Firstly I have to admit that there aren’t just 7 rules of Internet marketing, Internet marketing is relatively new and as such you should discard all the rules and find what works for you. When I say discard the rules obviously stay within the law! So this is 7 guidelines that will help you succeed at Internet marketing but that title sucked!

Many of these guidelines are closely linked, for example building a business and controlling costs could be included in the same guideline but wheres the fun in that, this article would end up being a business manual with more content than an MBA.
If you are bored already and would like the next 450 words condensed into 1 word it is… Commonsense  (or is that actually 2 words?)

Right assuming you are still reading this let’s get started with rule 1.

1. Build a Business

Internet marketing shouldn’t be a hobby or a pastime it should be treated as a business. That means having a business plan and a long term objective. Build income streams, adsense, Amazon and eBay are great but you can’t build a stable business on them.

2. Focus on the task in hand.

Set aside a time for work and stick with it. Turn off all distractions such as e-mail, messaging software and twitter and concentrate on what you are working on. I find I can build a site in about 2 hours with no distractions or 2 days if I don’t focus on it.

3. Control Your Spending

Every cent you spend on new tools and software is a cent more you need to earn before you are in profit. Before you buy the latest product being promoted ask yourself do you really need it and how much extra will you need to earn to cover the cost.

4. Know your topic.

I’ve known internet marketers who bring out products on PPC one week, fish care the next and then a few weeks later launch a new product on selling via eBay. It’s obvious that they can’t be experts in all these areas so why would anyone want to buy the products. Learn everything you can about your niche and become an expert.

5.  Residual Income is the key.

One of the keys to being a successful Internet marketer is to generate residual income. Knowing that you are going to be having a regular income coming in from various sites or affiliate programs each month frees you up to try more speculative and potentially more financially rewarding ventures.

6. Provide Value.

No matter what you do try to provide value to your clients and customers if you produce an eBook don’t release a version 2 after 6 months update the current version and send it to all you existing customers. The more value you provide them the more they’ll be inclined to buy from you later on.

7. Be a Leader not a Follower

Don’t just follow the herd seek out the untapped markets and design your own unique products. Aim to have people copying what you are doing after all imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Keeping only a few of those rules in mind when you are working in the internet marketing field should help you to become more successful.

The secret to writing these articles is to start with the main body and afterwards write the first and last paragraphs. You’ll see what i mean in the Video below. Another keypoint is to keep your articles at around 300 words.

Any more than 300 words and most peple start to lose attention and switch off. Don’t believe it? next time you are talking to someone record what you are saying then stop when they start to lose attention then go back and count the words you spoke.

Anyway on with the video…

Since creating this post I have written book on article marketing called Article Dominance you can grab a copy for free at http://articledominance.com/freereport.html

or you can pay for it at http://articledominance.com

The first thing you need to know is that Amazon have changed their TOS and they are now stopping anyone from using PPC to drive traffic to Amazon sales pages.  In the space of a few minutes people who have built their business on this model are without an income unless they have been sensible and diversified.

On the other hand those of us who use article marketing are possibily looking at an increase in income over the coming months.

The email they sent out says…

“After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.”

The second this thats worth know is all about Twollars 

Twollars is an online currency set up for twitter users , the idea is to help charities raise income. How it works is as follows. If someone makes an interesting tweet or makes a useful tweet, you can give them some of your twollars  (50 free with every account) . They can then pass these on to companies who will sponsor a charity and match Twollars for Dollars.  So for example if Sony wanted to attract twitter users they could agree to give $1 for ever twollar donated at their site.  Everyone wins.  The Company, The Charity and Twitter users.

Twollars is the idea of a very good friend of mine  Eiso Kant who I’ve know for as long as I’ve been marketing online. He was the programmer behind RSSG and several of my early sites.  At 18 years of age he is one of the most farsighted internet Entrprenures that i’ve ever met.  Check out twollars and send me some if you like it!!

Now for the big one.

One of the problems we all have is keeping people on our sites long enough, with google measuring how long people stay on your site as one indicator of the value of your site the longer people stay the better.

Let me now introduct Apture to you.  Apture is a plugin that does some awesome stuff That will keep people on your site. I am still working out a way to monetize it , videos will be one method and i am sure that I can think of some more over the next few days. So lets have a quick look at apture in action. 

In front of the highlighted words below you’ll see some symbols click on them to see what i’ve linked to..You can then click on related links within the boxes that come up for more info.

My Name Is Mark Thompson and I am The Author of WordPress Goldmine 

Now imagine the potential of this at the moment you can link to videos, documents, sites like techcrunch twitter scribd etc with no doubt more to come…lets hope ezinearticles are one such addition. Using Videos and sales pages and you could have a great way to make money online.

As With Twollars this really could herald the start of something big.

Check out apture today at www.apture.com

This has all been brought on by the February Step by Step I did in The WordPress goldmine Forum. Over 14 days I researched a niche and built a site and did some very simple promotion. I created the videos over 14 days but the actual time taken to research build and promote the site was under 3 hours.  Yes a whole 3 hours of my life.

I did nothing fancy just kept it simple. At the end of february In the last video I monetized the site. 1 month later the site has earned me over $200.  I’ll repeat that again $200 for a site that took me 3 hours.

I have several clickbank accounts which I  use to target different niches. At the beginning of March one account was averaging about $90 per week. During the month I wrote or oursourced about 20 articles which have been submitted. The result is that account has earned almost $700 this week and $600 last week.

Once again there was nothing fancy involved just keeping to the basics and keeping it simple.

No one is ever going to write an ebook that contains the secret to internet marketing as it wouldn’t even fill up one line of an ebook….  Traffic + Monetization = Income.   (That noise is the sound of me shooting myself in the Foot)

If you look at the list of recent ezine articles I have published (see the list in the sidebar) you’ll see one titled “WordPress Blogs and Articles – The Quickest and Cheapest Way to Make Money Online”

It contains a 5 step process to making your first $100 online why not try it this month (then obviously take the money you earned and spend some of it on buying wordpress goldmine!!  )

So come on try something simple, you’ll save time, make money and prove to yourself that internet marketing really does work.

To me A Free product means exactly that it’s free, it costs nothing , there is no payment needed. If you tried to access the Free Butterfly marketing promotion yesterday you would no doubt have seen that Free means different things to Guru’s as it does to us humbler marketers.

In the case of BFM 2.0 free meant a $29.95 postage and packing fee.. Wow How expensive is postage in the US?? I got a router and an Ipod fedexed over night from New York To Spain for about the same price. On top of that you signed up for a forced continuity program for a Newsletter which costs $40 a month .. (forgive me if I am wrong with the price I was laughing too much at this stage!).

Good Luck cancelling

I also loved all the email’s that came out about how you are getting agreat piece of $2000 software for free. I hope it’s improved from the buggy program that was released 2 years ago. I am sure I have seen it offered a few times since them for much less.

I hope you asked the guys promoting it if they use this “awesome”  (irony!!) piece of software.

So What am I going to do to try to redress the balance and show you that there are some great marketers out there who actually care about the people who read our blogs and buy our products.

How does this sound.

My favorite fellow marketer goes by the name of Potpiegirl like me she actually cares about people and above all wants people to succeed. So I am going to include a link to an excellent free guide she has released about creating an income from Squidoo. It is well worth a read.

I am also going to show you how to find a sucessful business model that you can copy and improve on.

So first off lets look at the video , it’s just over 8 minutes long but if you follow what I am doing I guarantee that it can change your life. There are loads of successful business models out there so just find the one that suits your circumstances.

Hope you enjoyed that. To grab Potpiegirl’s free book Click Here

Finally I am running an experiment with twitter so if you enjoyed this post please use the link at the top of the post to retweet about it. I’ll reveal my results in a few weeks.

As always comments are welcome.

Nothing Will Promote your site better or Drive traffic to your site as well a Article Marketing. Unfortunatly most people make basic mistakes when they submit their articles.  I recently checked 100 random articles that were listed on ezine articles and 0ver 75% of them had basic errors that if changed would increase the traffic from their articles.

Over the next two weeks I am going to be Running an Advanced Article Marketing course for the members of WordPress Goldmine.  Believe me you won’t have seen anything like this before.

Check out the Video below and feel free to grab the embed code and add it to your site.

“Would you walk into a restaurant hand the waiter $100 and then walk out?? Would you go to Wal Mart pay for your weeks shopping and then leave it in the store? Of course you wouldn’t but why do you do the same thing with your websites?

For some reason people seem to think nothing of building a website then moving onto the next one before they’ve even finished promoting the original one. I can understand this as i have often got renewal requests for websites that I had completely forgotten about.

The latest was ranking at #1 in Google for a keyword phrase with almost 6,000,000 broad matches. The annoying thing was it hadn’t been monetized! Just because I am an idiot it doesn’t mean to say you need to be one too.

Part of the problem is that building websites and researching is fun whilst promoting them is boring and repetitive. None of us wants to spend out days getting back links and submitting out sites to various directories.

Luckily there are two ways around this, the first is outsourcing. Outsourcing the boring repetitive tasks is a good idea but only if your existing sites are making money. If they aren’t or you are starting out then the best way is to get your hands on some automated site promotion tools.

Site promotion tools can knock hours off of the time it takes to promote a site leaving you more time to do the things you enjoy. Why spend 5 hours submitting your sites RSS feeds to various aggregators when a tool can do it in 8 minutes.

It’s always much better to work smarter than to work harder!!”

If you are interested in making site promotion easier you can grab my free report “Quick and Easy Site Promotion” from http://automatedsitepromotion.com

Have you ever noticed that when a new Wal Mart opens up in a new area they are quickly followed by smaller stores. or when McDonalds opens up soon after you’ll find a new Wendy’s close by. When Starbucks open up what happens? Smaller coffee stores spring up in the area. Why do you think this is?

The market leaders spend a lot of time and money on researching new locations. Do the smaller stores do the same research? Of course not they  just follow along behind the big guys , why spend money on research when Maccy D’s have already done it for you.

It’s the same in internet marketing if you want a short cut to a niche then look at what the big guys are doing. The ideal place to do this is at article sites like Ezinearticles and Articlebase. The first thing you need to do is to identify the big guys in each niche.

You’ll notice the 2 key words in that sentence are “each niche”If you look at the guys who have published most articles overall you’ll find a lot of information but it won’t actually help you too much in most cases. However if you go into each niche you can follow a link find out who are the top writers with the most articles in that niche.

I tend to look at the guys lower down the list rather than the top ones this is mainly because I’ve found they will be targeting different niches where as the top one will be targeting a single niche. It’s these multiple niche models that appeal to me more.

The expensive PPC analysis software that is being promoted at the moment works by assuming that if someone spends money on PPC ads for a long time then the ads are profitable. We will assume the same …

…If someone spends the time and money to write over 50 articles in a niche then it’s profitable for them. You then just need to look at their business model and improve it.  Improving on most article marketing is suprisingly easy as most article marketers make simple mistakes, I looked at over 100 articles researching this blog post and I estimate over 75% of them could have been improved in one way or another.

I hope you enjoyed the return of the Monday tip.

If you are interested in learning more about Advanced Article Marketing this months project in WordPress Goldmine will be of interest to you. Following the success of the February Project (over $70 income from the site in the first 2 weeks)I’ll be creating a series of daily videos showing Advanced Article Marketing tips including a method that I am testing that is currently getting a very high clickthrough rate.

So what is a website promotion exercise? Simply put it’s selecting a keyword phrase which doesn’t have many competing pages and using as many methods as you can think of to get pages ranking for that phrase.

So For example say we took the Phrase “Website Promotion Exercise” and decided to see if we could get it ranking there are several things you could do.

1. Place a post on some blogs with differing Page ranks and see which ranks higher the highest Page ranked site or the most relevant site. 

2. Use clipmarks and twitter and see which brings the best results.

3. Add a squidoo lens and a Hubpage 

4. Use services like Zimbo, Gather and Wetpaint and see which one outranks the others.

I could go on but I am sure you get the idea. Only when you’ve run tests like this will you know exactly what works and what doesn’t. I would recommend repeating the tests every 6 months or so as google tends to favor certain sites for a while and then move on to others. 

To  make it more fun you could challange a friend or group of friends to a competition and see who gets ranked highest.  Give it a go today it will really pay off the next time you build a site.

The thing Is these all came from marketers I like and trust as the charlatans have long since been subjected to the unsubscribe button. Something is bothering me about this…

Now don’t think I am going to complain about Mass Control. I’m not, the original product was excellent and I am sure 2.0 is just as good. I hope so cause I got it. I also think that Frank Kern is one of the very few good guys in the internet marketing world.

Actually there are 2 things bothering me, the first  is why Frank Kern actually needs to use affiliates?

I am sure Fank has massive lists. If he marketed to his lists alone he could cut the price by at least 50% and that would generate more buyers. I do have my therory about this, and I am convinced that these guys take turns in releasing products and in return for promoting someone elses product your product will be promoted when you release it. Just my over active imagination? you tell me!

The second one is that mass control is aimed at Internet marketers who want to launch products some of the people who were sending out emails and promising their first born if you bought through their links have lists made up of lot’s of newbies. In none of the emails I saw was anyone told that it might not be suitable for them.

Hopefully I’ll be able to open my inbox now as the MC2.0 has almost sold out..at least until Frank finds 50 copies under his bed in a weeks time!

Finally a confession, I actually had a dream a few days back that i was invited around to Franks Kerns house for dinner… I blame the pre launch!!!!!

Right back to work…I should stop thinking too much and eating cheese before I go to bed