Targeted marketing is the wave of the future for Internet advertisers. The key to advertising is knowing what consumers want. Once an advertiser understands the potential consumer’s needs, he has a much better chance of making a sale. This is the theory behind online targeted marketing.

And while in the Internet’s infancy the best way to advertise via the Internet may have been to simply rapid fire your advertising message to as many places and users as possible, today’s Internet marketer can make use of targeted approaches to online advertising to create a more efficient advertising model. One interesting example of this is indeed behavioral targeting.

What is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting is marketing ads to individuals based in prior buying or surfing habits. When an Internet consumer comes to a website enabled with behavioral targeting code, the site analyzes prior habits and places relevant ads on the site based on those patterns.

To do this a special program is used that, like we mentioned, gains access to where the visitor has been before. The program then uses this information to generate ads on the site.

Why Is Behavioral Targeting Useful?

Psychologists know that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. People who like to buy state of the art stereo equipment over the Internet are unlikely to restrict their online purchases to floral bouquets anytime soon. If advertisers can find out what someone has bought or taken an interest in before, they know the right things to try to sell to them in the future.

Putting the same ads on the same pages for every viewer to a certain webpage is simply a missed opportunity. Just as car manufacturers advertise in car magazines and makeup vendors advertise in beauty magazines, Internet advertisers want to advertise to people who are interested in their products, which is just what behavioral targeting allows them to do.

What Are the Concerns About Behavioral Targeting?

There is an ethical question of whether recording and storing people’s buying and viewing practices and habits is an invasion of privacy. However, since only the practices and not the personal information of the individual are analyzed by the program, this is not as much of an issue as some people may believe.

Hence these programs generally function “blind,” that is to say, they take the pattern data and spit out ads as a result. Not only does this benefit the advertiser but in the end also the consumer. Rather than being bombarded with irrelevant banners and ad-messages website advertisements is tailored to fit our needs and desires. It’s a win-win!

For starters, get out of your mind that the summer is dead. It is not dead. There are plenty of people out there who are potential customers for your products and services. Just because it’s hot and humid where you live doesn’t mean that it’s like that in all parts of the world. Some people do their best work during the months of July and August. So there is no reason for you to give up on your marketing efforts during this time.

Once you’ve decided to get your butt into gear, the one thing I would do is work on some new ads for your products. You’ve probably been using the same tired ads for months now. Don’t you think it’s time for a change? Sometimes, just putting out a new ad will ignite a failing campaign. When a new ad hits the Internet, everybody has to check it out…including your competitors. They want to see what you’re up to as well. So put on your ad writing hat and get cranking.

Finally, you want to search out some new promotional methods that you might have not tried yet. There are plenty online to choose from including article marketing, safelists, message boards, classifieds, pay per click, solo ezine ads, FFA sites, forums and a slew of other things. You’d be surprised how much success you can have promoting to a safelist if you know JUST how to use them. Every advertising medium has its place and can be profitable IF you know how to tackle it.

Just by putting the few tips above into practice, you’d be surprised at how successful the summer months can be. Some of my best months in the 5 plus years that I’ve been marketing have been during the summer. The reason is simple. I don’t believe people when they tell me that the summer is a waste of time.

Nothing is a waste of time if you put your mind to it.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to earn a 6 figure income like I do but get there in half the time? Please visit my blog at http://work-at-home-based-business.com/2007/12/06/review-of-nitro-marketing/ and read my review of the greatest info product ever to come out online in the 4 years I’ve been doing this.

At the top of my list is doing just that…making a list. What kind of list? Let’s say that you’ve decided that you want to learn pay per click advertising, list building, article writing and copywriting. Now, obviously, you can’t learn all of those all at one time. Your head will explode. So what I do is make a list of each item I want to learn and order them according to importance. In other words, which one do I need the most right away? I then concentrate on that one and ONLY that one until I have mastered it. I then cross if off my list and move on to the next thing. Trust me, this is a very effective method to dealing with information overload.

Another great method for dealing with information overload is developing what I call tunnel vision. This is a little harder to do, but if you can pull this off, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Let me try to explain how this works. Let’s say that I am working on a project that requires me to do certain things and have certain skills. I will look at my list of things I want to learn and see if any of those skills for that certain project are on it. If so, I will tackle ONLY that skill and master it. I will pretend that the other skills don’t even exist, no matter how tempting it might be to include them in the project. If they’re not needed, pretend they don’t exist.

Basically, what this all comes down to is discipline. And quite honestly, I don’t know how to teach that. Yes, it’s very easy to see the new shiny ebook on whatever and convince yourself that you have to have it. But if you really look at it rationally, you’ll discover that there are very few things that you really need.

And THAT is how you handle information overload.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Affordable Mentoring Services From A Marketer In The Trenches. I’ll keep you on track.

http://www.stevewagenheim.com/mentoring/mentoring.html

Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as “pligg” sites. I’ll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don’t like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious - you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse’s mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

The first thing I want to go over is how affiliate marketers pick their products. Sometimes I think they just close their eyes and pick them randomly. Absolutely no thought goes into this process. Hey, let’s just find the top selling product at Clickbank and promote the heck out of it. Um, no offense, but this is probably the stupidest way to go about it. Product selection is critical and just picking the top selling product is NOT the way to go about it.

Next on the list is how affiliate marketers promote these products. Laziness doesn’t even begin to describe it. Most marketers simply take the ads that the product creators kindly write up and blast them all over the Internet without changing one word. Let me tell you something, this is no way to promote a product. Think about it. If everybody on the Internet promoting this particular product is doing the same thing, how does anybody stand out from the crowd? They can’t. And if they don’t stand out, how can they make any sales? They don’t. This is why this is such a stupid thing to do.

Finally, there’s getting paid, or more specifically, making sure you’re promoting a product where you know you’re going to get paid. Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anybody else. But after being burned way too many times, I have finally smartened up and made sure I was promoting a product where I could be reasonably sure that I was going to get paid. The last time I didn’t get a commission was a very long time ago.

There you have it. Those are the three biggest blunders that affiliate marketers make. They pick lousy products, they don’t promote them properly and they don’t even know if they’re going to get paid for their efforts. Okay, want to know how to nail all this down and more? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin?

Check out my new book…Affiliate Assassin

Please don’t make the same mistakes that so many affiliate marketers make.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Turn Yourself Into An Affiliate Assassin

Why would that be, you may ask. Its because practice makes perfect..that’s why. I never thought I was much of a writer though it was not difficult for me. Come on, I’m a math teacher. My articles became better, maybe a little more interesting and gave some information that was useful to people. Who knew?

Keep writing and reading articles to see what others are doing. Don’t think that because it has been written about before that you can’t give a different twist. I struggled with that for a long time because I honestly thought that I didn’t really have anything special to say. That is not true…ever!

Article marketing is not just about writing for your niche. Write about anything and everything. Its your presence (and resource box) that will brand you. Don’t lose sight of that concept. You would be surprised about how many people are actively seeking information that you are able to give.

Remember, there will always be someone out there who is just starting out in this business and wants to absorb everything, try anything and do what it takes to be successful.

I’m one of them.

Read more of Laura’s posts at http://www.moneymakingmathteacher.com/blog

Let me start off by saying that affiliate marketing does have its advantages over selling your own products. The biggest advantage is that there is simply a whole lot less work for the affiliate marketer to do. For one thing, you don’t have to go through the agonizing process of creating your own products. If you think it’s easy to do that, it’s not. I’ve been creating my own products for years and the amount of work is astronomical.

Aside from the time factor of creating your own products, there is the cost factor as well. Affiliate marketing doesn’t cost anywhere near what it costs to create your own products. Some professional quality software products needed to create certain types of products cost hundreds of dollars. For example, take Photoshop which is the top product for creating ecovers. You’re talking about $600 in cost. If you want to create video products, Camtasia is about $300. That’s close to a grand for just two products.

And then of course there is knowledge. To create your own products, you have to have a solid handle on the subject matter. All my products are created from what’s crammed into my head. That knowledge did not come overnight. Some of it took me years to accumulate. What you don’t know, you have to go out and research. And let me tell you, research can be a painstaking process. One product I created took me almost one year to create because of the research required.

Okay, so you can see where affiliate marketing has its advantages. However, we haven’t touched on the disadvantages and other pieces of info. Well, in my signature is a free report that you can pick up. It will go over all the pros and cons of affiliate marketing versus creating your own products. I am sure that by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll know whether or not affiliate marketing is right for you.

So you wanna be an affiliate marketer?

Then you better know what you’re up against.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Why Affiliate Marketing?…Find Out HERE

First on the list is your sales page. You’re converting at a nice 1% and you’re as happy as a pig in mud. Well, you could be happier. How? Did you ever think of split testing your sales page against another version of it? You don’t have to change much. You could start with just using a different headline and see if that makes any difference. You’d be surprised the difference just one change can make. Then, take the better performing headline and test that against another one. Eventually that 1% will be 2% before you know it.

Another thing you can do is split test you list mailings. Don’t have a list? Well, that’s the first thing you can do to really get the most out of your business. If I didn’t build a list, I wouldn’t be making nearly as much as I am today. Yeah, I know…you’ve heard it a zillion times. The money is in the list. Well, it’s true. I am living proof of that. Anyway, build a list and split test your emails. Keep the ones that perform the best.

Finally, how many hours are you putting into your business? Whatever they are, add an hour a day. You’ll be surprised what that does at the end of a week. By doing this, I have been able to create and extra three or four products every year. Can you imagine how much extra income that gives me? Trust me, every second your put into your business counts.

There are other things you can do, such as outsourcing a lot of things that you’re not very good at. But we’ll leave that for another time. Just do the few things I’ve mentioned above and you’ll be well on your way to getting the most out of YOUR business.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
4 Steps To Building A Success Business

The first thing is your price. I don’t know how some marketers come up with the prices that they do, but a price that is either too low or too high isn’t going to convert as well as a price that is just right. And this requires testing. However, the point is, your copywriter can only work with the price that you give him to work with. If you’re determined to sell your widget for $47 when everybody else is selling theirs for $27, you’re probably not going to make as many sales.

After price, there is your guarantee. Now I realize that if you’re selling your product through Clickbank that you’re stuck with their 60 day guarantee. However, if you can, by increasing your guarantee length, you can, in many cases, increase your conversions. I sometimes offer 6 month or even 1 year guarantees on my products. This is another thing that is beyond the copywriter’s control. He can only work with the guarantee that you give him.

Then of course there are your bonuses, or lack thereof. Like it or not, most people expect to get bonuses when they buy something. That’s just the nature of the beast. So if you don’t offer any, that’s going to hurt your conversions. But you can’t just offer any old bonuses. You have to offer bonuses that are really worth something. Again, this is something that is out of the control of your copywriter.

Finally, there are your testimonials. Some people just don’t know how to give them. They’ll send you something that is so lame, it’s not even worth putting in print. Well, guess what? Your copywriter can’t do anything about these. You can’t fudge testimonials. You have to print them just as you get them.

So before you start throwing stones at your copywriter, take a good look at these four items. They may be the REAL reason why your conversions are in the toilet.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to save $2,500 to $15,000 in copywriting costs? Want to write copy yourself that can command that kind of payday? Visit my site at http://www.bcipe.com/ and discover killer copywriting tips that have allowed me to write my own copy for years and earn myself a 6 figure a year income selling my own products.

1. Blog - Short for weblog. It’s similar to an online journal. You may use it for personal or business. The blog entries are in chronological order.

2. Blogosphere - A blogging community

3. Blog Carnival - A blog article containing links of other articles on a specific topic

4. Blog Roll - A list of blogs you recommend to visit. Also called link exchange

5. Captcha - Squiggly random letters, words or numbers used to block bots.

6. Categories - Organizing blog topics by grouping related topics together to make it easier to find

7. Comment Moderation - Allows the blog owner to pre-approve or reject comments made by visitors

8. Comment Spam - Comment spam is the act of posting random comments on blogs, which are unrelated to the topic or promoting URL links leading to sites containing adult content, pharmaceutical drugs etc.

9. Link Love - Posting a link on your blog or other blogs you think may be of interest to others

10. No Follow - Is found on blog platforms to prevent search engines from following a link in a comment reply. This was used to deter spammers. To remove “no follow” visit http://randaclay.com/blog/i-follow/ for instructions

11. Ping - Letting blog search engines know you have updated your blog. You can use a ping service such as Autopinger.com to ping multiple search engines at once

12. RSS Feed - Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication is a format for delivering regularly changing web content

13. Splog - Blogs that are just spam. Usually splogs contain scraped (stolen) content from other blogs

14. Trackback - Is a notification from blogger A to blogger B by sending a ping to say I have written something related to your blog post on my blog. The first person receives the trackback in form of an excerpt with a link to the post of blogger B

15. Vlog - A video blog

Now you’re ready! Go ahead, enjoy your blogging experience!

–
S McIntyre owns Work At Home Space http://www.workathomespace.com a free work at home resource focusing on telecommuting companies, daily telecommute job leads, articles, business resources and other work at home related topics. You can also visit her blog Healthy Perspectives http://healthyperspectives.blogspot.com featuring an array of health topics, nutrition, recipes and fitness for maintaining a healthy and well-balanced lifestyle.