  |
Internet Marketing Resources
Here are a few of the resources that have helped me make my living costs on-line. My first website consisted of my own business bookmarks Internet Marketing Resources When I started out on-line I didn't have any budget. I had lost my trade of 30 years in the color printing industry due to an injury. I lived on my savings as I explored the internet looking for ways to earn money without spending more of what I had left. After about a year, I put my bookmark collection on-line. My site developed from that original collection of bookmarks. My bookmarks now number over 3,000, yet my website contains only the best ones. As I developed working relationships with my free providers, I began to purchase services from the companies that had helped me get started. I would like to share some of these resources with you. Before I had internet access I started out with a free email account. Juno.com offers a free downloadable program with a local dial-up number. It's perfect for people who don't even have a internet connection. JUNO MAIL If you don't already have one, I suggest you get a free web-based email account, using it as a reply email address whenever you are at risk of your real email address getting spammed. FREE WEB BASED EMAIL SOURCES START A MAILING LIST- FREE LIST BOT When I built my original website I found a free place to host it. Now I list several places that are reliable and free. Some will even host your virtual domain. These are good when you are starting out. FREE HOSTING SERVICES You might wonder why I would change from a free service to a paid host when there are so many good free hosts. I won't go into it in detail here. Getting my domain name on a good commercial server was one the best business decisions I have made since I started. HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT HOSTING SERVICE The differences between a free server and a pay server are best understood by comparing the services. MY HOSTING COMPANY Once I had my site up and running, I needed a free way to launch my site so people could actually find me. I started by manually submitting my pages to the major search engines. THE MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES ALTA VISTA: EXCITE: HOTBOT: INFOSEEK: LYCOS: WEBCRAWLER: YAHOO: About 90% of my traffic comes from these search engines. Things started picking up weeks after my submissions, but I was still only getting a few visitors a day. The next process was visiting each major search engine using my most important keywords. I looked at the top 10 pages from each search engine, and at the meta tags of some of the higher ranking sites. I would then alter my meta tags to be more more like the top listings. Just two years ago you could easily get a top ten listing, but not any more. UTILITY TO CREATE META TAGS META-TAG TUTORIAL SEARCH ENGINE BASICS FREE SUBMISSION TOOLS I soon learned that I was working blind without tracking where my traffic was coming from. The following free resources might save you a lot of time ARTICLE: Tracking Your Visitors FREE TRACKING SERVICES After I learned how to track my traffic, my site took off. I grew from a couple hundred visitors a day to well over a 5000 pages delivered a day. You would think I would be making a fortune but I wasn't, because I had no way to actually sell anything from my site. Without going into another long article here, I'm just going to tell you a few of the most important elements. In order to be taken seriously you want your own domain name and a method to accept payment on-line. Although there are many companies offering e-commerce solutions, I found that I needed to purchase several services from separate venders, and often they didn't work well together and all required set-up and monthly fees. After a year I went with Total Merchant Services because they offered all the e-commerce services I needed for one affordable monthly fee. TOTAL MERCHANT SERVICES They supplied the secure credit card processing, shopping cart, real-time credit card validation, check processing services and more. If you are just starting out on a shoestring, like I was, you might consider the following low cost partial solution. THE CLICK BANK VALID CHECK A year ago I wouldn't have said this step was necessary, but today it's a must to have a virtual domain server and commercial hosting company. BUSINESS HOSTING SPECIALISTS I found that, using interactive scripts on my website, provided better communication from my visitors, so I developed a scripts page. You can find good scripts that will do almost everything free or for a low cost. INTERACTIVE SCRIPTS I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that configuring scripts is easy. It's not, but as I have said so often before "if it was easy everyone would be doing it." I use the forums provided by my hosting company, and forums provided by the authors of several of the scripts I use. I also buy services when I get over my head. I'll mention a couple of my favorite scripts and their sources. The FreeForm Creator is a form generator that really works! It generates an instant form to do almost anything in minutes, without requiring access to your CGI-BIN folder on your host's server. THE FREEFORM CREATOR LINK-O-MATIC FREE 4 ALL SCRIPT MY FREE 4 ALL SITE - Try it Out I use a script to allow people to place a free ad on my site. It's from: MATT'S SCRIPT ARCHIVE VISIT MY FREE CLASSIFIED PAGE As you can see, the internet isn't a place you can set up business one day, and rake in the dollars the next. There is money to be made on-line and plenty of it. You are not too late if you start this year. Just don't quit your day job right away; at least until you see some of that money. I have seen so many people drop hundreds of dollars on products & services and that never earn them a dime. Internet marketing is full of hype from every self proclaimed eXperts. There is ONE product you can buy that can fire up the money generator. Marketing courses were not available when I started. I remember going to the biggest bookstore in my city looking for a good internet marketing book, Two years ago there was three books and none of them were up to date. Now there are hundreds most are not very good. Things have changed. Now my best advice is to purchase a suitable marketing course before doing anything else - even before starting your on-line business. A Internet marketing course can help make you more money than it costs, at the least. They also gives you a complete system to follow 95% of all marketers will not be successful anymore; at least not without some form of professional training. The following link covers the courses I have found to be the most useful. In general, the more you pay, the more you get. If you will send an email detailing your experience, budget and Internet marketing goals, I will reply with my suggestion about which training course most closely matches your goals. You can also reach us for a free consultation at (541) 689-1847 - 9 - 5 Pacific Daylight time MARKETING INFORMATION MAKE YOUR SITE SELL The best is The Internet Marketing Challange, which is a membership website that is constantly updated with the most current information about what IS actually working on-line at any given time. THE INTERNET MARKETING CHALLANGE Please take some time to visit my site again. A large part of my business now is helping you do the things you don't know how to do for a reasonable fee. I will continue to provide marketing tools and resources to help insure your marketing success. Best Wishes Bob ROBERT SMITH
helps thousands successfully market their Internet based home business. You can reach him by phone at: (541) 689-1847 PST, and by email at: The Best Programable Follow-up System Available Today
|
 |
 |
|
|
Click Here to Email Bob Smith
