knols-n-tools

List-Building Tips From Socrates Socratous

I've been all over the Net searching for free or low-cost make money ideas, I can't attend to some of my blogs. But yesterday, Gabor Olah sent me a most revealing set of videos from Socrates Socratous. I feel obliged to pass the news to you just in case you missed it.

Gabor owns the PLRWholesaler site where I am a free member. It is from here that I get a lot of free ebooks, software and articles. Many of these I can revise or keep as is and use as my own. If you know the guy and this particular site of his, you'd know at once that he really is out to help IM beginners. He must have felt some urgency in sending me the free videos from Socrates.

We all start as newbies struggling to piece together the success puzzle. Most of us recognize the importance of building a list of contacts but just can't figure out how to do it satisfactorily. The common methods are either useless or exasperating!

What Socrates reveals has been in use by software sites for a long time. The techniques look good on the drawing board. I am just about to try them myself. Check them out at the link below. (It's not an affiliate link, by the way.) Be sure to read this post completely first.

http://resellrightsfortune.com/inside/

You will need some web tools.

If you don't have a website and an autoresponder yet, try the free ones. You can get a free pro-quality website from Weebly.

The best free pro-quality autoresponder, you can get from ISORegister.

For a temporary download page, you can use free file hosting services like MediaFire at http://www.mediafire.com. You can upload a rebranded file and have it accessed from there.

The list-building techniques used by Socrates, as with most other methods, require a free gift with which to entice potential subscribers. If you can't figure out a gift to offer, I suggest an article writing software. It's not PLR, but you can rebrand it with your affiliate link and give it away to promote the mother company. The important thing is, you can get people who download it to opt-in to your autoresponder form first.

The article writing software comes from an article submission site which you will have to affiliate with. It fits well with any niche that has to do with writing articles, especially marketing articles.

Here's the link:

8-Minute Article Writing Software

For PLR ebooks, you can go to the Make Money Resources section of this site (see menu) where you can find links to PLR Wholesaler (PLR) and Resell Rights Mastery (Resell Rights). Both are free to join and you can find PLR ebooks to rebrand.

I hope you make the best of this info.

Again, thanks for the visit!

Internet Marketing Basics 4

Choosing who to sell to and what to sell to them are among the first questions that you will have to answer for yourself before starting your online career as a marketer.

The general advise is to start with a niche you are already familiar with, ideally one you are passionately interested in. The rationale is that, by being familiar with such a niche, you will find it relatively easier to talk and write about it. You will know what or which offers will be irresistible.

On the other hand, there are advanced marketers who "go where the money is" and "attack" niches which they are not even familiar with. They just do a lot of research to come up with relevant content.

Speaking of content, you can avail of PLR materials and simply revise them.

Keyword Variations

So, what niche do you have in mind? First, think of the one main word that names your chosen niche. Let's pick the popular "money" niche as an example.

Next, think of the problems concerning that niche. For samples; "how to make money", "how to make money online" and "how to make money for free". These are keywords pertaining to real questions or problems people want answers for. These can be ypur main or secondary keywords. For more  related keywords, use the Google AdWords free keyword tool and type in  your main niche keyword.

Google AdWords Free Keyword Tool

Take note of words that refer to action like "make", "earn" or "making". These are what people usually use when searching for information. You should be using them in your keywords as well so as to connect your content with  potential buyers. Also consider how-to keywords. These are used by people who are most likely to take you offers.

Even if you already familiar with a problem related to a keyword, research it further. You can find more ideas to add to your content this way. You will be perceived as more knowledgeable, an authority that can be trusted.

Using the Google keyword tool, only choose keywords that people are actually typing in searches. Well, why use a keyword people don't use? There are monthly averages searches. Pick the most popular keywords.

Organize the keywords into more specific groupings to pinpoint the most common problems people need or want solutions for.

Popularity and Profitability

The popularity of a keyword among searchers suggests market size and can be deduced from the Google AdWords free keyword tool. However, this does not necessarily imply profitability. The profitability of a niche requires having a balance between competition and perceived demand. Too much competition can be overwhelming. A small demand can be a waste of time.

By typing your keyword enclosed in quotation marks (e.g, "make money") at Google Search, results will show "1-10 of...". The number of advertisers or websitea using the keyword is the total count. This is the size of your competitors. There is no rule here but I would say that anywhere from 1,200 to 50,000 competitors is fine.

If the search results show ""Sponsored Ads", it is an indication that marketers are paying for those ads because the niche (keyword) is profitable. Some keyword researchers also check search results for AdSense ads. If there are few AdSense ads that don't last long, advertisers are not likely to be making money in the niche.

The Internet Marketing Niche

There are many profitable niches. Internet marketing is just one of them. There is the health niche, the self-development niche and so on. There are also micro niches that more experienced marketers "attack" and make a killing. You can make your choices later on.

The Internet marketing niche, however, is a good niche to train in. Why? Because it is about Internet marketing. You won't make money in any other niche if you don't market to it.

It is very hard to market to Internet marketers. Talk about selling to a salesman! But, according to some "statistics", thousands of newbies or Internet marketing beginners flock to the Internet each day. What would they need? What do they want? Let these needs and wants form your ideas for irresistible offers.

Ok, that's all for now. Thanks for sticking with me this far.

See you later!

Applied Internet Marketing Basics 3

To make money online or offline, there is an age-old formula proven to work everytime.

You must have an irresistible offer. Your offer should reach the maximum number of targeted prospects. You must have the ability to make repeated offers to these prospects.

I got the idea from Mark Joyner of Simpleology. Google the guy. He's a genius at motivating people.

Ok, so what's an irresistible offer?

Quite simply, it is one that solves a nagging problem, fills a pressing need or satisfies what people want. When perceived to be so, an irresistible offer will literally persuade buyers to fork out their wallets and hand you over their money.

This involves good product creation and/or the selection of relevant affiliate offers.

People have to be impressed of what's in it for them. This is the reason why good sales copies or sales pages emphasize the benefits that people can derive from their products rather than the product features.

But how do you come up with such an offer?

You must know your audience well enough. This can be simple or complicated. Simple if you are familiar with the subject or subjects the particular audience is concerned with. Complicated if you are not, in which case you will have to do some serious research.

An audience is the group of people belonging to a particular niche or field of interest. Golfers are in the golf niche. Gardeners are in the gardening niche. You get the idea. These and other niches represent buyers who are referred to as niche markets. To identify them and promote to them is called niche marketing.

Niche marketing is a way to focus one's resources - time, effort and money - rather than spread them out thin by taking on more niches. Resources spread out thin won't have the necessary concentration to make successful marketing campaigns.

An irresistible offer involves not only the product but also the way the product is presented. Familiarity with a niche also means knowing the psychology of the people in it. The effectiveness of your presentation depends on how much you know your audience.

The medium of your presentation also counts. Some people are better impressed with great-looking websites, videos and other gimmicks.

And what about getting the maximum number of targeted prospects?

Advertising. Not just hit-and-miss advertising but targeted. This concerns the ability to drive the right audience, the very people belonging to your chosen niche, to your website.

Internet marketing is basically search engine marketing. The fastest method involved is paid pay-per-click or PPC advertising. However, as discussed earlier, if your site can land on the first few pages of the SERPs, you have a good chance of getting free organic search engine traffic.

Thus, you must learn and implement good search engine optimization or SEO practices. There is on-page SEO which concerns the tweaks you have to do with your site. There is off-page SEO which concerns building natural backlinks or one-way links to your site. We'll get to the details as well as other methods eventually. There's just not enough space to do it one-time.
 
So, what's the ability to make repeated offers?

This concerns list-building primarily.

As you may know, about 95% or so of visitors to a website don't take positive action on their first visit. They just leave and may never come back. A lot of opportunity is lost this way. However, if you can entice at least some of these visitors to opt-on to your contact list, you can make follow-ups and subsequent new offers.

How do you do this?

The usual ploy is to have an irresistible offer as a gift, offered for free in exchange for contact details which the visitor fills an opt-in form with. The opt-in form is integrated with an autoresponder pre-loaded with messages that does the follow-ups.

But that's not all. List-building also concerns developing and maintaining good relations with the people in your list. Remember they are people, not just addresses. And so the good marketer will also pre-load the autoresponder with informative and valuable tutorials or e-courses. In-between, there would be subtle sales pitches and friendly messages unrelated to marketing.

As you can tell, this also concerns email marketing. You will have to study the subject as well.

Ok, that should be enough for an overview. In the next post, let's see what niche you have in mind and check it out for profitability. Then let's find you an irresistible offer to make, and get it out there!

Talk soon!

Applied Internet Marketing Basics 2

Earlier we discussed a little bit about how things work online, basically, what websites are and how they are accessed through a computer browser.

To make money online with Internet marketing, it shall be your goal to be sending targeted visitors or traffic to websites you are promoting. Targeted traffic means people who are actually interested in what your site is about and are most likely to make purchases. To go about doing this, it is necessary to understand how search engines work.

The search terms that people type in to search engine boxes are also known as keywords. A keyword can actually be a single word or a phrase pertaining to anything the searcher wants to find or know about.

Once a keyword is entered, the search engine then searches its database or index of sites to look for sites which it finds relevant to the keyword and shows them in search engine result pages (SERPs). The SERPs are what we see with the relevant websites on them.

Websites shown on the SERPs are usually positioned according to mysterious ranking systems which only the search engines themselves fully know. However, knowledgeable marketers know some features of these systems, enough for them to get on top of the SERPs.

What online marketers do to get top search results rankings is called search engine optimization (SEO). There is on-page SEO which has to do with tweaking a website so that it attracts search engines. Then there is off-page SEO which has to do with in-bound links coming from other sites, something usually achieved through article submissions. The use of appropriate keywords is involved in both cases.

To be on page one of the SERPs, especially at #1, is a coveted position. It means getting free targeted traffic and milking it for all its worth. To be anywhere but the first few pages of the SERPs means having a position where many won't bother to look.

When a searcher uses a search term or keyword, the websites that show up on the first few pages of a search result are said to be highly-ranked for such a keyword. It will be your object later on for your website or websites to be highly-ranked as well.  

Search engines have robot crawlers or spiders which search the Internet and crawl website pages. Unlike human readers, these crawlers cannot appreciate the difference between a literary piece and crappy content. All they can appreciate and find significant are the keywords. They will snob you if you don't have enough keywords, or if you have too much. (More on that later.)

A keyword pertains to a topic or niche market. If you decide to engage in the Internet marketing or IM niche, for instance, your main keyword and secondary keywords should be relevant to IM.

Be careful of what you write in your content. In one of my IM blogs, I made the mistake of mentioning my farm as part of an introduction. Then, suddenly, my AdSense blocks began displaying agriculture ads. This demonstrates how sensitive these crawlers can be.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. At this stage, what is important is that you know how search engines work and how important keywords are.

Applied Internet Marketing Basics 1

This article is for those who are totally new to the Internet, You can find the terms in the original Wikipedia encyclopedia but, hey, I need to put some content here.

The "www" stands for the World Wide Web or simply the "Web". It is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. The hypertext documents, a.k.a. Web pages, reside on Web servers which are special computers that receive requests for Web pages and can "serve" them to the requesting side. You are the requesting side when you click on a link and a website is "served' for you to see.

Each Web server, a.k.a. host, has its unique global address which is used to find it over the Internet. This address is known as the "IP address". An example of an IP address is 63.146.123.0 which is the address of the server where google.com is located.

A server can hold one or a lot of websites. A website can be a single page or a collection of several web pages identified by a particular domain name or subdomain name as its address on the Web or Internet. Weebly's domain name is www.weebly.com. This site is a subdomain of Weebly. This site's subdomain name is knols-n-tools.weebly.com.

The global domain name system (DNS) translates a domain name into an IP address. If you type www.weebly.com in your browser, your browser first sends a DNS request, then it receives the IP address of the server hosting www.weebly.com. Your browser then connects to said server directly and requests for the Weebly home page.

As I said, a website can be a single web page or a collection of several web pages. Each

web page is a document typically written in HTML. If you right click on a web page, you can locate its HTML source code. A web page is accessible via a protocol known as HTTP. This protocol transfers information from the website's server and displays it in the user's browser.

If you are to put up a business online (the Internet), you can start by creating a website. To do this, you will have to purchase a domain name from organizations accredited to sell them. Then, you will have to purchase hosting space so that there will be a server to host you website.

Again, your website can be a single web page or several web pages linked to each other. Your website will be linked to the domain name you purchase so that people can just type the domain name in a browser and see your site.

If you can't afford your own domain name and web hosting, you can start with free hosted websites and use subdomain names. 

Web browsers, like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, allow users to view web pages that may have various content (e.g. text, images and multi-media) and navigate among them using hyperlinks. Web browsers are client programs also called "user agents". Such web pages and other computer files are retrieved from web servers using their respective URLs.

So the browser retrieves content from remote Web servers and displays it on your computer. Thereafter, you can follow other hyperlinks in a web page that lead to other websites whose locations are embedded in their hyperlinks. Using hyperlinks to go to differrent websites is what we refer to as "browsing" or "surfing".

Once you know the address or URL of a website, you can just type it in the address field of your browser, cick go and get there.

If you don't know a website's address, or if you want to search a topic without a particular website in mind, that's when you use a search engine or directory. The top 3 search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Windows Live Search).

Now, this is important. The top 3 search engines are the most used by searchers (read: potential buyers). It should be your aim to have your website indexed by them or included in their databases. This will allow people to find your website when they use these search engines. This means free traffic or visitors for your site and, if you are promoting products or services, income for you.

Using search engines to promote your website is called search engine marketing (SEM). It involves search engine optimization (SEO) which, if you get really good at, can land your site on the front of search engine result pages (SERPs). Just imagine how much traffic you can get if everytime people search for a relevant term your sites comes out first.

There are many other terms you will encounter as we go along. For now, you just need to be familiar with one more common term.

Much of your online marketing activity will involve email marketing. Email (electronic mail) is a method of storing, forwarding, composing, sending and receiving messages through electronic communications systems. It has been in use even before the Internet.

The importance of email and email marketing will be foremost in your efforts to build a list of contacts (list-building), build good relations and make repeated offers.

That's all for now.

Thanks for the visit!

Make money with what?!

CAMOTE. Computer-Aided Marketing Online Targeted Enterprise. In short Internet marketing.

Okay, I started this one. It may not mean anything to you but, where I'm at, people find it meaningful. Camote or kamote, by the way, is a Filipino term for sweet potato. It's a lowly root crop, easily grown and serve as staple food for many local highlanders.

To be told to "go home and plant camote" is a sarcastic remark directed at those who are not doing well with city life. Since many of us are suffering hard times right now, perhaps staying at home "planting" the kind of CAMOTE that I have in mind may just be the answer to our woes.

Are you aware that many Internet marketers are making money not in spite of the down economy but because of it? Even during hard times opportunities arise, and those who can think out of the box are well able to see them.

There are people looking for alternative sources of income. There are people who want to save on purchases. There are people having problems with relationships. There are people having trouble getting sleep. These and many others are large global markets where CAMOTE can be applied.

I am not saying everybody will succeed at this but, if you just lost a job, Internet marketing beckons. Some successful marketers are even thankful they lost their jobs since it led them to the opportunities available online. But look before you leap, this may not be for you.

Inspiration.

A friend of mine has a 2-year old blog which earns him around $3,000 (US) a month from Google AdSense alone. He is not even selling anything. If you search Google for the keyword "make money online for beginners", you'd see his blog always at # 1 on page 1. It's a free Blogger blog! Now who says you can't make money, lots of money, with CAMOTE?

You may not have the kind of traffic that my friend's blog is getting. It takes time and a lot of effort to get to that stage. But you can consider AdSense as a bonus you'll be getting in the long run, then direct your immediate focus to marketing affiliate products and/or services.

You will need to invest in a PC and an Internet connection, of course. But it's a lot cheaper than setting up a convenience store. Your "office" can be your kitchen table. You set your working hours. You are your own boss. (That is if no one asks you to do the dishes or the laundry.)

Interested? I'll spell everything out to you in this blog.

See you later!

To my online friends and contemporaries, thank you for following me here. Nope, this is not another experiment. I do believe anyone can make money online using free tools. And, if you haven't done so already, you should try Weebly. It's simply the best!

So, what do we have here?

Well, first of all, we'll be having lots of free how-to tutorials related to the Internet marketing or make money online niche. I want to help beginners get started safely and quickly. Of course, I expect visitors to check out my affiliate partners. That's how things work.

I am still a proponent of free online marketing tools. That is the main thrust of the knols-n-tools list program. However, not every visitor is a newbie on a budget. Some may have the means and know the advantages of paid pro tools, so I am promoting them as well.

I intend to raise this blog up search engine rankings with the expectation that the accompanying website and all its contents reach a lot of targeted searchers. How? That shall be one of our topics here.

This is an open resource site. Feel at home.

See you later!