Internet marketers who don’t want to be left behind should have Web 2.0 strategies as part of their whole marketing push, and understanding how to use this platform properly could influence their bottom line dramatically.

With social marketing, people openly discuss products and services they have used or are interested in – and they are quick to condemn, slow to praise. And it’s no secret that your competitors could be lurking in forums quietly feeding negative comments about your products.

For those who have not yet embraced social media marketing – on sites such as ViralNetworks, YouTube, Facebook, Warrior Forum, MySpace, Twitter, and eHow, here are a few tips on its use:

• Get educated: Understand what different platforms are out there, and see if there is one that is devoted to your niche.

• Think strategically: Only target social media sites that are frequently used by your target audience. Don’t spend time on cat sites if you are selling a ‘how-to’ guide to making websites.

• Get involved. You must give and take in social sites. Don’t pack your posts with sales links – you will be banned or ignored. Provide quality information in your poses, and where allowed, and a subtle website link in your signature. Join in conversations – don’t just write posts and forget them. See what others are talking about, and contribute. Valuable posts will be bookmarked and shared.

• On your own blogs and static sites, make sure you have bookmark buttons – help your content to travel.

• Search engines love multimedia, so use videos and podcasts as part of your Web 2.0 strategies. If you find someone asking a ‘how to’ question in a forum, reply with a video of exactly ‘how to’. Interviews are great to podcast, so why not have someone interview you about some new ‘technique’ you’ve developed?

• As with all internet marketing strategies, measuring and monitoring is important with social media marketing too. You should be aware of how many people are reading your posts, becoming your ‘friends’ or ‘followers’, and whether comments on your products and services are negative or positive.

Social media marketing gives you the ability to convert visitors to fans to customers, and you need to allocate a certain time every day for social networking at your chosen sites. It could be as little as half an hour, but if done well, could grow your prospect and client base considerably.

If you are in Internet Marketing or any form of online business, ViralNetworks is a Business Social Network and as such is well targeted to your products and services. Follow the rules above, add value, make and share videos and watch your friends convert to fans and fans convert to buyers. If you haven’t yet, join and start networking with me today on ViralNetworks!

What Do You Know About Affiliate Marketing

As you already know, Internet marketing uses the Internet to market products as well as their promotion. You can be using this method to promote your own products or the products of others.

This is where we get into the affiliate programs and how they can benefit you financially by earning commission on the quality products you are promoting for others.

There are several avenues of marketing that you can use such as your website and web pages, personal blogs and Email Opt-in lists. You are going to promote the product with a squeeze page or promotional letter, In your letter, you will include an affiliate link which will contain the affiliate identifier.

With your affiliate identifier link, your visitors will click on the link, be sent to the product sales page or website, and with their purchase, you will be given a percentage of the sales price. This is very similar to sales in brick and mortar stores, however with an affiliate program, your part is very simple and self running. All you need to do is do the initial set up and optimize the traffic.

You need to realize though that Not All Affiliate Programs are the same, so choose wisely.

What you need to know and look for in choosing the right affiliate program:

1) Training and Support

Affiliate programs will usually provide training and support, which is crucial for those just starting out on Internet Marketing. This is so important as it will be the only way for you to become effective as well as profitable. You need to look for affiliate which offers sufficient training and the know how in selling their product. There are however, Internet marketers who have experienced great success in affiliates without the training and support, but wouldn’t it be nice to have that training and support?

2) Look for High Commissions

You are going to put in the effort to bring in the traffic to the affiliate product with your sales pitch, then directing the customers to the affiliate sales page, and for your well earned efforts, you will receive a percentage of the sale in form of commissions. As you look at the different Affiliate programs to market, look at the amount of commission they offer, some are hardly worth your effort.

The most popular site to promote affiliate programs is Clickbank. You will soon see that Clickbank is the largest online marketplace on the Internet. Clickbank places hundreds of thousands of products which are sold on a daily basis. There are some that pay up to 75% of the purchase price.

3) Affiliate Referral Programs

There are a few programs that will offer you a chance to recommend their affiliate programs yourself. This sill ultimately award you with a greater percentage of all the sales generated for the program you recommend. This is where your viral marketing techniques will come in effect, the more you recommend, the more money you will make.

4) Triple Combination; Affiliate Training and Support, Referral Commission and Product Commission

You will be happy to know that there are some programs out there that offer the best of all three worlds of affiliate marketing. You can have all of these with training to help you in your marketing efforts. A wonderful example of this is the Internet Marketing Center’s Affiliate program. With this combination, you can reap huge commission benefits.

You can make some good money with Internet marketing bringing you closer and closer to your goal of financial freedom. But remember, you need to be willing to put in the time and effort.

Traffic is something we all want when it comes to our websites and blogs. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the one method that is rising to the top is through RSS FEEDS. For Starters, what is rss feed?

What is RSS Feed?

I recently wrote an article on ‘what is an RSS feed, and how to Set them up“. Here is the followup article to that. If you haven’t read the first one yet, click here to do so now.

What does RSS stand for? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Remote Site Syndication. They both mean the same thing, so it doesn’t really matter what you call it. No matter the name, it works as a great traffic generating tool. You could go to any popular news website and see the feed options. This is a great way to stay on top of the latest headlines and news all over the world.

How Do You Get RSS Feeds?

You subscribe by clicking on the RSS button, then you will automatically get the news into your reader, or a reminder on your homepage. This is a simple way to stay in touch with your favorite websites and blogs. Are there advantages to RSS over Email Marketing?

Yes, and the main advantage is there are never any spam complaints, you have a 100% deliverability without any of the problems. You can usually count on your message being delivered to the readers.

When you have set up your RSS feed, you should submit it to the RSS FEED directories. Your message will have greater exposure to readers. You can do this in a matter of minutes then gain all the benefits.

A great site to read up on this is rssfeedgenerate.com. Here you will find some great instructions on the “How To’s”.

Another recommendation is to check out Mashables RSS Toolbox.

Does RSS Help Search Engine Rankings?

RSS is a fantastic tool for increasing rankings on the search engines, that is if you have it on your website. You probably already know that search engines love the websites that are continually updating their content, and the RSS Feeds will help your website to accomplish this. You will therefore achieve higher rankings on the search engines as well as increasing your website traffic. This is a win-win situation!

The keys to making money on the Internet is to increase your traffic and build up a mailing list. You can do this by using RSS Feeds, if you don’t take advantage of this great tool, you will be missing out and tons of opportunities.

There are 5 Key Points in using RSS Feeds to help you monetize your website and bring in lots of traffic.

1. Learn how to use RSS Feeds, If you aren’t sure how they work, educate yourself, start using this great tool and become familiar with it.

2. Attach links from other blogs and websites which will increase your your own popularity and traffic to your links.

3. Once you set up your RSS Feed, submit it to the RSS directories. This will increase your search engine ranking and increase the popularity of your link.

4. Keep your RSS Feed up to date which will have your site indexed by the search engines frequently.

5. Take advantage of the RSS Press Release. You will be able to use this instead of email marketing, helping you to spread your information and news to your readers the moment it comes in.

6. This is great for real-time advertising. Let’s say for example that you have a client that wants a particular product that you currently out of. You can use RSS to notify him when it comes available. Your customer will be well served and this will increase their loyalty to you. You will be taking care of your clients which will bring more money to you.

7. It is so important to create your own Brand! You are establishing your own credibility which is huge in this business. You will be putting your name out in front your readers just by using RSS Feeds. You will eventually become a trusted source of information.

You should now have a few ideas on how RSS Feeds can be used to generate traffic which is the key to your success.

Follow Me on Twitter: http://www.TwitterColin.com/ – I will Follow You Right Back!

Having said that, I am sick of people new to the industry feeling they need to spam their affiliate links all over the web. 99.99% of the time with no result other then to make yourself look like a tosser!

Comments are moderated these days so it’s a waste of time making spam posts, they won’t get approved. It wastes your time, my time and does nothing but hurt your reputation.

This is a short ‘Rant’ post because like a second hand car salesman business, there are some VERY good and VERY honest people that sell used cars; but if you say you are ‘used car salesman’ what is the response you get from others? Friends, Family? Do they say ‘wow, that is awesome!’? I doubt it…

Well our industry has a similar connotation! Even though we have so many great, amazing marketers who’s main focus and goal is to educate others and help them lead a better life… there are, due to the ease of labeling, ‘internet marketers’ who spam, fail and clog up our industry and with it the reputation of those of us who want to be positive and make a real difference!

Where am I going with this? Well anyone can be an ‘internet marketer’ even if you lose money at it! You can still self proclaim yourself an ‘internet marketer’. Guess what, if you post a bunch of spam, or even comment on forums promoting a product or service, you are ‘marketing’ on the ‘internet’, welcome: ‘internet marketer’.

From now on, I am an…. Interactive Marketer!

The difference? I interact with people both followers and friends and we work together to produce better results then are currently available, we work to advance the standard and truly help and educate people.

I challenge you to label yourself an ‘Interactive Marketer’ and walk the walk!

Check out the Posting Contest I have running: Click HERE to learn how you can win $100!

]]> http://www.colinklinkert.com/thanks-i-am-no-longer-an-internet-marketer/feed/ 26 http://www.colinklinkert.com/what-is-a-blog/ http://www.colinklinkert.com/what-is-a-blog/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:56:12 +0000 Colin Klinkert http://www.colinklinkert.com/?p=62

]]> What is a Blog?

This is a very basic introduction into ‘what is a blog’, the purpose of this post is to explain what is a blog to people reading blogs for the first time, or hear people talking about blogs, know what a blog is. Soon I will create a post on ‘how to make a blog’, but don’t worry, this is the most basic the content on this site will get.

you can either read the post: ‘what is a blog?’ below, or you can download the PDF by clicking HERE. Feel free to use it on your sites if you want to.

A blog is a weB LOG, therefore, BLOG.

A blog is a way to keep a journal in the form of a website.  A great and simple way to manage and publish your content with a platform. You can choose the style, write about your interests,  hobbies, even sell products.  You don’t need to know html, or any other type of computer language to create a blog.  You just need a computer and know how to type.

A blog can be whatever you want it to be.  It can be a place where you share and collect thoughts, as well as put them in an organized manner.  We all want to be heard, and there are times when you REALLY want to be heard.  This is a time to get on your blog and say what’s on your mind.  You have a way to publish your thoughts and opinions and put it out to the world.

A blog can include web links, affiliate products, adsense, which are great for creating income with your blog.  There are millions of people who make a lot of money just from their blogs, and there is no reason why you can’t do this too.

Blogs can be focused on your personal interests, hobbies, maybe you have been traveling and want to create a photo-blog.  A blog can be anything from news to gossip to politics.  Whatever the topic, it is available for public review.

What is a blog comprised of?   There are several features in a blog including;

* content; your thoughts, opinions, ideas, complaints, grievances, proud moments, celebrations, and so much more.
* archives of information
* comments
* photos
* videos
* pod-casts

The great thing about a blog is the archive feature.  A website does not have a way to store and access archived information, where a blog can go way back since the beginning of its creation.  Your blog is open to others, anyone can subscribe to your blog and they will know when you add new content to read.  You no longer need to feel like you aren’t heard, you can express yourself as much as you want, and say what you want.

What is a blog?  A way to be heard and make yourself known.  Anyone can be a published writer now, so go ahead, join us.  You think it may be too difficult?  It is simple to write a blog.  A blog is simply an email that you are sending out to the world.  If you can write an email, then you can write a blog.  It is so simple that you can post on your blog within a few minutes, you can add pictures of your family, or your vacation.  You are producing a journal that can be read and seen all over the web.

Check out the Posting Contest I have running: Click HERE to learn how you can win $100!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…