WebMarketingSucks.com

PPC prices keep going up. Google’s far reaching and overbearing tentacles can send your PPC campaign down in flames. MSN’s Adcenter is just a joke and Yahoo Search Marketing, is still as slow, strange and corrupt as always.

SEO can take months to show and results and it takes a lot of work too.

So what’s an internet marketer to do? Cloak that’s what!

Lots of people have heard of cloaking but most don’t really know what it is. If you read some forums the pious and arrogant often deride it as “cheating”, “unethical” or just plain bad. But the reason many of them don’t like it is because it flat out works and it beats out their pages in the search engines. There’s nothing bad about it, there’s nothing unethical about it, and there’s definitely nothing illegal about it! (Search engines are not legal entities and don’t make laws regardless of what they think about themselves.)

Most people probably see cloaked sites quite often and don’t even know it. It’s actually fairly common but of course it is “under ground” so to speak. Many of the REALLY BIG internet marketers use it although few will actually admit it. It can really be a black art and it’s often shrouded in mystery.

So what is cloaking? It’s simply showing the search engines one thing and showing a visitor another. Why would you want to do that? Well to give the search engines exactly what they want that’s why. They make their algorithms for certain pages to rank high and so you give them exactly what they want. The problem with that is that the pages that the search engines want are not necessarily the same one’s that your visitors want. It’s as simple as that.

With the search engines’ “god complex” they often force you to create content that they want regardless of what you the marketer, the store owner, the person who knows your customers best want to give your client. It often happens that your customer’s will tell you they want something specifically but if you give it to them your search engine ranking will suffer.

So I say give the search engines exactly what they want! They ask for it they get it. Then you also give your clients what they want and everyone wins. And the best part is, you can build hundreds or thousands of pages in a matter of minutes. Pages that the search engines will love. And think about it…if you can build hundreds of pages that fast, why not build hundreds of sites fast too! With cloaking you can do that.

Now there are some challenges with cloaking too just like with any traffic generation method. Obviously the search engines don’t like it and if they find a cloaked site they will probably delist it. The solution is to not cloak your “money site”, just build cloaked sites that point to your money site.

Another thing is that you have to have basic site building and web skills. You should know HTML and know how to set up a site and not be afraid to go “under the hood” to set things up. Of course you can also just hire people to do the work for you until you figure it out yourself. That was my first step. I hired a pro and then copied what he did over and over. I figure I saved myself lots of headaches by doing that.

So basically those are the only things you need to be aware of when considering cloaking. Other than that there’s really no down side to it.

Another thing…since you can build sites so quickly you can just build your own network of sites. The you don’t have to worry about going around getting links to your site anymore, you just create your own links! It’s pretty cool.

If you’d like to learn more about cloaking I cover it in my course. You can also find some info about it on the web but since this is something that the search engines don’t like, the cloaking communities tend to be rather tight and paranoid. They don’t want the search engines to figure out their secrets you know.

This is the cloaking software that I personally use I’ve found it to be the best and the easiest to use. It also has a good support community which is priceless.

So there you go. There’s the secret that many successful marketers use but few will talk about. It’s a traffic generation tool just like PPC, SEO, link-building, articles and the rest. Basically you can look at it as SEO (search engine optimization) because that’s exactly what it is. It’s just hundreds of times faster and more efficient than doing it the old fashioned way.

Just think, you can build dozens or hundreds of sites and thousands of pages pointing towards your affiliate sites, your adsense sites, or your own product sites. Basically almost anything that you do right now to make money online, you can amplify with the power of cloaking.

So that’s the story. Let me know what you think about all this by leaving a comment below.

Here’s to more profit!

Technorati Tags: cloaking, cloak, internet+marketing, traffic+generation, PPC, SEO

These are some tools/programs/sites that you may find helpful in your quest to make money on the internet.

Of course in my Internet Marketing Course I go into much more detail, and cover many more tools (many of them free), sites, and methods to increase your internet profits.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #3–Some Ways to Make Money on the Internet

Blogging
There is a ton of free info about setting up blogs so I won’t go into that here.

But if you’re looking to make some money with blogging then you may want to check out Rob’s course Blogging to the Bank. I met Rob a few months ago at a conference and he knows his stuff. He’s making over $1000/day blogging which is pretty darn good. His course shows you how he does it. He was selling it for about $100 but every once in a while he has a special sale for only $27 which is just too cheap.

Wordpress
This is generally the way to go for setting up free blogs. It’s easy to set up with the fantastico program in your web site’s control panel. There are thousands of people making little add-ons that do some pretty cool things, and there is a very active support community.

Blogger
Lots of people use blogger as their first blog because it is free and easy to set up. The negatives are that you won’t own and control the actual site/domain. Also Google (who own blogger) is known to quite often delete blogs that they don’t like. You might have fun playing with it or use it for getting links and traffic to one of your other sites, but for serious blogging wordpress is the way to go.

Yahoo Stores
As I mentioned in the audio, Yahoo stores are a quick and easy (relatively speaking) way to get an e-commerce site up on the net.

Their plans start at about $40/month and include:

• Store design
• Product catalog
• Shopping cart and checkout
• Customer service
• Marketing
• Promotion
• Order processing
• Payment processing
• Shipping and tax calculation
• Web site hosting
• Email addresses

That’s a lot of value for $40 a month. If you want to set up an ecommerce site this is probably the best way to go. That is unless you prefer to set all of this up on your own.

Yahoo Store Builder How to Information
Andy Jenkins is the go to guy for Yahoo Stores and his How to Create a Profitable e-Commerce Store course is the best out there. Andy know what he’s talking about and he has a few Yahoo Stores that bring in over 7 figures a year EACH! His Yahoo Store Builder program contains over 4 hours of video instruction along with a 200 page manual. If you want to build a Yahoo store then this course will get you started and show you a lot of shortcuts to quicker profits.

Affiliate Marketing

In my opinion this is the best affiliate marketing book out there.

Rosalind Gardner’s ebook The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s
Stuff Online explain the details and the ins and outs of affiliate marketing very well. (By the way, Rosalind is making a LOT more than $436,797 a year these days.)

It’s huge at 273 pages. She takes you step by step encompassing all parts of the business including: selecting niches, keyword research, finding products to promote, finding merchants, planning and building your site, selling, marketing, and managing your business. If you’re going into affiliate marketing then this is a must have. Even if you’re not going into affiliate marketing there is still a lot of very valuable information that any web marketer could learn from.

Making Your Own Products

Information products (Ebooks, audio, and video products) The real way to build wealth on the internet.
If you’re going to be making your own information products then you’ll find no better tutorial than the Underachiever iPack. (So named because these guys try to do as little actual work as possible.)

This is put together by two of the top dogs in the info marketing game-Frank Kern and Ed Dale. I’ve met and talked to them both and they’re straight-up guys (but pretty nutty.) They know this business inside and out and both make many millions of dollars a year selling little $30-$40 ebooks. They’re offering 3 DVD’s filled with audio and video presentations and PDF’s. They’ll teach you in great detail how to find profitable niches, create your own info products, build web sites, and market your business. The Underachiever iPack is not cheap let me tell you up front. BUT if you’re going to make a go of information marketing then you will not find a more comprehensive course to get you started. I’ve learned a lot from them both through their courses and also at their live conference presentations. One more thing…Frank is known as one of the best email marketers/writers out there. You can learn a LOT from him just by reading his emails.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #4–Niches, Customers, and Keywords

Finding Niches

If you’re going to make your own products, promote affiliate products, or sell or market anything online then you’ll need to do some niche and product research. How else will you know what your customers are searching
for? Even if you already have a product or a niche that you’re in, you still may want to use some of these resources for further research and information.

Clickbank.com
See what’s selling already and promote it yourself as an affiliate.
Find a hot product/niche, make your own version of it, sell it.
Get ideas for your own products or possible affiliate niches by looking at other products.

Amazon.com
Search these sites to see what people are buying and what they’re interested in. Chances are, if they’re buying here they might buy something for you. You can drill down through the categories and find niches upon niches and sub-niches upon sub-niches. For instance on Ebay you can click on a category and it will show you all of the sub-categories along with the top10 selling and most searched for categories. On Amazon you can drill down into categories and it will even show you related categories and other items that people bought. On Magazines.com
you can find all kinds of niche magazines. You can bet if there is a magazine for some thing, hobby, sport, etc. that there are people who are interested in it and probably spending money.

Nichebrowser.com
This is a very good FREE niche research product. It’s got tons of bells and whistles and will really cut down on your research time. It combines a lot of search and research tools into one place.

Wordtracker
Wordtracker is the granddaddy of keyword research and is the best. It’s very comprehensive and you can make a huge list of keywords and also find related words that you may have never thought about with it’s thesaurus feature. It also can look for common misspellings, which is quite nice for getting traffic that your competitors probably miss.

You can use it for a single day for about $7-8, and they also offer weekly, monthly, and yearly options at very discounted prices.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #5–Driving Massive Amounts of Traffic

Search Engine Cloaker
This is one of my favorite tools for driving traffic. You can build sites with hundreds or thousands of pages really quickly. The search engines don’t like it but that’s because it works so well.

You can’t buy it until they first “check you out” to make sure you’re not a search engine employee. You have to sign up with your email address and then later, if you’re “approved” Peter will tell you how to buy it.
Affiliates

Recruit other people to sell/promote your product. Simple ways are through:

Clickbank.com
The largest marketplace for promoting downloadable affiliate products. There fees are pretty high and they have a lot of strict rules to follow, but they can drive lots of affiliates to your product.

Selected Excerpts from Audio #7–Putting Together a Money Making Plan

Miscellaneous Tools/Sites You May Find Useful

SiteSell
Sitesell is quite valuable for those who want a whole “do-it-yourself-package” that is both quick, easy, and holds your hand from start to finish.

Sitesell combines:

• Web site hosting
• Point-and-click site design
• Market research
• Blogging
• Newsletter Publishing
• Email spam checking
• Search engine optimization and tracking
• Pay per click advertising research and bidding
• Online help
• Customer support
• And more things than I can list here.

It’s an incredible value. You get ten times what you pay without a doubt.

So if you’re looking for a huge all-in-one web site package this is a great deal. It’s especially good for newbies because of all the hand-holding that they do. They really do take you step by step through the entire process.

The results speak for themselves…62% of Sitesell’s users are ranked in the TOP 3% of all web sites in terms of traffic. That’s an amazing statistic!

You can use their video tour if you’d like more information:
Video Tour of the Features

Xsitepro
This is a very cool site design program. It was specifically designed for Internet Marketers and is a whole lot cheaper than Dreamweaver and Frontpage. It’s much easier to use too.

Here are some of the things that XSitePro does that benefit Internet Markets:

• Quickly add google adsense ads
• Change template And the look of your site in minutes
• Quick site maps for the search engines
• Auto updating of menus when you add pages
• easy page editor/Quick learning curve
• Suggested Actions List to improve search engine rankings
• A lot more that other more expensive programs don’t do

GoDaddy.com
Register domain names for your site.
Aweber
If you’re going to have customers you’re going to need to communicate with them. An autoresponder service (like Aweber) is essential.

The basics of it are this: You get your customer’s email address when they buy from you, or if you’re going to give out a free report or something and then you can set up a series of emails to go out automatically to them. That’s why it’s called an autoresponder–because it happens automatically.

The beauty of it is, you can create a series of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 emails or however many you like, and these will be sent to your customers automatically. You can use this to tell them about other products you have, give them more information, sell them affiliate products, and a lot more. You’re only limited by your imagination.

I’ve tested a couple of other autoresponder services and Aweber is by far the best and most people in this industry will tell you the same thing. The price they charge is insanely low–less than $20 a month. So really, if you’re in any internet business where you have customers this is a “must-have.”
Conclusion
So there you go. These are a few of the products and services that we cover in my Internet Marketing Course.

But just remember…don’t buy anything just because I recommend it, or anyone else recommends it. Like I talked about in the audio’s, you need to be clear on your goals and vision (which we cover.) That way you can decide if a certain tool fits into your business plan or not.

Again, if you’d like more information on my Internet Marketing Course Click Here.

Good luck with everything and I wish you much success!

Technorati Tags: internet+marketing, web+marketing, internet+marketing+tools, internet+marketing+instruction, internet+marketing+course, xsite+pro, aweber, underachiever+ipack, search+engine+cloaker, keyword+monster, keyword+research, blog, blogging, profit, make+money+home, sitesell, clickbank, blog+ping, how+to, yahoo+store

Diversify, that’s what my old financial adviser told me. And I used to believe it and go with the herd mentality until I met a different kind of adviser who showed me the truth about diversifying your assets and got me into some much better investments.

But this post is not about finance and investing. This post is about internet marketing.

For years I did the same thing on the internet. I made money in about a dozen different ways, some ways made more than others. But it was a major pain in the ass trying to keep track of everything. I was truly the “Jack of all trades master of none” and it was really taking it’s toll on me.

Now over the last several months you’ve heard Rich Schefren talking about how you need to focus on one thing and do it well instead of trying to do several things and doing none of them particularly well. I’ve even heard the legendary John Reese start talking about this lately, even though he is the king of doing a million different things. In fact, not so long ago John was promoting what he called “Virtual Real Estate Empire” or VRE. Which was in essence having a ton of sites making you money. So his change in thinking is significant. (Or maybe it’s ironic?)

The point is, just like my financial adviser told me, diversification is not all it’s cracked up to be. It can leave you spread too thinly, with too much work, not enough time, and bottom line…with less money in your pocket.

In my business I’ve cut out many things since adopting this new mindset. I’ve let several web sites lapse, I’ve stopped using some software, I’ve unsubscribed to many, many, email lists. In short, I’ve taken stock of the businesses I have, which are profitable, which are not profitable, plans for new sites, and almost every different part of my business.

I’ve pared down all the different things that I used to do (some not so well) into fewer things that I can do well.
I’m not completely focused on ONLY one thing like Rich talks about, but I’m getting closer. I’m not even sure that I will ever get down to doing ONLY one thing, but heading in that direction definitely helps.

This new mindset has even given me more motivation to outsource more work. I’ve been able to completely outsource some businesses so that I don’t have to do any of the work anymore but I still get the profits. Yes the profits may be less than they were when I did it all myself, but this gives me more TIME which is more valuable than money.

So how are you doing in your business? Are you trying to do 126 different things a day and doing none of them particularly well? Then maybe you should also look into de-diversifying (I don’t even know it that’s a word) and getting more focus so that you can do one thing well instead of doing many things not so well.

Diversity might be good for some things, but in business it’s generally not all it’s cracked up to be. What do you think?

Good luck with it!

Technorati Tags: internet+marketing+business, time+management, best+business+practices, diversify+business,

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve grown totally sick of all the hype and bullshit in the internet marketing business. Sure you can make a lot of money, but you have to sift through so much garbage, lies, and bad information before you can actually figure out HOW to make money in internet marketing.

So I decided to put my money where my mouth is. I’ve created a 7 MP3 audio course that’s over 5 hours long about how to cut through all of the crap and how to actually make money online.

I give the pros and cons of many ways that I’ve found to make money, and I also give you a list of the tools that I use to make 5 figures a month. I tried to NOT be to “hypey” but I ended up getting so excited about what I’d put together that I probably did get a little carried away.

Anyway, just visit my site WebMarketingSucks.com and you can get all the answers.

I’ve tried to help you learn about internet marketing and figure out how to make money online. I’ve told you about the mistakes I’ve made and the money I’ve wasted trying to figure it all out so you won’t have to do that too.

I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of it.

Here’s to your success!

Brad
WebMarketingSucks.com

Technorati Tags: internet+marketing, web+marketing, make+money+online, seo, PPC

Mike Filsaime recently reported that according to his research, 59.06% of people marketing online (those who consider themselves “internet marketers” have been doing it for less than one year. Wow! That’s incredible!

I didn’t realize it was that high. I guess it’s like anything, once you’ve been doing it for years you forget how much you’ve learned and how much you used to NOT know. I realize that sometimes when I’m teaching internet marketing to friends. I’ll say something that I think is perfectly clear and they look at me like I’m speaking martian or something. When you throw around words like marketing funnel or acronyms like SEO or PPC you’re speaking in the shorthand of your industry, but to someone just getting into the market it makes absolutely no sense.

But anyway, the point of all this is that some of the things that we think are so simple and that everyone already knows are actually things that everybody doesn’t know.

The great Marlon Sanders has come up with the video learning system that teaches you some of the basics– basic site design, registering domain names, buying site hosting, setting DNS, making nice-looking images, writing sales letters, adding cool graphics to your site, and more than I can go into here. Even if you’re not a newbie, there are still some really cool tricks that you can learn from this series. The best part of it is he’s selling it for dirt cheap. I don’t know how he can afford to do that but he is.

You can get more information by clicking here.

By the way, just to toot my own horn a bit…

As I’ve realized that there are so many newbies to the internet marketing game I’ve thought back on how I learned it all. It took a long time and I made a lot of mistakes, and I blew a lot of money in the process.

So I decided to put a lot of the information that I’ve discovered over the years into a teaching program of sorts. It’s an audio learning series where I teach you things like figuring out your strengths and talents and how to use them to make more money on the internet, explain the pros and cons of many different ways to make a buck on the net, driving traffic, sales and marketing, and a whole lot more.

There is over 5 hours of audio on 7 MP3’s along with a reference page of materials, links, and most of the software that I use personally. It’s worth a lot more than I’m selling it for because like the title of this site says. I’m just so sick of all the marketing hype. Anyway, just check out the home page of my site for more information.

Here’s the link:
Internet Marketing Course for Newbies and Not so Newbies. I hope you dig it!
I am thinking of giving away several copies FREE so that I can get some good feedback before it goes on the market.

Talk to you soon,

Brad

Technorati Tags: internet+marketing, learn+internet+marketing, web+marketing, home+business, newbie, internet+marketing+course