First go to post >> categories

Next just click “edit” on any of the category that we are interested in.  Our browser will display a complete url along with the category ID.  Never realize it will be that simple.

Since we are in a new year,  I’m certain majority of us have new year resolutions. As an internet marketer, for sure,  we want to improve our marketing success.  We want to reach a new level.  A new high that marks our new achievement.

Success won’t come easy, we need to have plan and strategy before we can achieve our goals.  Here are 5 steps that can help us achieve our New Year goals

1)   Plan

Obviously plan is very important.  That is the reason why I place “plan” as a number one step. It sounds obvious, but majority don’t do it. We fail to plan. Without clear vision on what to do, there is no way we can achieve our goals. Write down what we want to do, along with all the details. Just specify what we want to achieve, when we want to achieve it and how much money we want to make. Post our goals some where that can easily be seen.  It works as a reminder to us, especially during the down time.

2)   Schedule

On our daily schedule set aside how much time we want to spend for our marketing effort. Treat it as our official working hours, and respect our working time accordingly. To simplify the process print out the working schedule and paste it near your computer.  It will remind us the important of the schedule. It just a small step toward our goals, but it is very important

3)   experiment

Marketing is not an exact science.  There is no hard and fast rules.  What we need to do is to experiment and make the necessary adjustment based on the feedback. This is how we learn and improve our marketing plan and effort.  Don’t limit ourselves to the conventional methods.  Try something new or do it differently.

4)   Sharing

Share your knowledge with other marketers.  Sharing can be done though special portal or through forums.  What more important is to be able to communicate with other marketers that have the same goals. Indirectly sharing your knowledge also helps building your reputation.

5)   Optimize existing users

Obviously we should optimized our marketing using the existing customers. But a word of caution, don’t overdo it. We need to understand our customers’ needs, before we can market relevant products or services. The best way to understand our customers’ needs is through a simple survey.

The five simple steps can help us achieve our goals.  But what more important,  is for us to stick to our plan and be consistent is our efforts. That is not an easy task.

To our marketing success.

Here are three proven methods that can improve your sale.

Create testimony with photos

Photos give direct impact and build trust. So collect testimony as much as possible. Majority of our visitors will have positive impression about the seller and items that we are promoting.

I know it can be difficult to get a testimony, especially you are new to your customers. The simplest way is to offer some freebies for those who are willing to give their testimony. It don’t need an expensive gift. If you are dealing with digital product, you can always offer them ebooks or something similar. Similarly for physical you can always offer a reasonable gift as you compliment.

If you are using facebook as one of your marketing arsenal, you can just make a screen capture and use it as a testimony. Somehow people are more friendly within facebook. The good part is, facebook already have your customers photos. There is no need to request additional photo for the purpose. All we need to do is to ask his or her permission for the testimony.

Bigger “BUY” buttons

This is an obvious one, somehow majority of us don’t pay much attention for this one.

Most prospect tend to skim through the web pages. People don’t read much these day I presume. It will make it difficult for them if the buy button is too small, or hard to find. Personally I’ve come across a website that don’t have any buy buttons. Go figure how they make money.

People will just click away if they have any difficulty with the sale page, as simple as that. So, help them out in making their decision.

Who you are

I don’t blame our prospect. We can read all sort of scam in the internet, every single day. You name it, they have it. So the key is to build a reputation and tell them you real. That is one of the reason why we need to keep in contact with our prospect as much as possible. I’m sure they want to know more about yourself and what you do. This, indirectly, build trust over time.

These are just some simple steps that most of us overlook. All of the steps can be carried out almost immediately. I don’t think there is any special skill required.

I’m sure there are lot more tips that can improve our sales out there. Send me your tips if you have one. I’m sure we all will benefit from your sharing. I’m waiting.

Let me know if you have difficulty in grabbing the critical points.

In this short writeup I’ll share with you 5 simple steps that will definitely give you some edge over your competitors.

• Step # 1, convert the common PLR products into a customized, well-focused e-product.  The best method is to tailor the product into a sub-niche. Dig some more sub-niche and figure out the most suitable one. Google keyword tools will definitely sufficient for this purpose. Just type in the main keyword, keyword tools will give us a whole bunch of potential sub-niche. These small changes will make our product more focused and well-targeted.
• Step # 2, Edit your PLR ebooks to suit your sub-niche. We don’t need to revamp the whole ebooks, just amend where ever necessary. Probably just need to add few paragraphs here and there. What more important is to make it more unique and tailored to our needs. We also can combination several relevant ebooks.
• Step # 3,  change the title.  This is a very important point, in fact I would say as one of the most critical success factors. Just put on our thinking cap and try to come up with a more compelling title. One way of doing it is to go through similar listing at an auction site. Pick the one that interest you most. Study why you are interested in that particular listing. If suitable just rephrase our title into similar patterns/format. Run through the exercise several times until we have a winner. The new title will definitely separate you from the rest of the pack.
• Step # 4, create a new ebook cover. Make it totally different from the rest. Make it more unique. In most cases the potential customers have seen the ebook cover somewhere, if not from the same auction site. There are many products out there that can help you with this task. Some are just “plug & play” software,  very easy to use.  All we need to do is to pick suitable graphics and some tests,  the software will do the rest. Email me if you need any recommendation on this.
• Step # 5, cross promote your other ebooks/resources. This is one of the best opportunities for us to promote other ebooks. Just make sure the offer is related or in the same niche.  Not just some other irrelevant ebooks.  This is one of the biggest mistake (common mistake) marketers do. I’ve seen a marketer promoting gardening ebooks in a Forex ebooks. I just cannot figure out how the gardening related to Forex trading. Chances are the potential customers 99.99% will not click the links. Forex related ebooks is definitely more appropriate. It just a common sense.

Try this simple steps, you will be surprise the out come.

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.

Why?

Simply we are still new in the internet marketing.  In most cases we wont be making money right away. We need to spend lot of time and money in tweaking the system and campaigns. Since we are working in something that we love,  we can still enjoy the work even though we still struggling with the money part. We dont feel the struggle as much. The chances of success is lot much higher.

I’m sharing based on my personal experience. I’ve one website that is based on my hobby. It is one of the best performing site. Till this day I still enjoy working and updating the site. Isn’t that wonderful?

However using this approach, we need to determine the “profitability” of the niche before we can proceed further. There are many interesting niche that has no or less profitability.  Regardless of your efforts, the possibility of success in such niche is almost non-existance.

EBay  pulse

Most of us know eBay  very well.  We buy or sell almost anything at eBay. Surprisingly not many are aware that eBay  can also be used as a good research tool.  eBay  can tell us right away is “hot items” in the market.

Simply go to pulse.eBay .com.  At this site eBay  share with us what are the hottest selling items.  This is the current trend. With millions of users, data from eBay  definitely can be used as an accurate measurement.

Here is the snap shot from eBay  pulse.  Click on the categories menu if you want to dig further.  eBay will show us the top 10 items in the categories. There is no detail statistic. But that will be good enough for our purposes.

Finding HOT items from ebay

Niche from eBay  pulse will definitely be very useful if we intend to sell or promote (affiliate) physical items. Like selling at auction sites or promoting Amazon’s affiliate. However it can also be used as a measuring gauge for relevant digital products.

cbengine

Majority of marketers love working with clickbank.  Mainly due to its big profit margin and wide range of available products.

Specifically for clickbank,  we can use cbengine.com.  On the right hand side of the website,  there is a menu where we can find top selling products at clickbank.  Just select the correct category and cbengine will list out all the top selling products.  For our purposes there is no need to purchase the pro membership.  The basic data shown by cbengine is more than sufficient.

Find your niche through cbengine

There you have it.  3 simple yet proven methods. I really hope this posting help you select your niche.

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

First we need to have a niche.  Niche in its simple form is just a specific topic that we want to talk or write about. Something like golf or fishing.

Then we need to do a brainstorming. Find out all possible associated words that fit with our niche. You might want to use thesaurus for this part.

Ok now let’s visit freekeywords.wordtracker.com and enter our keyword.

Wordtracker will list out 100 keywords that related to our niche.

In the above example we are using “marriage” keyword. And here is the out come.

Step 2: Selecting Long Tail Keywords

In the second step, we need to select potential and relevant keywords.

pickup keywords that related to our niche.

Note that the number given by wordtracker indicate the number of searches for that particular words. Bigger number indicate a good keywords as more people are searching for that particular keywords. So our odd is better.

Now all we need to do is to go through the list and pick only keywords that related to our niche. Select 10-20 potential keywords and put them in a spreadsheet. For our purposes we are looking for keywords that have more than 10 searches per day.

If you don’t have Excel you might want to consider open office package.  Its free.

Now we are ready for the next step.

Step 3: Finding Competition

In the third step we want to find out competition for our keywords. We want to target for keywords with less competition. Less competition means the keywords are easier to target.

There is no special tools for this step.  What we need is the good old google.com.

Do search all of our keywords. Make sure we put them in quotation. This tells Google that we are looking for the whole phrase, not just a portion of it.

Once we hit the search button, Google will list out all site that contain the phrase. What we are interested is the number on the top-right hand side of the screen. I’ve marked with number “2” in the following snap shot. Record all finding in our spreadsheet.

Now we are ready for the final stage.

Step 4: Evaluation

Our final step is evaluation.  We want to find out keywords that are easy to be dominated.

In a simple term we are looking for keywords that are high in searh number but low in competition.  For this posting purposes, we only talk about these two factors.  Even though there are few other consideration that we need to think about.

For article marketing purposes, we are looking for the following characteristics:

• more than 10 times search daily
• less than 50,000 competition.

In our marriage example we have 4 winners.

• marriage compatibility test
• free marriage compatibility tests
• marriage records free
• 100 questions before marriage

That’s it. Nothing fancy. We are ready to rock.

Till next time.

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’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.

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.