on growing in response to the growing information that people need.

Search Engine Optimization Books

One of the real drawbacks of many internet marketing books is their tight focus with no real application to other facets of your internet business. This is a place where the SEO Book really shines. There is a lot of details on what you need to do to make your site successful not only within the search engines but also other methods of gaining traffic to your site.I look at the individual with one or more websites as the perfect customer for the SEO Book as it goes step by step into how to build your site to rate well (or fix it if it is bad). And then after a site is built what it takes to make the site bring in targeted traffic though various on and off page optimizations.

Chapter review of the SEO Book

Now for the details of the SEO Book. Although all e-books tend to have a money back guarantee it is still nice to know what kind of information that you are actually buying before you plunk down your credit card. This is the one thing that has always stopped me in the past when ever I have not been sure about a book. Itis always nice to see all of the testimonials but they are worthless if the book is not targeting the type of information that you are really looking for.Internet History: In this section of the book Aaron gives you a grounding of how the internet, search engines, and marketing got started. How and what to look for in domains and hosting which are critical even before you start your website.

General Internet Topics: How to build a site easily, copywriting, usability. These are information that will help you build a better site and make a site that is easy to change in the future. Also when you are writing it is important to write for people on the internet, not magazine or newspaper readers or even people reading books. This is a different medium in many ways.

Writing for search engines: When you write for people you are writing in a very free form style but search engines are built with algorithms that look for some things and avoid other things and can actually ban you if you do things that are considered by the search engine as being very wrong.

Interacting with search engines: This is a fantastic chapter as Aaron breaks down each of the top four search engines. These four engines combined account for over 95% of all searches that web surfers do on a daily basis. This chapter goes into getting listed, optimizing for and basically all of the factors that you should look at to rate highly in each of these search engines. This I believe is the most important chapter for those wondering what has gone wrong with all of the work that they have already done wrong on the web and I myself hung on every word in the chapter.

Pay per click: There is more than one way to skin a cat. If you are not going to rank highly for a keyword than you can always pay the money to get traffic for that keyword with Google Adwords or Overture. This chapter although of course not the kind of detail that Perry Marshall does in his big book still gives you all of the essential details. Details that will give you 90% of what you need therefore you will be able to save money and get lots of traffic by ranking well for those ads.

Monitoring Results: Aaron Wall looks at building, optimizing and maintaining a website as a campaign and as with any campaign you only do well when you have a way to monitor your results and gains over time. This monitoring chapter goes into detail about what to do when things don’t seem to be changing and ways to speed up your results.

Hiring an SEO: This is just a throwaway chapter to me anyway that looks at what you do what a professional does and what to do if you really decide that you don’t want to do the work and would rather farm it out to a pro. Aaron has laid everything out so if you know before you even start if this is something that you want to invest your time in.

Quick start checklist: This is actually the chapter that you should read first. This section takes a point form method to point out each of the different facets of your optimization methods. In this section Aaron Wall probably points out 100 things to look at and these topics have all been covered in detail in the book before this point. The detail that this goes into may be a little daunting but it is a great way to see what and how many things are really important when getting your pages and site optimized

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is a broad and very tricky area with secrets and expensive tips that no one is really sure if they want to pay for even if the info is worth it. In this review I have tried to detail all of the things that the SEO Book covers. Overall I have really enjoyed reading this book and it is hard to be objective about this book as I have not been able to find another book that covers the subject material in depth that this book does.The SEO Book is $79 and I believe that at this price it is a great value. I have seen many books that sell for $29 but this book give you more and more accurate information than any internet optimizing book or material that I have ever seen.

Here is a great and prolific article writer Sean Mize with some tips to writing really effective articles.

1. Always use effective titles. Kick-start each of your articles by using titles that will make your audience want to read your articles. I wouldn’t lie about it; writing killer titles isn’t always easy but this is something that you need to learn and master as soon as possible. Remember, the success of your articles will largely depend on the effectiveness or attractiveness of your headlines.

2. Always start strong. Make it a point to put the most explosive information you have on your first paragraph. You would want to get your readers on the edge of their seats and you would want to hold their attention as long as possible. Kick-start your articles with intriguing questions or jaw-dropping statements. Ensure that these will help you make your readers want to read your articles until the end.

3. Make your articles informative. Don’t make your readers feel that they just wasted their time on your articles. Make them happy by giving them every information that they are looking for. These may include the solution to the things that they’re going through, answers to their burning questions, guides that can empower them to do certain things on their own, and useful tips and techniques.

4. Deliver well-written articles. It’s not enough that you give your readers useful information. To really satisfy them, you also need to give them great reading experience. You can do this by making sure that your articles are well-written. Your grammar usage must be perfect and you must use the most effective words at all times.

5. Ensure that your articles are flawless. Spend a couple of minutes checking your articles before you post them online. Ensure that they are free from annoying errors and make sure that your content flow smoothly.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article writing success, “Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide”

Download it free here: Article Writing

You are probably wondering what American Girl has to do with marketing but if that is the case then you probably have not seen this in action before.

American Girl sells high end dolls. These are not the kind of dolls that you buy at the store but instead you order them online for over $100, not your average barbie that’s for sure. Anyway there is a whole lot around these dolls to keep kids interested and do grow revenues. We can look at the integration of this and maybe you can see ways that you can wrap this into your business.

First the dolls. The dolls are about a food tall and are shaped like a real little girl. The dolls eyes open when you stand them up and close when you lie them down. There are a few choices for dolls. Either you can buy a American Girl labeled doll or you can get one that matches your girl that has the same hair and eye color. Finally there are different dolls for girls of different ages

So that seems simple enough but it is the tie-ins to the marketing that makes things interesting. First of all as I will see next month there is a tea room/restaurant in just a few cities that you can go for a formal meal with mother, daughter, and doll. At the store you can of course buy clothes for the doll and apparently match them with the girl, you can get the dolls ears pierced, you can by accessories for the American Girl doll and finally there are DVDs. More on that in a moment.

One of the great marketing/income methods that American Girl has setup is a collection of movies. Each movie features a starring girl character that girls fall in love with and this character is set in a certain time and place in American history. This makes the movies interesting to kids and parents and of course each of these characters is in fact another doll that you can buy.

Buy the movie, buy the doll, buy the clothes, and go for lunch.

I have of course been immersed in many different kids trends and fads and they are all very interesting but as a marketing system I do not think that there is any better market integration than American Girl. Even with a 50 year headstart I do not think that the people at Mattel have been even close to putting all the pieces together so tightly as this company has.

So the questions that you have to ask yourself is:

1. How do you integrate seemingly unrelated part of your complete sales process?

2. How smooth is the backend process of getting more sales from existing customers?

3. How many avenues and revenue streams do you have that are not competing with each other?

Bum Marketing Keyword Research

When you are doing Bum Marketing as Travis Sago teaches it you are looking for two things. A hungry market and overlooked keywords. I think this is really important since you are really looking for people that can and want to buy something but are also available to you to pitch.

So here is an easy bum marketing example. Acne Treatment. Have you ever looked at the competition for acne keywords? It is terrible, everyone that markets knows how painful that acne is socially (maybe we have all suffered from it?) and that people that want to get rid of their acne will try almost anything to get rid of it. But there are a couple of problems with the acne market. First young people with acne are not in the position to spend money on acne products like Accutane as it is expensive and secondly trying to crap the top 10 for acne treatment will take so much effort that most people not hooked up with great backlinks will just give up.

So what do you do? Travis says go after low competition high traffic keywords. So you want a keyword term that has low competition, lets say 1,000 to 5,000 sites that are looking for the phrase and then at least 500 searches a month so that you have some traffic and not very much competition.

This is the basics but isn’t there more than that?

Buying Keywords

There are certain buying keywords that are important to recognise. Lets say with the above example that you could actually rank high for acne treatment. Well that is pretty vague. How do we know that buyers are really going after that term, maybe instead we would see people doing research, reports in school or trying to create internet marketing pages to sell acne products.

Instead think more of the words that people are looking for like buy, or purchase, or a product name, or review. I have consistently found that there is much less competition for these kind of keywords even though they are later in the buying cycle.