There are so many opportunities online to make money and make a difference. If you ever wanted to get started in this space, now’s the time.

I know that I’m a few weeks late, but I want to use this post to reflect on the past year in terms of what I learned about online business building and marketing. I’ll outline my top 5 learnings from 2009 and share my Internet marketing predictions and tips for the new year. Cheers!

1. Time is always against you – focus, hustle, and outsource
As I pile on new projects and campaigns on my plate, I’m learning more and more that time is always against you. There’s only so much you can do in a 24 hour day, so those who manage their time wisely and use it most effectively are going to win.

My biggest tip? Don’t spread yourself thin with too many projects and sites. You may think you’re doing yourself a favor with “diversification”, but in this case, it’s better to put your eggs in one basket. That way you’ll be able to focus all of your attention to growing one or a few sites to reach critical mass. Otherwise, you’ll likely see no results whatsoever.

Furthermore, don’t be afraid to spend money on outsourcing some of your work! Some people insist on doing everything themselves, but remember, time is more valuable than money. You can always make $100 back, but you’ll never be able to the get the past 10 minutes of your life back. Outsource whenever possible so you can focus on the activities that yield the greatest ROI.

2. The early mover advantage is growing
Back in May ‘08 I wrote that the window of opportunity is shrinking for independent publishers online. A lot has happened since then, but my theory still holds true. Webmasters who started their sites back in 2000 have a huge advantage over their more recent competitors. Not only are they given preference by the search engines simply based on age, but they’re more likely to have accumulated high quality links, social mentions, and stronger branding over time.

In some super competitive niches, it’s almost coming to a point where new sites with small or medium-sized budgets have absolutely no chance of competing. Even smaller less competitive niches are getting saturated very quickly.

The solution? Don’t delay any longer. Focus your attention on just a couple branded sites and build them out like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll want to start by focusing on and dominating a smaller sub-niche.

3. Buying established sites is a great shortcut strategy
In the summer of ‘09, I had my first experience buying an established site (a personal finance blog) in the 5-figures range. I’ve always wanted to get involved in this industry, and buying an existing site with good traffic and positive cash flow offered a great opportunity. Not only was I able to get a large head start in the personal finance industry but the cash flow allowed me to invest monthly profits back into the site for further growth. It’s a great strategy especially since growing a new site these days is increasingly difficult (as I mentioned in my previous point #2).

Monitor online site marketplaces like Flippa, Digital Point Forums, and eBay on a regular basis. You may be able to pick up a distressed site for relatively cheap – especially in this economy. People are more willing to part with their sites to gain cash quick.

I have a detailed case study about my experience buying an established site for 5 figures as part of my Winners Circle membership program. Check it out.

4. Ad-based business models aren’t reliable – build out your own products
If there’s anything the recession has taught you, it’s that you shouldn’t rely on advertising to make up the majority of your site’s revenue. I’ve written before that blogging for ads is dead and I think this is a trend that will continue moving forward. If you have a large site that gets a ton of page views, then sure monetizing through advertising can be very lucrative. But for 90% of sites out there, making a significant amount of money through advertising isn’t really feasible. Plus, an ad-based business model forces you to be at the mercy of sponsors. Who wants that?

A much better way to make money online is to create your own products – whether they be e-books, DVDs, subscriptions, or an actual physical item. It’s definitely not easy (I’ve experienced this first hand through my Winners Circle membership program), but the rewards are greater and much more steady even for small sites.

It’s fine to start monetizing through ads, but I think all online publishers should work towards some sort of paid model. With the web being polluted with free low-quality content everyday, readers will increasingly begin looking for better paid sites to cut through the clutter. You’ll want to be in a position of authority with your products ready to go when this happens.

5. You need creative & aggressive marketing strategies to stand out
As I mentioned, the competition online is getting stiffer and web surfers now have more options online than ever before. So why should they go to your site to fulfill their needs? You can say that you have better content, better features, blah blah blah. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to marketing. Yes, I agree that content is important, but what’s equally important, if not more, is getting people to actually see your content and come back again and again.

For that, you can utilize marketing strategies like social media votes, contests, link bait articles, software and tools, etc. In fact, I’m currently holding a huge contest over at Money Crashers with $8,300 in prizes. In just 2 weeks, RSS subscribers have increased from 500 to 3,000. Of course, for promotions like this you need the content to back it up and get people to come back when it’s all over. Even so, big promotions are great for giving your site a boost and actively putting your site in front of your target audience.

The most important thing is to keep hustling and working smart in the new year to see success. Consistency and persistence are always rewarded.

Do any of my tips and experiences resonate with you? What are your goals for online business in 2010? Share them in a comment below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Top 5 Crucial Internet Marketing Tips for 2010 – Are You Prepared?

• 3 Important Factors in Selecting Your Internet Marketing Strategy of Choice
• The Money Tree Online Business Formula – Who Says Money Can’t Grow on Trees?
• Micro Sites = Mega Mistake, Why You Should Focus on One Site
• 6 Crucial Factors to Determine Whether Continuity is Right For Your Business
• Don’t Just Make Money Online – Build Business Assets that Last

Khalid and Ayat over at Invesp do an amazing job with conversion optimization and put together a solid list last year – Top 100 Internet Marketers of 2008. I even did a followup post called How to Be a Top 100 Online Marketer in 2009 – 8 Lessons in Personal Branding which many of those included helped me to promote. In fact, my goal was to use the very principles I talked about in that post to get on the list for 2009. Well a year later, I made it… but it does feel bittersweet.

I’m not alone in voicing my issues with the list either. Rae Hoffman wrote a pretty comprehensive post (in her usual scathing hot style) outlining where the list went wrong – including all of the top marketers who were left off. No Chris Pearson? No Michael Streko? That’s like playing NBA Jam back in the nineties when Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal were left off in the game due to licensing reasons. Not as fun.

Anyway, I realize that a list like this is mainly for linkbait purposes (hey, I’m writing about it afterall). But the process could definitely have been streamlined to come up with something of higher quality.

Are you thinking about creating a Top X of 2010 list? Here are some of the biggest considerations and tips that you should have in mind based on the flaws of this latest list.

1. “Top People” lists work great, but…
Let’s be honest. Top lists of people work because they cater to people’s egos. Everyone likes seeing themselves included on a list – so they’ll share it and make sure others take notice. That’s free marketing that you can take advantage of.

On the flip side, the same lists can be double-edged swords. Sure, those included will help you promote but what about those people who were left off? Or what if bloggers and social media users damage your reputation because they don’t agree with you? As an example, John Chow went as far as to say that Invesp is on his **** list. That in itself probably offsets a lot of the benefit obtained through the strategy.

My point? If you plan on creating any sort of list that plays on people’s egos, be careful. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

2. You can’t please everyone
Like anything in life, you can’t always please everyone. This is especially true for top lists. There are always going to be different opinions, different vantage points, different relationships and different priorities. Just because you think someone should make the list, doesn’t mean the person next to you will too.

So if you’re creating a list of top people, develop a reliable system to base the rankings on. Ideally it would be something that would be hard to argue with (e.g. a list of top marketers based on income, not user opinions).

3. Use numbers and justify reasons for inclusion
You can’t argue with numbers. If possible, base your rankings on actual numbers rather than intangibles like popularity. For example, if you want to create a list of top bloggers in 2010, use metrics like traffic, revenue, social media, etc. Leaving the rankings to biased user opinion is a recipe for disaster. My list of the best Internet marketing blogs works so well because it uses a large set of data to determine the rankings. If someone has a quality blog, all of the numbers should tell the story.

Furthermore, add some reasons why that particular person is placed at the specified rank and why he or she deserves it. Invesp really dropped the ball here because it seemed like all of the rankings after the top 10 were completely arbitrary. To make matters worse, my bio was taken straight from the about page here.

4. Don’t leave it to public voting
I was actually quite surprised when I saw that Invesp opened up their top marketers list with a public call for nominations. Basically, anyone could add anyone else they wanted for consideration to the list. I get why the Invesp team might have wanted to do that to increase exposure and public interaction, but it certainly did not help the process. Many people nominated and voted for themselves and Shoemoney and John Chow decided to endorse a rather unknown marketer just to game the system. That caused quite a negative backlash that I’m sure did not help Invesp’s cause.

What are some of the ideas that you have for top lists? You’ll definitely want to consider all of the points I mentioned. Otherwise, you could end up doing more harm than good. Thoughts?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Big Flaws in the “Most Influential Online Marketers of 2009″ List and 4 Ways You Can Avoid the Same Mistakes

• 100 Most Influential Internet Marketers of 2008 – Who’s In?
• How to Be a Top 100 Online Marketer in 2009 – 8 Lessons in Personal Branding
• 3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Use Numbered Lists in Your Posts
• Get Off the Blogging Bandwagon & Set Yourself Apart
• Exclusive Interview with the Missing 41st Blog Blazer – Finally Revealed

You can see the full text of the FTC’s final guides governing endorsements and testimonials (link to PDF on the right sidebar). It’s an 80 page document, but it may be worth going through if you’re doing any kind of advertising or endorsing online through your blogs, sales pages, marketing campaigns, etc.

The new guidelines state the following:

1. Endorsements must be based on the honest opinions and experiences of the endorsers. Paid actors must be disclosed if they are used.

If you’re a blogger offering paid reviews, you can’t write glowing recommendations (against what you really think) just because you were paid for it. Reviews and endorsements must reflect true opinions and any money being exchanged must be disclosed (described in #4).

2. Endorsements may not contain any representations which would be deceptive, or could not be substantiated, if made directly by the advertiser.

If you’re an affiliate of a certain product, you can’t claim any benefit or result unless it’s something that the advertiser can say directly. For example, you can’t say that a weight loss product helps people lose 20 pounds in a week unless it can be proven by the advertising company.

Believe it or not, a lot of shady affiliate marketers used to write fake reviews of products with outlandish claims, just so that they could make more commissions. This sort of practice is very deceptive and wrong, but there’s no denying that it works in terms of making money. Thankfully, under these new guidelines, this sort of thing is now banned.

3. Endorsements must be representative of what most consumers can reasonably expect to achieve. Any claim made by the endorser must reflect the opinion or experience of a significant proportion of consumers. Disclaimers like “results not typical” are no longer sufficient.

A common marketing tactic is to display testimonials or case studies where amazing results were achieved. Examples include how a certain diet pill helped someone lose 50 pounds in 6 months or how an online training course helped someone else make $1 million. Advertisers frequently used these types of stories to lure people in – without having to clearly specify that similar results are actually very difficult to obtain (other than a tiny “results not typical” disclaimer).

Under the new guidelines, any claim made by endorsers must be indicative of results for the majority of people, not just a select few.

4. All material connections between the advertiser and the endorser (including research or medical organizations) that consumers would not expect must be disclosed, including free products or monetary compensation.

All payment for reviews or endorsements must be disclosed, including monetary compensation and free products/services. This is especially relevant for bloggers and celebrities who write paid reviews/tweets/whatever.

Who Does This Apply to?

If you make money online, chances are pretty high that these new regulations affect you in some shape or form. Bloggers must be transparent and honest, advertisers can only claim “typical results”, and affiliate marketers must stay within the confines of those advertiser claims. And in case you were wondering, these new regulations apply to all areas of the web – including blogs, social media, sales pages, emails, PPC and banner advertisements, etc – but only in the US.

Apparently you need disclaimers on tweets and Facebook status messages too. But paid links (for SEO purposes) and affiliate links by themselves are likely okay.

The penalty? Fines for violating the new rules could be up to $11,000 per instance. However, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines do not have the force of law (although the FTC can still sue for violations) and are mainly for advertisers (not individual bloggers). In fact, back in October, Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC stated that they will not be patrolling the blogosphere or investigating bloggers. Responsibility falls on the advertisers and that’s who the FTC will be targeting with the guidelines.

My Thoughts on the Guidelines

The Good
I’m definitely all for the FTC cleaning up spam and protecting consumers from shady marketing scams online. I’ve seen this sort of stuff first hand, and it really isn’t pretty. It’s easy for people to be tricked by the deceptive ploys online – which could negatively affect their health or finances. If anything, the regulations will instill confidence in the minds of online shoppers and further legitimize the real businesses out there doing it right.

Bloggers especially stand to gain. Being transparent is never a bad thing, and I think the disclosure will make bloggers more trustworthy overall. After all, it’s okay to write paid reviews – but readers deserve to know the motivations of why a certain product or service is being featured (sponsored or not).

The Bad
That being said, marketing online will become much more difficult with these regulations in place. For example, effective marketing tools like hype, case studies, and testimonials will take a major hit. How do you get people excited about something if your claim is something unspectacular like “lose 0.5 pounds in 3 months” or “make $10 working from home on the Internet”?

It’s the extraordinary claims and possibilities (even though they represent uncommon results) that sell people on an idea – and these claims don’t necessarily have to be deceptive or misleading. The new rules essentially take this option away and advertisers will need to find new ways to play on people’s emotions. Product Launch Formula guru Jeff Walker recently had to take down all of his students’ case studies.

The Uncertainties
I understand that the FTC’s intentions are good, but the steps for implementation and enforcement of the new guidelines are vague at best.

For example, what exactly is a “typical result” and how is it defined? How will the FTC police all of the marketing and advertising activity that goes on online? What about the offenders who operate outside of the US? Furthermore, can a review or endorsement truly be “honest” if money changes hands?

The FTC has stated that they will only go after advertisers in cases that are black and white and that they are “not interested in playing gotcha in gray areas”. But really, with such vague guidelines, what’s black and white?

Practical Applications
Alright so now that you’ve spent some time learning about the new FTC guidelines and how it applies to your business as a blogger, affiliate marketer, or advertiser, what are some things you should be doing now?

If you’re a blogger who accepts compensation for posts, create a disclosure policy page. For ideas, John Chow has a humorous one here and Jim Kukral has a more serious one here. You can generate your own at DisclosurePolicy.org. Also, be sure to disclose your affiliations with the product or company at the end of reviews or endorsements – whether you were paid up front, paid affiliate commissions, or even scored free review products. Michael Gray recently listed one out at the end of a review post.

Disclosure: This was not a sponsored post; however, I was comped a subscription to easytweets. A positive review was not required or incentivized in any way.

Again, the FTC will not be going after any individual bloggers, but this is all good practice so that advertisers will be willing to work with you under the new guidelines.

As for the “typical results” claim (#3), be sure to frequently survey your customers so that you have a better understanding of what you can realistically offer. Of course, you never want to stretch the truth, but you can always present the data in a way that is favorable for your marketing (e.g. amount of money made by users who finished an entire Internet marketing training program AND started an online business).

What do you think about the new FTC guidelines? Do they significantly affect the way you run your online business? Leave your thoughts in a comment here below.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



New FTC Guidelines for Bloggers & Internet Marketers – The Good, The Bad, and Everything Else You Need to Know

• Does a Paid Review Mean a Positive Review? My Recent Blogging Dilemma
• The 12 Essential Elements of a Highly Effective Blog Review – Make More Money
• Affiliate Income is Most Stable
• What To Review On Your Blog – 7 Ways to Find the Right Products & Services
• Gasp! Advertising on Twitter with ad.ly & Sponsored Tweets… Is It Okay to Make Money?

Squeeze pages are important – no doubt about it. If you have a free offer that you’re giving away in exchange for user information (name and email address), you should be utilizing a squeeze page. If not, you’re probably leaving a lot of leads on the table and limiting your email list building potential.

I’ve written before about the 7 components of killer squeeze pages and you should look to incorporate all of them if possible.

But what if you’re not technically savvy or would rather rely on a system to do all of the heavy lifting for you? After all, tweaking and optimizing on-page elements usually requires a good understanding of technical code. Enter Squeeze Theme – a new premium Wordpress theme created by the team over at Unique Blog Designs.

Squeeze Theme isn’t really your typical theme in the sense that what you see is not necessarily what you get. In other words, you wouldn’t be using it for a set layout or color scheme. It’s more of a framework rather than a theme. There are a ton of options and configurations in the backend that allow you to customize the look and feel of your blog. Of course, the strong point of the theme is that you can easily set up optimized squeeze pages and sales pages in addition your blog – all with a few clicks of a button.

Here’s a video introduction to Squeeze Theme.

The Wordpress backend looks like this…

There are options for pretty much everything – including appearance and colors, layout, fonts, logos, form and submit button settings, etc. Here’s what the homepage of your default blog might look like. Keep in mind that many of the elements and colors can be changed however you wish. In fact, if you notice, the SqueezeTheme.com site uses the same theme.

In addition to the traditional blog or magazine layouts, the theme also allows you to create custom squeeze pages and sales pages (without sidebars). Below are some of the existing templates and examples to show you what’s possible.

Final Thoughts

Squeeze Theme costs $147 and definitely is not cheap compared to other premium themes out there. However, if you consider the value of squeeze/sales pages and the potential new leads and customers that they can help you obtain, it can be a very good investment. Furthermore, since Squeeze Theme can easily be customized, you can use it for many of your sites with different settings in place.

It’s possible to create squeeze pages on your existing blog by tweaking the code and adding some templates. However, if you’re looking to build an email list and sell products on your blog without much technical know-how, Squeeze Theme may be the perfect solution for you.

Try out Squeeze Theme now.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Squeeze Theme Review – Squeeze/Sales Pages on Your Blog Made Easy

• 7 Components of a Killer Squeeze Page that Gets Thousands of Leads
• Blog Themes Club – Win a Free 1 Month Membership for Premium Themes
• Tatto Media Keeps on Improving – Followup Review
• 11 Ways to Maximize Your Blog’s Subscriber Count
• Arkayne Review – Display Related Posts Around the Web

It’s every webmaster’s dream to go popular on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. A front page feature on any of these sites brings a flood of new traffic – thousands of visits in a single day. Of course, that kind of reward attracts a lot of competition and the social sites are thus protected by tough voting algorithms. You not only need good viral content and a large network of friends to help you, but also a lot of luck. Hitting it big on social media does not come easy.

Enter the Reddit Self-Serve Advertising Program. A few weeks back, Reddit announced that it will be opening up its homepage for anyone willing to pay. How does it work? Advertisers bid for the space at the top of the Reddit homepage, where the adverts pretty much look the same as regular Reddit listings, only they’re labeled as “sponsored links” and have a border and blue background. The ads should get a ton of visibility. Here’s an example of what they look like:

The bidding process for the advertising space is actually quite interesting. Advertisers bid a certain amount per day, anywhere between $20 and $9,999.99. All of the money is then placed into a big pool, and advertisers get a proportional amount of exposure based on how much they bid compared to everyone else. For example, if you bid the daily minimum of $20 and there are 9 other advertisers, each bidding $20 as well, then your ad will show up 10% of the time.

Of course it’s be a lot more complicated than that. While this bidding system is great for Reddit’s income, it does add a bit of uncertainty for potential advertisers. How much can you expect to get for your money? There’s a lot of outside factors involved – including how many other advertisers there are and how much they’re bidding.

So how do you know whether or not Reddit advertising is worth your while? You don’t. Like with any other advertising, you just have to try it and see if it sticks. Getting in early while there are less advertisers will likely give you an advantage.

The Reddit self-serve advertising platform is not yet open to the public, but I did manage to get an invitation to the beta. I decided to throw $40 into it for a day and analyze the results. In the rest of this post, I’ll describe the process and outline my findings.

My Results with Reddit Advertising

Setting up a promotion using the Reddit self serve system was very easy. Just fill out a form with title, URL, duration, and bid amount and you’re good to go.

Once you create your ad, the Reddit team will review and approve/reject it. You do need to submit two days in advance of when you want to start.

I decided to promote a recent article I wrote here on Winning the Web called 3 Reasons Why Google Needs to Buy Twitter in Order to Survive.  After $40 and 24 hours, these were the results.

In 24 hours, my listing was shown 26,050 times (to 3,187 unique visitors). The link in my ad was clicked 419 times, resulting in a unique click through rate of 13.15%. Not bad – that’s about $0.09 per click.

Let’s take a look at the quality of that traffic by analyzing Google Analytics data for Reddit in the same time period.

As you can see, there does seem to be a discrepancy between the visits in GA and the clicks in Reddit. It could be that the platforms are using different tracking methods and/or some of the clicks are not necessarily being interpreted as visits in GA. Regardless, you can see that the quality of the traffic from Reddit isn’t particularly great – an average time on site of only 19 seconds, although the bounce rate is low and visitors load 2.11 pages per visit. Furthermore, I did not gain any new RSS feed subscribers nor did anyone download my free Internet marketing e-book.

The lackluster results could be because I promoted a rather controversial Internet / tech article on the homepage of Reddit. Something more general and interesting for Reddit’s demographic would probably fare better.

Other Advertisers on Reddit

Since this new program involves a bidding war between different advertisers, the competition does affect prices. See the breakdown of statistics for all advertisers in recent days.

When there were 28 advertisers on 11/19, CPM was $0.92 and CPC was $0.13.  However when the number of advertisers decreased to 13 on 11/23, CPM went down to $0.43 and CPC to $0.04. It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers change when even more advertisers come on board.

There does seem to be a diverse set of advertisers so far in the beta program. Here are a few running on the Reddit homepage right now – including a promo for a giveaway, a social media article, an affiliate offer landing page for a free phone, reddit t-shirts, website software, and an ad for a DVD movie on Amazon.

Final Thoughts

Advertising on the Reddit homepage is a great way to get social traffic to your site fast without having to play the social voting game. The program is still in beta but it’s definitely worth a shot once it launches (in a few weeks). Since you get more for your money when there are less advertisers, it’s best to get in early (as an advertiser myself, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this). Based on my very small experiment, the traffic doesn’t seem very sticky or targeted, but test what works and scale up your campaigns once you find something that clicks with the audience.

What do you think about the Reddit self-serve advertising platform? A good model worth trying out? Leave your thoughts and experiences in a comment here.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Reddit Homepage Advertising Beta Test Results – What I Got For $40

• Why You Should Change Your Blog to Show Excerpts on the Home Page
• Gasp! Advertising on Twitter with ad.ly & Sponsored Tweets… Is It Okay to Make Money?
• Why I Use Private Advertising & How I Determine Prices
• Case Study: How I Used Twitter to Generate 35,967 Extra Hits to my Site in Just 14 Days
• A Headline Title Trick to Maximize Social and SEO Traffic – The One Two Punch

The bigger your list, the better. As your pool of targeted leads grows, you develop a solid foundation that’s not affected by how much search traffic Google sends you or how many of your blog posts go popular on social media sites. Sure, all of the marketing strategies help, but a big targeted list means you already have a high quality customer base you can market to over and over again at will. In other words, your job as an Internet marketer becomes easier and much more stable.

So why wouldn’t you develop your list? Every type of online business (including blogs, e-commerce sites, membership sites, forums, etc) can benefit from email marketing. Now is the time to get started if you haven’t already. I recommend Aweber as your autoresponder service to manage your email campaigns.

How to Build Your Email List to Massive Size

Okay, now that you understand the huge benefits of building an email list, the next question is, how? Do you just put up a random email form in the sidebar of your website? Or is there more to it than that?

The first step is to come up with a compelling free offer. What can you provide your potential customers that will entice them to give up their email addresses to get it? After all, you can’t expect people to sign up for no reason – especially with email spam running rampant. Free instant downloads of digital products like e-books, audio, video, and software demos tend to work best as long as you’re providing real value. A little bit of hype helps too. Just make sure you’re able to back it up. Here are some ideas for free products you can use.

If you haven’t noticed, my free ebook, The Winning Way – Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies, is my offer to build my list for this site. So far, it’s worked incredibly well – netting me around 2,000 email subscribers over the past year without doing much promotion off site.

After you’ve figured out what you’re going to give away, the next step is to create a squeeze page that’s optimized to maximize sign ups (we’ll get more into this in the next section). You’ll then drive traffic to the page via banner ads, paid search ads, blog promotions, SEO, etc and tweak the set up as you go along.

The Squeeze Page

So what exactly is a squeeze page? It’s a destination where visitors land, created for the purpose of getting them to opt in and give up their information (name and email address).

Believe it or not, there are a lot of intricacies involved and the best squeeze pages are those that have been split tested countless times to maximize conversions. For example, a slight change in layout, a tweak in the headline, or even a new color can have drastic effects on the sign up rate.

Some great examples of squeeze pages are below. In fact, you may already be familiar with some of them.

Facebook.com
I’m sure you’ve seen this one. In fact, you probably signed up. Facebook has XX million users and this simple yet effective homepage played a part in that.

DoubleYourDating.com
Eben Pagan is well known for the design of this squeeze page – which is the first step in the sales funnel of his $20 million per year dating business.

TheMotleyFool.com
This is a popular investing information site. The form is very simple, and the headline leaves you wanting more.

SqueezeTheme.com
This is a squeeze page created by Unique Blog Designs for their upcoming Wordpress Squeeze Theme. It looks pretty good. Gotta practice what you preach.

All of the above pages look very different, but they share some common characteristics that help them to generate a massive number of sign ups.

7 Components That Every Squeeze Page Should Have

1. Simple layout
First of all, make the layout of your squeeze page simple – no frills. Include a headline, maybe a paragraph of text or a short video, a sign up form, and submit button. That’s it. Make sure everything is above the fold and eliminate all distractions that may prevent users from signing up (e.g. external links, unnecessary images, clutter, etc).

2. Catchy, attention-grabbing headline
The headline is probably the most important component of the squeeze page. If there’s just one thing that a visitor reads, it’s the headline so make it count and entice people to continue on in the process. The best headlines are at the top of the page, big and bold (red usually works well) and are focused around people’s emotions.

3. A play on emotions
Simply put, emotion sells. Find out the hopes and dreams of your target audience and deliver on that. For example, don’t just offer an ebook with a bunch of information. Provide a manual to gain confidence with women. Or a method to finally make money online. Or a guide on how to get accepted by a dream college. You get the idea.

Also, be sure to touch on as many emotions as possible when writing your copy. Fear and urgency work best when trying to get people to take action.

Here are some examples.

Urgency: “Special limited time offer for the next 50 subscribers only.”

Fear: “3 out of 4 people lose money in the stock market. Find out how you can be in the top 25%.”

4. Selling on benefits
When describing your offer, sell on benefits not on features. In other words, explain how you will fulfill subscribers’ needs and desires. As the old marketing quotes goes, people want a hole not just a drill. Visitors don’t need to read through another product description. What they really want to know is, “what’s in it for me?”

This is essentially how you can give your offer a high perceived value. A PDF ebook in itself probably doesn’t have much value. But a guide on how to improve a person’s life in some way definitely does. See the difference? Use it in your marketing.

5. Minimal web form
Never ask for more information than you need. Can you get by with just an email address? If so, it might be worth limiting your form to just that. Get rid of all barriers to conversion. Not many people are going to want to give away all of their personal information for a free download.

6. Loud and clear call to action
Rather than use generic words like “go” or “submit” for your form button, use a clear call to action like “download now” or “get your free ebook now”. These tend to lead to much higher conversion rates.

Also test different colors, button sizes, and placement. You’d be surprised by some of the small changes that have a big effect.

7. Disclaimer and privacy policy
This is one component that a lot of marketers ignore or forget, but nevertheless is very important. Always include a disclaimer and privacy policy on your squeeze page. Not only will they protect you in case of a lawsuit, but they also help you to obtain the trust of your visitors.

Include a line like “We hate spam just as much as you do. We will never share your information with any third parties.” Displaying a security badge (e.g. Verisign) next to the web form also helps to prove legitimacy and thus improve conversion rates.

Final Thoughts

The guidelines listed in this article offer a good starting point for your squeeze pages, but you have to remember that you must constantly test things out. No matter how great you think a conversion rate is, every squeeze page can be further improved with testing, testing, and more testing.

So what do you think? Are you making the most of email marketing and squeeze pages to gain more leads for your online business? Share some of your favorite squeeze pages and testing results in the comments below!

Also, for more information on this topic, be sure to check out Squeeze Pages 101, a free report from Unique Blog Designs. The team over there is releasing a new Wordpress theme called Squeeze Theme next week specifically for squeeze pages and I’ll be reviewing it here when it comes out. Stay tuned.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



7 Components of a Killer Squeeze Page that Gets Thousands of Leads

• Squeeze Theme Review – Squeeze/Sales Pages on Your Blog Made Easy
• The Secret to Successful Marketing for Your Information Products
• Assembling the Internet Marketing Puzzle – Learn What Goes Where
• Make Money Online Ebooks – Are They All Scams?
• 16 Ideas For Free Products That Will Double Your Subscribers & Leads

• spreading brand awareness
• directly interacting with customers
• syndicating links to related content
• running special promotions

In fact, Twitter has its own Twitter 101 Guide for businesses and includes basic how-to, best practices, and even case studies. There are quite a few big brands effectively utilizing Twitter with new ideas to gain traffic.

However, almost all of the marketing being done on Twitter right now is direct through company profiles and viral marketing (retweets). What if businesses wanted to spread awareness by paying prominent and influential Twitter users to advertise for them to their own audience? Is that allowed..?

Twitter currently has no such program and many cringe at the idea of incorporating advertisements into tweets. However, I think it can be a win-win situation for everyone involved and the advertising doesn’t have to be so bad.

Advertisers get a ton of exposure by leveraging the audiences of the top users and seeding viral campaigns. Users get paid handsomely for a bunch of sponsored 140 character messages. And Twitter is finally able to generate some revenue. Sure, you might argue that incorporating advertising may turn people off and hurt Twitter, but which communication channel today isn’t attached with ads? (TV, print, radio, blogs, web mail, etc) People seem to deal with it just fine. Besides, if Twitter doesn’t do it, third party sites will.

Which brings me to my next point…

Make Money with Advertising in Your Tweets

There are already a handful of startup ad networks that specialize in connecting advertisers with Twitter users willing to publish sponsored messages to their followers.

The networks with the most promise so far are ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets. ad.ly has received a considerable amount of funding and has the support of celebrity publishers like Kim Kardashian, Dr. Drew, and Brooke Burke and top advertisers like Microsoft, Sony, NBC, and Universal Pictures. Sponsored Tweets has Kendra Wilkinson, Bethanny Frankel, CarrotTop, and many more.

So how exactly does it work?

Advertisers on the ad.ly platform choose which Twitter users they’d like to pitch their advertisement to and submit bids. Users then have the option to either approve or deny the bid. If accepted, the advertisement message is automatically sent out, usually 4 times over the course of a week. Of course, the messages are marked as ad.ly ads as shown in the example below.

As for tracking metrics for advertisers, there’s a dashboard that displays clicks and estimated impressions for all targeted publishers. Of course, each campaign would need to be tested and tweaked to achieve maximum results.

How much money can you make?
After signing up as a publisher for ad.ly, the system gave me a suggested weekly price (~4 tweets) of $67. My personal  Twitter account @gyutae has around 5,000 followers.

This is based on a quality score that doesn’t necessarily rely solely on the number of followers. For example, a Twitter user with a loyal following of just 500 could make more than someone with 5,000 random bot followers.

The rate that I got from ad.ly is considerably better than what Sponsored Tweets offers me per tweet – $6.05.

Obviously, the more followers you have and the more engaging you are on Twitter, the more money you can potentially make. Another reason to build up that Twitter account!

Money making examples

To give you some examples of what’s possible, John Chow recently made $1,000 for his first tweet (he has 50,000 followers) on ad.ly. Shoemoney made $15,000 in one month for tweets he sent out using ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets.

Very impressive – and these guys are very small compared to the celebrity Twitters out there. I don’t even want to know how much Kim Kardashian gets per tweet (a user with millions of followers gets 5 figures per tweet).

Sign up for ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets as a publisher, and try them out. How much money do your tweets command?

Advertising on Twitter – Does it work?

Personally I have not tried out any of the pay per tweet services as an advertiser, but I think it could bring interesting results. After all, if publishers are making a lot of money it means advertisers are making even more, right?

The main benefit that I see with Twitter advertising is that sponsored messages could lead to organic retweets and sharing. In other words, you could potentially get a lot more for your money by igniting a viral campaign starting with the ad networks. Of course this will require a lot of trial and error, but the strategy is definitely on my to do list for marketing my sites.

Check out some of the experiences other marketers have had using pay per tweet advertising from Sponsored Tweets and ad.ly:

• Is Paying For Tweets Worth It? – Shoemoney
• Sponsored Tweets: Results as an Advertiser – Ian Fernando
• Sponsored Tweets: a case study in Twitter marketing fail – eConsultancy
• Sponsored Tweets Review – Eric Nagel

Results are mixed so far, but like I said, Twitter advertising requires quite a bit of testing before finding something that works.

What do you think about ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets, and the other pay per tweet ad networks? Would you use them as either a publisher or advertiser? Leave your experiences and thoughts in a comment here!

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Gasp! Advertising on Twitter with ad.ly & Sponsored Tweets… Is It Okay to Make Money?

• How to Harness the Power of Twitter in 4 Easy Steps
• Case Study: How I Used Twitter to Generate 35,967 Extra Hits to my Site in Just 14 Days
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• Twitter SEO – How to Optimize Your Website For Twitter Search
• New FTC Guidelines for Bloggers & Internet Marketers – The Good, The Bad, and Everything Else You Need to Know

What’s the difference between a professional Internet marketer and a wannabe? Besides hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits, the biggest difference is in the way they manage their time. Both types of marketers have the exact same 24 hours in a day, but those who excel have mastered the art of time budgeting.

The biggest mistake I see Internet marketers make is their refusal to outsource their work. They’re too afraid to even take a few days of vacation time, and if they do, they always seem to drag their laptops along with them. Sadly, these marketers can’t see that they’ve become slaves to their online businesses.

People dream of starting a business so that they can be free to do what they want, when they want. Unfortunately, many marketers simply never learn how to properly budget their time. Ironically enough, as their business grows, it requires more and more of their time and attention. Not only is this a recipe for personal unhappiness, but it can also cost thousands of dollars in lost profits.

The good news is that most tasks related to your sites can be outsourced, including customer support, marketing, product creation, copywriting, etc. However, too many online marketers try to wear all the hats for their business, and then wonder why their profits are below expectations and their stress levels are through the roof. I can’t emphasize enough that the single most important skill any online marketer needs to master is outsourcing. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this skill alone could easily double or triple your current profits.

Since the goal of every business is to increase profits, it’s extremely important that you focus your efforts on the tasks that make the most money. For example, outsource your customer support so that you can focus on product creation and marketing. If you’re weak in one of these areas, you can outsource that too.

A lot of new marketers tell me that they simply can’t afford to outsource. My response to them is always the same – this is a business and must be treated as such. You have to spend money to make more money. If you invest wisely in your business, it could pay you back tenfold.

I understand that for those who have never outsourced before, hiring someone can be an overwhelming experience. This lack of experience is a major roadblock for many, but it doesn’t have to be so intimidating.

In the rest of this article, I’d like to share some outsourcing tips that have served me well over the years:

1. Start Small
Try to outsource one project at a time until you’re comfortable with the process.

2. Use only reputable sites
While you will find shady providers everywhere, the risks are much lower if you stick with reputable sites like Rentacoder.com and Elance.com that have solid track records.

3. Provide as many details as possible
You will want to describe your project in as many details as possible, including the timeframe needed for completion. Be very specific about what you need done and don’t leave it to chance that the provider will completely understand – especially when work is being outsourced to other countries.

4. Payment
Never pay a provider more than 50% up front, especially if you’re working with him for the first time. This keeps him motivated to finish your project and gives you leverage if things go awry.

5. Develop good working relationships
A good working relationship requires a combination of communication, flexibility and mutual respect. Also keep in mind that you will most likely need the provider’s services again in the future. By developing long term business relationships, you can easily save both time and money, because the provider will know exactly how you want things to be done and may even offer a discount.

Keep in mind that not every outsourcing job goes as planned. In fact, very few of them actually do. Don’t ever let one bad incident stop you from reaping the benefits of outsourcing. Remember that your time is the most valuable asset you have. By learning to outsource your work, you can leverage your time into thousands of dollars in extra profits.

Are you outsourcing yet?

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Are You A Slave To Your Online Business? Outsourcing for Effective Time Management

• Time is Your Only Limited Resource – 5 Ways For You To Use It Wisely
• Failure is a Prerequisite for Online Success – Have You Failed Yet?
• 8 Reasons Why You Need a Business Partner
• “Don’t Put Your Eggs In One Basket” is Bad Advice for Internet Marketers
• How to Solve the Biggest Challenge For Your Online Startup Business

As you know, Google is the search engine and controls an obscene amount of traffic on the web. In fact, it’s not uncommon for many users to spend at least 25% of their time online on Google properties like Gmail, Google maps, and news. With a cash cow business model (a monopoly in search advertising) and a killer brand (”google” it), Google is living large and seemingly invincible. But is this really the case? Is the Google search engine as stable as it seems?

With the rise of social media, the search game has changed dramatically. Users no longer just want a single source telling them what to look at. Instead, they want recommendations from real people with similar interests and experiences. That’s precisely the reason why social networking is so hot right now and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Social media isn’t just a fad – it’s here to stay and will revolutionize the web in the process.

Twitter, in particular, is interesting. I’ve written before that Twitter is the future of search and I still stand by that claim 100%. In fact, both Google’s and Bing’s recent partnerships with Twitter to incorporate real time status updates into the search results is a clear step towards that direction. More and more people are starting to use Twitter, and the social platform will play a pivotal role in shaping the web and the online community. And no, not even the mighty Google is immune to the coming changes.

Mark Cuban explains it well…

TWITTER AND FACEBOOK are platforms that allow the news sources, like newscorp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not. In other words, if I trust a newspaper, tv or any brand, I can follow it on twitter and expect the news to come to me. The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow.

Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.

The solution for Google? If it wants to remain the dominant online powerhouse that it is today, it needs to adapt to the shifts in the social landscape and buy up Twitter before it’s too late. Sure, Google’s own social innovations like Wave, Social Search, and Search Wiki are nice – but they’re way too late to matter, especially during this critical stage of shifting user behavior.

Back in March 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt questioned the usefulness of Twitter and called it the “poor man’s email”. Boy, was he wrong. It’s a mistake that could cost Google $6 billion or even more, especially if they fail to swoop up Twitter any time soon.  Google as well as Facebook have tried to buy up Twitter in the past, without success. Twitter is resistant to a sell off, even at $1 billion, but anything can be bought if the price is right.

Here are the 3 main reasons why Google needs to buy Twitter in order to survive. The price tag will not be cheap, but if there’s any company that can afford it right now it’s Google.

1. Twitter gaining fast – huge amount of data

Twitter is mentioned and promoted everywhere these days – CNN news broadcasts, popular radio stations, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal, the majority of blogs big and small, and even the ESPN homepage.

Everyone and their grandmothers are on Twitter and the rapid growth will only accelerate as Google and Bing incorporate status updates into their search results. In fact, we’re only a few years away until Twitter receives mainstream acceptance as a communication channel – just like email addresses, phone numbers, and website URLs. People are already placing their Twitter usernames on their business cards.

So why does this matter? Twitter is essentially collecting the daily life streams of millions of people around the world – breaking news, opinions and reviews, interesting links, connections between people, interests, etc. Once a larger percentage of the population starts using the service, it’s scary what’s possible. With the right technology, Twitter could potentially mine that data to pretty much find out about anything important happening in the public world. It could also figure out which websites are the most popular and trustworthy sources.

Hello…Google..?

2. Google’s ranking algorithm in danger of being outdated

Google’s current search ranking algorithm relies heavily on link analysis to determine what’s important and what’s most relevant to a given search query (e.g. a link from CNN implies that the page is important and worthy of high rankings). While this technology was revolutionary to the search industry in the mid 90’s, it’s in danger of quickly becoming outdated in the current landscape.

First of all, users now want information in real time – especially for things like breaking news. Because Google works by indexing web pages, the search engine is clunky and unable to keep up with real-time queries.

Secondly, user behavior is changing online and links are becoming less and less reliable in terms of determining the authority of a page. Webmasters represent only a tiny fraction of the overall population and some hobby bloggers are leaving their own sites for social media sites like Twitter. So why let the few in power control the rankings with their links? Link manipulation is a common tactic used by search marketers and a relatively new site with regurgitated content could potentially rank #1 for a competitive keyword simply by buying some under-the-radar links. It’s a glaring weakness in Google’s algorithm.

Once Twitter goes mainstream and is used by the masses (not just the tech savvy), imagine all of the data that Google could utilize to perfect its search rankings. Compared to links on actual web pages, links found in Twitter status updates represent a larger sample of people.

What does this mean? If Google were able to incorporate Twitter data into its current link analysis algorithm, search results would be better with less spam – something that’s integral to Google’s core business of search advertising. If that’s not a reason to buy, then I don’t know what is.

3. Play keep away from Bing – competitive advantage

Twitter has enormous potential – there’s no doubt about it. But while Google overlooks Twitter, what if it was bought up by Bing? Microsoft has already acquired Yahoo’s search business and seems a step in front of Google in the social sphere. If Google is smart, it’ll block Bing’s moves at all costs and prevent Twitter from springing up with its own search engine in the future.

Let me say it again in case you missed it – Google needs to buy Twitter.

What do you think about a Google acquisition of Twitter? Bound to happen? How would the deal affect the search industry? Leave a comment.

Also, just to clarify, I’m not necessarily for Google buying Twitter and taking over the Internet. In fact, I think it’d be a nice change of scenery and good for the Internet if Google lost some of its dominance and met some fierce competition from Bing and/or Twitter. Time will tell.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



3 Reasons Why Google Needs to Buy Twitter in Order to Survive

• 6 Crucial Steps to Prepare Yourself for the Twitter Facebook Real-Time Search Integration
• 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search – Google Beware
• 5 Crucial SEO Tips For the New Binghoo (Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search)
• The Google-Digg Prophecy – 5 Ways a Deal will Change the Internet
• Twitter SEO – How to Optimize Your Website For Twitter Search

Article marketing is a very effective way of bringing in sales and many affiliate marketers are already taking advantage of the method. Article marketers submit their articles and reviews to the following places:

1. Article directories
2. Blogs – their own and other related ones

Both are good options, but since this is more or less a blog about blogging, I’d like to give some tips to those of you writing articles on your blog.

Affiliate Marketing for Blogs – Product Reviews

As a blogger, you start off with a big advantage – especially if you’re a blogger who’s been around for some time. You have the benefit of having a readership that trusts your opinion and thus making money is much much easier. Your readers respect your opinion and you should be able to get them to take out their credit card when you recommend something.

Of course this will only be true if you’re a trustworthy blogger who has been around for a long time and have consistently published valuable content. But if this is the case, then your endorsement can be enough to get readers to buy a product. Use this power with caution!

The perspective that you take in your product and service reviews should be that of a user or critic. Nobody wants to hear infomercial material biased towards only the hyped up features of a product. Go over the pros and the cons so that you come across as a legitimate reviewer instead of just another salesman. If you’re honest about a product that you truly endorse, then people are still likely to buy after reading the review.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you can’t promote low quality products! Your readers will abandon your blog and begin to distrust your opinion. All those authority points that you built up by writing post after post with quality content will just go down the drain. So again, do not promote bad products! You will lose your readership and it’s just not worth it.

However, that’s not to say that some marketers do promote bad products are still able to make money. For example, I recently saw a blog that was clearly intended only to be a shady Clickbank money earner. Basically the site had 15 reviews of scammy paid survey products. Although the owner’s readership was zero, he worked on getting traffic to each specific post using article marketing for backlinks and he made a decent amount of money.

I can’t do that because I want a blog – with readership, comments, and interaction with my readers.

When marketing with article directories, people don’t necessarily know who you are and so you can promote bad product after bad product without anyone knowing. You could potentially find some scammy forex product that gives you a $100 commission, start writing related articles on sites like EzineArticles.com and start earning money. All you really need is a domain name and an affiliate landing page.

And you know what, some marketers do use this questionable tactic to earn money. But it’s definitely not a good long term strategy.  In fact, if I was earning money by writing fake reviews, I’d be very worried right now. If you haven’t heard, the FTC is starting to crack down on this market.  People were writing fake success stories for certain products only to promote them and make a commission. As a result, many people bought into it and were obviously scammed (and sometimes even experienced negative health consequences).  The acai berry diet is notorious for this. With the new FTC rules, the bloggers themselves will be held responsible for false reviews and fake testimonials.

Writing false testimonials is illegal and pointless. Sure, you can make a quick buck but you end up hurting others and it’s just not worth it in the long run. The real money is in promoting quality services and it always will be that way.

My advice: Promote quality products. You’ll be able to write real honest reviews, get sales, collect large commissions, and not have to worry about being sued one day.

Internet Marketing Blog - Make Money Online Copyright 2009 Winning the Web. All Rights Reserved.



Article Marketing, Blogging, and the Real Truth About What You Should Promote and How

• Does a Paid Review Mean a Positive Review? My Recent Blogging Dilemma
• 10 Reasons Why You Should Write Product Reviews On Your Blog
• 10 Easy Methods to Promote Your Blog Reviews
• Blogging is 100% About Building Trust – 8 Ways to Get Me to Trust You
• The 12 Essential Elements of a Highly Effective Blog Review – Make More Money