Internet Marketing Ideas by Steve Weber        Questions or Comments? Click Here

Wow! I spent 6 hours straight today on a sales page. I’m not nearly finished with it either! This stuff takes a lot of time. For beginners, success can come maddeningly slow. I have had plenty of success along the way which makes it easier to stay focused now.

What about the beginner who has not had any success yet? Unfortunately, most will simply give up and quit. What is different about the ones who succeed compared to those who quit? If a beginner eventually enjoys success, he or she had to believe completely in themselves.

Internet marketing is tough enough without the doubt monster looking over your shoulder! Sure, there are no guarantees. But if you know that I and other marketers are neither smarter nor luckier than you, what are the other options which lead to your success? Once again, “Relentless Focused Action” is the key.

Those who succeed are average people…just like you. They simply tried and learned and tried again until they finally got some traction. They are the ones who refused to give up.

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Someone told me today they could not afford to do Internet marketing. $3.95 a month for hosting and $9.95 a year for a domain name was simply too much money for them.

I understand things can be tight. However, I’d bet that most of us easily spend that much (or more) in a week on our favorite vice! Those soft drinks or coffees could more than pay for starting a new career to leave the rat race with!

I am reminded just how great Internet marketing is in that respect. There is almost no risk, almost no investment is required, and the potential is nearly unlimited. No other business can compare with the possible return on investment Internet marketing offers!

Break that caffeine habit and get yourself a website!

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Something came up in our conference call tonight I wanted to cover further. It has to do with competing sites found in search engines results. Here is the gist of what we were talking about:

Say there are 50,000 results for a long tail keyword relating to lawyers. Another keyword phrase relating to gardening also has 50,000 results (potential competitors).  Does this mean a page optimized for the lawyer keyword is just as easy to rank with as a page optimized for the gardening keyword?

No! Here’s why:

There is a LOT of money to be made with a well ranking site related to lawyers. This means there are some of the best SEO professionals in the world helping to optimize those lawyer pages. This is not the case for a lower paying niche like gardening. There are not to many of those sites with big-gun SEO forces behind them.

Even though the number of possible competitors is the same, the quality of those competitors can be very different.

These same phenomena can be seen in other high paying niches like insurance, gambling, home mortgages, etc. Also, Internet marketing is a very difficult niche to SEO for. The best of the best are optimizing for that niche!

Consider those factors before attempting one of those niches!

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I finally have my new Adwords product completed and ready to go!

AdWords can be a real “money pit” for those without a working method. With AdWords Guerrilla I teach you the EXACT method I use for success.

Check it out here…

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Today I had two people contact me who were thinking of using one of those “drop shipping” services for their eBay business. This is a VERY bad idea!

In almost all cases the prices which the items can be sold for will yield very low profits. Remember there are many thousands of other people out there using these same drop ship services. This extreme competition drives the prices down to the point where profit margins are very small. Not to mention eBay and PayPal fees! These can run a combined 10 to 15% of the selling price…plus there are listing fees too!

However, the profit margins are a minor problem!

The worst part comes when there are customer service issues.  Imagine this scenario:

An eBay seller makes a $200 sale for a digital camera. The buyer pays the seller via PayPal. The seller in turn places the order for the camera with the drop shipper using his credit card. The drop shipper ships the camera but the buyer claims the camera is broken upon delivery and contacts you. Now the eBay seller has to deal with this and explain to the buyer how to return the camera to the drop shipper. To make a long story short, the buyer does not get the camera back in a timely manner or at all and files a claim with PayPal…and wins the claim. Now the $200 sale is gone and the seller’s credit card is charged for the camera.

I think you can see how messy this can be when you have no control over the drop shipper’s and buyer’s actions. Like I said, the profit margins are so low that just one of these losses will negate many other sales.   

There are ways to drop ship products successfully. Doing so involves a very good relationship with a specific and trusted manufacturer. However, the numerous “drop ship” services offered online are simply money pits waiting for beginners to fall into.

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How many successful Internet marketers have one, and only one site? How many successful Internet marketers never have the need to create extra landing pages, modify thank you pages, create squeeze pages for list building, etc.?

None that I know!

 The more success a marketer has, the bigger their web of online presence becomes.

I think the amount of domains, sites, squeeze pages, sales pages and such I have would shock most of you. Of course I started out just like everyone else…small and not knowing what I was doing. I didn’t wake up one day to all this; it was and is a constant work in progress.

My point here is this:

(I am not picking on anyone here for sure…this is simply a trap many beginners land in…just one of many.)

Once again this week I find myself trying to help several people locked into those “site build it” type wizards. They don’t know how to create sites on their own so they pay far too much money each month to have one site. For what most of those places charge for just one domain, I can host nearly all my domains.

But there is worse news than just the money aspect. Using those “wizards” keeps a person helpless with respect to growing their business. There is simply no way to grow an online business without knowing how to create simple html pages and sites…period.

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Every beginner asks this question at some point. Usually the thought happens after the first failure.  By the way, the first failure normally happens with the first attempt!

However, Internet marketing is not for everyone. Those who need a very precise road map to follow won’t succeed. Although I help beginners get started with their online businesses, I cannot tell them exactly step by step what they personally need to do. I can educate a person on the basic principles and necessary skills of Internet marketing. However, I cannot provide a personal road map for them to follow.

Success in an online business means matching ones own personality and knowledge base to a very specific niche. Luckily, the same basic skills required for one area of Internet marketing are identical to the ones required for other areas. Learning the skills is just the beginning (which I can help with). From there, the beginner must soul search their own way to success. There are no master plans anyone can provide.

Unfortunately, those who need a master plan may not be suited for Internet marketing.

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Most people who “fail” at Internet marketing simply give up too soon. I have heard from beginners who didn’t make money for the first two weeks, got frustrated and then just quit. Many of them who quit think the idea of making money online is simply a scam or some kind of trick.

I have no idea why so many people think there are instant riches to be made online. An Internet business is just like any other; much time and effort are required to build a profitable business. Two weeks or two months is not enough time. It takes that long to just “get your feet wet” with the concepts.

If a beginner works hard for six months without any results, then there could be a problem. It either means the beginner was not really committed or he was off on the wrong track. In most cases I have seen, people simply lack sufficient motivation.

On the other hand, I heard from another beginner who had spent hundreds of hours over the past months submitting affiliate ads to free classified sites. She had posted many thousands of ads; she WAS motivated! However, she only made a handful of sales in 4 months.  How I wish I could have redirected all that work she did toward productive tasks!

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If you currently have AdWords campaigns running, you should know that Google has automatically enabled a new feature within each of your campaigns.

It is called Automatic Matching.

I won’t go into all the details here what it does, but basically it will enable Google to ALWAYS max out your daily budget by supplying additional keywords of their own choice in order to reach the daily budget.

I for one do not want Google to pick my keywords for me without being able to test this (which I don’t have time for right now).

I highly suggest turning that option off in each of your campaign settings until you fully understand Automatic Matching and can test it

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