How To Start An Internet Business From Anywhere. Even Malaysia!

Archive for the ‘Internet-Marketing’ Category

My TweetMeme Plugin Is Not Working.

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

My TweetMeme plugin is not really working properly. When I’ve tried ‘tweeting’ my own posts just to see if the number increases, it doesn’t work.

I’m not sure if that’s because you’re not meant to ‘retweet’ your own posts and that’s why it’s not increasing, or if I’ve set it up wrong.

Could someone do me a favour and just Tweet or Re-tweet this post so that I can troubleshoot?

If the number increases, great, if not, will have to consider using an alternative method of allowing my readers to re-tweet.

Your help would be greatly appreciated,

Cheers,

-William

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Posted in Twitter | 2 Comments »

My Twitter Follow Count Has Maxed Out!

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

For those of you who are following me and not being automatically followed back, I’m really sorry, I’ve reached a limit (for now).

Basically what Twitter does is that they impose a limit to how many people you can follow (2000 people) and they will not lift that limit until your total number of followers equals 2000 as well.

I’m currently a couple hundred short, so till I get those followers, I apologise for not following you back!

Thanks,

-William Lee

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Posted in Twitter | No Comments »

What Is Affiliate Internet Marketing?

Friday, March 6th, 2009

I won’t lie to you, this is a test of my SEO skills by writing an article on what is ‘affiliate internet marketing’ and how people are making money from it.

I’ve been doing localized Google searches (web pages from Malaysia) and realized that not many websites have the term above in their URL. Also, this term in general is searched quite regularly according to Google’s keyword tool, so by assumption, there should be quite a lot of localized searches for it too.

Although the mighty Google bot can search through text and find out a lot of information, I doubt they will be able to read my intentions if I actually DO write an article about affiliate marketing on the Internet.

Well here goes:

What is Affiliate Marketing Anyway?

685pxaffiliate-marketing-illustration.png

From Wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

From the point of view of the average Internet marketer, it is being paid comission by selling somebody elses products on behalf of them. For every sale that is made, you will typically get between 50% – 75% of the total sale price of the product.

From the point of view of the advanced Internet marketer, affiliate marketing is the process of building a strong affiliate marketing network, providing them with all the materials they need in order to make the most sales as possible.

For every sale that they make, you only take a small % of the total sale price, but you will most of the time require little to no advertising on your behalf, your affiliates are you arms and legs to the niche or market you are targeting.

Which Method Makes More Money Online?

Typically the product creator with a huge affiliate network working under him would make the most money, even though he or she may only be receiving 25% or less of the product price.

But put it this way, which is easier? You selling 5 items at 100% profit? OR a 1000 strong army of affiliates selling 1 item each at only 25% profit? You do the maths.

That being said, there are some super affiliates who make a KILLING with affiliate commissions. But I still think the product creator has a much bigger advantage than the affiliate.

Which Is Easier To Start?

Starting as an affiliate selling on behalf of the product creator is the easiest way to start. You get all the marketing materials provided for, you don’t have to create the product, basically you just drive traffic to them.

Clickbank.com and CJ.com are great places to start looking for products to push to your website’s viewers…

But in the long run, product creation is the best way to go, building your affiliate marketing base and get other Internet marketers to drive traffic for you rather than paying for it yourself.

Good luck,

-William Lee

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 4 Comments »

Is Internet Marketing Immoral?

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

As an Internet marketer, do you sometimes think that what you’re doing tiptoes on the lines of immorality?

I mean, some of the strategies you use to get people to pick up your products can sometimes be questionable right?

Have you ever used a pseudonym on a ‘niche’ site, where you are trying to promote an affiliate product using the social proof method?

That’s basically where you pretend to be someone else and the entire contents of the web page or blog are telling your story of how you went from (fat/poor) to (thin/rich) and how you did it because of product X.

How many of these sites do you think are out there? Not many I hear you say… think again.

Have you ever come across any of those blogs aptly named ‘Jenny’s weight loss blog’ or something similar? And when you open it up to read the contents, it shows a wonderful before (fat) and after (thin) picture of ‘Jenny’ and how she managed to accomplish it all with the use of the magical Acai berry.

And what’s more, OPRAH SAYS IT WORKS TOO!

Did you know you can buy before and after pictures from the Internet? I’ve seen people asking for it at many a forum.

So ‘Jenny’ might not actually be ‘Jenny’…

Does this offend your sense of what’s right or wrong?

How about those Internet marketing specific products which teach you how to make money online?

Where they claim ‘I Made $100,000 In 30 Days!’ and ‘You Can Do It Too!’ for a price of $78 $68 $38! Hurry! Only 2 days left!

Have you bought one of these before to find that the product is a super general e-book on Internet marketing in general and that there’s no real meat behind their promises?

But deep inside you know that this kind of product is what sells best and that you provide at 30 day money back guarantee! So if they are not happy with the product, they should return it for their money. It’s their own fault if they don’t.

But even deeper inside you know that statistics show that alot of people who buy e-books tend to forget about them until it’s too late to ask for your money back.

How about this? Does this disturb your morality meter a bit?

Or is this what needs to be done to make money online…

Well that’s up for you to decide. I didn’t title this article ‘Internet Marketing IS immoral’ or ‘Internet Marketing ISN’T immoral’.

I asked you, ‘Is Internet Marketing Immoral?’

Always questioning,

-William Lee

p.s. Make 100,000 In 30 Days! Click Here To Find Out The ‘Secret’ To Making Money Online!

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Posted in Internet-Marketing | No Comments »

Domain Name Masking and Redirects For Affiliate Marketing

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Sending people to an affiliate page is key for us affiliate marketers as that’s where the sale can be made and your commission earned.

However, affiliate marketing does suffer from two major drawbacks, a) people sometimes don’t like clicking a link which says: http://lwliang1.maverick66.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=10 because more and more people know what an affiliate link looks like now a days.

b) and even if they DO click, they can easily remove the ‘lwliang1’ in the above example, continue with the purchase of the product and rob you of your commission!

So what is a struggling Internet marketer going to do?

Well the simplest way is to mask your affiliate link and use that to send people to the affiliate site.

Masking With Tiny URL

This is by far the simplest way of masking your domain. Go to http://tinyurl.com or http://pinurl.com.

tinyurl.jpgType in your long URL that shows your affiliate ID and click ‘Make TinyURL’. It will result in something like this: http://tinyurl.com/bhtq54.

That looks alot better right? It increases the chance that people will click through on the link because they’re not sure if it’s an affiliate link or not.

mav.jpg

However, there is still one drawback. When you click on the link, it will still show your affiliate ID in the address bar of your browser. People can still remove your ID, continue with their purchase and take your commission away from you!

So what’s the best way of masking and redirecting your visitors to an affiliate website and protect your affiliate ID?

I thought you’d never ask.

Domain Name Masking and Domain Name Redirects

With Cpanel

Some webhosts have this built in to their cpanel account for their users.

1) For those people with this lucky privilage, just create an empty folder on your server under the root directory and name it something suitable for the product you are selling.

E.g. http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/googleshadow (create a folder called ‘googleshadow’.

2) Login to cpanel on your webhost, select ‘redirects’ under domains, tell them to redirect ‘http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/googleshadow’ to your affiliate site by using the TinyURL address as described above.

3) Select the ‘masking’ tab (if there is one) and put the address of the website you’d like to display in the URL of the browser when being viewed on the affiliate website.

Without Cpanel – Coding

For those who don’t have the advantage of having domain masking in cpanel, it’s not that much harder.

1) Follow step 1 above, create a suitably named folder

2) Create a new file in the folder labelled index.php

3) Copy and paste the following code into that new file and change the details listed with your details.

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<base href=http://address_of_domain_you_want_to_display.com />

<meta name=”DESCRIPTION” content=”">

<TITLE></TITLE>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET ROWS=”100%, *” frameborder=”no” framespacing=0 border=0>

<FRAME SRC=http://insert_your_affiliate_link_here.com NAME=”mainwindow” frameborder=”no” framespacing=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″></FRAME><frame src=”UntitledFrame-2″></FRAMESET>

<NOFRAMES>

<CENTER>

<H2>

Your browser does not support frames.  We recommend upgrading your browser.

</H2>

<br><br>

Click <a href=”http://address_of_domain_you_want_to_display.com“>here</a> to enter the site.

</CENTER>

</NOFRAMES>

</HTML>

4) That’s it! You’re done!

I’ve done it for one of my affiliate links, check it out and see: http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/googleshadow

Thanks,

-William Lee

p.s. your affiliate ID will flash at the bottom of the web browser’s screen while it’s loading, so this doesn’t completely hide it. But it does a good enough job.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments »

10 Tips on Internet Marketing For Online Businesses

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Online marketing, or Internet marketing can be quite a complex thing to some, quite simple to others. There are many methods of doing it out there, but what do you think are the essentials things that you need to do? Let yourself be the judge:

  1. If you already have an existing customer base, to sell more back end products to them. You’ve already built the trust, so why no build on that as you’ve got the credibility.
  2. Upsell to new customers. Make it a habit to offer something a little bit better for a higher price. If they decide to buy the original product, then offer them something else.
  3. Use other businesses out there to cross promote products that aren’t your direct competition. This will enable you to reach a larger audience at a lower cost.
  4. JV (Joint Venture) with other Internet marketers/ businesses. Same as above, you’ll be able to create a much better profit margin as your costs are less.
  5. Offer an affiliate program for you product or service. You may not need to advertise again if you offer an attractive enough product, as your affiliates to the brunt of this cost.
  6. Barter/ trade with other businesses if you don’t have the revenue to buy advertising. Trade banner adverts, e-zine ads, links etc.
  7. Out source. This can save on employee costs (for most countries), equipments costs, tax, expansion and other miscellaneous costs that come with having a workforce.
  8. Give things away free with your offer that have a high perceived value. This can be in the form of books, members only area, e-reports and more.
  9. Viral marketing can get your business all over the Internet in a very very fast way. Give free things away in your advert and encourage people to give it away as well.
  10. Use an auto responder to follow up with all your prospects. It can be a newsletter, an ezine, an update or even just a reminder list. Don’t let them get away!

Hopefully some of these tips help you in your affiliate marketing tasks. There’s alot of power in Internet marketing for online businesses and I believe everyone should give it a try.

Later,

-William Lee

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Posted in Internet-Marketing | 5 Comments »

Can Twitter Make You Money?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

The recent trend in online marketing is using Twitter, which is essentially a mico blogging service, where you are limited to writing snippets of information of no more than 140 characters (including spaces!).

That’s not a lot of space to get your message across and hence improving your copy writing skills is a must. But the question on hand is, can twitter help you make money?

I’ve recently heard that Twitter will be the next big thing to the internet marketing community, but how’s best to use it?

In Twitter, you can add people by clicking on them and telling them ‘I’m following you’ if they are interested, then they can click the same button and they’ll also be ‘following you’ too.

If you go about doing this constantly and target internet marketers (or internet marketing wannabes) by looking for ‘followers’ of the popular internet marketers, you’ll quickly have grown a very large list of interested, potential and most importantly, TARGETED people.

But what to do next? Do you:

a) Use your copy writing skills to convince this group of people within your 140 characters to click on a link and send them straight to an affiliate page? Would this work and could you do it more than once (since one person mass sending nothing but affiliate links might not be so popular). It’s kinda like fishing.

b) Or do you send people to interesting articles on your website and build your personal brand? That way, you can ask them to join your mailing list/RSS feed etc, and perhaps sell them an affiliate (or your own) products sometime in the future?

My great Twitter experiment will be to build a list of a few hundred followers and to split test doing the above. I’ll let you know how it goes sometime in the future, hopefully.

Twitter me,
William_Lee

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Posted in Twitter | No Comments »