First of all, what is Adsense?

When people buy ads on Google, they have the option of also placing the ads on the content network.  Actually, they default to placing the ads on the content network and have to remove that option if they want to only place the ads on Google’s search pages.  These ads on Google are called Adwords.

Adsense, on the other hand is Google’s word for you, the website owner, who places their ads on your pages.  You get a percentage of the amount of money that Google gets for each ad.

Of course, people have to actually click on the ad in order for you to get paid.  So, your job as an Adsense merchant is to do two things.  First, you have to get people to come to your site and then you have to get them to click on the ads on your page.

Getting people to your site is beyond the scope of this article, but I am going to show you how to get people to click on your ads.

First of all, you want to have laser-focused content.  A blog about your life where you talk about breaking up with your girlfriend one day and about memories about fishing with your grandpa the next is not going to make much money.  If you want to slap Adsense on a blog to make a few pennies, that’s okay.  But as a business model, it stinks.

Instead, create a website or blog around one highly focused, high earning concept.  For instance, a site about car insurance or personal injury law is going to make more money than a site about hummingbird feeders.  It’s a matter of supply and demand.

Next, you want to have a lot of pages of content.  Articles over 500 words just perform better.  People feel like they’ve gotten some “meat” from your site and don’t hit the back button as quickly.  You should have at least 20 pages of content on each Adsense site and many have hundreds of pages.  Not only does that give a visitor multiple places to enter, they can also navigate within your site to have a good experience.  Then, when they click away, it will likely be through one of your Adsense links rather than through a back button.

The look of your site also matters.  You don’t want the ads to just “blend in.”  Make the links stand out so people will know to click them.  Many studies have shown that the 250×250 leaderbox put flush left under the headline with the article wrapped around converts the best.

Of course, you should do your own testing on all of these features.  Adsense is a moving target.  The only way to stay on top of Adsense Conversion is to continually monitor your performance.

WordPress themes are available free online if you do a search. The trick is that you have to leave the link to the developer intact. If you don’t want to lose any link juice, you can have a wordpress theme developed just for you.

Here are some things to look for in a WordPress theme – how to choose the best one, in other words.

• Probably the most important thing is that the theme is compatible across browsers. When you build a site, look at it in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. Check it out on PCs and Macs if you can. You don’t want anyone’s experience on your website to be diminished because the theme is not compatible with their browser.
   
• The next feature you want to look for is the ability to add widgets to your word press theme. One of the great features of the word press software is the availability of add on scripts called widgets. These are extremely easy to upload. But, if your theme can’t handle widgets easily, it’s not worth it, even if it has a nice look.
   
• You want your word press theme to load quickly. If people have to wait seconds to see your site, they will click the back button before you have the chance to make your case. If you are using a free theme, try loading someone else’s site that uses the theme before you take the trouble to put it on your own site. If the CSS is compressed, this can speed page load time.
   
• Is the theme SEO optimized? It doesn’t matter how good your content is if the search engines can’t find it. Some things to check for as far as SEO compatible themes include an emphasis on content rather than graphics, have HTML validation, and should display post extracts on archive and category pages.
   
• Make sure your word press theme has a search capability. This is a basic item, but there are still some themes that don’t have the compatibility for search.
   
• Is the theme already overused? If too many marketers are already using the theme, your web site might have a “me too” feel.
   
• If you plan to have ads on your site – either banner ads or Adsense – make sure that the theme supports them in its design.
   
• Finally, can you grow with the design? As your site develops, will you be able to keep the same look and feel? You don’t want to surprise existing viewers with a new theme without a strategic marketing reason for it.

Choose wisely when selecting a word press theme. How you make money off your site may depend on the theme you pick.

And even of those who see your ad, what percentage of them is likely interested in whatever you?re selling? Like a billboard on a highway with everyone passing, not many are actually going to be looking for what?s in the advertisement. So if you base your ecommerce marketing strategy on those kinds of ads, it?s kind of like throwing rocks into a crowd and hoping you accidentally hit someone.

There are techniques you can implement in your ecommerce marketing strategy, though, that are very focused and take much of the randomness and guesswork out of your plan. Search engine optimization is an important part of your strategy. This will help you design your content and web pages to get noticed by the search engines. You?ll focus each page on certain keywords surrounding your business, and when someone?s searching on that phrase, your company comes up high in the search engine results.

At least that?s it in theory. In reality, it?s not nearly so simple. Just optimizing the content you already have will definitely help. But the key to this type of ecommerce marketing strategy is to show new content on a regular basis. This shows the search engines that the website is active and updated regularly with keyword rich content. As far as the search engines are concerned this makes one site more valuable and vital than another site with similar content that?s not updated as often. So an important part of your ecommerce marketing strategy should always be new content that?s also search engine optimized.

Four- to five-hundred words on each keyword is a good plan, at least to start with. And care must be taken to make sure this content isn?t just attractive to search engines, but important to people, too. Gone are the days when site could list keywords or be filled with gibberish full of keywords just to get good rankings. Now it?s important that the content is there for more than just your ranking. So your ecommerce marketing strategy has to address the quality of the content not just how many times a keyword might appear within it.

Where at one time a simply repetition of the keyword many times in a row might have attracted a good ranking, you should avoid this in your ecommerce marketing strategy because search engines recognize most of these tricks.

With online business to business operation and marketing, many of the expenses of running a traditional business are gone or greatly reduced. This positively affects all the other aspects of running the company. Less expense means less time spent managing the money going out, and more money for important things like business to business marketing and promotion. No company will succeed without an advertising and promotion budget. And as many large, worldwide corporations have shown, the more money spent advertising, the more people become familiar with the brand. That breaks down into more customers and more profit.

A company that does its business chiefly online won�t need the storefront that a traditional business does. And company that relies on business to business marketing wouldn�t benefit from a traditional storefront anyway. Since traditional customers won�t be coming in and out browsing goods or asking about services, the need for a traditional shop area is eliminated. This drops overhead costs dramatically. There�s no huge warehouse or building to pay heating, cooling and lighting bills on, and no need for insurance to protect customers.

There�s also no need to pay a staff to man such a store, which eliminates many of the expenses associated with being an employer. An online company that chiefly exists through business to business marketing may still have employees and some expense, but the lack of a storefront will greatly reduce the costs associated with managing employees.

Now, money that would have been spent on necessities like payroll and utilities can be better spent business to business marketing and increasing the customer base. The expense of promotion is also lessened with this business model because it�s so much easier to identify a target market. There�s not as much need to figure out exactly which consumer to market to as there would be with most consumer products.

With business to business marketing, what it is that you�re offering to business automatically identifies your target markets for you. If you�re selling general business products like paper or office supplies, then your market is large and wide open, and you�d do best finding a particular angle to market your products to each specific industry. But if you choose a product or service that�s very specialized, your marketing research is simplified a great deal.

The internet is great for b2b marketing because of its word-of-mouth properties. While many of your customers will find you thanks to your business to business marketing and promotion, many more will because of social networking.

You don�t even have to create or develop your own product to sell online products. Affiliate marketing is a strategy where you sell other people�s products.

In affiliate marketing, you are the middleman between a buyer and a seller. Your job is to pre-sell products and deliver warm buyers to the end seller�s home page.

Pre-selling is an art that not everyone has mastered. You may be so used to the continual onslaught of advertising that you think that in order to sell online products you have to �sell, sell, sell.� In fact, you are better off providing a good user experience to your visitors and then making softball recommendations to people who have come to trust you.

For instance, if you want to sell an ebook on planning a wedding on a budget, you could create a blog about your own wedding. You could talk about the trials and tribulations of mother in law interference, dieting so you can fit into the wedding dress, and how your caterer canceled at the last minute.

Then, from time to time, you will mention just how much good advice you�re getting from an ebook you bought which has helped you to plan your wedding on a budget. Include a link to the wedding book with your affiliate code embedded into it.

Another way to pre-sell to your visitors is to offer a free report in exchange for their email address. You can put affiliate links for 5 or so products in the report.

But, once you have their email, you can continue to promote products. There are two ways to do this. One is to offer a series of emails offering useful advice and have an inconspicuous link to an affiliate product at the end of the email. The other is to send stand alone advertisements to your list from time to time. Remember that you can�t just �sell, sell, sell� even in email marketing. You have to continually deliver good value to the customer.

If you want to sell online products, the opportunities for the type of products available abound.

� One way to find products is to look at major networks like linkshare, shareasale, and commission junction for physical products and clickbank for digital products.

� Another strategy is to go to large stores such as Wallmart and Amazon that offer a variety of products to promote and set up an account directly with them.

� A final strategy is to type in your keyword plus the phrase �affiliate product� into a search engine. For instance, a search of �Debt Relief� + �Affiliate Program� turns up more than 90,000 results. Many of these are affiliate programs in the debt relief niche.

Start to sell online products today through affiliate marketing strategies.

You can only get so many people to come to your website on your own. Your pay per click resources are limited and you can only write so many articles and create so many back links before your time is exhausted. If you have an army of affiliates promoting your product, you simply will be able to make more sales. If your affiliates aren�t poaching off of the sales you would make yourself, paying affiliates to market your product is a no brainer.

If you were selling chocolate chip cookies, each additional dozen cookies would cost you money to produce. But digital products are different. It costs you almost the same amount of money to produce one product as it does to produce a million. Therefore, why wouldn�t you want to pick up low hanging fruit by paying affiliates to promote your product?

Additionally, once you get a customer, you can sell to him or her for life. If you have structured your product line correctly, you can pay an affiliate 75 percent of the original purchase price, but continue to market to that customer for the rest of his life without paying the affiliate any additional money.

Affiliate marketers are very good at their area of specialization or they wash out quickly. Some are experts at pay per click and know how to deliver traffic to your site that converts. Others put in the time to write articles that pre-sell customers on your product before they ever land on your page. Video marketing, forum marketing, and classified ads are other specialties of affiliate marketers.

So, are there times when it doesn�t make sense to pay affiliate marketers? Yes, there are.

If you are only going to sell 100 of an item and you have 1,000 responsive people on your personal email list, you will probably not want to pay affiliates. When you can sell out the subscription yourself, there is no need to split the proceeds.

Another time when you may want to consider not using affiliates is when you want to control how the product is marketed. When you open the product up to affiliate marketers, you lose control of the advertising process. Marketers could spam safe lists or classified sites and give your product a bad name.

Most product owners, however, find that the benefits outweigh the down sides of paying affiliates.

Clickbank is the most popular way to set up an affiliate program for digital products. PayDotCom tried to give Clickbank a run for its money, but hasn�t taken off as well as the promoters hoped. You can also set up a script to run an affiliate program. The $7 script and Rapid Action Profits are two scripts which let you pay affiliates.

What is even better is that it is incredibly easy to start a computer business. There�s very little cost involved and you can get started in your spare time without leaving your job.

The first thing that I have to tell you about starting an internet business is that there is not one single model to follow. Many people who want to get started online find that there are so many models that it is overwhelming. When you do your research, keep in mind that there are many ways to make money and you have to find the one that is right for you.

There are three different basic business models for those wanting to start a computer business. You can either create a product to sell yourself, sell other people�s products, or provide a service. All business models boil down to one of these three concepts.

When most people think of products, they think of physical goods. Indeed, you can sell physical products like crocheted doilies or your home baked chocolate chip cookies through the internet. But remember, when people go online, they are largely looking for information. So, creating an information product is the fastest way to make money online.

It is interesting that people will pay $15 for a paperback book at the bookstore that runs 300 pages, but they will pay $47 for a 60 page ebook that they download and print out on their own paper. However, that�s the economic reality of the internet. And, instead of having a publisher who gives you a dollar or two for the product, you get to keep the whole amount.

The next thing you can provide is services. If you write well, have graphic design skills, or can whip up a software program with ease, you can offer your services on the internet. There are sites like elance and rentacoder where buyers and sellers of such services meet. You can also go to forums where internet marketers chat and strike up relationships with people who can help you get started and who want to use your services.

Finally, if you want to start a computer business, you can sell other people�s products. This is called �Affiliate Marketing.� Basically, you are the middle man between the buyer and seller.

You can sell physical products ranging from house wares to diamond jewelry as an affiliate marketer. You can also sell other people�s information products.

Affiliate commissions range from 4% to 75% of the total sale price. Because many information products offer 75% of relatively high purchase prices, many affiliate marketers begin by selling information products. The largest clearing house of information products is clickbank.com where 10,000 products are available for you to sell.

Once you choose a business model, you can begin to figure out how to make sales. But don�t jump around from one thing to another always in hopes of jumping the �next big thing� bandwagon. Rather, decide on a model that works for you and run with it. That�s how you start a computer business in your spare time.

An old saying says that embarking on anything without a plan is a little bit like trying to get to a place you�ve never been without a map. And it is true that people who make plans and write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than those who just have a general idea where they�re going and no real concrete plans about how to do it, and no definite idea about when they should arrive. Your strategic marketing planning can give you a road map, and even an idea of when you should see results, and how good those results should be.

Let�s continue the idea of the traveler with no map and no real sense of his destination. What happens when he gets where he wanted to go, and it turns out to not be the place he�d dreamed of. What then? Without a plan, he�s got no real recourse except to keep going aimlessly or to go back the way he came. With strategic marketing planning, once you see your results and they�re not what you�d hoped for, you have a plan in place to deal with it. You have set measures for how to make changes and improvements to work toward the results you wanted in the beginning. You�re working toward a goal, not meandering aimlessly and using intuition and guesswork to build your business.

When you�re ready for strategic marketing planning, consider sitting down with the experts and building your plan. You can find a consultant who will just help you with the plan, should you not want to hire someone to handle promotions altogether. But just having an expert help you with your promotion planning can confirm for you that what you�re doing is sound. And it can make sure that your goals are achievable, too, so you can avoid the disappointment of setting goals that are too high to reach.

Strategic marketing planning gives you a concrete result to aim for. You know what you want, now it�s just up to you to take the steps to achieve it. And as the results come in, you�ll have methods of adjusting your plan to build upon those good results, or steer your promotional activities away from methods that aren�t working. You�ll know how to adjust certain promotions to make them work better, and how to judge whether a specific type of promotion just isn�t right for your business. With strategic marketing planning, you�ll always have a step ready for you to take next.

For a local company, internet marketing that gives you exposure to people thousands of miles away is pretty pointless. There�s no need to invest in what can be expensive marketing campaigns like pay-per-click or network-wide banner advertising, for instance. You know your target market�local people. So the only promotion and advertising that will do you any good are promotions which target that market specifically.

If you don�t have a website already, get one. If you know enough HTML to get a web presence up then by all means do so. If not, pay someone to do it for you. What might seem like an unnecessary expense will actually become a very important marketing tool. You�ll also want to make sure that your website is search engine optimized for your local area, and it�s well worth learning how to do this yourself or paying an expert to do it for you.

When it comes to your company, internet marketing with search engine optimization won�t be like the SEO efforts needed by an online company. If you run a computer repair shop, for instance, you won�t want to focus your attention and money on very general keywords that might be good for an online business whose customers can come from anywhere. You�ll want them optimized for your local area. Computer repair San Antonio, for instance, might be a good keyword for you.

You might be surprised how many local potential customers use the internet to search now instead of the yellow pages or simply by driving by and stopping. Most people who use the internet at all use it to search for items they want to purchase before they buy. Someone who needs a computer repaired in your town might very well use that exact keyword search phrase. Springfield computer repair something similar would be something commonly typed in for someone in that town needing a computer fixes. For your company, internet marketing efforts that focus on your local area can bring in lots of extra business because people will find you online.

Another advantage is that other small businesses in your field might feel the same way you did, that a website and your company internet marketing was a waste of time. So if someone from your local area does a search like that above, your site will be the one they see. And if other business are online and you�ve spent some time and maybe a little money on your company internet marketing, your site will still probably be the one they see first.

This is where many of the internet marketing center and programs you can purchase fail the average business person.  They give an introduction to different ways you can promote your business online, but they only go that far and stop. They don’t give in depth information about how to tweak these techniques to make them work for you, and what to do if they don’t seem to be working.

 There’s only one true secret to effective internet marketing: Reevaluate often and change tactics when necessary.  Most sources of information you’ll find on internet marketing urge you to try many different models of promotion. Traditional ads, pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization, joint ventures and a variety of other very good suggestions for ways to get your product or service out in front of those who would need or want it. So you’re introduced to all these various ways of marketing. Then many people think that’s all the information they need, so they jump in with both feet, blow their budget on pay-per-click advertising or some other expensive promotion. The reasoning is that the profits made from this promotion will replace the funds spent and even increase them for the next advertising campaign.

Unfortunately, it rarely works just this way. Very often a person will put these marketing techniques into effect all at once hoping for a large return, but instead very little happens and now there’s little budget left to try again. While there’s nothing wrong with advertising campaigns that cost, like pay-per-click marketing, this type of promotion isn’t right for every business, despite what the expert might say. And it’s hardly effective internet marketing to start out with pay-per-click spending.

Where most fail is that they don’t carefully monitor the response of every type of marketing they have in place. Effective internet marketing isn’t done once and forgotten, left to work behind the scenes to generate huge profit. It’s an evolving process, one that takes regular adjustment and change to be truly successful. And you really can begin this process without spending very much money, and sometimes without spending anything at all.

Aim for the lower cost forms of marketing first. Article marketing, for instance, and filling a blog with fresh keyword optimized content to attract good search engine ranking effective internet marketing and a great start. Yes, you’ll want to optimize your web content, even if you have pay someone to do it correctly.

But hold off on the expensive pay-per-click campaign until you see which keywords and which articles and blog post are referring you the most customers. Then put your money where your customers are, in essence, by creating a pay-per-click campaign based on results you’ve already seen with other methods. Effective internet marketing requires you to reevaluate all of this often, because your best keywords can change even from day to day.