Archive for December, 2009


December 29, 2009

If you are a marketer that needs to plan your business then you should try out free mind mapping software to start by jotting down what your goals are. The software is actually called FreeMind. It allows you to jot down your ideas in diagram form as if you were making a tree.
This is essential because one of the biggest mistakes that new affiliate marketers make is to have no idea of what their targets or objectives are. If you have no objectives, there is no way you will ever know where you are going which again suggests that you are likely to get lost on the way.
Try to create an objective that realistic as well. Whilst we would all love to be in a position to make $1 million in our first month as an affiliate marketer, I am certain that no brand-new affiliate has ever managed to achieve this and you are not likely to either.
Rather than setting ridiculously overambitious objectives that you have no hope of achieving, try to be modest and realistic because this way, you have a decent chance of achieving what you’re aiming for.
For example, if you are just starting out on your affiliate marketing journey, you have never generated a product sale as yet. Hence, your first target should be to generate your first sale, for which you might set a target of one month assuming that you are starting from ‘point zero’ and do not want to spend a lot of money getting your business off the ground.
You might then take this another stage further forward by targeting 10 sales in total in the first three months, 30 sales in the first six months and 100 in the year.
With objectives in place and armed with the knowledge that you will have after reading this guide, you can then work backwards from your targets to plan the necessary ‘how to’ that will take you from where you are now to those goals.
As suggested, your business plan does not need to be complex or difficult because this is not rocket science and it is only for your private use. Nevertheless, as the cliché has it, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail meaning that having some kind of framework in place is absolutely essential.
Software gadgets like Freemind can help you find that focus you need to make these clear decisions by giving you a way of mapping out your future in a way that visually makes sense.


December 26, 2009

If you are into marketing it means you are probably using articles to promote your site is simply a question of creating suitable keyword rich articles before submitting them to article directories.
The problem is that article marketing can be incredibly time consuming. Really effective. article marketing is effectively a two step process. The good news is that both steps of this process can be automated.
You might be exhausting yourself writing your own articles. Firstly, you can get your articles written by any of the thousands of article writers who advertise their services through Elance and other similar sites.
Secondly, you can automate the submission process, but the degree of automation will depend upon how much money you have available. For instance, if money is tight, then you can use a free semi-automatic article submission program like Article Submitter, which will submit your work to over 370 directory sites.
While this will be worthwhile, it does have a couple of disadvantages of which you need to be aware. First, the submission process is only semi-automatic, and therefore it takes some time to do, and, secondly, every article that is submitted is identical. This is considerably less powerful as far as the search engines are concerned than it would be if you could submit unique content to every site.
Automatically submitting unique content to over 500 article directory sites is exactly what Article Post Robot does, and if you want to fully automate the article submission process, and you can afford this software, this is by far away the more effective option.
If you are brutally honest with yourself (and you must be), you will probably be quite shocked to realize just how little your personal input is really necessary. You can get other people to do this work for you if the automation web site gadgets don’t really work out for you.
It is hard to think of human beings as gadgets but that is practically what virtual assistances. You can give as much or as little of the work to your assistants as you want or can afford to do. You can hire these individuals to take care of everything that your marketing gadgets can’t. Sometimes when you are submitting articles or uploading blogs nothing will do but that personal touch. That is because many web sites are just cantankerous. there really is very little in your business that you actually need to be involved in on a personal basis.
If you compare the concepts that you have just read with a real-world, ‘bricks and mortar’ business, you are the CEO of the company and your virtual assistant is somewhere between a personal assistant and your senior manager. However for the most part there is automation that can make your life ninety percent easier.


December 23, 2009

If you are adding content to a blog then you want to make sure you have the right gadgets or widgets in place to successfully do what you need to do.
The first of these plug-ins is SmartRSS, which you download entirely free by clicking on the link. However, do pay attention to the installation instructions on the download page, as they are slightly different to the norm. Once this plug-in is successfully installed, it allows you to automatically add content from any number of RSS feeds completely on autopilot. Thus, this simple plug-in allows you to automatically update your site every few hours and every time it happens, your blog will automatically send out a ‘ping’ to let everyone know of the changes.
The only problem with this particular method of adding content to your site is that because you are pulling that information from other people’s RSS feeds, it is not unique content. The search engines and especially Google are extremely keen on unique content, so using SmartRSS is great, but it is not perfect.
The other plug-in that you must consider using enables you to get round this problem by uploading your own unique articles en-masse to your blog, and then the plug-in will publish those articles one by one. More importantly, it does this on a random time basis so that it does not appear to the search engines as if there is any automation involved in the process.
All that you need to do is go back to the articles that you wrote for your article marketing efforts and rewrite every one of them by doing little more than changing the words to some degree. You then upload these articles en-masse to your site and let ZipPoster handle the task of publishing them one by one in a manner that looked entirely manual and therefore natural.
With 100 articles, if you published one every two or three days, you have a years worth of content available that will be posted to your site on autopilot. That should almost guarantee that your visitors come back time after time and that in turn will generate an ever-increasing flow of AdSense revenues.
This of course entirely ignores the fact that, from time to time you might want to manually add reviews of suitable affiliate products from a site like Clickbank as a way of pulling in an extra few hundred dollars every now and then.
However, the important point to appreciate is that with an automatic RSS feed and ZipPoster adding a regular supply of fresh content which WordPress is automatically pinging every time it happens, you do not have to do so if you don’t want to! You know that you already have a totally automatic passive income generating machine set up and whether you make any additional effort is entirely up to you.