Anyway, be sure to bookmark this blog and come back often. I’ll include a newsletter sign up soon, but until then you can go and sign up at my Internet marketing blog.

Why should you come back often you say (yes, I can hear you screaming that ). Well, every now and again I’ll have a contest running and you’ll be able to win great prices (products or hard cash to your PayPal account). Furthermore, here I’ll be discussing new and old very effective Internet marketing techniques, styles and so on – including how to build a list, how to make money as an affiliate, how to make money with Adsense and much more. I also suggest you download your copy of my free ebook titled “How To Succeed Online“.

OK, this is it for now. Have a great day and write you soon.

there’s a lot of discussion going on about duplicate content nowadays so I’ve decided to clarify a few things here. Don’t tell this to anyone as the fewer people know about this the better!

I’m going to be straight forward about this, so try to keep up

Duplicate content per se isn’t bad. Search engines don’t absolutely adore it, but your site won’t get de-indexed or even penalized if it’s showing duplicate content. But there’s a simple twist…

If you were to copy an article and paste it directly to your site, especially if it’s an article that 189,000 other sites have on them, your site is going to be awarded fewer points and will therefore rank much lower for your chosen keywords…

But if you were to add something to your articles, then you can very quickly make the page unique in the eyes of the search engines and they will reward your site more points than the others… nice…

But you cannot go and change the content of articles you get from article directories. That’s against terms of service. But what you can and should do is write an introduction to the article and concluding remarks at the end thus making the web site “unique”.

The other side is the “private label articles”. These you can change as you wish. I really suggest you don’t put them on your site exactly as they come as 100’s of other people are doing it. What you want to do is something similar to what you’ve done with the articles from the directories… write your own introduction, maybe add a paragraph or two inside the article and write your own conclusion.

You must remember that you *must* put some work into everything! Don’t just purchase software that “makes your article unique” — that’s all baloney. The best one that I’ve seen adds some pre-written, general content and finds some synonyms for many words in the article. The problem is that search engines can determine those synonyms just as fast as that software. And they can also pick up on those “general sentences” embedded into the article. It can work for now, but you should never try to outsmart search engines…

The Secret No One Wants You To Know…

Search engines are a business. And a very serious and profitable business at that. They work very very hard to give their customers (you and me) what we want:

• relevant results
• useful results
• as fast as they can

That’s basically it! Do you think that a multi-million dollar corporation like Google will allow some punk to use their system to make a quick buck and make their customers frustrated and angry in the process!? No, didn’t think so…

So why do people do that anyway? Well, all I could think of was the following:

• they get blinded by the “easy money” mentality
• they know that their “tactics” won’t work for the long term and are just doing it to get a quick buck and leave
• they are selling useless software and gimmicks to unsuspecting suckers trying to make it online
• they simply don’t know better

Maybe there’s more, but this about covers it.

Believe me that Google and other search engines have people working around the clock to determine “flaws” in their algorithms and to find about different tactics people use to “outsmart” them.

Search engines are getting “smarter” every day and if you’re building your sites for the long term, then you should consider this:

• provide relevant, accurate and useful information on your sites
• “duplicate content” is OK as long as it complies with the previous rule and as long as you put some effort into it to make it “unique”

This is basically it — really!

This has worked for me and still works extremely well. I don’t fear any “updates” or anything. My sites rank high and that for the long-term. Sure, I’ve fallen victim to some scammers and got pulled in by the “quick buck mentality”, but where’s that work now? It all went down the drain in less than a month.

So, what’s better — to put in eight hours of work a day for the first three months and then live of it for the rest of your life or to put four hours a week and see results and in a few weeks do four more hours more with something else and so on for the rest of your life?

I’d take the first option any day of the week, and you?

So, To Wrap Up…

Many people think that they will make a fortune by slapping private label articles or articles from article directories on their sites. They couldn’t be further from the truth. What those people don’t realize that by just putting some work into it they indeed could be making you a fortune quite quickly!

So, instead of slapping 50 articles a day on your sites, consider putting just five, but give them a simple twist — write an introduction in the beginning and a summary at the end. It will take you an hour or so, but after a week you’ll have 35 new, unique content rich sites that the search engines love. Do this for a couple of months. Of course don’t forget to do the off-page search engine optimization also (getting quality links back to your site)!

Write some articles yourself or outsource them. The rest can be private label articles and articles from article directories — with a twist (lol, I love saying “with a twist”).

You’ll see that in a few months you’ll start getting massive amounts of traffic to your sites! Then it’s just a matter of maintenance which is a lot less work.

I’ve just given you the real “system” to work (with) the search engines. It is extremely rewarding. Think of it as symbiosis (where two or more animal/plant/bacteria species work together for a mutual benefit). You provide relevant and useful content and search engines provide guests to read it. Simple yet profound…

Think about it.

I’d also be very happy to read your comments on this. What do you think?

Have a great day!

Most recently I’ve done a simple experiment. Initially I’ve been going for some easy money, but then it became a great experience with very interesting results…

I’ve set up some promotions for a highly converting product that promises “instant riches” without any investment (other than the course itself), work or preparation. It was kind of funny to me when I was setting those up as I remembered the days I thought this was actually possible.

I posted the promotions on some “free advertising” forums and waited. Needless to say, very soon I started to see sales. On one side I was excited as I was earning quite a nice deal, but on the other side there was this feeling of being sorry for all the people that bought this bogus course. I’ll admit that I haven’t even tried it as experience told me that it CAN’T WORK!

Anyway the sales were good, but in less than 14 days I’ve started to see refunds. Obviously the “system” didn’t work quite as well as described in the sales letter. It didn’t come as a surprise to me. But what did shock me a bit was the refund rates. I mean I have never had refund rates grater than 1%, but here I was experiencing it with almost 100% of people. LOL, was I promoting something THAT bad?

Then it struck me… I was promoting in specific places — free advertising forums…

What kind of people come to free advertising forums? You guessed it — advertisers, and NOT that successful advertisers either. Those forums are (no offence to any one!) swarming with lazy, calculating, and broke people that just can’t make it online. I’m talking very general here and am not saying that ALL the people that come to free advertising forums are like that and that all such forums have such people on them.

So, my experience told me that one important factor to consider if you don’t want huge refund rates with your affiliate promotions was — you have to advertise in the right places!

I mean many, if not all, of the people that bought the “system” I was promoting purchased it with the mind set of asking for a refund. They were a bit curious and wanted to earn money for no work, but they also know the workings of ClickBank and they know they can get a refund within 90 days after purchase. So, many even made the purchase knowing they will ask for a refund after a few days or weeks – regardless of the product quality…

Also they were all from the “Internet marketing” scene (and the product was meant for this market) which makes it even worse.

I have seen a ridiculous post on a great Internet marketing forum the other day… a guy was asking how to get a refund from ClickBank because “he bought an ebook that he finds great, but he really needs the money right now”. The ebook cost him $47! I’m not saying that this isn’t a lot of money, but please. This isn’t fair and if you ask me he shouldn’t be granted a refund though I’m pretty sure he was.

I’m afraid that this is the mentality of almost all newbie internet and affiliate marketers. They don’t realize that they HAVE to spend some money to make it online and that they MUST educate themselves — which sometimes doesn’t come cheap.

Many think that you can get all the information on the Internet for free nowadays. I can’t say it’s not true at all, but the really great stuff, the really extreme information is never free and you can obtain it very rarely.

So, to conclude: how to avoid massive refunds? Simple, just follow these guidelines (it works for me every time):

• make sure the products you promote are of excellent quality (this means you MUST first examine them and see for yourself if they really work)
• try to stay away from the “Internet marketing” scene as people there are more savvy and are much more likely to ask for a refund. This guideline has MANY ”holes” in it, but if you’re very new to this, stick to it!
• avoid advertising on the free advertising forums (NOTE: you should also post on such forums, but don’t solely bet on these!) — especially if you intend to promote “make money online” products

This is simply it. You have to put some work into it, that’s all. Hope your conversions will now soar and your refund rates will go to bare minimum!

Unfortunately a vast majority of people don’t succeed. And it is in many cases because they are victims of one or more of the three main “lethal” misconceptions on Internet marketing. These three misconceptions are discussed in this article…

1. All the Gurus have succeeded overnight and if I don’t, it means I’m not meant to be in the Internet marketing business…

I hope you are very aware that this statement is a complete hogwash. There isn’t a successful Internet marketer that became rich overnight. Many of them spent countless nights behind the computer studying and they probably bought just about every ebook they could get  their hands on.

Yes, some succeeded in 6 months, some took a few years, but none did it overnight! And you probably won’t too (sorry to say it in such a way… in reality there’re always chances you could make it overnight without any work, but they are very slim!).

So, what you can do right now to correct this faulty assumption and start making it really big?

You could make a plan! If you’ve been studying (and I mean actively) Internet marketing for at least 6 months, then you probably already know what to do. Just sit down and write a plan… You know the saying: “He who fails to plan, plans to fail!“

Write your goals… Do you already have a web site? Write a goal of getting 200 visitors a day in two months. Then write a strategy… Going for MSN first, then Yahoo! while waiting for Google to give your site a glimpse; forum advertising (write quality articles and post them or genuinely help people ad put your site in the signature) — incidentally, this technique works wonders when you use it correctly. I’ve had up to 30 unique visitors a day from a single forum! Imagine posting on ten, twenty…; Post articles to article directories etc…

Do one or two things a day… EVERY DAY and you’ll soon (within a month) see massive results. This is soooooo hard to understand for some people it almost makes me cry every now and again. But then I remember that it’s actually good for me — A bigger share of the billions that are being made every day — FOR ME

Anyway, the moral of this first misconception is: don’t go chasing for those “opportunities” all the time. You’ll end up frustrated and broke. Just make a solid plan and stick to it!!! Chunk your work down to pieces — do a little every single day! If you can afford it, hire someone else to do the work for you — be the project manager, not a mere worker…

2. It’s too hard to create a product and sell it online…

Now this is the second most common misconception when it comes to making money online.

In reality, it’s very easy to create “a” product. It’s a little harder to create a great product, but worth it many times over. Product creation consists of 4 easy steps and if you follow them thoroughly, you can literally have a product ready and selling within a month!

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Research the topic you wish to write about (create a .PDF ebook)/talk about (create an MP3)/show (create a video). This is an important step and can also be a lot of fun. Make sure there’s a market for what you want to write about. Do some search — Google is a great start. Search your key term and work from there. If there are millions of sites competing for your topic don’t worry — write about some specific aspect of the more general topic. For example… instead of writing about Internet marketing, write about “How to make money with blog comments the right way”. Be more specific, dig deeper — look for sub-niches!
2. Learn what particularly people want to know about your topic. Join ten forums on our niche and look for frequently asked questions. Read blogs on the topic. It’s a good idea to read relevant magazines — they do a ton of research on what their readers are interested in!
3. Write your sales letter (yes, even before you write your book!). This will make you more creative and you won’t be limited to what you’ve already written. Make it a good sales letter and promise a lot. Then start creating your product and fulfill every promise you made in the letter and then some. This step takes the most physical work. You can even hire someone to do it for you. Go to http://www.elance.com or http://www.rentacoder.com and place a job. You should come through with less then $500. You can get excellent deals there. Just be specific with what you want.
4. Set up an account with clickbank and start selling. Yes, it’s that easy. You won’t be an overnight success this way, but it will take off eventually. At first you’ll have to do all the promotion on your own, but in a matter of months you’ll start seeing affiliates selling your product. It’s the most wonderful site you can imagine

This is basically it. You have to get a lot more involved and technical if you want to make a massive launch — the ones we see only a few of every year. But it is possible. And by the way — people are usually online from 5 to 10 years before they do such a massive launch. Before that they study hard and make a lot of contacts. This is something I talked about in the previous “misconception”.

Oh, one other related thing to this misconception… many people think they must get a special permition from the gurus or whomever to create a product. This was actually a hard one for me to get — you don’t need anyone’s approval. You’re your own master –after all this is why you want to make money from home, right? 

3. There’s absolutely no way I can ever make it so huge online as some guys I know about…

Internet is vast. There are hundreds of millions of people already online and several hundred thousand join the community every day. Do you mean to tell me  that right now there isn’t 10.000 people from all those people that are willing to pay $100 for your product? Sure there are. Many more in fact. You just have to know how to get to them — this is where experience and know-how comes into play…

Study hard and one day very soon you’ll get a million dollar idea. Honestly. Meanwhile create multiple streams of income. create 5 sites that bring in $1000 a month — that’s $5000 a month. Or, if you think it’s more realistic — create 10 sites that bring in $100 a month. Find out what works (read this blog, buy some good ebooks on how to make money online — see the recommended ebooks section of this blog) and then multiply it. Repeat as many times as you want!

I hope now you look at Internet marketing with a slightly different perspective. It isn’t as hard as it seems after a few months of actually doing it and it also isn’t as easy as it seems before you start doing it. But after a while when you get a hang of it and when you really GET IT, it becomes amazingly simple to make money online.

There are three things you should know in order to be a super affiliate:

1. You absolutely must own a quality, responsive list of targeted prospects
2. You must get to quickly evaluate what sells and what doesn’t
3. You must never promote products you’ve never tested before yourself

Seems simple enough, huh? Well, it gets complicated soon enough, so read on…

Let’s go through the first point in this article.

How does one obtain a quality, responsive list? Well, first of all you should know that a relatively small responsive list of about 1000 people can be far better than a list of 10000 untargeted freebie seekers! “Well, DUH”, you say? It’s not so obvious to many affiliate marketers out there, so I thought I should mention this. A lot of people make a mistake of thinking that simply by getting people subscribed to their list they will get rich…

Nothing could be further from the truth. I had to learn this the hard way. When I was starting out, I simply set up an autoresponder of some private label articles I got and put some affiliate links inside. I created a site with some good articles on them and invited people to subscribe to the newsletter for more information. The list grew and pretty soon I had about 200 subscribers. But the problem was… nobody was buying the things I promoted. What was I doing wrong?

I begun my search for an answer and now, after buying almost every book on Internet marketing and listening to countless audios, interviews etc., and of course, having some success myself, I can tell you what the main “ingredients” for a responsive list are: 

• A list must be targeted
• You have to build a relationship and trust with your prospects BEFORE promoting to them
• You have to put what you’re doing into a correct frame
• You must be perceived as an authority on the subject to your subscribers

Now let’s look at each of the points in detail…

A list must be targeted

This shouldn’t be too hard to understand. All this means is… decide what exactly you want to promote (”How to become a super affiliate part 2″) and create an opt-in page where you specifically target people that you think would be interested in the products you’re about to promote.

The more targeted you can get, the better the response you can expect. Be sure to explain exactly what your subscribers should expect when subscribing to your newsletter.

Build a relationship and trust with your prospects BEFORE promoting to them

This is an essential step. You should be very aware of this simple fact: People don’t buy products, they buy YOU. Read the last sentence again! That’s right. How often do you buy from people you’ve just met, and when you do — why do you do it? Would you buy a car from a sleazy guy who’s sort of pushing you to purchase and he unconvincingly promises that the car has never been crashed and that it was very well maintained? Not likely!

It’s the same in Internet marketing. People must trust you first before they’ll buy things through your link. If you seem like you’re just trying to sell something to them they will most likely unsubscribe very soon and you’ll loose a potential customer.

You can build trust by providing relevant and quality information to them and by answering to their questions. Here you should be careful though. Don’t give them too much as that way they might start to perceive you as a source of free info!!! This is to be avoided. You have to find balance.

Don’t wait too long before starting your promotions. A few initial emails with information is great. You can also send a teaser with the second mail saying that you just got your hands on a great product and after you’ve evaluated it you’ll tell your subscribers what it is… then in the third mail tell them all the benefits you got with the product, but still don’t tell them. Let them crave it for a while… Then in the fourth mail give them your affiliate link to the product and maybe offer a bonus for purchasing through you — as a token of appreciation for trusting you or something.

Put what you’re doing into a correct frame

Like I said before, you should always tell exactly what your prospects should expect from you. This includes telling them that from time to time you’ll send them reviews and recommendations for related products they can buy. This way they won’t immediately see you as a source of free information.

Be perceived as an authority on the subject to your subscribers

Last but not least, you should be perceived as an authority on the subject by your prospects. This is very important as if they perceive you as such, they will be much more likely to purchase what you recommend.

You can do this by writing an ebook on the subject and selling it online. You won’t believe how much authority you gain if you have such a thing to show to your prospects. Just by having a professional looking web site you’ll most probably be viewed as a guru! You can have everything done for you for a couple of hundred of dollars. Look at it as an investment. It pays off many times over! If you don’t have money to spend at the beginning, then I suggest you get a job and earn some before trying to make money from the Internet. You MUST make some sort of investment.

Nothing is for free! (except if you have a helluva lot of time on your hands)

Alternatively, you can write your own ebook, your own sales letter, create your own graphic etc. Most likely none of the things (except perhaps the ebook) will look professional and you’ll loose many, many points for that!

In Internet marketing a great deal is in appearances. Most of the great Internet marketing “companies” you see online are one guy owning a company. Sometimes he or she hires somebody to check their mail and respond to the customers. But mostly it’s just a single guy or gal like you and me that made a very different perception of themselves to us, the customers.

To finish this article, I’ll just tell you about a simple “trick” you can do to make your list responsive beyond your wildest dreams…

Like I said before, create an ebook and offer it to your existing list for a very small price ($10 or so, even $5 or $1 will do). Make sure you justify the low price — because they are your loyal subscribers. After they purchase your product, sign them up to a new list and have them automatically unsubscribe from the previous one. Now you have a smaller list, but this one is much more likely to bring you massive profits when you email them a promotion… after all, they’ve already shown you they have money to spend and they trust you enough to spend it on you!

You can very easily automatically unsubscribe people after they joined your other list with Aweber (link opens in a new window), an Internet marketer’s choice autoresponder service. Please don’t go for anything else. I’ve been burned quite a lot because I wanted to go cheap on the autoresponder.

Aweber is $19.95 a month — that’s $0.67 a day. Almost anybody can afford that and it will bring you so much advantage that it’s not worth going for anything else. Trust me on this one.

OK, now you know the first part of the secrets of becoming a super affiliate. Now start building that list!