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Blogging: a Miracle for SEO Losers

The internet moves fast, but sometimes simple rules aren’t figured out by the majority for a decade. Today, juging by the buzz surrounding blog marketing, it’s official, the internet marketing community realized on a wide scale how powerful blogging is in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), hence for business.

Let’s start simple: if you thought SEO wasn’t for you, think again: by learning only a few basic rules, you can get ranked on page 1 of Google for just about any keyword. Hard to believe? Well, mark my words: in a year from now, as far as business related keywords, there will be 75% blogs ranked on first pages of Google, so start learning now!

Now for some more technical stuff. Why are blogs so powerful in terms of SEO?

1- because of their amazingly SEO friendly internal structure. By the way, onpage optimization factors are VERY underrated. Blog superiority in terms of SEO underlines this in a big way. Of course, the real power behind blogging isn’t just the fact that blogs are already SEO friendly, it’s that they can be tweaked very easily to become fully optimized. Don’t know what onpage optimization factors are? Simply put, OOF are the way the pages in your blogs are connected to one another, and how the links that ensure this connection are picked up by search engines. The extent to which you can control that structure is important to rank even better.

2- because blogs interconnect by themselves, creating outbound links without the blog owner even knowing it: that’s automatic offpage optimization! This is due to the amazing work done par Drupal and Wordpress, to name the biggest names. Overtime, they built an empire in terms of how blogs built with their platform interconnect. Again, not doing anything won’t be enough to make it to the first page of google, but blogs offer options that are of gigantic interest to someone who wants to optimize their site for search engines. By the way, offpage optimization factors are basically the links that point to one’s site, and more importantly the keywords used in the anchor text link that points to one’s site. The more links you have, the better, provided that google considers the site that link to you valuable, which is the case of other blogs built with big blogging platforms.

3- because blogs are so easy to create that you can respond to the evolution of a market or a niche extremely fast. Say you already have a domain name for a site that has nothing to do with a market that you want to target. From there, if you count the time it would take you to purchase another domain name for your blog, point its name servers to your current hosting company, set up, let’s say, a Wordpress blog through Fantastico (or even without it) and add some content to it, all of this can be done in under an hour.

4- because blogs are so customizable that if it’s well done, you can’t tell the difference between a blog and a regular site (not that it would matter if you could in terms of SEO!).

5- because there are so many resources out there to learn how to make your blog a success that the only thing you need to do to succeed is to want it. One might say: isn’t that a general rule? The answer is yes, but it’s way easier and faster to rank well with a blog than it is for a regular site, so why bother?

In closing, I’ll do something I rarely do. I’m going to blatantly promote a product that is related to the content of that post. Now I want to make it clear that you don’t need anything other than your right mind and your will to make money with blogs, but if you are so lazy you don’t want to add content yourself nor make the effort to look for content and copy and paste it to your blog, you’ll be amazed by this. The reason I’m recommending this software is, to this day, I still can’t believe how great this product is. It is a perfect example of how smart it can be to invest in something when the payback is so enormous. Introducing FIREPOW, the ultimate blogging software.

Check out its many features HERE.

You can try it for 2 weeks for $1 by clicking HERE.

Why 97% of affiliates are doomed…

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money with minimal effort, especially when that lazyness is not going to cause any prejudice to your customers. This is especially true of affiliate marketing, where you use the leverage of another person or company’s product to generate a profit. When you think about it, if you are an affiliate working 12 hours a day, there’s no point starting an online business since you don’t have time to spend your money on anything you like!

However, the very nature of affiliate marketing, i.e. promoting someone else’s product in exchange for a commission, is devastating the typical newbie internet marketer so bad that statistics show 97% of them fail to generate a pofit online. Why is that?

Or course, there are many marketers out there that obey to the basic fantasy of overnight fortune making and are not building a list, nor learning how to become a better marketer. But a good proportion of newbies are serious about their business and yet, they fail to make a living with it. Clearly, one can be serious and yet badly mistaken.

In my view, the number one factor for this massive fiasco is the idea that affiliate marketers can save themselves the trouble of building a webpage and focus on traffic, since their affiliate link will take their customers to a product sales page designed by the vendor.

Many people are affraid they don’t possess the technical skills to have their own website, or believe it’s not important to have one as an affiliate. There are several reasons why this is a terrible miskake:

- obviously, sales pages promoted by affiliates all look alike. Therefore, customers aren’t compelled to go to one instead of another, not to mention the odds are they will have seen the very same page as yours multiple times before seeing yours. This creates VERY poor odds of anyone buying or signing up through a non personalized sales page

- search engines hate web pages that don’t bring value to the internet community. Affiliate pages fit perfectly into that definition. In terms of search engine optmization, a standardized affiliate page is the worst one you can use. Two years ago, I personally suffered a ban from google indexing because of a NOT SUFFICIENTLY PERSONALIZED AFFILIATE PAGE, although I did bring some changes to it and set it up on my own domain!

- nowadays, the web is flooded with products and offers, so it’s foolish to believe that people will buy from  your typical sales pitch rather than from a page that gives an honest opinion on the product you sell

- last but not least, affiliates promoting a standardized sales page are not building their list. This is the most devastating element of not having your own affiliate site. Lists are the heart of any successful ebusiness. Even people saying you don’t need one simply mean they will teach you how to build one… or are flat out lying. A prospect who doesn’t get the chance to signup to your newsletter is lost forever. Even if 1% of prospects actually get on your list, that 1% can mean a lot of money for you. With enough traffic, any business can work with 1% of prospect opting in. But you can do MUCH better than this.

Now for the good news if you don’t have you own site:

- it is easy and cheap to have a website and an autoresponder (autoresponders are the only way you can build a list)

- applying these simple tips increases the odds of finally making good money online dramatically

- I’m in the process of editing a series of videos that describes the process of building an affiliate page from A to Z, starting from  picking up a product to generating traffic to your site.

Until then, work smart.

Cheers,

Damien

The Business Building Strategy is LIVE!

Hi everyone,

I’m very excited and proud to announce the launch of a very powerful tool for network marketers. It is called The Business Building Strategy. In a nutshell, it is an extremely comprehensive and in-depth online business course, which gives you the option to receive monthly updates.

In tried to provide the exact quality and variety of information I was missing when I started working from home. TBBS covers all major ways to make money online with digital products or physical products, whether you are planning on doing affiliate marketing, network marketing, PLR, or create your own product. If you wish to sharpen your marketing skills, TBBS will be perfect for you as well.

More importantly, this course is intented to provide the tools to help internet marketers make the most out of the information and take action to actually improve the quality of their online business on a daily basis.

This is why TBBS comes with monthly updates that include autoresponder messages, graphics packages, tutorials that detail specific procedures that are needed for any marketer to set up their own system.

Feel free to leave comments about the sales page or ask questions about the course. Should you choose to become a member, remember that if you take the one time offer, I will personally give one on one assistance in reaching your goals.

I think you will be completely blown away by this product considering how affordable it is and the extremely high value and comprehensiveness of the training material made available to you.

Check it out now:

http://www.TheBusinessBuildingStrategy.com

Cheers,

Damien

Why and How Mentorship Can Save You…

Hi,

I you haven’t already, I suggest you read the previous post about how to deal with information overload. Information overload is in my opinion one of the three biggest problems internet marketers have to face nowadays, along with failure to learn and failure to take action.

It all started as great news a few years ago. Once business owners realized that they needed to build big lists of prospects that they could email regularly in order to increase the odds of making sales, they started flooding every ad space available with free material (ebooks, sofware, audios, videos, conference calls, etc) that people can get in exchange for an email address. This made both basic and advanced online marketing knowledge available to anyone willing to apprehend this kind of information.

We all know on some level how vital knowledge is. When you think about it for a second, it is obvious why knowledge is power. Yet, we fail to gain the level of education that would eventually make failure impossible. I believe there are two main reasons for that. First, everyone likes knowing, but no one wants to work for it. Human beings are lazy, and any serious knowledge requires that you fight this natural tendency to give yourself a chance to complete the learning curve. Second, the way successful internet marketers interact with newbies is based on having them believe that this kind of effort can be avoided. Even if they fail to admit it, all business owners have their potential clients believe that if they purchase their products, they will be successful in record time. The reason they do it is it works and if they didn’t, they probably would lose a lot of money and run the risk of actually failing (this is due to the very nature of business in itself, but that’s another story).

To sum things up, misleading your clients to some extent is the safest quickest way to succeed for anyone having their own online business. This is why I said in a previous post that you need to stay away from the hype in order to have the odds in your favor.

There is no doubt in my mind that professional online marketers have a huge responsibility for the fact that 97% of their clients fail to make money online. Think about what this stat tells you about this business for a second. Yet, business owners are not the only ones to blame for this terrible situation. This is a two way street and sellers are giving buyers what they want, and what they want is to get rich quick.

It is your responsibility to change your mindset to wanting to succeed IN SPITE OF the bad odds and hard work to be accomplished. Once you make this decision, a whole new picture unfolds. By accepting the fact that marketing online is hard, you start to deal with reality, ask the right questions, get the right answers, meet the right people at the right place at the right time. And then every step you take brings you closer to your goal. It takes time, but it is well worth it. Because in the end, there is a lot of money to be made online.

I can assure you that people are fantasizing so much about being wealthy that if they were guaranteed a success within a 2-3 year time frame, they would decline the offer, try to be successful quicker and take the risk to fail. Believe it ot not, THIS is the main reason why so many people fail to make a living with their online business. They follow their instinct, desires and emotions rather that relying on reason. On the contrary, successful internet marketers are the most rational people you’ll meet.

Now that you know what is at stake and what the risk is, I’m guessing you could probably use some advice on how to avoid the vicious circle of hype and information overload. Now this may surprise you, and I did not like this idea myself at first, but mentorship is how I got the most valuable and coherent information, the kind that I could not get before in spite of all the ebooks I had downloaded. The day when, out of despair, I bought a whole online course and got in contact with a successful marketer, I learned so much in just a few days that I felt like I hadn’t learned anything during the last 10 months.

First, let me make myself clear. I am not suggesting that you spend hundreds of dollars on some guru’s products, nor am I suggesting that you shouldn’t try to learn through free ebooks or any other kind of educating material. What I am saying is you should create direct contact with someone who has been through the same process you are, and who solved the same kind of problems you are facing.

The first benefit is you are going to save A LOT of time because you will get immediate personal help for the exact problems you are confronted with and you will receive advice based on what YOU need. The second benefit of mentorship is this: what you already know will make much more sense when you see how someone with online marketing experience uses this knowledge to build a coherent SYSTEM. Knowledge is power, but knowledge without practise doesn’t create results, so it becomes useless. All the knowledge you acquire will be put to better use if you are shown how to produce results with it. It’s really a problem of putting the pieces together, and this is the kind of empirical knowledge you only get through practise and coaching. The latter will save yourself months of tests and hesitations if you go to the right person(s).

Who should you look for? Don’t go to Mike Filsaime or Stephen Pierce Right away. Not only are there people not helping others for free, they are generally not available for one on one tutoring. The key is to look for someone with more experience than you but not too much, because that person needs to be able to relate to what you are going through. Make sure that anybody you plan on working with is fully available. Only then will you be speeding up your learning curve and seeing results. Take the time to make contacts on forums or business oriented social networking sites, and ask questions to test your contacts’ sincerity. In any case, run away if you start feeling uncomfortable with anyone you initiated a mentoring relationship with.

Another lesser known type mentoring relationship I strongly encourage you to build is the kind where you get to mentor people with less experince than you. I don’t care how inexperienced you are, you can always help someone, at least with some aspects that you are more familiar with than them. Everything you know you should share to start long term business relationships. This is as important as finding your own mentors, because these people can be your future business partners. There is nothing like one on one contact for business. By investing in this type of direct human contact, not only will you get partners, but you will learn faster and more efficiently. You will also gain confidence, motivation, plus you will generate teamwork dynamic, three absolutely key elements to making money online.

If you read the previous post, you already know that I try to practise what I teach. One of the main reasons I created this blog was to be able to help whomever feels like they could use some help to start making money online. I work online full time, and I enjoy interacting with people, so feel free to contact me, whether you feel you need a mentor or not!

Damien

How To Deal With Information Overload

There is one excuse nobody will ever be able to seriously use to justify not being able to generate a significant amount of money, be it online or offline, and that’s lack of serious information on how to accomplish this goal.

The web provides the full spectrum, from disinformation to top quality educating material. But information being the number one type of product sold online, within one minute researching a couple of internet marketing big names on google, you’ll find yourself in position to purchase training material from these people. For online marketers, providing good educating material is key to any long term strategy. Therefore, the odds are you’ll learn valuable lessons from them, and any kind of money spent on products sold by such individuals would be a good investment.

Even better yet, researching the web a little more deeply will allow you to access valuable information for free. Internet marketing forums are a good place to start looking for free stuff. Depending on what you need, you can also look for more specialized forums. For example, if you are looking to educate yourself on search engine optimization, type in “seo forum” on google and you’ll be a few clicks away from becoming more knowledgeable at no cost.

The bottom line is it’s very easy to learn whatever it is you wish to learn on the internet. Nowadays, people who are new to doing business online have to face another problem: what to do with the information that they are constantly bombarded with?

First, why are we all submerged with information? Simple: the best marketing technique known to date is giving away free valuable products in exchange for a name and an email address, which is why just about any serious online marketer does so, most of the time in the form of educational material (ebooks, audios, videos).

How is the average network marketing newbie reacting to this? Typically, this phenomenon triggers a primal reflex shared by many living creatures that find themselves in a situation where they have more vital elements than they need: we store. Psychologically, we feel comforted as we associate such “wealth” with a feeling of security. The trouble is we tend to think that possessing this kind of material is enough when in fact we are in the exact same situation we were before getting our hands on it as long as we don’t study it. Some of us even tend to store indefinitely, and then, the very fact that we have so much to catch up on discourages us to even start looking at what we have in store.

As incredible as it may seem, easy access to information can produce very counter productive results if you are not organized.

The answer to this problem is simple. Use some of the time it usually takes you to collect free information, and search the web for what are considered the best pits of knowledge, ebooks, etc. Then, once you are confident enough that a resource is worth your time and/or money, get it and STUDY IT EXTENSIVELY. This might sound silly but understanding what you are being told is not enough. Underline important parts if you are reading an ebook (I strongly suggest you print it), take notes if you are listening to an audio or viewing a video. Go through it again if you feel some aspects aren’t cristal clear. And once you are done, read your notes until you know everything there is to know. Again, it’s NOT enough that what you read or heard makes sense. It has to be known in order to be applied.

It’s always better to master one resource perfectly than to vaguely study several of them. If you are new to internet marketing, there will be times when what you hear seems obscure. Take the time to research some terms if you don’t know them. Try to put yourself in the mind of a marketer to understand the logic of selling. This is where you need to take your time, because building your system the wrong way will always disserve you. Try to make this learning curve an occasion to stay offline. You will be much more productive, creative and receptive while away from your computer or TV screen.

There is another pitfall you need to not avoid: there is a natural safisfactory feeling that anyone who starts mastering a particular subject experiences, which makes them want to know even more. There is nothing wrong with being a perfectionist and constantly wanting to improve, but unless it is absolutely necessary, stop studying for a while and take concrete action. There are (at least) three reasons for doing this:

- nothing can be achieved if you don’t apply what you learn, regardless of the quality of your information. Sounds obvious, but failure to take action equals complete failure even if you are the smartest most knowledgeable network marketer out there.

- some aspects of marketing online can only be learned through taking concrete action. Nothing replaces experience. Some things simply can’t be taugh in books or any kind of training resource.

- I already said it, and I’ll say it again, making mistakes is the most powerful way to improve, and making mistakes can only happen to those who take action and take risks. Knowing how to deal with failure and use it as a way to constantly get better is one of the few real secrets behind any success story.

A few words of conclusion about my personal experience. I spent a lot of time trying to list all the ways through which one can make money online, all the different ways to generate traffic, etc. I figured I needed to know a lot in order to make an informed decision. I have this tendency to want to learn, know and understand something fully before taking action. The truth of the matter is: you can only know so much, and hanging on to the idea that you can reach any kind of perfection by mastering one subject absolutely is not only an illusion, it is also a very dangerous and destructive mindset. In my case, everything changed when I made the conscious decision to narrow my centers of interest and take daily action. Ironically, I’m learning much more this way than I ever did before!

Cheers,

Damien

To All Newbies: Avoid the Internet Marketing Niche like the Plague!

I love internet marketing. It is by far my favorite niche of all. But let me confess something: my first online dollars were NOT made in that niche.

My first internet marketing experience was launching a product in the health niche, in the form of an ebook about how to fight stress, coming with an upsell for a very complete monthly newsletter on the topic. I was more confortable in this niche because it is far less saturated, and I was not in the learning curve.

Eight months ago, I came across an ebook called The Internet Marketing Cure (by Scott Boulch), which confirmed that it is indeed pretty hard to start internet marketing by selling in this this very niche. Aside from the saturation factor, it is tricky to brand yourself as an expert when you are launching your first product. While this is true of any niche, I believe it is far more difficult to be regarded as an expert in the internet marketing field, which makes your success more hypothetical.

Of course, this is especially important to those thinking of being business owners, but affiliates and network marketers too can benefit from this information. There a part of bluff in any commercial pitch, but it should never reach the point where you are simply lying about your skills. For example, as a network marketer, you may try to recruit new members by convincing them that you will be able to help them because you are very experienced when in fact you became an affiliate a few weeks before. This is both unethical and uneffective since you obviously won’t be able to teach what you don’t know and will end up failing anyway.

Very big names in the IM community such as the creators of StomperNet made their first millions selling products that had nothing to do with that niche, and it makes much more sense this way, because whatever it is that you sold successfully, it means that you have something valuable to teach to the internet marketing community. It is much harder (and unethical) to brand yourself as an IM expert when you are trying to make it in that niche without having done any ebusiness before.

A good idea is to sell products that you know fairly well because you have a personal interest in them (in my case, health related products). This will bring value to your customers or affiliates outside of the strictly commercial aspect of the selling process, which you will eventually become good at overtime.

When you do, use this knowledge to the maximum for whichever niche you chose. It is very likely that you will have the upperhand on most of your competition, since many people pick a niche because they are familiar with it, not because they know how to sell their product in that niche. And most of your competitors will be less experienced than you business wise, or lack specific commercial skills that you made the effort to acquire.

By doing so, you will also be able to put forth your experience and success, should you choose to sell an internet marketing related product in the future.

Damien

The Reign of Free material in The Internet Marketing World: Yes But…

It’s now the norm: free material has become a part of every internet marketer’s strategy. Basically, business owners give away free stuff of high value and once people join their free membership sites or claim their gift, they are offered to buy more advanced products.

An even more popular strategy is to offer a free product associated with a monthly subscription for another product, which you will be billed for one month later if you don’t cancel. As long as you don’t fall for all those offers and don’t end up paying for something you wanted for free, you’re golden.

I’m not saying you should never buy from the people using this technique. What I’m saying is you should see these offers as occasions to test your resistance to sollicitaion and to educate yourself for free. Take the time to actually learn from your free products and if you really like one, consider investing in an upgrade.

More importantly, if you plan on selling your own product, I highly recommend that you use the very same type of free content based membership websites.

I’ve been marketing online for a year and a half now, and most a good proportion of what I know, I learned from free resources.

Here are some of the very best ones:

InstantAffiliateWebsite: All your affiliate links, reviews and blogs gathered in one free website. The ulimate resource to promote your business and make money with the tools you are using.

SucceedIn30Days: Make sure you are on the right track from the start. You might not succeed in 30 days, but you will avoid many rookie mistakes and reach your goals faster.

MiniSiteProfitsExposed: My all time favourite. It reviews the whole money making process from creating a product to building a huge list of prospects to sell it. A masterpiece. Still can’t believe it’s free.

The7FigureSecrets: Developed by a great online marketer. This package will tell you all about Viral Marketing, which Mike greatly contributed to develop in the online marketing field. All serious marketers use viral marketing techniques.

EmailPromosExposed: Find out how to write killer emails to sell your products. This is brought to you by the very best. I use it for my MLM business with good results.

SecretsOfEliteMarketers: You won’t believe how much free content you’ll get on this site. Whatever you need to learn, you will find. Quality-wise, it’s even better. The name says it all. Only the best people in their domains are on the menu!

ZezWeb: You don’t need to build your own website anymore. The first free tool to build your own business website with your payment processors built in. Great idea, great quality.

Frank Kern’s blog: One of the most famous and successful internet marketers out there. There is no point in buying Frank’s expensive products if you don’t know what he teaches in his blog for free, so start now.

The Warrior Forum: lots of info, contacts, reviews and much more await you there. You might not to start here if you are a complete newbie, but I recommend you spend time on there and learn from the many knowledgeable members of this forum when you start feeling comfortable with your online marketing skills.

I’ll keep you guys posted on the free stuff I’m using. Meanwhile, tell me if you have specific needs that you would like fulfilled for free.

To be completely honest, free material is NOT where I got the best information myself, although I’ve learned a lot with it, but you can and should definitely start your online business education with some free tools such as the ones I mentionned. For more advanced knowledge and strategy, refer to previous blog posts about mentorship.

Cheers,

Damien