The first thing to understand is that you need to be realistic. If you are in a niche that is competing with millions of other, already indexed pages in the search engines, you will have very little chance to be seen on the first page in the foreseeable feature. But by taking a little time, and having a bit of patience, I can give you a few tips on how to improve your search engine rankings.

What are you trying to rank for?

If you want to achieve any type of success in internet marketing or just have a known presence on the internet, you first have to understand you niche. The very first place you need to go to is: adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. That is the free Google keywords tool. Put in your main keyword – this is what your website is about, and see what results Google gives you.

Don’t be discouraged if there is a high number of competition. That just means that it is probably a pretty profitable niche. But what we need to do is to drill down. Find terms that people are searching for that have less competition. Carefully, take note of a few of the search terms that you feel comfortable with. I encourage you to start small.

Gaining a Confidence Builder Advantage

Lets adjust your mindset. Although a certain keyword may only get 1500 searches a month, would you like to rank first for that term? It is very realistic that you could, and this will be your ‘confidence builder’. By finding search terms that are less competitive you greatly increase your chances of success. And then you take your next search term, repeat the process, and so on until gradually you start to own large patches of your niche.

Now it is important that you keep track of what is going on. The internet is not a place where you can set it and forget it. There are people who out there who are voraciously competing for certain keywords, maybe even the same ones you picked out, and believe me they are not afraid to be aggressive.

Creating Unique Content

The very best, how to improve search engine ranking technique is to have unique content. This is the gold standard for SEO. Now you don’t have to always have 100% unique content, but you will have better search engine rankings if you have content that is directly related to the search terms you previously picked out. This is where the hard work comes in. This means that you need to be writing and or working on your website or blog nearly every single day.

The more original and quality content you have, the more you will get search engine love. If you need some inspiration, check out what your competitors are doing. But never, never directly copy any of their material to your site and try to claim it as yours.

Getting Link Love

Search engines love to see inbound links to your site. So go out and make some friends. If you see that someone else has written an article that you like, and that relates to what you are doing, contact them and let them know you would like to post it on your site. You supply them with a link and article credit, and most likely they will reciprocate.

As I am sure you are writing good quality articles, submit them to the better article directories. If they approve your submission, they will give you a link back. Join a number of forums that are related to your niche and offer quality comments or advise, putting in your contact info if it is allowed. Allow your RSS feed to be syndicated.

Be sure to keep your links diverse, yet related to what your site is all about.

Do It And Learn

As with anything, the best way is to just do it. None of the ideas presented here will cost you any money. So don’t be afraid of making mistakes. You will learn by trial and error. But it does take time and work to succeed, so be patient and persevere.

If you treat this as a hobby,that is what it will be. If you want to make money online in internet marketing, then you need to have a plan. There are many, how to improve search engine ranking techniques and advise out there, but if you build your foundation with these very basic ideas, I’m confident that you will eventually succeed.

Be fearless

Billy Oai

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One really can’t underestimate the importance of how to buy domain names, especially if you are doing internet marketing. The domain name that you register can have an almost immediate effect on you web presence.

Internet Marketing: What Works For Someone Else May Not Work The Same For You

The main effect being that you will have an easier time in getting organic search engine traffic, depending on your niche. If you enter a very competitive market you had better drill down deep to find out where you have the easiest chance of getting in and being noticed.

Domain name registration is a very inexpensive and easy process, and almost every web hosting company has a domain registration program. But in order to start out on the right foot with your internet business you need a plan, and you need to do some research. Don’t make the common mistake of thinking up a cutesy name and then registering it. And I’m going to tell you why.

First of all, if you have a good budget and want to brand yourself, it really doesn’t matter what what your domain name is. Take the names Google or Yahoo for example. Nobody typed those names in a search engine on a regular basis to look for them. But with an expensive publicity campaign they have become household names. Huffington Post is another example, they had a multi-million dollar budget to build a web presence for their news service.

First you need to do some research on your niche. A niche simply means: what is your website going to be focused on. What are you selling? What type of information are you offering? You need to get specifically focused as you can. Then you need to use the free Google Keyword Tool.

Put in what your niche is about. If its ‘toy trains’, put it in and see what the results are that people are looking for. Google will tell you how many people are searching for information about toy trains and what words they are using in looking up information for this.

That is your first clue in how to buy domain names properly. If you think of a catchy name for your product or service, but no one is looking for it how will they find you? But, if people are already searching for information that is related to your niche, isn’t that something you should consider when creating your website?

So find a keyword phrase that people are already searching for that fits closely to what you are doing. Be sure to take a look at the number of searches. You don’t want to use a keyword phrase that millions or even hundreds of thousands of people are searching for.

Just take a look at the competition bar on the Google keyword tool and you’ll see what I mean. Drill down deep find a decent phrase with a decent number of people searching for it. Write down several of them just in case the one you feel good about is already registered.

Now you go to your domain name registrar. Many internet marketers are now using ‘NampCheap.com’, simply because they include privacy in the cost of the domain name. If you plan on doing internet businesses in a serious way, you need to cover your tracks.

What this means is if your competition wants to see what you are doing, what your successful websites are and then come in and copy you, the more you can cover your tracks the better off you are. And believe me, you should do your best to keep your financially successful niches and personal information under the radar, because if other internet marketers find out that you are making money there, they will jump in fast, and copy everything that you do.

Always try to go with a dot com extension. This still has search engine priority. So that means you may have to add an extra word or two if the name you want is already taken. For example; ‘toy trains.com’. I’m sure that is already taken. What about ‘toy train parts.com’. Or ‘the toy train store.com”. Just think of little variations, but, and this is very important, keep your main keyword phrase together. And keep it as short as possible.

Now if you do your research properly and look up the competition for your keyword phrase, often you will find that just the name is registered, no website, or often a poorly designed website. In that case if another extension, such as dot org, dot net, even dot info, is available with your exact keyword phrase, I would consider getting it.

Stay away from registered trademarked names. Even if you are an affiliate selling one of their products. It is much better to set up a domain name such as ‘the toy train store.com and then make a sub folder with a the trademarked name. For example, ‘the toy store.com/Lionel trains’.

Consider not registering your domain name with your domain host. Even if you feel are getting a particularly good deal. You may want to part company with your host after a while, and people often end up with severe headaches trying to move everything elsewhere. So it may be a good idea to pay a little more and keep them separate.

These are the main factors to consider in how to buy domain names. The search engines love finding exact keyword phrases and will give you much organic search love, especially if you have good content.

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai.

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A strategic component when optimizing your website is in using the right keywords. If you are conducting a PPC – pay per click campaign in order to generate traffic and business to your site, you really need to do your keywords research. If your budget doesn’t allow for PPC, being able to target the right keywords are a must in order to start generating traffic.

Take advantage of Google's free keyword tool

While there are several well known keyword research tools available for a price, one excellent free resource is Google’s keywords tool. This can be used for doing an AdWords campaign as well as helping to produce effective SEO results for your website.

Even though Google’s keyword tool is free and easy to use there are still some other pros and cons to be aware of.

Positives:

It offers up a smorgasbord of information from for your AdWords campaign such as: depending on your keyword bid, what your ad position will be, what the average CPC – cost per click is, it lets you know what the number of competing advertisers are, it displays the average search volume for the previous month as well as the previous 12 months, what the search volume trends have been for over 12 months, as well as the month with the highest search volume

Shows you related keywords, as well as different keywords to take into consideration

It enables you to export the keyword list to your computer using Excel or notepad as well as saving them to your AdWords account to help you in your PPC campaign.

It Allows you to put in your websites URL and will analyze your site and offer you keywords based on your content. This really helps to give you a jump start if you are unsure of what words you want to target. Hot tip: you can also use this to see what keywords other websites are using in their campaigns.

Being able to see what the yearly trends are offers you the option of targeting specific keywords through out different times of the year. For example during seasonal changes, and holidays people will be seeking out specific information related to these times of year.

Negatives

Even though Google is the biggest elephant in the room, only their search engine data is reported upon. Results from other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN may offer up different outcomes, so be sure to take this other information into consideration, especially when you are trying to drive organic traffic to your site.

The reality is that the search volume numbers are not exactly precise. I know this may seem a bit contrary but nobody outside of Google knows exactly how they determine their guesstimates. For example, how they differentiate what people type in when looking for something like, “downtown hotel Portland Oregon”, has a different result than, “hotel in Portland OR”. One may be exact and the other results rounded up.

Google doesn’t like anybody to know exactly what they are up to, but it will be a safe bet that their numbers fairly closely represent what they say they are. It’s up to you to watch your campaigns closely to see for yourself.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a valuable free resource that should be utilized when conducting your keyword research.

But just as important you should use as many keyword research resources that you can, in order to get an overall perspective of what people are looking for.

While Google is the dominate search engine and their analysis matters, keep in mind that this is where the greatest amount of competition will be. Do not forget the importance of the other search engines and their results.

Information is power – so obtaining as much information as you can, while learning how to analyze it properly, will help to give you the edge you need in order succeed in internet marketing.

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai

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The two most well known doorways into internet marketing involve PPC – Pay Per Click, or Organic SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

Internet marketing simply boils down to getting traffic. After all, if nobody sees your site, you are invisible, and in effect, all your hard work and efforts are neutralized.

Do Your Research and Have an Online Marketing Plan Put Together

If you are a Newb, be very careful with doing PPC – no matter how hard the Guru’s try and sell you how much money they make with it. If you don’t pay close attention and have a handle on it, its no different than gambling.

We all hear stories of people winning in Vegas big time, but there has never been a casino that has gone out of business because of their customers striking gold. You know the saying “What happens in Vegas …”, well that goes for the vast majority of peoples money too.

Ideally, you would use both methods to maximize your internet marketing efforts. But since my blog is geared for beginners lets take a look at the pros and cons of each method.

Organic Search Engine Optimization Vs Pay Per Click

The All Important Click

Most internet research studies show that people doing their searches are 70% more likely to click on the organic search engine listings than on the PPC advertisers. In fact, almost 80% of people have stated they only found the information they were searching for around 40% of the time when clicking on PPC advertisers. And that leads to the issue of…

Trust

The search engines are being programmed smarter and smarter all the time. This means if you are mainly doing organic SEO, your website and keywords have to come through. When people put in their search criteria they are often looking for specific information and your site has to deliver or your rankings will suffer. Like, you won’t get any.

In using PPC, you have a little more leeway, because, after all you are paying for it. But the trends say that potential customers are trusting the organic searches more and more. One study shows that over 60% of customers distrust paid ads and almost 80% claim that they only found what they were looking for through sponsored ads around 40% of the time.

Because of the efficiency of the search engines, people are simply trusting the organic search results more and more. If you are an internet marketer mainly relying on Organic SEO, this make your potential for converting sales much greater.

Now lets not pretend that advertising doesn’t work. In fact, it is a great method for getting immediate traffic to your website. But just like organic SEO, you had better deliver. Customers are becoming savvier and savvier.

So many marketers are saturating the market using the same ol’ tricks and psychologies, that many people see through it all very quickly. So when using PPC, you had better have all of your ducks in place, so to speak, or you will be leaving the promised land discouraged and empty handed.

The Costs

Stated simply, much of the valuable – money making – areas of the web are completely saturated with people who have been doing this for years. It can be done, but it is extremely hard for a newcomer to rank organically on the first page for a profitable search term.

But the way to get there immediately is through PPC. But hang on to your wallet, because you are not competing with the nicest people in the world. If you threaten their turf, they have ways to put your PPC budget through the roof. What will happen is that you can end up overpaying for a keyword that may not convert as well as you can afford, and you will be financially driven out of the market.

I’m not trying to scare you, just be willing to start out a little further in the pastures where you will attract less attention from the sharks. In this way you can work on your organic rankings while learning the PPC ropes.

Time Frame

Using PPC can put you on the first page of a search immediately, while getting a high organic ranking can take months. It is true that for some long tailed keywords you can be on the first page within days, and if you are just starting out that is what I would encourage your online strategy to be.

The reality is, that if your budget runs out for your PPC campaign, Google shows absolutely you no love, no matter how much money you have spent, and your website is retired to the back pages.

Whereas by working on organic SEO you can have a website that keeps growing higher in the search engine rankings over time. So again, if you are doing PPC, the smarter internet marketeers are also working on their SEO at the same time.

So what is the decision?

Putting together an Organic SEO website that has high rankings, is one method that takes a bit longer, but can have very long lasting and profitable results. I’m assuming that you are doing this yourself or in-house.

If you are paying an outside company to do SEO on your site, you may seriously want to consider PPC, simply because you will never find a good company to work for only a few hundred dollars a month and plus, they will need to have a contract and or, they will want a slice of the pie. A good organic SEO ranking just doesn’t happen overnight.

If you want results fast. Put together a well planned out PPC campaign that you can afford. With PPC you don’t need any contracts, you can stop your campaign immediately and take some time to analyze the results. But you still need to work on your SEO or you will feel the pain when your budget runs out. Of course, if you are converting those clicks, all is good

In short, both methods are very useful and in order to be successful, you really need to learn the ins and outs of both techniques. There is no overnight road to financial success in internet marketing. Those who finally make it are not afraid of falling down, they take it all as a learning experience. So remain positive and keep moving.

Be Fearless

Billy Ojai

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Daniel Tan’s SEOPressor is One Great WP Plugin and I can only say, it is not only revolutionary, but should be MANDATORY for anyone interested in getting to the top of the searches for their niche!

If you are serious about making  money with your WordPress Websites by  scoring high rankings, you need this  plugin, period.

Here’s what the plugin does:

> automatically add bold to keywords
> automatically add italic to keywords
> automatically add underline to keywords
> automatically add ALT tag to images
> automatically add keyword to titles
> gives me a SCORE on pages
> Gives a strong correlation with Google’s top pages!
> Intelligently tells what to do next!
> Tested and proven algorithm for high ranking!
> Feeds right into Google’s PATENT of search tech!

Check out this video to see what it does

The reviews are excellent and the product is continually updated to reflect changes in the search engines.

And it comes with a 7 day FREE Trial!

So be sure to check it out and let me know what you think.

Be Fearless
Billy Ojai

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Love em’ or hate em’, but if you are interested in succeeding with internet marketing, you have to quickly come to grips with the fact that Google is the dominating search engine on the web. In fact, it has more traffic and searches than MSN and Yahoo combined!

In order to get your website recognized by Google, and by default, other search engines, you need to become indexed. This just means that Google acknowledges your site and then analyzes it in order to give it search rankings. Keep in mind that there are plenty of websites that do not get indexed by Google, and even become de-indexed if they don’t follow Google’s TOS – terms of service.

The good news is that you don’t have to spend big bucks to get Google’s attention because it’s fairly easy to get your website indexed. And bear in mind that we are just talking about initially getting your site noticed, you will still have to put in some time perfecting your SEO.

Perhaps the easiest way is to go to Blogger.com and open up a free account. Why Blogger? Google owns Blogger. Just follow the easy to understand directions and your new blog will be ready to go in under 5 minutes. Now write your first blog entry. Don’t just write some crap, but make it relevant to the website you want to link to.

Check Out This Instant Money Maker Today – At No Risk To You!

If possible, write up an article every day or two for a few weeks, putting in the relevant links. Often within days, the Google bots will assess the Blogger site, notice the links, and your website will become indexed.

Now be sure that your main site has good content and is optimized, otherwise your extra effort will be futile as far as making money from internet marketing.

A really important factor to include on all of your website and blogs is to have a site map. While very few of your visitors will click on it or need it, it is very important to the search engine robots. A sitemap will include all of the pages on your site, making it easy for the bots to find and index them.

There may be some pages you don’t want indexed for various reasons, so be sure to tweak your site map to reflect this. Don’t just use Google’s xml site map tool. Be sure to include a sitemap that the other search engines can also easily use to index your content.

Another great way to get indexed fairly quickly is through article writing. Put together at least 5 well written articles of between 300 to 600 words, post them on your website and then submit them to article directories.

Be sure to post them on your website first so you get dibs on the original content that the search engines place a high value upon. Open up accounts at a few different article directories, follow their instruction, and very quickly you will be submitting articles to them that they will publish.

A word of caution; Google has cracked down on many article directories because they accepted and published articles that were pure crap. So these directories have gained a rep for having no juice with Google and you will not get any credit for backlinks.

If an article directory has people who go over your submissions, and it may take a few days to a week for them to decide whether to approve your article or not, those are whom I would encourage you to go with. Even if your article get denied, keep trying, they will only help you to get better.

Like in Blogger, make sure you add a link to your site in your author byline.

The bots go through the quality article directories quite often, so with a week or so your article and site will be indexed.

Be sure to keep submitting. Other webmasters will pick up your articles and post them on their sites with your links included, giving you even more link juice.

There is quite a lot of competition in the internet, but if you go for quality content, and keep plugging away, it may take awhile, but you and your site will be recognized and your internet marketing endeavors will not go unrewarded.

Be Fearless
Billy Ojai

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Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer!

This is a long article (10 pages) if you prefer to print and read, download the pdf here.
by Mike Grehan

As a kid, I once asked my father: How do you become a multi-millionaire? He looked at me and said: “Easy! First you make a million…” and then he had a good laugh.

Come the latter part of the sixties, my father was a very wealthy man. As a serial entrepreneur his interests in show business had netted him a fortune. He had opened his first nightclub in 1962, which was home to a local group called The Animals, who he helped on their way to international stardom (the bass player of the band and his former business partner would go on to manage Jimi Hendrix).

He drove a Jensen Interceptor (very cool car at the time), wore the most “fab gear” (Beatle speak for hip clothes) and hung around Las Vegas with his pals quite a lot (a little too much for my mother’s liking unfortunately!). He was at the peak of his career and a major influencer within his social group. Not bad, for a guy who had to catapult himself from his early beginnings as a typewriter salesman.

It was some time later in life when my father and I were talking about wealth creation that he used the expression: The rich get richer.

I’ll come back to my dear departed Dad again, but stay with me right now, as this is going somewhere. And I’m afraid some of it may be pretty bleak reading if you have newly created, lowly indexed web pages and you’re desperately waiting for someone to link to them so that they stand a chance of ranking in a search engine with a static link based algorithm.

I have to tell you, for the past 18 months, I’ve been absorbed in an entirely new world of research. Network science can be regarded as a branch of complexity theory. Complexity itself describes any number of different sciences, theories, and world views such as chaos theory, emergence and network science. And it’s fascinating. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying enthralling.

By trying to further increase my understanding of the real power of linkage data in search engine algorithms (to be shared with you in the upcoming third edition of my book), I’ve become even more aware of how “the rich get richer” power law affects search engine results and also the ecology of the web itself. The richer you are with links pointing back to your site, the richer you are likely to become in search marketing terms.

Are search engines giving a fair representation of what’s actually available on the web? Not really. If pages were judged on the quality and the relevance for ranking, then there would be less search engine bias towards pages which are simply popular by “linkage voting”. Unfortunately, quality is subjective so finding a universally acceptable measurement or metric is not going to be easy.

If you’re involved in the search marketing industry, particularly on the link building side, then you’ll know better than most, that getting links for a large and more visible web site is easier than that of getting links for a start-up or a mom-and-pop type outfit.

Now you may feel that you’re about to read something obvious and decide to skip the rest here. But please stay with me a little longer.

I believe you may be very interested to know that the scale of the problem is rapidly getting greater with the bias of a static based “link popularity” algorithm such as PageRank, largely the cause of the problem.

“Now wait a minute Grehan,” I hear you say. “Aren’t you the biggest skeptic about PageRank and its role in Google search results?” And the answer is “you bet I am.” However, what I want to do with this feature article is to try and highlight how great the bias is for high ranking pages which are fundamentally ordered on link based algorithms, to attract more links.

And why I believe (along with many in the research community) it’s becoming necessary for search engines to seek a new paradigm. I think it is of benefit to the search marketing community as whole to understand the implications of such concerns by search engines to move away from current methodology as it will certainly have its impact on our industry.

When speaking on the subject of linking at conferences, seminars and workshops, I always attempt to explain the different manner in which search engine marketers look at links on the web compared to that of the way search engines view the same data. Search engine marketers are concerned, basically, with a hyperlink from another page back to theirs. And generally speaking, the more the merrier!

However, search engines take a much more mathematical, philosophical and analytical impression of the entire web (or more to the point, the fraction of it that they have captured). To search engines, web pages which are linked together are nodes in the web graph. By applying random graph theory to the web, they have viewed it as a type of static, equilibrium network with a classic Poisson type distribution of connections.

Even though graph theory has made great progress and been an important factor in the way that search engines have been able to plot crawling of the web and ranking of documents: We now know that the most important natural and artificial networks have a specific architecture based on a fat-tailed distribution of the number of connections of vertices that differs crucially from the classical random graphs studied by mathematicians. Because, as a rule, these networks are not static but evolving objects.

It’s really only been the last five years or so that physicists have started extensive empirical and theoretical research into networks which are organized this way. The main focus prior to this research was in neural and Boolean networks where the arrangements of connections was secondary.

So now I hear you say: “Hey Mike… Whoa! Stick with search engines and optimization and suchlike. I’m a search engine marketer, not a physicist! Random graph theory, equilibrium network with a classic Poisson type distribution, fat-tailed distribution, neural networks… I’m brain zonked already and this is only the second page of your article.”

Yup, I understand that, I’ve scrambled my own brains a bit a few times recently. But it’s important that you do know a little more about what’s really going on in the research field to provide a better analysis of what currently makes one web page more important than another and how that is likely to change.

Your business may depend greatly on being able to optimize for search engines. And that’s only going to become harder and harder.

Tell you what I’ll do – I’ll back up a bit here and try and do a brief history to what I’ve been kind of “glossing over”.

Let’s have a slightly (and I do mean slightly) more in-depth look at network science and how it is mathematically, philosophically and otherwise, applied to search. As Russian physicist and genius Sergei Dorogovstev put it in his excellent text, Evolution of Networks, from last year, I feel it’s “more important to be understood than to be perfectly rigorous”. Although I have tried to eliminate the math as best as I can and stick to the principles, there are bound to be sections which do reference formula. Therefore brave reader, as I frequently do myself, don’t be afraid to skim over some parts you don’t understand to reach those that you do. Remember: Like you, I’m a search engine marketer – not a scientist.

The history behind social network concepts and graph theory applied to ranking algorithms is something which can help you understand a lot more about their complexities and why some of your best SEO endeavors may, already, not be working.

It may seem as if the web grows in a very unorganized and haphazard way. But that’s not really the case. It’s beginning to show powerful underlying regularities from the way in which web pages link together to the patterns found in the way users surf.

And it’s interesting to note that, these regularities have been predicted on the basis of theoretical models from a field of physics, statistical mechanics, that few would have thought would apply to the web.

Among the chaos of activity and information on the web, scientists have analyzed data which has been collected by the internet archive and other sources which has helped to uncover hidden patterns which hold many clues to what’s really happening in cyberspace.

These patterns are being discovered all the more by the many researchers worldwide who are intrigued by the new science of networks. And the discoveries they make are both surprising and very, very interesting.

What is of most interest to us in our little search marketing community, is how quickly researchers have established that the distribution of pages and links per web site follows a universal and lawful behavior. The simple truth of the matter is, few sites have enormous numbers of pages and many have few. And it follows that few sites have many links pointing to them whereas many have few.

How is it that the web in its distribution follows some kind of known patterns, when there is no central planner of the web? There is no central body to suggest how it should grow and who should have links and who should not.

You need to look at the origins of network theory which throw a light on a number of social mechanisms which operate beyond the world wide web. These theories help to explain why the web has become a huge informational ecosystem that can be used to quantitatively measure and test theories of human behavior and social interaction.

Phrases such as “it’s a small world” and “the rich get richer” and “well connected” have worked their way into everyday vocabulary. It’s interesting that such phrases have been the by-product of a mixture of research in social network analysis, physics, mathematics and computer science. All of which can (and do) apply to the algorithms used by the major search engines.

It’s a small world:

In the 1960s, American psychologist Stanley Milgram, was intrigued by the composition of the web of interpersonal connections that link people into a community. To inform himself more about this, he sent letters to a random selection of people living in Nebraska and Kansas, asking them, in turn, to forward the letters to a stockbroker in Boston. But he didn’t give them the address of the stockbroker. Instead he asked them to forward the letter only to someone they knew personally and whom they thought may be ‘socially’ closer to the stockbroker.

Most of the letters did, in fact, eventually make it to the stockbroker. But the much more startling fact was how quickly they did so. It wasn’t a case of hundreds of mailings to reach the final target, but typically, just six or so.

This true experiment has passed into folklore and is now famously known as “six degrees of separation”. Although, it wasn’t Milgram who named it so. That was from the 1993 play of the same name:

“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet.”

Ouisa Kitteridge. From John Guare’s play, Six degrees of Separation.

Popular culture plays its part again, when in 1997, a new game called “The Kevin Bacon Game” arrived on the scene. The game was invented by a couple of movie buffs who (for some reason of their own) had come to the conclusion that Kevin Bacon was the true center of the movie universe (it has been proven that he is actually NOT the most connected actor in Hollywood circles, but nevertheless…).

If you haven’t heard of the game, here’s how it works. The movie network consists of actors who are connected by virtue of the fact that they have acted together in one or more feature films.

And this is not just Hollywood. This is any movie made anywhere. According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), between the years 1898 and 2000, roughly half a million people have acted in over two hundred thousand feature films.

So, here we go… If you have acted in a movie with Kevin Bacon, then you have a Bacon number of one (Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0). As Kevin has acted in more than fifty movies, he has acted with more than 1,150 other actors. It follows, therefore, that over 1,150 actors have a Bacon number of one. Moving outward from Bacon, if you ever acted with an actor who had appeared with Bacon, then you have a Bacon number of two. And so on and so forth…

But the Kevin Bacon game is not the only one in town.

It’s actually based on “Erdos numbers” these being applied to the distance between mathematicians who authored a paper with the great Paul Erdos (we’re coming to him in more detail in just a few paragraphs) and those who authored a paper with a person who authored a paper with Erdos, and so on and so forth.

Much like the Kevin Bacon game, the smaller your “Erdos number” the higher the prestige you have within the mathematician community.

The existence of these short chains of acquaintance have actually been observed and documented by social network scientists for years.

Milgram’s experiment with the Boston Stockbroker raised a couple of interesting issues. One regarding the properties that networks must have to become small worlds. If you were to draw a network of people (nodes) and links between those nodes relating to who knows whom, it wouldn’t be at all obvious that any two nodes would be separated by six links. This is because there is something peculiar about a social network that is reflected in its link structure.

The second issue concerns what the best strategies are for navigating such small-world graphs in a short number of steps. Think about the people in Milgram’s experiment. They did not have detailed knowledge of the social network in which they were embedded, but they still managed to pass the messages in a fairly short number of links.

These issues have since been addressed by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz at Cornell University and also Jon Kleinberg (in a small world way) also at Cornell. However, the conclusions and finding are vastly beyond the scope of this paper as an introduction and covered in more detail in the third edition of my book.

Does the same small world phenomenon exist between web sites and web pages? A few years ago, Lada Adamic, of Xerox, Palo Alto Research Center, undertook a study of the average number of links you would need to traverse to get from one site on the web to another. She discovered that, just as in the social sphere, one could pick two sites at random and get from one to the other within four clicks.

This phenomenon was again shown to exist for the number of links between any two pages on the web. Albert Lazlo Barabasi, at Notre Dame University (more about Barabasi coming) discovered that, in the case of pages, the number is nineteen.

Getting connected:

Hungarian mathematician and genius, Paul Erdos, was the first to address the fundamental question pertaining to our understanding of an interconnected universe: How do networks form? His solutions laid the foundations of the theory of random networks. To explain: suppose we take a collection of dots on a page and then just haphazardly wire them together – the result is what mathematicians refer to as a random graph.

Okay, now imagine that you’ve been given the task of building roads to connect up the towns of an undeveloped country. At this time there are no roads at all, just fifty isolated towns scattered across the map. Because the construction guys are likely to misunderstand your plans and build roads linking the wrong towns and, of course, the country has so little money, you need to build as few roads as possible. The question is then: how many will be enough?

Mathematician and author Mark Buchanan, in his excellent book, Nexus, explained it this way:

If finance wasn’t a problem then you’d simply order the construction guys to keep building until every last pair of towns were linked together. To link each of the fifty towns to all forty nine-others would take 1,225 roads. But what is the smallest number of roads you need to build to be reasonably sure that drivers can go between any two towns without ever leaving a road?

It’s one of the most famous problems in graph theory and could be expressed in any number of ways; houses and telephone links; the power grid etc. It’s a very difficult problem to solve and took the considerable mind power of Erdos back in 1959.

In this particular problem, it turns out that the random placement of 98 roads is adequate to make sure that the towns are connected. Even if that seems like a lot of roads, it actually only represents 8% of the original figure of 1,225 roads in total.

Erdos discovered that, no matter how many points there might be, a small percentage of randomly placed links is always enough to tie the network together into a more or less completely connected whole. To put this into the internet perspective, the percentage required dwindles as the network gets bigger. For a network of 300 points, there are nearly 50,000 possible links that could run between them.

But if no more than 2% of these are in place, the network will be completely connected. For 1,000 points, the crucial factor is less than 1%. And for 10 million points, it is only 0.0000016.6

So, does that mean that if people were linked more or less at random, the typical person would have to know only about one out of every 250 million for the entire population of the world to be linked into a social web?

Let me just make a note here; one of the primary features of a random graph is that its degree distribution always has a particular mathematical form known as Poisson distribution (named in honor of the French mathematician).

The Rich Get Richer:

I want to just skip forward very quickly here for a moment. By 1999, Hungarian physicist Albert-Lazlo Barabasi had become completely engrossed in network theory, in particular, its application to the World Wide Web. He himself had been schooled in the Hungarian tradition of graph theory, including the Erdos model of random graphs.

His excellent work in the field has given great insight into networks as diverse as those which begin as cocktail parties right up to the growth of the national power grid. And his innovative work has shown that many networks in the real world have degree distributions that don’t look anything like a Poisson distribution. Instead, they follow what is known as a power law.

Barabasi’s body of work has transformed the study of links and nodes. He has discovered that all networks have a deep underlying order and operate according to simple but powerful rules.

Duncan J Watts, one of the principle architects of network theory, has argued that, the origin of the Poisson degree in a random graph, and its corresponding cut-off, lies with its most basic premise: that links between nodes come into existence entirely independently of one another.

This means that, in an egalitarian system, things average out over time. An individual node can be unlucky for a while, but eventually, it has to be on the receiving end of a new connection. And in the same way, no run of luck can go on forever, so if one node gets picked up more frequently than average for some period of time, eventually others will catch up.

But you know, real life is not that fair unfortunately. Particularly when it comes to matters of wealth and success. Let’s just think about the growth of a social web, as posed earlier, from the mathematicians viewpoint to begin with.

Duncan Watts puts it this way. Imagine you have a hundred friends. And each one of those also has a hundred friends. This means that at one degree of separation you can connect to one hundred people and within two degrees you can reach one hundred times one hundred which is ten thousand people. By three degrees you are up to almost one million; by four, nearly a hundred million; and in five degrees about nine billion people. What this would mean is, that if everyone in the world had one hundred friends, then within six steps, you can easily connect yourself to the population of the entire planet.

But as he also points out, if you’re at all socially inclined, you’ll already have spotted the fatal flaw in the reasoning.

A hundred friends is a lot to think about. So think about your ten best friends and then ask yourself who their ten best friends are. And the chances are that you’ll come up with many of the same people. Go to Orkut now (if you can remember what Orkut is!) and check on your ten best pals in the search marketing network to get a real life understanding of this.

It’s what known as clustering. We tend not so much to have friends as we do groups of friends, based on shared interests, experience and location, all of which overlap with other groups. And this is an almost universal feature, not just in social networks, but of networks in general.

It’s this social network phenomenon which is the underlying cause of the rich getting richer. And this phenomenon has been with us for a long, long time. The great twentieth century sociologist Robert Merton dubbed it the “Mathew effect” as a reference to a passage in the Bible, in which Mathew observes, “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

[Once the vision of Michael Palin, in Monty Python's Life of Brian dissipates from your mind, I'll continue here...]

The Mathew effect, when applied to networks, basically equates to well connected nodes being more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor.

In fact, it has been proposed that “the rich get richer” effect drives the evolution of real networks. If one node has twice as many links as another node, then it is precisely twice as likely to receive a new link.

Let’s return, for a moment, to Barabasi’s introduction of power laws to bring us into a real world example. The distribution of wealth in the Unites States, for instance, resembles a power law. The nineteenth century Parisian engineer Vilifredo Pareto was the first to notice this phenomenon which subsequently became known as Pareto’s law and demonstrated that it held true in every European country for which the relevant statistics existed.

The law shows that very many people possess very little wealth, while a very small minority are extremely wealthy. We tend to refer to Pareto’s law more generally as the 80/20 principle.

Interestingly, a similar process tends to underlie the growth of social networks. A study by sociologists Fredrick Liljeros and Christopher Edling of Stockholm University, working with a team of physicists from Boston University, looked at the links of the sexual contact between 2,810 randomly selected individuals in Sweden. If acquaintance is a fairly loosely defined relationship, the existence of or non existence of a sexual link is not.

In the sexual context, these are the people who Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Tipping Point, referred to as “the connectors” a socially prolific few who tie an entire social network together.

You might put the prolific performance of the connectors in a sexual contact network down to special skills given at birth, or in early childhood…

But in the experiment carried out by Liljeros, another plausible explanation for the structure of the sexual contact network includes the increased skill in acquiring new partners, as the number of previous partners grows, and the motivation to have many new partners simply to sustain self-image… As you can see, it’s evident in the sexual contact network that, “the rich get richer” here too.

This is a scale free network described by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi as a power-law or fat-tail distribution for network elements according to the number of links they have.

The physicists themselves believe that their approach is the best for understanding the evolution of networks. It’s a direct generalization of the usual physics of growth, percolation phenomena, diffusion, self-organized criticality, mesoscopic systems etc.

The physicists’ approach has brought with it enough mathematical and computational data that you can fry your brains just trying to get your head around the basic concepts. But that’s not what I’m trying to achieve here. I’m hoping that I’m able to give some basic but useful background to the way that social network concepts are applied and identified in the connectivity graphs used by each search engine when analyzing linkage data. You should also note, of course, that “connection-ism” is very much a descriptive word applied to the field of AI.

Perhaps the greatest discovery of the laws of network organization focuses on the idea of “hubs” and how they form. These are the centerpieces of networks, around which many links form.

Before we even apply it to the web and search, a strong case has been made by Barabasi (and subsequently by others) that the best way to combat AIDs, for instance, would be to concentrate on identifying and treating the hubs in sexual contact networks.

Information about the structure of the web is of great importance to search engines. The common observation is that, one good web document tends to link to other good documents of similar content. So therefore, there will be groups of pages of similar content (and similar quality) which refer to each other. The quality of the pages is presumed to be guaranteed by the recommendations implicit in the links between them. However, as we shall discover, this is not necessarily a good metric overall for quality as many had first thought.

Lada Adamic (Xerox) tested her theories (mentioned earlier) built around an application to examine a repository of web pages crawled by Google. For any given search word, she brought back results to the queries which provided PageRank, text match and link information for each page.

She then identified all the connected clusters and selected the largest one, as it would most likely contain links across sites other than just the common ones. What she discovered was, connected clusters spanning several sites tend to contain the main relevant pages and are rich in “hubs” (pages which contain links to many other good pages). It is then possible to find the center of the cluster by computing the number of links among all the members of the cluster.

This shows that, rather than presenting a list of documents that contain many sequential entries from the same site, a search engine, using the phenomenon of the “small world” can present just the center from each cluster. Users can then explore the rest of the cluster on their own.

Hyperlink based “popularity” algorithms

Maybe it was a small world event in a scale free network (pun), or simply a quirk of fate that, Jon Kleinberg, foremost computer scientist, found himself as a professor at Cornell University at just the same time as foremost physicist and sociologist Duncan Watts. Whatever it was, the information exchange between them in the study of networks has helped to transform the way that search engines relied almost solely on methods such as the vector space model which had pages “standing in isolation” to the two major hyperlink analysis algorithms: HITS and PageRank.

The application of network analysis and physics has given search engines fundamental principles to base ranking mechanisms on, among other things, clustering, inter-connectivity and popularity.

I don’t need to tell you that, the majority of web page accesses are referred by search engines, you already know this. Given the sheer quantity of information on the web, it’s no wonder that search engines have become an indispensable tool.

An individual could never sift through the billions of pages online trying to find the ten best. So, that becomes the job of the search engine: To narrow it down to a smaller number of pages worth looking at.

This method of “topic distillation” to tackle the issue of “the “abundance problem” i.e. too many relevant pages being returned for a query, with little indication as to which are the most important, or authoritative, is centered around PageRank and HITS.

These algorithms applied to the link structure of the web fundamentally suggest the higher number of quality links you have pointing back at you, the higher you should rank in the results. It’s a popularity metric.

Of course, the fact that strong hubs form in networks such as the web, the utopian dream of a free and equally democratic internet which many have dreamed of, becomes somewhat nonsense. Having covered the basic ideas of how networks form and strengthen and dominate topological degrees gives us an indication of what is bound to follow with a static hyperlink based ranking algorithm.

I write a lot about HITS/CLEVER which is a query specific algorithm. Using this approach, HITS builds a sub-graph of the web which is relevant to the query and then uses link analysis to rank the pages of the sub-graph. But for this particular article I just want to stick with PageRank as it is this approach which causes the accelerating “rich get richer” problem which many search marketers struggle with.

PageRank, is the most visible of the link based algorithms due to its association with Google and can be referred to more as a static ranking scheme. Using this method, all pages to be indexed are ordered once-and-for-all in a best-to-worst rank, regardless of any query. When the query does arrive, the index returns the best ten pages that satisfy the query at the top of the pile. Best, here, being determined by the static ranking.

But this is also the creator of a very worrisome problem which affects new web pages with low linkage data, regardless of the quality of those pages. Quality and relevance are sometimes at odds with each other. And the ecology of the web may be suffering because of the way search engines are biased towards a page’s popularity more than its quality. In short, “currently popular” pages are repeatedly being returned at the top of the results at the major search engines.

So, the “filthy linking rich” get richer and currently popular pages continue to hit the top spots. The law of “preferential attachment” as it is also known, wherein new links on the web are more likely to go to sites that already have many links, proves that the scheme is inherently biased against new and unknown pages.

When search engines constantly return popular pages at the top of the pile, more web users discover those pages and more web users are likely to link to them. This therefore means that currently unpopular pages (as such) are not returned by search engines (regardless of quality) so they are discovered by very few web users. And this, of course, is unfortunate for both the publishers of web pages and the seekers of their information. (Not to mention web marketers!)

This has been a lengthy journey already and we’re still only scratching the surface. I want to finish by making you aware of an experiment which took place by scientists in America earlier this year.

First of all, they suggest that by 2002, around 70% of all web searches on line were being handled by Google. They also suggest that, while Google takes into account more than 100 factors in its ranking algorithm, the core of it is based on PageRank. This is a “static” link popularity metric to represent importance or authority for ranking purposes.

Now it’s important to understand that there is a distinction between the importance or quality of page to that of the relevance of page following a user query.

The scientists suggest that the relevance is a quantity which relies heavily on the particular search issued by the user. But the importance or quality of a document could actually be computed at crawl time and could be seen as intrinsic to the document itself.

And the reason they are looking at this intrinsic quality is based on the desire to find a new paradigm for ranking web pages which is not so heavily based on link popularity.

The problem being that Google repeatedly returns “currently popular” pages at the top of the results and ignores newer pages which are not so densely connected. Therefore it is inherently biased against “unknown” pages.

So are the “rich getting richer” insofar as linkage is concerned at search engines? Yes and it’s a rapidly worsening factor. The experiment carried out covered data collected over a seven month period. And from that experimental data, they observed that the top 20% of the pages with the highest number of incoming links obtained 70% of the new links after seven months, while the bottom 60% of the pages obtained virtually no incoming links at all during that period.

So where’s the good news Mike? Well, there is a little consolation in that, the “rich get richer” behavior varies in different categories. A new model has been developed which can be used to predict and analyses competition and diversity in different communities on the web.

However, that is covered in more detail again in the third edition of Search Engine Marketing: The essential best practice guide.

I’ll round up here where I started with my dear departed Dad. Just as he became a social bright light earning (and burning) lots of cash, so he attracted lots of new friends (links). But when the Gaming and Lotteries Act in the late sixties forced him to close many of his venues (something he hadn’t seen coming) the cash reserves slipped away… and so did the friends.

Still he left me with one excellent piece of advice. I said to him, it’s all right saying you become a multi millionaire by becoming a millionaire first, but how do you do that?

He looked and smiled and said, in my experience I’ve discovered that looking for the million dollar deal is very difficult. Getting a million dollars from one person is hard. However, getting one dollar from a million people is really not so difficult.

Like myself, my father was much more of an optimist than a physicist!

You can find the research paper covering the “rich get richer” problem at Google here:

Impact Of Search Engines On Page Popularity.

http://oak.cs.ucla.edu/~cho/papers/cho-bias.pdf

(C) Mike Grehan & Net Writer Publishing 2004

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SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is a subject with many layers. Depending on who is discussing it, it can sound as complex as brain surgery or it can be described in very simple and basic terms. I’m not a brain surgeon but I do know how to plant seeds and help them to grow.

In Internet Marketing What Works For Someone Else May Not Work The Same For You

If you are interested in Improving Your Internet Marketing Search Engine Strategy, there are basic seeds you need to build upon and these do not need to be overly complex techniques when first developing your search engine strategies.

Determine What Your Internet Marketing Strategy Goals Are

Focus on, ‘What is the purpose of my website?’ Not what you want to achieve, just, ‘why do I even have this website?’

Is it to sell products or information?

Do you want to use it to generate leads for your sales people?

Is it designed primarily to give out information and or advise? To educate your target audience?

Once you have determined your purpose or mission, then focus on:

Creating Your Internet Marketing Search Engine Plan

First, understand that there is not just one ‘magic plan’ that will help you to succeed. It is usually by combining different ingredients together that your website will be able to achieve a high ranking in the search engines. But what you want to happen is that when people type in your particular niche or keyword, you want to show up.

You really only have two approaches

Using PPC – pay per click.

This is when you pay to advertise your website. Depending on your niche and keywords, this can become very expensive if you are not paying attention. You really need to do deep keyword research on this one and test, test, test, different adverts in varying markets within and related to your niche.

If you are just starting out, do not try to be number one. There are many deep pocket advertisers out there who can afford $5 or $10 a click and remain at the top spot every day. Don’t be in a hurry unless you really have done your research and really know the ins and outs of putting together an adwords campaign.

A. Determining what are your targeted keywords are.

B. What are you willing to bid for them.

C. Writing ads that show up in the proper areas when people type in your keywords.

For example, don’t use ‘gardening’ as your main ppc keyword, focus on an aspect of gardening. Tomato’s, what kind, what are the best seeds, soils, etc. Find keywords that people are searching for, that are related to your niche and don’t cost an arm and a leg.

That being said, this is the quickest way to start selling and getting leads to your website.

SEO – search engine optimization.

This is when you optimize your website to show up in the ‘organic’ searches. This involves many different aspects, the proper keywords, good content, quality backlinks, just to name a few. There are many articles and books out there on this already.

There is no easy way to do this in today’s competitive market, but your focus should be on building an easily accessible website with quality content.

A. Write brief, descriptive HTML description titles for each separate article or page.

B. Write a summary sentence for each separate article or page

C. Have quality, focused, page content.

D. Write an descriptive/keyword ALT text for all of your images.

E. Make sure all of your pages comply with current web standards, as well as Googles terms of service.

Then you an continue on with more advanced SEO techniques, such as, 301 redirects, link building (getting more links to your site), RSS news feeds, blogging, backtracking and more.

By starting in the right way, you can produce a search engine marketing strategy, that will focus on what matters most when carrying out your plans, which will help you to effectively attain your internet marketing goals.

Be Fearless
Billy Ojai

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It’s no secret that some people are uneasy with Facebook’s privacy practices, despite the company revising its policies repeatedly. Netpop has released an interesting study finding that 8 in 10 social media users feel “uneasy” or “ambivalent” about sharing personal information on social media sites.

Is Facebook A Part Of Your Online Marketing Strategy?

Here’s the breakdown:

42% of social media users are “Uneasies” (concerned about privacy)
38% … are “Ambivalents” (uncertain about privacy)
20% … are “Laissez-Faires” (not concerned about privacy)

Social Media Privacy Concerns

“Social media is growing in the United States and around the world, prompting Internet users to share an ever-growing amount of personal information,” says Netpop. “Social media platforms are, of course, in the business of making it fun and easy to share more, and do more, with more people.

But where does the information go? Who sees it? Who owns it? And how is it used? These questions become increasingly important as social media expand and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are driven to better leverage (and monetize) our information and social connections.”

“Findings reveal that the vast majority (80 percent) are uncertain or uneasy about the social sites they use,” the firm says. “This is particularly true of Facebook: 85 percent of Facebook users are either uncertain or explicitly concerned.

Findings also show that privacy concerns and distrust bear a negative impact on social brands: Users have a significantly lower perception of social brands if they are concerned about privacy or distrust the site to use their information appropriately.”

The study also found that users with privacy concerns rate social sites significantly lower in terms of the Net Promoter Score the report looks at, which is a comparison by level of trust that site uses shared information appropriately.

This is something to think about in all of the Facebook-connectedness of the web today. It’s gotten to the point where it is pretty hard to find a site that doesn’t use some kind of Facebook integration.

The fact is that it is simply too attractive to webmasters to use Facebook for a variety of reasons – engagement and traffic among the top. The study brings up an interesting point of discussion. Are some consumers trusting you less because of your Facebook and other social integration?

Keep in mind that Facebook came under more fire for privacy concerns when it rolled out its Open Graph initiative than arguably any other time in the company’s existence. Of course, the company has updated its privacy policies since then, but clearly a lot of people are still “uneasy”.

Facebook was already getting integrated into a good portion of the web before the launch of the Open Graph and “instant personalization,” but that, along with Facebook’s social plugins (most notably the “Like” button, really sent things into overdrive.

Considering it’s only been a little over a year since then, it’s quite incredible to note that you’d be hard pressed these days to find many credible sites that don’t have some kind of Facebook integration.

Facebook has a number of social plugins that sites can (and do) use:

The Like Button
The Send Button
Comments
Activity Feed
Recommendations
Like Box
Login Button
Registration
Facepile
Live Stream

Each of these have potential benefits to a site, in terms of user engagement. No question. Given user “uneasiness” about Facebook, however, you may want to ask yourself how much of this stuff you really want on your site. Better yet, what combination of this stuff will benefit your site the most, while keeping your audience and their possible concerns in mind. Perception goes a long way.

While a plugin like “Facepile” might be designed to actually add trust to a page, there are some users out there who may feel that their privacy has been violated because you are showing that you know who their friends are in the first place. Of course, it is not you that knows. It is Facebook (and for that matter, they have to be logged into FB in the first place), but not everybody understands this. Again, it’s about perception and audience.

To be clear, I am in no way suggesting anyone lessen their Facebook integration. It’s quite clear that the social network can do a lot to increase your traffic – not only directly, but indirectly through search. Facebook can also bring a level of engagement from your customers that just isn’t possible through other means.

I’m simply saying that if Facebook is making so may people uneasy, you might want to ask yourself if the majority of your audience is likely to fall into this category, and if so, are the benefits of Facebook integration worth bringing this kind of vibe to your own site? And to what extent? Something to consider.

I don’t expect the findings will sway too many site-owners away from Facebook integration, but perhaps it does highlight the need for giving consumers different options in terms of how they connect with your site.

Another study released this week, finds that 47% of Facebook users have profanity on their walls.

article source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-trust-2011-05

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Did you know that over 75% of people venturing into the business of internet marketing fail? Here is a Newbie Guide to Making Money With Internet Marketing

Why do you think that is?

It can’t just be for lack of money, because as long as you have access to the internet and a computer you can start an internet business with little or no money. And maybe that is part of the problem for what seem like a very large failure rate. Too many people have no idea what they are getting and want to follow the ‘herd’, or they think they are going to make money buying one of the latest ‘guru’ packages.

Most certainly, there are those people who hit the internet lottery fairly quickly, but for the vast majority you need to do your research and not overreach. If you are an internet ‘newb’, work on one project until you perfect it before you start multi-tasking with several internet marketing endeavors.

With that in mind here are three solid ways to start making an income on the internet.

Create Your Own Product

If you have a talent or the know-how about a particular subject, there are plenty of people willing to pay you for that information. Put together an ebook on your subject, include some audio and or a video that people can easily download.

There are literally thousands of possibilities for products that you will be able to easily create. Just pick a subject, do an internet search and get busy. Finding a niche market is easy, and don’t be afraid of the competition, just figure out how you can do it better.

You don’t even have to be a writer, you can outsource the writing to a friend or ghost writer. If you don’t feel you have a great face or a good speaking voice find a friend who does to help you with the audio or video.

After your product is created, your after costs are virtually nil. You can sell hundreds, thousands or even millions, (we’re being very optimistic here) of copies of your product and it won’t cost you another cent. Your initial start-up costs will easily be covered by selling just a few copies of your product.

But you don’t even have to do all the marketing and selling all by yourself. There are thousands of people already involved in affiliate marketing that will do the selling for you.

Affiliate Marketing

For the newb, this is perhaps the easiest way to get started in internet marketing. Signing up to join an affiliate program is free. You then find the right product and find ways to promote and sell it. Being an affiliate marketer carries very little risk, can be marked with little or no money and you don’t have to worry about contact with the customers.

In fact, it possible to do affiliate marketing without even having a website. Just check out Click Bank or Commission Junction for products and you will see what I mean Please understand that you will be up against some of the best minds in the business, so study hard and ‘think outside the box’. Don’t be discouraged. Just concentrate on making that first sale, then another and… Soon you will have the hang of it.

AdSense

If you have a website, you can participate in Google’s AdSense program. AdSense is an advertising program where you display ads on your website from Google’s list of advertisers. Every time someone clicks on one of those ads, you, and Google make some money.

Google’s technology allows its search engine to scan over your web page, and then, according to your content, place relevant advertising. After you sign up with Google’s AdSense program you will be given a code to place, wherever you decide it should be, on your web page.

So the important thing is to have relevant content that fits your niche. How much will you make per click? Only Google knows that. But it is a well known fact that certain niches cost more for the advertiser to advertise in. Just do the research. And never click on your own ads. You will get banned, and its usually just before your expecting to get paid from Google.

Those are just 3 business models you can use to start up your internet marketing business. When you reach a certain point you can combine all three together to cover as many financial revenue bases you can. Just get started.

Doing nothing means just that, doing nothing.

Be Fearless
Billy Ojai

Check Out This Instant Money Maker Today – At No Risk To You!

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