Every World Internet Summit is an outstanding event. They often SELL OUT weeks before the event, so it’s important that you start marketing as soon as possible so that you don’t miss your chance of making profits. Every two months, twelve of the best internet marketers in the world come together to present one HUGE weekend of internet learning, somewhere around the globe – Sydney, London, Dallas, Auckland, Singapore and more. You’ll be there, won’t you? A dozen top world internet marketers are coming to speak at the World Internet Summit. There are only a few seats left (every year it sells out). But if you want to be on the inside and find out what’s working and selling on the internet, you’ve got to be here.

This morning I received another email invitation to pay Roger Hamilton’s company for a “WealthDynamics Profile” test.  According to them, the “WealthDynamics Profile is the key to you doing better in business”. By throwing in the names of credible entrepreneurs, the soft sell persuades us that by paying $100 to complete the Wealth Dynamics  test, we will find our similarity to the likes of entrepreneurs Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, George Soros or Warren Buffet. Not that any of those worthies have taken the test, you understand. You have to hand it to XL – their marketing is not bad! Just to be clear: the WealthDynamics Profile was dreamt up by the Roger Hamilton, it has not been validated independently and it is used as a hook to sell life membership in his organisation. There is news on that front – Roger Hamilton has moved his scandal-hit XL Result Foundation to a new website with a new name – XL Nation. That company name is no mistake – read this, from the xlnation.org website: “On 31st March 2009, on XL National Day, XL Nation launched as the first global nation without borders. Operating as a non-profit, for-social-profit nation, XL Nation is in the process of harnessing technology to operate as the first real-time global democracy”  WHAT?  This megalomaniac copy goes on and on, with glowing testimonials from memners of the XL nation.  But, as ever, there are no concrete examples of business benefits for XL members – just plenty of training sessions to make them feel good.

The XL Nation membership page states: ‘XL Nation is a community of like-minded, social entrepreneurs working together with integrity and purpose towards realising World Wide Wealth. XL Nation Citizens are entitled to invite and accept those individuals who they believe would both benefit from and add value to XL Nation. If you are applying independently and as yet don’t have a Buddy to invite you to join, we would be delighted to help find one, who will invite you to join their circle directly and give you access to all of XL Nation.’  Sounds more and more like Network Marketing to me…

Aftedr so many allegations that Roger Hamilton’s XL Results foundation is a con or a scam and so many complaints from members who paid upfront and demanded refunds, it is no surprise that XL Results Foundation has rebranded itself to try and appear more legitimate.

Today I went to the local shops, to get a bracelet repaired.  There is a jeweller who makes her own stuff on the premises, using beads, pearls and silver.  The products range in price from £15 to £150.  The shop rent is probably £200 a week, and rates are £75 on top of that.  The electricity bill could be up to £30 a week, making the fixed outgoings at least £300 per week – say £50 per day.  Today, on a glorious sunny afternoon  in our tourist town, no customers came into the shop in the fifteen minutes I was there.  Other times I have been to the shop, I have always been the only customer.  To cover the outgoings the business needs sales of £200 a day and I saw no hint of any paying customers coming through the door. The business owner has invested time and money in the company, she is makiing the jewellery herself every day and paying the fixed business costs.  That business must be operating at a loss.

My online blogging business cost me $8 to set up, my fixed business overheads total about $5 a week for hosting and domain name registration.  Sure there are quiet days when I do not make many sales, but I am not mortgaged to the hilt so there is no financial downside to this internet marketing model.

There is one WordPress Plugin that could make all the difference between success and accidental oblivion for your blog – especially if, like me, you often rewrite your finished blog posts.  WordPress contains some brilliant built-in functions, for example it pings new posts to your chosen blog services automatically every time you publish a new post.  When you write a new blog post, WordPress sends an automated ping to all those websites telling them there is new material on your blog.  All well and good when the post is new, but suppose you edit the post after you have published it? WordPress thinks the ping services will want to know about your revised post, but they will raise the alarm if you ping the same URL to them over and over again.  Your site could then be flagged up as a spam site – and banned by the ping services because of ping spamming. If you edit several already published posts, everyone will cause a new ping frenzy, unless you havea Ping Optimizing Plugin installed. Because spamming is an SEO technique that is used by black hat sites, and even if the mistake was accidental, you will still suffer the same penalty. The Smart Update Pinger and the  Ping Optimizer by MaxBlogPress are two Free WordPress Plugins that help you avoid making these mistakes, protecting your site’s position in the Search Engine results.  The plugins take over the WordPress standard update ping functionality. Instead of pinging every time you save a post, the Smart Update Pinger  and Ping Optimizer plugins only ping when the post has not previously been published.  You can also see a log for the latest pings, together with error messages, on the plugin’s options page. The author of Smart Update Pinger has said that he is not updating the Plugin any more but my log stats show that the plugin is still working for me.  Have a look at each of them and decide which one is best for you. But make sure you install one of these plugins to keep your blog out of trouble! And do not forget to download the WordPress Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin to maximise affiliate earnings from your blog.

Here is the best plugin I have found for displaying Adsense ads on WordPress blogs. If you visit the WordPress Plugins page you will see plenty of hype about the Adsense Deluxe Plugin. I tried that but I found the settings very fiddly. I carried on searching and eventually I found something better. The easy Adsense plugin that I am using here will show your Adsense ads in the middle of your WordPress posts and pages and float the text round them seamlessly. This has to improve your clickthrough rates! I found this free plugin by searching on Google Code and it works really well for me. After trying the Adsense Deluxe plugin without success I had also tried some widgets and other plugins, and I was even looking at some paid tools. They were all complicated to install and I was wondering if I would ever be able to place Adsense ads around my WordPress blog posts. So what is the magic WordPress plugin that I love so much? It is called ‘Adsense Injection‘, and it will ‘insert Adsense into your blog. If I managed to install this plugin in less than five minutes, then you can probably do it in three!

1. Download the plugin to your computer and upload it to your web host server under ”wp-content’ – ‘plugins’. The best way to upload the plugin is by using FTP. If you have not already found a free FTP service, try Core FTP.  Once the plugin is uploaded, go to your WordPress control panel and there are two quick things to do.

2. Click the ‘Plugins’ section and you should now see an entry for ‘Adsense Injection’. If you look at the ‘Action’ column you just need to click on ‘Activate’

3. You will now see a button called ‘Adsense’ in your ‘Options’ section. All you have to do is click on this and fill in your Adsense publisher ID number and check the colour codes for your ads.

The only thing lacking in this plugin is the ability to exclude Adsense image ads, because most Adsense publishers find that image ads do not get such a high clickthrough rate as text ads. If I find out how to exclude image ads using this plugin I will post an update.

The best features of the “Adsense Injection” plugin are that it will insert Adsense codes automatically into every blog post, including older posts. This is great if your blog already has a lot of existing content, and you don’t want to insert codes manually into all of them. As the name suggests, when you use Adsense Injection you “inject” your Adsense codes automatically and randomly into all previous and future blog posts.

Thus, you will not have to worry about what’s called “ad blindness” as your Adsense blocks will appear in different positions within your content. You can also randomize different ad formats and different alignments to make sure that no two pages have the exact Adsense codes on them.

Finding affiliate programs to use for making money from your blog is quite simple. I am signed up with two of the biggest marketplaces for affiliate programs – Commission Junction, who call themselves CJ, and ClickBank. It is completely FREE to join, they pay your commission by cheque (check) . CJ pay in sterling over here, but Clickbank pay in US$ checks unless you are generating a lot of sales. If you are outside the US this is not so convenient as getting your payments through Paypal and I suggest you opt to receive payments once they are above $100 otherwise bank charges will swallow up your earnings.

How to post your Affiliate Links

As soon as you are a registered affiliate, log in to your dashboard and you can search the marketplace for products in your niche that you can sell.  Most merchants supply a variety of banners and text links with your affiliate ID coded in to them. It is easy to insert the code into your website, blog, email or forum signature and start promoting the products.

But you might not want to show your affiliate name, and there are people out there who could hijack your link ad get the commission for themselves.  You also want to manage the placement of your links and update them fast if they change.

There is a great WordPress plugin that you can use for this to protect your earnings, and it will help you sell more as an affiliate. It is called WordPress Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin. The way it works is to link words and phrases in your blog content to one of your affiliate links, taking your readers straight to the product without the need to add an affiliate link every time.  When you write a blog post about handbags, there will be a link to a company that sells accessories.

For me this plugin made all the difference in successful affiliate marketing: until I started using Affiliate Link Cloak, I spent hours messing about with affiliate codes without getting a decent payback for the time involved.  Once the account details were programmed in, the links appeared like magic and my earnings soared.

Marketing to a mass market can be expensive. You often cannot target your perfect prospective customer properly because the market is too broad with wildly-different needs and desires. For example, if you make a living selling life insurance, selling your product to a group of people interested in “insurance” would be ineffective. Some need car insurance. Others need homeowner’s insurance. Still others need health insurance. To sell your product more effectively, you need to focus on a market within a market. You need to focus on niche marketing. This article will provide three tips you can use to start marketing to a niche.

Identify Your Niche Market

Whatever product or service you are selling, you can likely dig deeper and identify a segment of the broad market. Using the example above, your segment or “niche market” would be those people who specifically want to buy life insurance. However, you can continue to dig deeper by separating the segments of people who want to buy a whole life insurance policy and those who want to buy a term insurance policy. Each of these niche markets have different needs. Speaking to those respective needs is far more effective than speaking to the needs of a broad market.

Reach Your Niche Market

Once you have identified your niche market, you need to figure out how to put your message in front of them. Most niche markets are comprised of people who congregate amongst each other. For example, those people who have suffered the experience of having a spouse cheat on them share their experiences with each other on several online forums devoted to the subject. If you are selling a product or service targeted to that niche market, you can easily reach them there.

Also, you can reach niche markets easily through advertising on the search engines. Using the “cheating spouse” example above, you can advertise on Google using their Adwords program. When someone types “catch my cheating spouse” into Google, your ad can be displayed. This can be a very effective way of reaching a tightly-focused niche market.

Speak To Your Niche Market

After you have identified your niche market and discovered ways to reach out to them, you need to create a selling process that converts prospects into paying customers. As mentioned above, every niche market has unique needs and desires. It is easier to speak to those unique needs and desires if you focus on a small segment of a market.

For example, assume you are promoting a dating service. Your selling process to convert men into paying customers will likely be far different than your process of converting women. Each gender has different needs that you can speak to if you segment the market. Further, each gender often responds differently to various selling techniques. Segmenting a market into small niches gives you the opportunity of speaking to each niches’ unique needs.

Niche marketing is about focusing in on a segment of a market. You can accomplish that by first identifying the group of people within a broad market who have similar needs or desires. Then, you need to find ways of reaching out to that niche market of people to expose them to your product or service. Lastly, you need to create a selling process that speaks to your niche market’s unique needs and desires. If you follow those tips, you may be surprised at how easily you are able to convert your prospects into customers.

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You can get more quality free information about finding your own niche in the e-course “List Building in a Niche Market”. cyber-marketing411.com/niche11

Here is an interesting piece that has explained some of my unanswered questions about how to use articles to get more traffic to your blog and achieve good backlinks.

Article marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to build back links and to get your home based business globally recognized. Getting an article published on hundreds or thousands of directories will bring a surge of traffic to your site as well as setting it up for long term highly targeted traffic through the search engines. There are many different variables that come into play in making this method work effectively and efficiently for your home based business.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is if you feel comfortable enough and confident enough to write. If you are, good for you! Read through a couple of high quality articles to get a feel of what it takes and get started writing one yourself. After writing a couple you’ll really start to pick up on speed and what it takes to make your articles successful.

On the other hand, if you have no previous writing experience or just don’t feel comfortable writing articles, don’t worry, you can have your articles outsourced for you. There are many people and/or services that you can buy bulk amounts of articles for a relatively low price. Although I would highly advise and recommend you to learn to write your own articles. In the long run it will be much more cost efficient and also more gratifying to be able to accomplish something by yourself. You may never know if you are good at something unless you try it. Read more »

The techniques used in internet marketing are invariably changing with new systems added all the time. And while some features of Internet marketing are similar to traditional marketing, others are not. Having the correct tools, and proper mindset, for internet marketing are essential to success.

Internet marketing is in reality, one of the most difficult professions to become successful in, but it can be achieved if you are both hard working and apply a little elbow grease. Internet marketing is the process of expanding and advertising an organization using online media as well as the use of the Internet to advertise and sell products and services. Your website and Internet Marketing are the tactics you use to persuade visitors to make purchases or become an internet lead.

For anyone conducting business on-line, a properly optimized website can mean the difference between success and failure. The more exposure your website gets, the greater the potential you will have sales, which is the lifeblood to any business. Using Google’s pay-per-click advertising system has been proven to bring targeted customers to your site. As a result, every business should have a PPC program for their targeted keywords. With correct keyword density and meta tags, business websites will come through with top rankings on major search engine lists. Once internet business owners are experiencing the essential website traffic in order to secure high ranking search engine status, they should submit their internet business website to all of the major search engines.

There are also low-cost internet marketing methods available to internet business owners, and these methods are easy to utilize. If internet business owners are searching for low-cost internet marketing they should seriously consider becoming engaged in link exchange opportunities. Exchanging links is primarily a free process, making link exchanges a cost effective way for business owners to increase traffic to their website.

The long term prognosis for online advertising is that it will continue to outperform other types of advertisements in reaching the highest targeted audiences. Successful online marketing depends to a great extent on your ability to identify those advertisements that provide the best opportunity to reach your target audience in a scalable and cost effective manner.

Internet Marketing is a terrific way to make a living and a great place for people to start the business of their dreams. The opportunities that exist for Internet marketing are endless. By recognizing areas in which you can enrich your Internet marketing techniques, you can help facilitate your long-term success.

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Don Downes is a top internet marketer who specializes in helping others succeed in creating multiple 6 figure marketing incomes working at home. To learn more internet marketing information you can visit Don’s Wealthy Marketer site = AutomateWealthOnline.com

Every blog or website needs a sitemap so that the search engines can find your web pages. Navigation on your web pages is also important, of course but today I discovered a tactic used by a competitor of one of my SEO clients that reminded me of the role of sitemaps. My client was getting really upset because his site had fallen down in the SERPs results for his search term. His business is in the service sector so the search phrases are geographic. His web pages have nice search engine friendly titles, of course. This means they describe the page content – for example this page could be named website-sitema

ps.html and that would indicate the subject matter. I had analysed his competitor’s site for keywords and phrases and there was nothing radical going on. The site navigation was on dropdown boxes – nothing special there, either. But when I looked at the sitemap I found that there was a separate page for each district and village where the company wanted to rank. They were not apparent on the navbar, but they were being fed to the search engines and the website was ranking high for all the districts where they operate.

So the sitemap is crucial. If you are using WordPress, all you need to do is get the free Google Sitemaps plugin, install it and forget about it. It is almost as easy to get a free sitemap for regular (HTML) websites as well, thanks to Sitemap Builder. Just visit the site, enter your site URL, check the pages that Sitemap builder finds and click if you are happy. A Google-compliant sitemap will be generated. All you need to do is paste the content into a new sitemap.xml page on your cpanel and it will be there to tell the search engines about your website content. If you have registered your website with Google Webmaster Tools you can check that the status of your sitemap is OK.