Archive for category Internet Marketing
This Mistake Costed Me Thousands of Dollars
Posted by Sergey Lorens in Internet Marketing on August 10th, 2009
During my internet marketing career I have made many mistakes. The one I will be talking about in this post however, has ended up costing me thousands of dollars. Yes, just like many other internet marketers, I neglected email marketing. I did not collect email addresses from my visitors and by the time I realized that I should give it a try, I already had over fifteen websites. When I added autoresponder opt-in forms to each of these websites, I managed to increase my income by approximately by 20%. So why is email marketing so effective?
In real businesses, over than 60% of all income is made up by clients the business enjoys a close relationship with and has been working with for a long period. This partnership has forged serious relationships between them and this is the reason is why they treat you with respect and trust. Ultimately, offline and online businesses are very similar. When people subscribe to your list, you can build a relationship with them. This means that in the long term, you may be able to get multiple sales from people on your list. People will begin to trust your views and ideas, and with a good relationship they are more likely to buy products you promote or recommend, again and again.
When you collect the email addresses of your visitors, you can avail of so many new opportunities. Some people may not buy the product you are promoting at the time immediately if they see it on your website for example, or it may take them some time to decide whether they need it or not. If they subscribe to your list and you send them an email with information or your views about the product, the chances that they will buy it in this situation is large. When you ignore email marketing, you are simply losing all these leads.
What I really like about email marketing is that when your email follow up sequences are created, they will generate money almost on autopilot. Your subscribers will get your follow up emails automatically and the only thing you will need to do is to send them an occasional broadcast email. Personally, I use this “autopilot system” with all my websites that are not related to internet marketing, however, with internet marketing lists I do my best to provide them with quality content as well as regular updates.
Some internet marketers estimate that each person from their list earns them around $1 per year. But do you know, these estimates are very modest. From my experience, in some niches that are not even related to internet marketing, each subscriber can earn you up to $3 per year. So what is the verdict? Well, many internet marketers told me that the money is in the lists when I first started out in this business. I did not listen to them. Now, I am one of these people who recommend you start working on your lists. It does not matter whether you promote dog training eBooks or World of Warcraft guides – it’s time to start building that list!
There are many autoresponders available on the internet today. Personally I used GetResponse when I was just starting out but now I use Aweber and also recommend that you to give it a try.
How I made $0 Using Twitter and 11k Followers?
Posted by Sergey Lorens in Internet Marketing on June 30th, 2009
Most affiliate marketers would have heard of the new product called “Twitter Traffic Machine” by now. Clickbank’s stats have it down as having the highest gravity of all their products at the moment, so I decided to buy the product and discovered that the concept behind it was a very intriguing one. In a nutshell “Twitter Traffic Machine” shows people how to utilize Twitter to secure affiliate sales.
For the uninitiated, Twitter is a totally free micro-blogging and social networking service that lets users keep up to date with each other’s updates, or tweets as they are known in the community. These tweets are basically short posts of up to 140 characters in length which are shown on the users profile page and at the same time are sent out to other members of the community who have subscribed to receive the individuals tweets – or followers of the person. To cut a long story short, the more followers you may have for your Twitter account, the more potential visitors a site of yours could receive if you send out a tweet that contained your URL or affiliate link embedded. The nagging question for me though, was the following: is this method really as effective as others are making it out to be? I came to a decision to give it a try and the following is a case study of the results I achieved.
The first thing I did was create three Twitter accounts and started to try and gain followers. Initially, people were reluctant to become followers of myself, but I soon found out that the more followers you gain, the more will start joining you. You see, having followers is rather like having “authority” – the more you have, the more others will respect you and be inclined to join your followers list. Getting to a thousand followers was the hard part, but once I got to that milestone, within a month I had 7000 to my main account. The other two accounts (don’t forget I opened three initially) had about two thousand followers each so altogether I had almost 11,000 followers.
But were my efforts of attracting all these followers worth the trouble? Did I manage to make any affiliate sales? The answer is no. Through various tweets I sent to the followers had affiliate links and landing page links, they didn’t convert at all. Out of 11,000 followers, only an amazing 0.003% clicked on a link – yes, only 33 people out of 11,000 clicked a link! You may be saying that there had to have been a reason for this; maybe the traffic wasn’t targeted enough? In fact, all my followers were people that were somehow interested in affiliate marketing and as so had “affiliate marketing” as one of their interests. Well, the reasons for not making any affiliate sales, in my opinion, is spam. Have a look at what I mean:
You can see that so many individuals are trying to sell one product or another that if you post a tweet with any affiliate links embedded, it disappears in a flood of other ads.
The verdict? Well, I think it’s clear. From my point of view, twitter is worthless when it comes to affiliate marketing. When Twitter first started and there weren’t many affiliate marketers there, it may have been possible to make some money from it, but now it is not so simple. You have to note though, that I’m talking about the Twitter platform, not the Twitter Traffic Machine, which I discovered to be quite good. It did deliver what it promised on the sales page and I got lots and lots of subscribers in a relatively short span of time by utilizing the methods described.
If you have been able to make an affiliate sale using Twitter, please post a comment below to let us know the details. How many people followed you? How many clicks did you get per tweet? What niche were you promoting? Etc, etc.
Just a Quick Update
Posted by Sergey Lorens in Internet Marketing, SEO on June 27th, 2009
Yesterday I received an email from Mitchell Collins. He read my posts about article marketing, search engine optimization and found them very interesting, however he didn’t know how to use this information. I realized that there are many people like Mitchell subscribed to my list. That is the reason why I decided to write a report about affiliate marketing for all beginners. In the report you will learn what is affiliate marketing and how to get started with it.
Of course, if you are already making money online as an affiliate, you won’t find anything new there, however, if you are looking for ways to make money online, you will find the report useful. If you have not subscribed to my list yet, fill in the form to receive the report.
Article Spinning As a Very Effective Link Building Method – Part 2
Posted by Sergey Lorens in Internet Marketing, SEO on February 26th, 2009
I started this case study just over three months ago in an attempt to prove that article spinning can be a very effective link building method, one that doesn’t only increase your website positions in the search engine results (SERP’s), but can also bring a fair amount of traffic from article directories as well. If you recall, the initial results of the case study was quite successful so now, in the second part of the case study, I will show you the website’s results that I have achieved so far and how much money it has subsequently generated. To begin with, I will show you the website’s traffic graphic from my Google analytics account.
As you can see, the website gets around 50 unique visitors per day and more than 1200 per month. 81%of the visitors came via the search engines and 13% came from referring sites. In my case, these referring sites are the various article directories where my spun articles were posted. At the moment the website is at the fifth position in Google’s results for the main keyword. Positions in Yahoo are lower; it is not even in the top ten for the keyword the website is optimized for.
The website has generated $2,627 so far which works out at about $850 per month just from one single affiliate website which took me only two hours to set up and about two hours to write quality seed articles for my article spinner. As mentioned in the previous part of this case study, I actually hired a person who manually submitted the spun articles to various article directories, so the total amount of money invested in this website has been $80 ($50 for submitting my articles and $30 for 3 months hosting) and the total amount of time invested is a paltry 4 hours!
I am absolutely delighted with the results I achieved from the website. If you can make $850 per month on autopilot from one single website, why not create ten or even more websites? Moreover, you do not even have to have a website to promote it using spun articles; you can use squidoo lenses or even blogger blogs instead. You can even avoid paying $50 for submitting articles if you have the time and the patience to do them on your own.
I think that this will be the last part of this case study. It is enough proof that article spinning is undoubtedly a very effective and profitable link building method which you should include in your “to do” list. At the moment I am writing some very useful affiliate marketing tutorials which will be sent to my subscribers in the very near future.
I really hope you found this case study useful. Don’t forget to subscribe to my list to get more information on affiliate marketing and search engine optimization.
Article Spinning as a Very Effective Link Building Method – Part 1
Posted by Sergey Lorens in Internet Marketing, SEO on December 27th, 2008
If done properly, submitting articles to directories can be a very effective link building method, one which can not only boost your overall position in the search engines but can also bring a fair amount of traffic from these article directories. One of the first strategies I personally use after creating a new website is posting a few articles to high PR article directories such as ezinearticles.com or articlesbase.com. A long time ago I used to write only a few articles and submit them to hundreds of article directories but after analyzing my backlinks I realized that that most of these articles were being placed in the supplemental results due to the issue of duplicate content. (Wikipedia: supplemental result). Of course, links from supplemental results are not deemed to be valuable, so consequently I didn’t see any positive changes in my positions in Google or in any of the other search engines.
There were many solutions I could try to attempt to solve this problem. One of the first ones which sprang to mind was to write a unique article for each article directory in my list. It would take me almost three days as there were more than 200 articles in my list at that particular time. I soon ditched this idea and started to Google. Not long after I came across information about article spinning and found the concept very interesting. The only thing you needed to do was write one seed article, which looks something like this:
{Hello|Hi|Greetings} {John|Mark|David}, {how are you|how do you do|how’s life}?
Then you use a special script or piece of software which spins the seed article and generates many unique versions for you. Just from the example above, it is possible to generate 27 different variations of the sentence. Imagine how many unique articles you could generate from a 400 word article? I think you’re getting the idea.
I decided to test this method on one of my websites and the results were amazing. After just one month submitting spun articles to various article directories, I was seeing lots of valuable links as well as positive changes in my search engine positions.
Before writing this post, I made a small case study. I created a new mini affiliate website optimized for a keyword that was not very competitive (about 1,000,000 competitors in Google). There were only two link building methods I used with this website: article spinning and social bookmarking. I actually only submitted my website to couple of social bookmarking sites because it is proven to be a very fast method of having your website indexed in the search engines. Almost three weeks have passed and here are the results so far:
On December 6th my website was indexed in Google at number 60 in the search results and I then started submitting my spun articles. As you can see, the very next day my website dropped to number 75 and then disappeared from Google’s index for four days. This is a normal occurrence with brand new sites, so I continued with the article submissions. From December 11th my positions have been constantly improving and there haven’t been any negative fluctuations since then. The website generated more than 400 USD in three weeks through affiliate sales. Some of these sales were from traffic that came from the article directories; however, the majority of sales are from Google organic searches.
Judging by initial results, I can honestly say that this link building method is undoubtedly worth continuing. Moreover, it has two positive aspects: first, you can get sales from the article directories because if you have written a quality seed article, so generated articles will also be of good quality, and second, you can get sales from organic search engine traffic.
To sum up, I would like to say that today there are many quality article spinning services, some free, some not. However, I have written my own simple script which I use and have decided to share it with you, so here is the link: Lorens Article Spinner. You can also find the link in the right menu. I am going to continue improving the script as best I can and as always, I appreciate your comments with any suggestions on how I can improve it. This was the first part of this particular case study and in a couple of months I will post the second part so we can all see the results.
What if I Told You That You Can Make at Least $7,000 Each and Every Month on Affiliate Sales? Subscribe to my List to Get This Information for Free.
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