Before I do, let me say it again, You should learn Search engine optimization and implement good seo tactics.

I am telling you to ignore seach engines because it’ll be easy and less stressful to keep track of it all.

You see, I was just noticing few of my own blogs and I noticed a simple trend in almost every single one of them.

Most of my blog were getting loads of traffic from Yahoo and MSN and almost nothing from google. And recently it completely switched up and I am getting all my traffic from google and almost nothing from Yahoo/MSN.

Search engine are always updating their algorithms, they are always making minor changes. And chances are you’ll see the massive effect on your website once a few month. It’ll often settle down in upcoming months. If you keep stressing over them, you are playing right into their hands.

Let people who have full time job to follow Serps do that. Your complete focus should be on the topic of converting your visitors into customers and then into long term relationships. SERPs will not make you money but your customers and relationship will.

That’s one of the reason, I do not target any of the serps. Yes, I do follow basic tenets of seo. And you should too. Don’t forget the reason why you got into online business.

Goals – How can affiliate marketers achieve them while reducing their time, effort and money?

There are many tips on increasing productivity, which often talks about “not check emails, your adsense/affiliate accounts every few minutes”.

But I am going to take a different approach to them. If you want to be productive, it’s easy and you can follow the tips (Read Darren’s Blog post on productivity). I am going to tighten some lose ends, strengthen the structure and Marketing process more efficient, and so on.

The way to to efficient your marketing structure is by testing and streamlining. I know testing sounds a LOT complicated to a beginner, but What I am going to do is show you how to use the simplest of testing. I call it self-testing.

Odd name for a testing methodology. As you know, I like to keep things simple. The idea behind self testing is “Find out what is getting you result and do more of it”. Now I know most people are wondering “Isn’t that’s what testing is supposed to do?”

Yes, you are right. But for you to figure out you need to install software and stuff like that. Which is time consuming process. If you remember my earlier blog post on testing advertising concepts, then you know I tested without any script or software. Do you know the basic process of affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing process –> Find the market -> Find a Hot Selling product -> Get Traffic -> Promote The affiliate product.

It’s 4 phase process. And what I am suggesting is going to be implemented in 4th stage. While promoting your stuff you are going to take notice of your results. Find out at what time period, you are making a sale.

For example – If you are promoting a Product X and you make a sale at around 100 Unique targeted traffic, then what does this tells you? It basically give you green light to put all of your efforts to promote this product.

Even if you are making a sale per 200 unique visitors, you are actually doing a lot better than others.

This is what I meant by Self-testing. You notice when you are making a sale. When you start out, chances are you won’t find the kind of results I talked about.

Here’s what to do when you are not satisfied with results?

Let’s take an example where You’ve created a 1 Pre-sell Page and You are bringing traffic to this page to promote a Brand X product.

Now you have brought about 500 unique visitors and still no sale. That’s a bad-bad equation in front of you.

Now Here things get hairy and you have to make an intelligent decision.

Find out why people are not buying it?

1. Bad Traffic – Product Match : This happens more than often you’d imagine. Most of times, the traffic you bring in is not a good match for the product. Now if you are getting traffic to a product called “Make money online” and your traffic is targeted (make money online type). So what’s the big deal here? Can you guess?

   Now chances are you are bringing crowd that belongs to affiliate marketing niche and your product is all about using your product and stuff like that. This is slight disconnection which goes almost un-noticed between your traffic and Product. And your conversion will DROP significantly. The moment you bring the right crowd (for this example, people who create their own products), you’ll see jump in sales.

   The major difference between you and myself is the experience to judge this kind of situation immediately.

2. A Disconnection between traffic and your pre-sell page : Every market has a Lingo or style or manner of speaking. If you are out of element in this department, it’ll create a HUGE disconnection in your pre sell page. (BTW, If I haven’t said it before, ALWAYS CREATE PRE-SELL PAGES).

   If you think this is the reason, Find couple of High traffic forums in your product/market and spend some time there lurking. You’ll get a heck a lot about the demographics of your market.

3. Bad Promotion from Brand X product: This stuff happens too. Bad Marketing. Do you know there’s rare breed of marketers who spend most of the time finding this kind of situation and write their own pre-sell page to promote the product from clickbank.
4. Disconnection between Traffic and Product page : Actually this should also comes into 3^rd angle here. But Again this disconnection is pretty much like the disconnection we talk about in 1 and 2^nd point. In this case, Your only option is to create a better pre-sell page or find a better marketed product.

As you can see, just by judging your traffic and sales, you can start making decisions that’ll reduce your time and effort by making it more efficient. I am of belief that you should spend more time doing things that brings you money rather than doing useless stuff Like designing the web page, trying 10 different things.

Focus on doing 1 single things and do it effectively. If you are getting only 100 uniques visitors a day, you can find out if you are going to make money in 5 day or less. It’s about making a proper decision.

How NOT to suck at making money?

Yesterday evening, I got a call all the way from New Zealand. And this guy Brian was intent on asking me very heavy duty question.

His question was – “Can you realistically tell me how soon anyone can be making $100 (US) a day?”

I was silent for quite a while as I knew this was a loaded question. There are so many variables that are needed to meet to make $100/day. Heck It took me many months to get that kind of income.

“Brain, frankly speaking anyone can start making money in less than 24 hrs. To get to $100 a day, can be achieved in 5–7 days.”

“Really”, he asked me.

“Yeah, It’s possible, but you have to understand the mindset of a marketer to achieve that kind of results fast”.

For Example – About 3(or 4) year ago, a friend of mine asked for my help to earn some pocket money with part time stuff. I explained to her, what I do (blogging) and How I do it?

I gave her the link to basic resources like blogger.com, google’s adsense link and a statcounter link.

Also told her how to use pingomatic to ping all of her content. And few examples on how to get traffic.

I spent about 30–45 minutes explaining detail about all of the above stuff. No secret techniques, no secret traffic generation software, nothing. Plain basics.

For next 30 days, she kept in touch with me and kept asking me very basic questions  like How to add adsense to blog or simple stuff like that.

In first 20 days since she started, she hit her first goal $5/ day. Which was really good from my opinion.

In next 12 days (total 32 days), she got her 2^nd goal of $20/day. 

In 32 days, she achieved what I wasn’t able to. Most affiliates or internet marketer do not even make $200 a month income. And she was able to do generate $600/ day Income all doing 20–30 minutes of blogging every day.

How did she do it?

1. She understood the basic of marketing “People are buying, all you have to do is stand in front of them and pitch”.

2. She was consistent, agressive and solid in promoting her blog and content.

That’s it.

So If you have to ask me to list few key things about her mindset, then it’d be much like this.

1. Laser like Focus on your tasks.
2. Do not give a shit about others and what other thinks about your blog/site etc.
3. Treat it Like a Business.
4. Do not waste your time on un-necessary stuff like (buying too many of “Secret techniques to Make $14,475 overnight”.
5. For God sake, Stop crying and Do something. Anything will do, As long as you keep your goal in front of you.
6. Become passionate to promote your stuff (if you don’t like your shit, chances are nobody else will too).
7. Always Keep Your Goal in sight.
8. Remember the IMBasics Mantra–> Content + Promotion = Traffc = $$$ bling bling.

Realize that you’ll fail… Accept it, Let go And Find Way to Make Some serious dough.

Now I know what I said was pretty much oxymoronic. But remember If you are hung up on “Doing it Right” then you’ll never get off your ass and do things.

In my friends case, the moment I told her to make a blog, in 30 minutes later (on  56 Kbps Phone modem line), she created her first blog and made a post.

Money Likes Speed <– Joe Vitale.

Act fast, Act with passion on your desires and then focus on your goals. Taking action is going to make you money.

The faster you’ll fail, the faster you’ll start making money.

To answer’s Brian Question I told him to.

1. Find a Hot Product that people are buying
2. Send Traffic to that Product (Use PPC)
3. Repeat as many times as humanely possible.

That’s it. 3 damn steps you need to do.

People are hesitant to spend their money on PPC because they expect to get charged “TOO much” by Google. From my experience, if you spend 1 days using PPC, you’ll have more experience than 85% of the current online marketers.

When you put your money on the line, you realize the consequences of your action. You Put All of your focus into it. You automatically start to thing clearer and smarter. That’s how much putting your money on the line can do to you.

Can You do it with Free Traffic Sources?

Heck yeah, Remember there’s no such thing as FREE lunch. When you are talking about Free traffic sources, you are still putting a lot of your time and effort.

If you just create 1 Page in a week and Then spend 2 hrs on promoting that page it all over the place for next 7 days, You’ll get traffic. PERIOD.

In 30 days, You’ll have spent at least 60 hrs on promoting 4 pages (hopefully you’ve have created these pages as Pre-sell to affiliate products). You’ll see income rolling in.

When You are writing anything and promoting your stuff, your passion will flow from you and it’ll show up in your work. If you are not passionate, then chances of your succeeding is low.

Remember You do not need another $1000 or $2000 product. You are only chasing the marketer’s dream.

The moment you stand tall, sit back and start focussing on your own dream and put all of your efforts into it. You’ll succeed.

[Learn to focus without distraction.

In the end, If you do not want to suck at money, then

1. Stop Chasing Marketer’s Dream.
2. Start Working on Selling and promoting products RIGHT NOW.
3. Get Focussed on Doing the damn work (there’s no Free lunch).
4. Spend money on things that brings you money (i.e. PPC, Buying links to your site etc).
5. Follow the 3 Steps above and promote the heck out of your pre-sell pages.

One thing that can help you in getting foccessed is Derek Franklin’s Action Machine. Put Your Own List and Add how much time you are going to spend doing each activity (Write a Post, Promote Your articles, create videos etc) and Let the machine go.  Take any task you’ve been putting off, give yourself 30 minutes to get it done, start your timer, and watch what happens. Click Here to get Action Machine. 

Image Credit – David Jackmanson, Image Credit – CassiaA, Image Credit – sepblog

Now when you go back home, few days later you starts contacting every single one of them and start pitching your products to them.

Can you guess what are your chances of selling your products to them?

Very Low, unless you are master persuader and salesman.

And this is where all of us go wrong. We treat our website visitors and subscribers the same way. We let them subscribe to our list and then starts sending promotions to them.

Can you make sales doing that? Of course yes, many of the marketers are doing it that way.

Do you ever wonder why some Affiliate marketers fail (and others go ga-ga over their massive checks)?

It took me about 7-8 months in general to figure out how to sell products as an affiliate. And I believe most affiliates do not even spend that much time and quit.

Even those who do not quit early, does not succeed as they should have. This question bears a serious thought and a response.

One of the key component I have found in top and successful affiliates is “Relationship”. They share a very cordial relationship with their subscribers. Or Their relationship is based on trust.

The fact is that they spend time in creating a relationship with their prospective customers. And they get paid handsomely for that effort.

But It takes time, who has it?

Now, now, don’t be rash. I am asking you to spend next 30 day to create a relationship with your subscribers, can’t you just spend next 30 days with it? How much effort does it take?

Oh well, let just say you don’t want to spend that much time, then what to do?

Now this here comes into category to seduction or attraction. You have to understand and treat it like real world. You’ll often meet people who are good at connecting with others in instant. Often these people will have others telling their life stories to them in no time.

You have to understand, “Nobody likes to be sold, but they sure like to buy”. If they are not buying it from you, they are buying it from someone else.

Should you use Hard-sell or Soft sell?

I’ve been brought up in hard selling environment. My business experience comes from that background. And I personally despised it for a long time. It wasn’t until I started using soft selling skills. I realized hard selling created a pressure on me which was ultimately non-existent.

If you do not like using typical sales techniques, then go the soft selling route. Understand at one point, you’ll end up using a mixture of both skills and it’s like a circle of life completing itself.

Creating a Relationship is a soft selling skill.

When you start creating this relationship with your subscribers, chances of them buying from you gets really high. And that’s how I get more than 75% click throughs on my email campaigns (notice I didn’t not talk about emails opened, but click throughs)

Every interaction is a time where you should spend some time thinking about “building a relationship”. One of the good examples of this kind of marketing is “David Deangelo in Double Your Dating“.

Eben (or David his pen name) takes his subscribes to the series of emails where he connects with them in many ways. He tries to understand and give them solution that’s best for them. And he does not do it forcefully. He nudges them into the direction.

And he didn’t chanced upon this method by some universe or ‘law of attraction’ magic. He spent time understanding it.

And this is where You have to spend some time ripping apart every single of your own marketing materials.

Remember, In any sales interaction, your main goal is to build a relationship.

Best Regards
Varun Pratap

How to play the leading role in your marketing “movie” – so you always “get the girl”…and the sale!

If someone like me who scored 48% in English in high school can write faster, then anyone can.

It all started in year 2000. I bought my first pc in oct sept 27 and got connected to internet. That was my starting point, where I changed and become a writer. Heck I didn’t realized this till 2004.

Are you wondering how it happened?

Well the secret is “Forums”. Yes, forums.

Participating in forums will just get your writing juices flowing. First you’ll participate in flame worthy threads and soon with some experience you’ll become a accomplished writer.

When people participate in discussion, they brain goes out and starts giving them results. This is a skill that you need to develop if you want to write.

Another thing about forums is, you tend to get into ego-fights (or flame wars). It often happens if someone says really flaming comments about some of your belief (HA.. often it starts with “You are stupid, you don’t know anything” LOL).

Anyways People communicate and ask questions in forum. All of this will going to help you improve your writing ability. You don’t have to think about Introduction -> body content– Conclusion to write a comment.

Blogs are 2^nd best but they don’t give you any material to get your juices flowing. You have to come up with content ideas on your own. That’s why I am rating them at No 2.

NOTE: Avoid forums if you want to succeed in online business. That’s because it wastes heck a lot of time and it’s addictive. We tend to create relationship with peoples from all over the world, whom we never met. Often we just go there to see who’s posting.

This is fun way to learn how to write. Chances of you getting addicted to a forum is very high.

Writing is all about flowing from one coherent thought to another and putting it on paper. The more you write, the better you’ll get. No matter where you show off your writing prowess.

Along with this method, you can get my Article writing manual to learn how to write. I clock around 7–8 minutes for 300 word article using this. Its a matter of practice.

The best thing is you don’t have to be “the first” in market to be a leader. Often if you are different and people have a different image (of course favorable)), then you can position yourself as an expert. That’s the main reason you see many different companies in same market (i.e. Nike and addidas in footwear).

Let’s use these 4 tips to create a different positioning factor for you.

Presentation – Know How to present the information.

Anyone can find information if they spend some time searching online. But Not anyone will be able to present it in a manner which is favorable to them. Content often matters, but often the delivery system matters most. It’s like telling a joke, you’ll often find people who have knack for telling jokes and few people who always bomb.

That’s how much difference you can make with your presentations.

Keep yourself updated

You’d be surprised how many marketers do not keep themselves updated on the latest news. But when I am talking about updating yourself, I am talking in every perspective of your market. If you have to learn about new softwares, or may be new strategies or may be something completely new. Be ready to be the front of it.

Remember – Leaders Lead, followers follow. You have to show them by doing it.

Don’t publish junk Information.

Do not publish bad information. Internet is already very polluted. This will only be bad for your credibility.

Teach.

Be open to teaching others, be it in classes or via emails or tele-seminars. Be open to teach about your market. Share your knowledge with the world.

Click here For More Strategic Internet Marketing Tips. You’ll get 30 days Internet Business plan plus regular blog updates at http://www.imbasics.com

Varun Pratap

Aim for That Peak Like Mad.
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.

So should you give up on this Or be ready to take the bull by horns?

Now if you’ve been reading any of my blog posts/articles on SEO, you know how much I favor doing the basics (Title, h1, description tags etc). When it comes to give a little boost to my rankings with some carefully planned articles, then I think it’s worth spending your time.

Let’s differentiate what You should do differently than people who get slapped by google.

1. Manipulate or not? That is the question – Understand, when you are writing an article on any keyword, you are trying to manipulate Search engines in one form or another. The people who got slapped silly were the ones who took this manipulation to the extreme.

2. Think about the visitors First – Even if you are writing an article to attract search engine traffic. ALWAYS write an article from a reader’s perspective. It’ll not only hurt your conversion but also work against you as the content will not be of higher quality.

3. What does Google actual wants – Now if you are searching for something on google, what does it actually wants to serve you? Google wants to give you as close to content you are looking for. So if you somehow manipulate your rankings and do not provide the right content match, then chances of losing the rankings are very high.

When you start writing with keeping in mind about your main goal (Visitors First, Best Content Match for google and then add writing for search engines). You’ll get good results.

It’ll always be challenge to write an article which also boosts your rankings. But Our so called SEO writers have made it too hard.

When you are looking to write an SEO article then follow these steps

1. First write an article for visitors.

2. Sprinkle some keywords related to your topic.

3. Read your article out loud to see if your article jumps around or not.

4. Write your article headline after you’ve finished with the article.

5. Do not go overboard with adding keywords into your articles.

See.. how simple it is. Click Here to Learn how to do some SEO writing

Here’s the Video

Do not think for a second, a template or modeling someone’s article is going to help you write fast. These things helps only if you have the habit of writing an article.

Now you have to understand every article has 3 key important things.

1. Headline

2. Body content

3. Author Bio.

I do not write my headline until I’ve finished writing an article. This is best way to write a better headline. As you finish your article, you’ll find that your brain is in overdrive to process lots of information. And the chances that these headline ideas starts jumping to you won’t be surprising to me.

A good headline will cause your reader to sit up and take notice. If they don’t work like that then you have to learn (and practice writing) more. there’s no other secret behind it.

2nd important point in all this is body content. Like I suggested you should first pen down all of your thoughts regarding the subject. Let your fingers follow the brain idea flow. Just let it all out. You can always edit it later.

Your body content will largely determine what kind of headline you’ll write. Your content will also determine what to write in a author bio box.

Take notice of the flow and speech pattern of your article to write a good author bio box.

Author bio box is nothing but a conversation on flow where you are introducing yourself. If you suddenly interrupt, you are distracting the flow of your article. Think of it as a greased slide. From start to finish, reader should go with the flow.

Now this article took me about 7 minutes and 24 seconds to write. Can you write an article like this one and clock my time? So far this is my best time for over 300 words article.

Click Here if you want to write fast and efficient like me.

If your goal is to make money online sitting in your underwear, then you have to learn how to judge markets efficiently. Most people while creating their internet marketing plan does not plan well enough for the market.

There are way too many elements which can either help you succeed or become a failure.

These basics elemnts are

1. Are people buying in this market?

2. What’s the highest price point for this market?

3. What are the products /services provided in this market?

4. Can I find a different angle to sell my own product/service?

5. How much I have to work in getting Natural search engine rankings

6. Is it too saturated by the competitors?

7. What type of product are selling and can be sold (Ebooks/Audio/Video/DVD etc)

Though the list goes on but at least these are the questions you should start with.

One major mistake almost beginners make is that they understimate how much they have to work to start making money in any market. Any seasoned internet marketing veteran will be able to get into the market and start making money even before the week is over.

Why? Because they often spend most of their time in research and finding the pulse of the market.

They want to know what is selling and how it is selling?. And as soon as they get the pulse, they jump into the market with all of their ammunition. They don’t hold back. Otherwise, it’d be financial suicide.

Most internet marketing guru’s don’ spend their time talking about this because this is largely a self -exeperience skill. The more markets you’ll trying getting into, you’ll start seeing the patterns over and over again.

Like they say “Ask the right questions and You’ll get right answers”. People are not asking but complaining “I am not making money because of _____”. Stop doing that, it’s self – defeating attitude.

The faster you work, the better you’ll get at it.

Best Regards

Varun Pratap

PS: Click Here to follow Stephen’s formula to succeed in any market.