Greg Cassar.com

WordPress is the most common way that entrepreneurs and business owners build sites these days.

 
WordPress is infinitely extensible. One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

 
Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, in the directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ you can find, download, rate, and comment on all the best plugins.

 
While there are literally thousands of plugins that you can apply to your site, lets now look at 5 Must Have Plugins to extend your WordPress site’s functionality and reach.

 
Please note: We have not included security plugins here. We will cover WordPress security in a future edition of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’.

No 1. All In One SEO Pack

 
This brilliant WordPress plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

 
It allows you to set your title tags and description and keywords in one easy place within the plugin for the home page. There are also approx 20 other SEO settings that make your URLs friendly to the search engines and a whole bunch of other SEO related settings.

 
Whenever you make a blog post down below the post while you are still in edit mode you will get the options to set the Title, Description for the search engines, and Keywords related to the post.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

No 2. PopUp Domination

 
This amazing list building WordPress plugin works like a PopUp but gets passed the PopUp blockers. It has a classy look and feel to it and as a result it doesn’t feel as intrusive as what you may imagine a PopUp to be.

 
Its primary purpose is to help you build your list faster. Why we highly recommend it is that we noticed our own list building doubled on our main sites when we implemented this plugin. Every serious marketer should test and implement PopUp Domination.

 
Popup Domination works with all major auto-responders including but not limited to aWeber, iContact, Constant Contact and Infusionsoft.

 
Price: $47
Get it at: PopupDomination.com/new/

No 3. Google XML sitemaps

 
While not particularly exciting in it’s functionality, this is one of those boring bread and butter type plugins that is essential for your site.

 
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap, which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog/site. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

 
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

No 4. Like-Button-Plugin-For-Wordpress

 
This plugin adds a Like-Button wherever you want on your blog. The button can be placed before or after the content, as well as a sidebar-widget. And many more!

 
Having a Facebook ‘Like’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Like’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post.
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Like’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like-button-plugin-for-wordpress/

No 5. Facebook Share (New) Button

 
This plugin adds a Share-Button, which allows site visitors to share your posts. It also shows the number of times the post or page has been shared through out the Facebook.

 
Having a Facebook ‘Share’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Share’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post. It is slightly more powerful than Facebook Like because when the site visitors ‘share’ they get the ability to add a line or two of text to endorse why they shared the content.

 
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Share’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-share-new/

I hope that is of use to you. We have tested hundreds of plugins and these certainly are some of the best.

The undisputed king of the search engines in 2011 is Google.  If you are an online entrepreneur or even a traditional business owner you can’t afford to ignore Google and your presence on their platform. Chances are that Google Search is a major way that your potential prospects and clients either are or are not finding you.

But Google is much more than just a search engine. They are a very smart organisation that has morphed into a whole bunch of different services or utilities online. Many of these services they provide are free for you to use, while some are premium paid services.

Lets now look at some of the best services that Google provides so that we can quickly identify how you as a business owner can ‘get the most out of Google’.  The areas we will cover are as follows:

1. Google Adwords
2. Google Image Ads
3. Google Places
4. Google Apps / Gmail
5. Google Analytics
6. Google Website Optimizer

1. Google Adwords

Google Adwords Search Network ads are the paid ads that turn up on the top section and the right hand side section of the Google search screen.

This is the most pure and perfect form of advertising that exists in the history of mankind. Big call I know, but the reason why I say this is because your ads only show up if people are actively searching for the keywords that you have advised Google are related to your product / service that you are advertising.

Then the best bit is that you only pay for your advertising if a Google searcher clicks on your ads.  It can’t get any fairer than that.  If you compare this to an ad in the newspaper – I can’t see any major publications allowing you to only pay for your ad if you get some interest from it.

The Google Adwords search network system works on a Pay Per Click (PPC) model. This means that you pay a pre-determined amount (eg. $0.56 or $1.03) every time that someone clicks on your ad.

The whole thing works on relevance. If Google determines that your ad is very relevant and highly regarded by its searchers because it’s getting a good Click Through Rate (CTR) and people are staying on your site a good length of time, then they will reward you with lower advertising costs and your ads will rank higher than other advertisers who are not creating as relevant advertising.

To really win the Adwords game your ads need to be relevant to the keywords that are being searched for, and then the website landing page that the searchers end up at after clicking the ads need to be closely relevant to the keywords that were searched for as well as the keywords in the ad.

Google Adwords is something that every business owner should consider from accountants to plumbers and beyond.  The reason why is because there are already millions of people searching for solutions to their problems, so it makes sense for you to have your ads showing up on the first page of Google stating that you can provide a solution to the relevant problems.

Unfortunately Google Adwords is not as cost effective in 2011 as when I first started doing it 6 years ago.  There are more competitors now and because of supply and demand the cost per click goes up over time.  A good Google Adwords Consultant will be able to smash the competition for you and result in cheaper clicks and better rankings for your ads. This may be more cost effective for you than trying to learn to do it yourself.  My team at http://InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com can assist you if you need a hand in this area or any of the sections below.

2. Google Image Ads

Google has a 2^nd major part to its advertising, this is the display network. The Google Display Network is when your advertising shows up on relevant non Google Websites where website owners display Google ads on behalf of Google on their sites.

Display network ads come in many types, but essentially there are two main types – text ads (like Google Search) or image ads. I love Google Image ads because it works out a very cost effective traffic source for driving leads to free offers.

‘Image ads’ is just another way of saying Banner Advertising on Google’s display network.  The thing is that it is more targeted than standard banner advertising on other networks because you can determine the keywords and page content that are relevant to the websites where you want to show your ads.

Your image ads can be either standard images or they can be animated (gifs or Flash).  You should choose animated gifs as this allows your banner ads to have a cost effective way of having animated components. This means you will catch the site visitor’s eye more with movement on your ads. The other main benefit of animated gif ads is that you will be able to communicate more on the same sized banner ad because you have multiple images worth of words and images that can rotate on your ad.

Unfortunately there is a little bit of an art to really getting this form of advertising really cracking.  Give it a go yourself but if you don’t get the results you are after you should engage a professional to give you a hand.  These campaigns don’t require much maintenance so once it is live you could save money by managing it yourself.

This form of advertising is not necessarily well suited to every business.  Where it is relevant is if you have some kind of free offer that you are using for lead generation such as a free report or video in exchange for their contact details so that you can market to the leads again.

3. Google Places

‘Google Maps’ is now called ‘Google Places’ even though most people still think of it as Google Maps. Millions of people search Google Maps every day. A free listing on Google Maps makes it easy for them to find your business.

If you are a localised business then you want to make sure you are maximising your exposure in this medium as it really is an easy way to rank high for free traffic from Google.

Use Google Places to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. It’s easy, free, and you don’t even need a website of your own, but it is better if you have one that you can link to from there.

A common thing that we find with nearly every local business that we work with is that they have a presence on the maps on Google but they have never ‘claimed their listing’ and populated the information.

While Google never really reveals their search and ranking algorithms it is clear that Google Places listings that have been ‘claimed’ and populated with full information about the business do get higher priorities in rankings than those that have not been claimed.

Google Places is particularly relevant if you have a ‘traditional business’ such as ‘Accountant in Bondi’ etc as these local searches are when the Google Places listings will show up.

If you haven’t already done so then please visit http://www.google.com/places/ to claim your business listing today.

4. Google Apps / Gmail

Google has grown into a service provider online that provides web visitors and website owners far more than just search services.  One of their biggest developments in recent years has been their Gmail email service.

In a relatively short period of time Google’s Gmail service grew in popularity because of its superior spam protection and smart web based email client. Many people use Gmail as their personal email service, but as a business owner you also have the option to use the premium corporate version of this service called Google Apps.

Google Apps has many components to it, with one of the most popular of these being the email service.  Effectively it is like is Gmail for your business, so instead of your email address being @gmail.com it is @yourdomainname.com.

This is not a free service, it costs US$50 per mail user per year but it is a very cost effective way of running an email service for your business.  Back when I had a day job one of my roles in corporate IT was as an email Network Architect for large multi nationals, so I know email very well.  For a small to medium sized business it is no longer cost effective to run Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino (Notes) if you can have an email service hosted and managed by Google for just $50 per user per year.

The other real benefit of Google Apps for your business is that it will provide you with a whole suite of other collaboration tools for your team such as Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites just to name a few.

Try Google Apps at http://google.com/a for your business today, as it really is excellent. We find we implement it in 9 out of 10 companies we work with.

5. Google Analytics

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is one of the better things I learned from one of my marketing mentors Mal Emery. The tool that I use for measuring website stats and I recommend that you use too is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service from Google. Effectively you tell Google what website that you want Google Analytics to track website visitor statistics on. Google Analytics will then supply you a piece of tracking code to put on the pages of your website.

Google Analytics will then start recording how many site visitors you get per day, how they found your website, what parts of your site that they are clicking on and much more. You can even get Google Analytics to send you automated reports on a how your website is progressing.

It’s amazing how many website owners we meet who don’t have Google Analytics setup for their sites. If you fit into this category please consider this a virtual slap on the wrist from me for being a naughty boy / girl / other and take action immediately to get it live for your site by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics/

6. Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is another free service from Google.  What it does is it gives you a way of comparing two website pages or website elements together to see which one results in the best lead or sales conversions.

Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without having to spend additional funds on traffic.

As the readership base for Internet Marketing Magazine is quite diverse from complete Internet Newbies to full-time marketing pro’s we’ll keep it simple and talk about the most the most common configuration of the Google Website Optimizer tool which is A/B split testing.

Most website owners take guesses at which components of their websites are going to result in the most leads and sales. There is no need to guess when Google Website Optimizer will tell this information to you based off real site visitors and their actions.

Say you have a page on your website and it’s primary purpose is to give away a copy of your free report in exchange for the site visitors details. Each time this happens we would consider it a ‘conversion’.

What you now need to do is take a copy of that page and create a 2^nd version of it with a new webpage name.  On that 2^nd version of the page change a design element that you think may have a positive effect on your conversions.  A great place to start is by writing a new headline.

Then within Google Website Optimizer tell it the web address of the first page and also the new page you’ve created. Also tell Google Website Optimizer the page that the web visitor will end up at following an opt-in (a conversion).  Google will now give you some tracking code to put on those pages.

Once that is done you choose for the A/B experiment to start and Google will start rotating automatically between those pages in a round robin fashion when site visitors hit the site.  Over time you will be able to see which page of the site performs better and you will be able to declare a winner.  You then take this winner and create a 2^nd version of it and repeat the process again.

Effectively what you are doing is constantly tracking and measuring and pushing the conversion rate up on your website.  You can have the same advertising cost but actually reduce your cost per lead simply by increasing your conversion rate.  If you are paying for any advertising for your site you should without a doubt be utilising Google Website Optimizer in your business.

There is much more to Google Services than we have outlined here, but this is a good summary of the fundamental services of theirs you should be implementing in your business today.

99 out of 100 entrepreneurs online are focused on ‘Selling’ as their primary objective and main focus. This is understandable as selling for profit is the reason that we do marketing online.

While this is a valid model, it’s certainly not the best model to position your business
for lasting success in 2011 and beyond. Traffic is getting more and more expensive and so the cost of acquiring a customer to make a one off sale often costs the same as or more than the profits you will make from one sale alone.

So for this reason…

Your Number One Most Important Job as an Internet Marketer is to build a list (database) of prospects and clients who that you can create a relationship with to then market other products and services strategically to them over time.

Think about it now in your own business – “If building my list is the most important task I have online, how much time, effort and resources do I put to that task each week or month?”

How was your answer?  Chances are, not good, but that’s OK provided you learn from that and move on. If you were able to answer honestly to yourself that you are devoting massive time and resources to building your list and your relationship with them then congratulations as you are well and truly on your way to building a good long term strategic internet business.

Most new Internet Marketers I meet are in the ‘Opportunity Seeking’ business, meaning that they are chasing one online opportunity to make some cash after another.  I know this for a fact well as I did it for several years myself. You know what, this is fine initially when you first start marketing online because you really need to get some experience with driving some traffic and making offers and trying out different niches until you find the area that you are going to specialize in.

All the consulting clients that we work with at InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com that are doing big numbers online have changed from being opportunity seekers to strategic marketers at some point in their development. They now make money out of building a big list and creating relationship with them and making offers over time. There is no exception to this.

Think about it, how often does Amazon email you?  And they started off as just an online bookstore making one-off book sales and evolved and morphed over time into one of the best marketing machines on the planet. The great thing about their business is that they are emailing a list of ‘clients’ rather than ‘prospects’, which is a very powerful position to be in as they know their list already are buyers.

So how do you build your list?

The answer is to build a  website  (or  a  squeeze  page  section  of  your  website  where  you  drive  traffic)  where  its  primary  focus  is  to  provide  something  of  value for free in exchange for your new prospects’ contact details.  You then follow up with them again in an automated way with the use of autoresponder software.

Your free offer is about quality… not quantity.  What you offer is only limited by your imagination, but good examples  of  what  you  could  use  include  free  reports, videos, audios and newsletters  etc.

To create a good free offer you really need to get into the mind of your prospect and ask yourself “What is it that they really want?” and give them that, as that will significantly increase your chance of getting a great conversion rate on your landing page.

An important point with your opt‐in offer is to also communicate you are going to follow up with them again, otherwise what people see and hear in their mind is that “I’m just going to get this free product or service the one time”.  You want to set up the right relationship from day one so that they look forward to future communication from you.

You can achieve this by having an eCourse component to your offer or advising them that they will also receive your newsletter or follow up training components on an ongoing basis.

Once you have your free offer in place you need to drive targeted traffic to it over time to capture your leads and deliver your free offer to them.

A recent study by our friend and colleague Armand Morin showed up something so powerful you can’t ignore it.  His research showed that of the top

100 websites on the Internet 89 of them use the new ‘free’ model.

What we’re referring to is, if you look at the major online companies today, like  Google, My Space, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of them utilise the 100%  FREE model… it costs you nothing to use!   Then they make money out of you over time with enhanced services, or they make money out of advertisers because they have they have the target market on their list.

The way we look at it is that we can debate this all day long but the facts are facts. The free model is here and it’s here to stay.  It’s a great model and it is obviously the right model because the marketplace as a general rule doesn’t want to be ‘sold to’ and this is more the case now more than ever before.

What do you do now that you have them on your list?

You need to follow up with them in an automated system called a ‘marketing funnel’ that provides both value as well as offers over time. (I’ll cover detailed ‘marketing funnel design’ for you in a future edition of the magazine).

By opting-in the prospect has put their hand up to say that they are interested in your area of expertise, your training, your products and/or services.

You get the opportunity to nurture and educate them and build trust so that when you do make offers there is a high probability of their success because you are not marketing to strangers – they feel like they already ‘know you’. This way you become a welcome guest rather than an unwanted pest.

Having a large list with which you have a good relationship enables you to make good value offers and generate income on a predictable basis. Marketing to your existing leads and clients is always more cost effective than the costly process of continually trying to get new clients.

All successful Internet Marketers (without exception) know that the money is in the lifetime value of the client, not in one‐off sales. If you are not following up with your prospects and clients you are potentially leaving a huge amount of money on the table.

Ask yourself now “how many automated follow up emails do I have in my marketing funnel sequence that create value and relationship as well as offers over time?”

If you answer was ‘not many’ then this is a great place to start on your action list of what you need to do next to become a more successful marketer in your niche.

When thinking of Internet Marketing Online there really is 2 main camps:

1. Info marketers
2. ‘Traditional’ type businesses with an online presence

While the learnings from this article will work for both, it is written with the traditional business owner in mind, as these businesses often stand to benefit most from the following leverage points.

The 3 proven steps to ramp up any businesses online presence are:

1. Increase the targeted search traffic to the site
2. Deliver that traffic to a relevant well written specific benefit ridden web page
3. Make the primary call to action prominent and clear

You may be thinking at the moment ‘that is obvious’ and in some ways it is, but most businesses we work with don’t do this well initially.  By making these changes we have increased companies revenues by hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and with some increased their lead generation by hundreds or thousands of percent. So it seems often it’s the fundamentals that make the most difference.

Let’s now explore these 3 leverage points in more detail:

1. Increase the targeted search traffic to the site

Chances are that people are already searching in the search engines for the solution to the problem that your product or service solves.  The trick is to make your Pay Per Click  (PPC) Ad or natural search engine listing(s) show up on page 1 of the search engine at the time that they are searching.

For the purpose of simplicity and speed of implementation let’s focus on Pay Per Click as it’s easier and quicker for you to have a direct impact on your business.

Google Adwords Search Network ads are the paid ads that turn up on the top section and the right hand side section of the Google search screen. Yahoo’s version of it is called Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft’s version is Microsoft AdCenter (these two have now merged in what is commonly referred to as the Search Alliance).

Pay Per Click advertising like Google Adwords is something that every business owner should implement to get your message in front of the millions of people searching for solutions to their problems, and have your ads showing up on the first page of Google stating that you can provide a solution to the relevant problems.

When designing your PPC Ads make sure you use very small tightly themed Ad Groups. The reason why is so that your Ad is highly relevant to the keywords that they are searching for.

Let’s say you are running a timber company and you sell two main types of timber: ‘pine framing timber’ and ‘pine flooring timber’.  If the searcher is searching for ‘pine flooring timber’ we want to make sure our ad is tightly focussed on ‘pine flooring timber’ and even mentions that in the ad.  We don’t want our ad to be about ‘pine timber’ in general as it won’t get as good a click through rate because the searcher won’t find it to be as relevant.

So Step 1 is to get your relevant, highly targeted Ads or Listings coming up on page 1 when people are actively searching for your product, service or problem statement.

2. Deliver that traffic to a relevant well written specific benefit ridden web page

So now if you have done Step 1 correctly you have highly targeted search traffic turning up to your site.

In Step 2 here we really have 2 main things that we need to achieve:

The first is delivering the traffic to the right page that is 100% relevant to the search. If the searcher from the search engines was searching for ‘pine flooring timber’ it’s important to take them from your ad directly to a page about ‘pine flooring timber’, not about pine framing timber, and certainly not any other type of flooring timber or a page as general as your home page.

The page should be just about ‘pine flooring timber’ not about any other subject. The number of links and banners etc off to other products and services should be minimized.

The second is Quickly and clearly communicate your marketing message. When the new site visitor gets to your site, they are instantly making a ‘will I stay or will I go’ decision. There is a term called the ’10 Second Rule’ which means that you only have 10 seconds when they get to your site to answer their ‘What’s In It For Me’ (WIIFM) question that goes on in their head. With the amount of things competing for people’s attention these days it’s probably closer to 5 seconds than 10.

On your new highly targeted page some design and sales copy elements that you should include to quickly and clearly communicate your message are:

• A Benefit ridden headline
• Clear product image(s)
• Benefit ridden bullets
• A quick video which explains the benefits of the product / service
• Reasons why to choose you
• Social proof elements of what other satisfied customers are saying

3.         Make the primary call to action prominent and clear

With every page on your website you should know in advance what your desired primary course of action for your site visitor is going to be. If you have a primary, you should also think about the secondary course of action that you desire.

It is important to then have these desired primary call to actions buttons in a logical spot above the fold (meaning before they have to scroll down).

The most common calls to action buttons we see and use are:

• Get a Quote
• Speak to Our Team – Call 1300…
• Leave us a message
• Book in an Appointment
• Register Your Interest

If you have long sales copy you will also want to repeat your call to action buttons at the bottom of the page.

So in closing… take action now by looking over your site and traffic with a new set of eyes and identify if there is any of these fundamentals that you can apply in your business for a boost in your sites lead and sales conversion rate.

I’ve been working in IT ever since university, and dabbling in my own online entrepreneurial projects since 2003, but I’ve only been a full time internet marketer for 3 years now.

Towards the end of 2003 I went to a positive cashflow property seminar. I met a fellow property enthusiast there and we started talking about that maybe we should publish and sell some property content of our own.

Within a matter of weeks we formed a JV (Joint Venture) and started writing an eBook each. We then built our first website. As I was a geek in IT I did everything the hard way, right down to getting a developer to code our own shopping cart from scratch.

As you can imagine the whole process was very time consuming and it took us over 6 months before we were online and made our first sale.

Back then traffic was cheap. I was able to buy targeted traffic from Google Adwords for 15 cents a click and if we got a 1% conversion rate to sale we still made $15 on a $30 book.

We then started sourcing books from distributers and found that they sold better.

We very quickly learned that we were never going to get rich driving traffic directly to a $30 product.

I sourced a product that sold for $97 that was a printed manual that was in high demand. This started selling well and before we knew it we were turning over $3k a month.

I learned about up-sells and put a second printed manual as an up-sell before the customer went through the checkout and quickly found that 33% of people took the up-sell to the new two manuals offer for $120. This made the business more profitable almost instantly and we were now turning over $5k a month, but not all of it was profit as roughly 50% of it was costs.

This whole process took a year or two. We split up the JV as we were moving in different directions and sold the business for $10k.

With the benefit of hindsight staying in that property niche and building a big list rather than just focussing on one-off sales would have been much smarter, but we live and we learn.

Fast forward on to 2008 and a combination of both successful and unsuccessful niches and techniques tested over the following years.

I was working for a major corporate IT company in Sydney. I was what you call an IT Infrastructure architect. It meant that I designed computer systems on either a national or global scale for large corporations like banks and insurance companies.

It was a high paying, rewarding job for a great company, so in theory I had nothing to complain about, but it was also highly stressful. Can you imagine the kind of pressures that came with working as the architect on a $4 billion dollar contract? There were times I got sick from the pressure of it all.

I had a sales component to my job also. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when one of my customers came to me for a $200,000 job, but by outlining their strategic requirements I was able to do a $1.1 million up sell and turn it into a $1.3 million job.

So how was I rewarded by my employer for boosting its coffers by over a million dollars? With a $250 Myer shopping gift voucher, that’s how.

That was the day I decided I was over working for ‘the man’. So I started ramping up my online businesses with a vision to very quickly get out of the day job.

I was a constant student of marketing through all this time and people within the marketing community as well as other business owners started asking me if I could I build sites, Adwords campaigns and podcasts etc for them. I started doing this part time by using a casual web development contractor who was a young guy from the local university to help me build the sites while I balanced the day job and my new found consulting clients.

Within 3 short months I was happy to make the call to my boss to give him notice. The boss wasn’t so happy about it, but I knew I was doing the right thing, even though my wife was due to give birth to our third child in two months time. As you can imagine everyone was telling us we were crazy, but we stuck at it.

My quality of life is so much better these days now that I’m out of the rat-race. My wife and young family and I averaged five days a week at the beach during the summer of 2009/2010 and a similar amount in 2010/2011. It was the most time I had spent at the beach since I was a back packer in my younger days.

I’m often lying on my back floating in the water in the middle of what would traditionally be a working day just because it was too hot. When it cooled down a bit I’d go and catch up on work. That’s the freedom of the passive income you get with online businesses.

Now our business is structured so that we have the consulting business as well as various products and services that we sell online to multiple target niches. The affiliate cheques keep flowing in from other peoples products and services that we promote and we now partner with successful businesses to promote them as JV’s and affiliates for additional income streams.

So if you look back at my story I’d love to be able to say that I was one of those guys that got online and found it all to be very simple and started making money from day 1, but the reality is that that was just not the case.

At times it felt like 2 steps forward and 1 step back, and then at other times all our ducks lined up and we made good money online. We are now at the point where we consistently back winners and are on the fast track, but that has come about because we persevered, we kept investing in our education and never gave up. We also diversified our income streams so that we had multiple sources.

Think about this for yourself now. If you are in the day job still can you become a master at web development or Adwords etc and start picking up some consulting clients to supplement your income while you build your other online businesses?

The sky is the limit… just never give up, back your winners long and cut your losers short.

The fact is that the web has become overwhelmingly competitive. The days of slapping up a quick website and buying some cheap ads, doing some quick SEO for a profit, or making a living off a simple ebook or two are long, long gone.

If you rush into markets unprepared in 2011 it will end in tears and not be profitable. Check out this quick 2 minute video where I explain about how some colleagues of mine Perry Marshall and Glenn Livingstone outline how to succeed in competitive markets with the current state of the internet.

ps. The blog post I referred to in this video is www.GlennLivingston.com/BrutalMarkets.php

In this quick 2 minute video I share with you a website design technique that you can use for crushing the competition by building the best site in your market place.

When examining your competition don’t just look at what they are doing, look at how they are doing it with their website design and can you ‘borrow’ or ‘be inspired by’ those best design elements and roll them into your site design.

Yahoo and Microsoft have recently merged with their ‘Search Alliance’. This means that the Bing search technology is now behind the scenes of both Yahoo and Microsoft’s organic and paid search.

With the Pay Per Click taking your adwords campaign and migrating it into Microsoft AdCenter is not always the best way to go. Watch this quick 4 min vid where I explain how Microsoft wants you to structure your Microsoft AdCenter campaigns.

Please note: the audio on this video is not great because of a problem with the camera, but the content is very relevant.

I’ve just launched a new digital publication called ‘Internet Marketing Magazine‘ – the original and leading free magazine designed specifically for Internet Marketers to be delivered on the web, iPad, iPhone and Android platforms. (iPad, iPhone and Android delivery via the Zinio platform will go live in the next week or so).

‘Internet Marketing Magazine’ will be Bi-Monthly initially, and will provide you with the knowledge of those fundamentals and the boxes that you need to tick to achieve success online. The content will also cater for advanced marketers with leading tips and strategies on what is working on the Internet right now.

The panel of writers for ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’ is quite diverse in it’s knowledge base. All the contributing writers are doing Internet Marketing or Direct Marketing and Copywriting on a full time basis, so the experience that we can draw on for the articles and content for you is quite extensive.

We aim to deliver you up to date relevant timely information on all facets of marketing on the internet from niche markets through to traffic, conversion optimization, marketing funnels, online stores, social media, eBay and just about anything else you can think of.

So sit back and enjoy your first edition of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’ (you can download it at this link).

Pls click ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ or ‘Comment’ if you think it’s worth passing on to your fellow marketing geek friends

2010 has now come and gone. It was what it was. For you it may have been a massively profitable year with your internet businesses, or you may be at more of a beginner or intermediate stage and still be finding your feet and testing and measuring new things to see what works and what doesn’t.

Either way, no matter what your results last year it’s always possible to, and it should be a goal to make this year bigger than the last.

Let’s get stuck straight into our 5 steps to make your Internet marketing businesses more profitable in 2011…

1. Speed of implementation

This is a concept I can honestly say I really only ‘got’ in the last few months. How it came about for me was that I was doing pretty well online in that I was already a full-time Internet marketer, but my consulting business was demanding more of my time than my other ‘Real Passive Internet businesses’.

When I thought about it my real goal was to be in the ‘lifestyle creation business’ meaning that I really needed to get my passive income streams cranking more, rather than adding additional active income streams.

I got some advice to go see a man by the name of Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and get my head right. So I got on a plane to London and did exactly that. As luck would have it on the 2nd day of my Licensed Practitioner of NLP course I got hypnotized on stage by Richard and he made it plainly obvious to me that if I wanted my passive income streams to grow then I needed to focus on those businesses with the same amount or more energy as I was doing for my active income streams.

The other big learning was the speed with which I needed to implement to achieve the results that I was after.

Following that trip I am now implementing in my businesses at roughly 12 times the rate that I was previously.

Now think about this for your businesses. Are you treating your Internet business like a hobby or like a real business with urgency? Give yourself tight deadlines, hit those deadlines and make things happen quickly.

Effectively you will test and measure more techniques, niches and product offers more quickly. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to achieve the results you are after.

2. Build your list faster

When you know what niche(s) you are going to specialize in online you really need to build a list (database) of prospects and clients that you can market to over and over again.

The most common way of building your list is to give away something of high perceived value to your target market in exchange for their contact details so that you can follow up with them again via your auto responder software.

There is an art to this so that you create a good relationship with your prospects and customers by providing them great information and value, while also implementing enough offers to them so that you make a profit while actively building your list.

This point is also closely related to the first one we covered – are you implementing quickly with building your list? Do you have a sense of urgency with it?

Ultimately the bigger you build your list and the better your relationship and offers with it the more money you will make in your business. So what can you do in 2011 to actively and rapidly build your list?

3. Work on your mindset

Have you ever noticed that people who win the lottery are after broke again after 5 to 10 years? It’s amazing isn’t it? I often thought about how could this be, and then I heard Pat Mesiti say “you can’t stay a millionaire if you have a two dollar mindset”.

This is pretty clever. What it means is that as your wealth creation mindset expands so will your opportunities and your prosperity. It also means that you can do all the clever Internet marketing traffic and conversion strategies etc but if your mindset is not right you will never get wealthy – sad but true.

There is no easy way of getting your mindset right, and in many ways it is a journey rather than a destination. For me learning NLP has made a massive difference because I now understand how the unconscious part of my brain works and can control it better rather than letting it run it’s own programs. For you it may be different, but ultimately this mindset area is a field of study that should get as much of your attention as the Internet marketing area in 2011 and beyond.

4. Test and measure like a pro

With our Internet marketing strategy and consulting business we get to see the inner workings of hundreds of businesses that do marketing on the Internet. The great thing about this is that we no longer guess about what is going to work online, we can gather data and observations across a number of industries and identify trends and traits of successful businesses online.

One thing that we notice about all successful Internet marketing businesses is that they test and measure consistently. There is a saying that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” and this seems true with Internet marketing 100%.

We measure our stats like clicks, opt-ins, sales, conversion rate, cost per lead, cost per sale etc on a weekly and also monthly basis. We have monthly goals that then roll up into annual goals. This works beautifully because at all times there is visibility of what is working and what isn’t and it allows for quick adjustments along the way.

The other part of test and measure like a pro is to be constantly working on improving your conversion rates. Google website optimizer is a fantastic free tool to help with this as in its simplest form it allows you to run two versions of the same web page against each other and see which converts the best.

You then declare the page that converts the best as the winner and try and create a new page that will convert better again. What this means is that for the exact same advertising spend over time you start to get better and better return on your investment (ROI). Professional marketers do this constantly and you should too.

Now think about your business, do you have a spreadsheet with your weekly, fortnightly or monthly stats on it? If not how quickly can you get one implemented? Do you have Google Website Optimizer implemented for the main landing pages of your website? If not how quickly can you get it implemented?

5. Cut the dead wood

Over time as you test and measure new products, niches, sites etc you incur both monetary costs and also tasks that require your time.

On the financials in your business, if you take it back to the fundamentals to make more profit you either need to make more sales revenue or reduce your expenses. With this cut the dead wood theme, review your business credit card statement – is there any software tools or other expenses that you don’t need anymore? If so then cancel those services and reduce your expenses where ever possible. In our businesses we review all our expenses quarterly and anything that is not actively being used gets culled. This one technique will save you thousands of dollars over the course of the year.

The other part of cut the dead wood is look at all the different aspects of your business such as the websites and product offerings you have. Are there any there that are taking up a lot of your time but not significantly increasing your profits? If so look at them with a critical eye to see if you can cull them to free up your time and make space for new opportunities to enter your business life.

We like to think of it as “run your winners long and cut your losers short”…

Treat your business with priority, efficiency and urgency. Implement the 5 strategies above in 2011 and watch your results improve.