Recently I’ve attended a big marketing seminar. Conducted by a famous author Robert G Allen. (you read more about this amazing author HERE). I met many interesting future internet marketers. Big numbers of them. One common question that I received was “how do I pick a correct niche? ”

So in this short article I’ll share 3 proven methods. I’ve used all of them in selecting my niche. All 3 methods can be carried out in a few minutes. A very simple methods.

Here there are:

Hobbies

We have hobbies.   We know and understand our hobbies in and out. We know the subject very well. So the possibility of making wrong statement or blog entries is very minimal. We also dont need to learn a new subject. But the most important part of it,  we enjoy doing it.  This is very important when we just starting  up. (more…)

There is no doubt, keyword (KW) is very important in the internet marketing. Especially for article marketing. Right KW helps us getting good flow of organic web traffic. The good part, we don’t have to pay for the traffic.

Just for clarification, keywords are word or phrase that internet users use when searching for information. Some call keywords with a combination of 3 or more words as “long tail keywords”.

There are many ways of finding the keywords. None are perfect.  However the one we going to discuss today is widely used by internet marketers.

Here are the steps :

Step 1 : Brainstorming (more…)

Article marketing is popular among budding Internet Marketing (IM) newbies. Mainly because the cost associate with article marketing is very minimal if any. You don’t need to have thick pocket. Anybody with good articles can start IM business through article marketing.

In this posting I’ll share the over view of article marketing, before going into the details the coming articles.  Later I’ll cover in detail about keywords, article writing, article submission and optimization.

Ok, what exactly is the article marketing?

In simple term, article marketing is a way of getting visitor to our website through search engine and articles. Here is a simple illustration how our articles bring in potential customers to our websites or affiliate pages.

When someone is looking for something, most likely he will be using search engine like Google or Yahoo.  For illustration purposes we assume that the search engine (SE) will list out our articles as one of the search result. Of course its all depending mainly on the keyword relevancy and how the SE perceive our articles. We’ll discuss more on this in the coming posting.  Assuming the potential customer click the articles links.  The visitor will be presented with our articles. Of course for marketing purposes we’ve included links to our websites or our affiliate page in the articles.

If we’ve created enough excitement and interest in the article the potential customers might follow the given links. The final landing page can be anything. Most cases article marketers will direct their visitors to the sales page of an affiliate program.

The article marketing system is very simple.  There is no mystery in the process. The success mainly depending on the quality of our articles as well as the numbers of  articles that we churn out.

The number of articles plays a big part in article marketing.  The more you have the better. In an ideal case the numbers of visitors that we get from the article is proportional with the number of articles that we’ve submitted.

Let me know if you need further detail information.  Till then see you in the next post about keyword search.

Most of us are familiar with office tools like Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheet.  These are useful software that we cannot go without.

Unfortunately there are cost involve if you want to install and use Microsoft office package.  If you are a budding IM and tight on budget you might want to consider alternative.

Welcome to OpenOffice. OpenOffice package is not much different from Microsoft office package. In fact if you are familiar with window based application, then you will not find much difficulty in adapting yourself.  Best of all the OpenOffice package is FREE.

Find out more Openoffice.

Currently I’m only using two type of redirection. The first one is through WP plugin called GoCodes. I did discuss about this method is this GoCodes redirect post. My second method is through php redirect.

The method is very simple. However you need to have access to your hosting as the php files need to be placed somewhere in your hosting. Here is how.

In a text editor, type the following codes. Make sure you replace the url with the correct url.

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.myaffiliate.com/index.html’ ) ;
?>

now just save the file as index.php or any file name with php extension.

There are two possible approaches. One is to create a directory and use index.php. So when our visitor visits the directory he will be directed to the correct url. We just need to direct our visitor to the directory. There is no need to include the index.php. index.php is the default file that our browser will look for.

http://www.mysite.com/myurl

Alternatively we can name the php codes with different file name. So what we need to do is to point our link to the php file. Just like in the following example

http://www.mysite.com/myurl.php

Our valued customers will not see any of the original urls. The redirection will be fast and quick.

Hope you like the short tutorial.

I presume we all understand the important of hiding our affiliate links. So we will not be discussing that.

I’m a big fan of wordpress (wp). It is one of the best blogging platform out there. wp is very flexible and easy to manage. In fact most of my websites are based on wp.

You might want to consider GoCodes if you are using wp. GoCodes helps you hide your urls and give your sites a cleaner look. Lets get started.

1. Download GoCodes and install the plugin. I presume you are familiar with wp plugin installation. Let me know if you need any help. eMail me.

2. Once activated just go to “settings” menu and select GoCodes

3. Then you will be presented with the GoCodes setting. There are two type of setting that you can do. “URL Trigger” is a special folder where Gocodes handles all the redirect. The default value is “go”. You may change the value to any value that you like. But it cannot be left blank. “recommended” and “sites” are two good example. At the bottom there is “No follow” selection. No follow is one of an important SEO elements. However for now we just leave it alone.

4. Next we need to set our urls. Just click on the GoCodes at the “tools” menu. There are two parts that you need to complete. First one is the “Redirection key”. This is the word that we want to use for our new url. Just use any single word. In the example below I’m using “affiliate1″. In addition we need to provide the actual url. This is one of the GoCodes beauty. You can change the destination url anytime, as required.

5. Now we are ready to go. When ever we need to use the url just call for the new url we just created. In this example the new url will be “http://www.noorazman.com/go/affiliate1″ Our visitor will only see that url, nothing more. whenever he click on that url the program will redirect to the actual url which is “http://www.affiliate1.com/myaffiliateid” in the above example.

That it. Very simple plugin.

Probably you have heard of FTP, a short acronym for file transfer protocol. This little program allows the transfer of files between you pc or laptop with your hosting server. FTP program is very important if you are developing your own website. Lot of files need to be transfer back and forth. So a good and very reliable FTP program is very important.

I’ve used various FTP (mostly freeware) programs. They do works but with minor weakness here and there. Especially with the connection stability.

Few months back I downloaded Filezilla. Honestly I’m very satisfied with its performance. Connection is stable and the program is very easy to use. FileZilla is released under General Public License (GNU). Meaning it is free.

Have a look at FileZilla

Here are 3 common mistakes by IM newbies in no particular order.

1. Internet marketing is easy

Undoubtedly this the biggest mistake majority of newbies make. People always think doing internet marketing is simple. You only need to spend just few minutes a day. And tons of money will roll in day and night non stop. Really hope that is true, but the reality can be harsh. We do need to spend our time, money and effort before we can reap the profit.

Fortunately internet marketing have many advantages. Making it very attractive if you interested in generating income from home. Lot of major advantages that is. I’ve addressed it here.

There are good reason why majority of newbies having this wrong preconception. One of the major contributor is no other than “get rich quick” scheme. There are tons of this ads around. Without realizing it people start thinking that doing online business is so easy. All you need to do is have one of the “magic” system and you are ready to go. No knowledge needed and easy to maintain (if not maintenance free).

As human being we always wanted to have an easy system. It just our human nature and nothing wrong with that.

2. Don’t bother to purchase own domain and hosting

Seriously lot of beginners pay the price for this mistake. People are too afraid putting some investment for their online. Obviously they are not serious about their business. Some simply are not confident with the effort. More like trial and error sort of approach.

As an alternative they use the free blog or free hosting. If you are using free blog your chances of loosing your valuable assets (you website ) is very high. A slight mistake your privilege will be revoked and you will be out of business in an instance. Just consider how much time you spend on the site. Consider your time and money for the website development plus your marketing effort. Is it really worth it?

Having your own domain in the long run will give you the credibility. Your valuable visitors feel more confident when visiting your site. This definitely will have impact to your conversion rate.

The cost of ownership for your own domain and hosting is very minimal. Cost for a domain currently is less than $10 for a year. They are not that expensive. Hosting cost also is very minimal. You can purchase shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Hostgator for example offer various packages that can meet our requirement and needs. In most of the packages we can host more than one domain. We can host various domains in a single hosting. Different domain for different purposes.
3. Wrong business model

There are two major business models: service and product based. Product based model can be further divided into 2 major subcategories ; physical and non physical items.

We wont go into the details of the business model. But what I want to highlight is that we need to start with a business model that we are good at. Or at least we are familiar with. If we are good in graphic design, obviously offering our services is the most logical. You don’t need to spend time learning graphic softwares. You can focus your energy and attention on marketing. By doing that you already win half of the battle.

There are lot of uncertainties when we start our business. Starting with a business model that we are good at allow us to pay more attention on improving the business rather learning the rope at the same time. Our changes of survival will definitely be higher.

Hopefully by highlighting these mistake we can make the most important step : take action.

Selecting a correct affiliate username is very critical especially if you are with clickbank.  Reason being,  your username will be included in the affiliate URL (the affiliate link).

Majority will just pick any username that he/she think is suitable. Here are some common username :- myaffiliate, johnaffiliate and maryinternetincome.

Majority of internet users know that the person behind the username will benefit something if he/she click the link. As a normal human being he/she might gives a second though. We hate others benefit from our action. Naturally he/she feels more comfortable with less obvious affiliate username like “reviewpage”. It just a human nature.

So do a careful consideration when choosing an affiliate username.

So how do we select a username ? any specific consideration ?

Here are some pointers that can help us:-

1. Chose a name that does not reflect any affiliate activities. Never put “affiliate” word or anything similar in the username. This is a big RED light.
2. choose something that can disguise your affiliate works ie. Review, view. These word disguise your affiliate activities. Our potential buyers will not be alarmed because of the username.

However there are affiliate owners that are using software that hide all affiliate username. For this case, it does not really matter how is you username look like. I’ll blog about that part later. Unfortunately majority of the affiliate programs are still using the old system, displaying the affiliate name at the end of the url. So to be on the safe side, do consider your affiliate username.