Making Money Online, Google Adsense & Online Auctions

Turning Online Purchases Into Profit

Posted on 20th November 2009

Copyright 2005 Michael Lever

Dear internet marketer,

I have some advice for improving your bottom line, whatever that may be.
It could be many things ranging from improving website traffic to increasing sales or even just expanding your mailing list.
But whatever your bottom line is, you have two choices when setting out to achieve it.

Your first choice is to employ an assortment of free traffic, sales, or opt-in subscriber generating techniques.
These can be effective but generally take time and results are usually slow.

Most people adopting solely this choice end up failing and frustrated. But at least they haven't lost their pants in the process.

The second choice you have is to pay for services designed to improve your bottom line. This will almost certainly speed things up and improve the results you achieve both short and long term.

If you find yourself choosing this second option, make sure you can measure quantitative results as you need to know what ROI (return on investment) is being achieved for each paid service.

Most of you are probably a combination of both choices. And if you're anything like me, you probably started using free techniques before moving to paid alternatives.

Enough beating about the bush.
What's my advice? Simply this.

If you pay for any form of online advertising or promotion, do yourself a big favour and explore services designed to assist this process without attempting to influence your decision-making in any way.

Affiliate directories and Customer Acquisition Exchanges also known as "Customer Reciprocation" are 2 such services.

These are really an extension or improved version of link exchanges as they can provide paying customers instead of potential traffic generation (leads, click-throughs, or visitors).

It's that simple. These paying customers earn you sales or commission, depending whether they purchase your own products or products from your affiliated merchants.

So what are you waiting for?

Each time you purchase online and don't take my advice, you're missing out on paying customers willing to purchase through your own referral URLs.
Choose wisely and turn your online purchases into profit.

Side note - I've mentioned thus far your online advertising and promotion purchase intentions but did you know that all online purchases you make can gain you paying customers?
That's because customer reciprocation services incorporate unrestricted global shopping directories.

A comparison with Ebay makes interesting reading.

Whereas Ebay matches buyers and sellers of products through an auction process, customer reciprocation services match buyers and sellers through referral URLs via their own exchange engines.
In effect, they work like limited versions of Ebay.
The exchange process can only be completed for people who promote product using referral URLs.

However, they expand on the Ebay model in the sense that with Ebay, sellers can only offer their own product whereas sellers are able to offer both their own product and those of other merchants through the use of customer reciprocation services.


Regards

Michael Lever


About the author:
Michael Lever is a co-founder and CEO of SpinningTornado.com , an independent company offering unbiased tools and services to help affiliate and network marketers build profitable online businesses . http://www.SpinningTornado.com Partnering affiliates the world over .

Tools For Online Tracking

Posted on 20th November 2009

Copyright 2005 Sharon Housley

In order to determine which advertising and marketing efforts are effective you must have ways to measure the results of those efforts. Alerts and instant notifications can be instrumental in monitoring search engine position, trademarked terms, monitoring competitors and staying abreast of online occurrences. And, of course, the notification can be used for "ego searches".

Ego Searches
What is an ego search? Find out where your name or company is mentioned, view forum posts or online articles that mention your name or company.

Trademarks
The best offense is a good defense. By monitoring newsgroups or search engines for trademarked terms, you often head off a future conflict. As a trademark owner, it is your responsibility to actively protect your mark. Otherwise, you could lose your trademark rights. Monitoring tools send immediate notification should any suspected trademark infringements occur.

Search Position
Statistics show that more than 85% of Internet users find web sites with the help of the search engines. Therefore, a website's search engine position is crucial to its success. Prudent webmasters regularly check their search engine position. Monitoring fluctuations and re-indexing of major search engines affects keyword terms and phrases. Monitoring of positions will alert webmasters to any shifts before sales decline.

Competitor Watch
Monitoring newsgroups for mentions of competitors may allow you opportunities to chime in and offer an alternative solution in a helpful, friendly way. Knowing exactly what your online competitors are doing provides a competitive edge that can be used to your advantage.

Website Downtime
Accessibility is the most critical measure of your website's performance. If customers can't access your site, they can't shop; and if they can't shop, they can't buy. More important, your business could gain a bad reputation among your customers, which translates into negative word of mouth and even worse, if you're highly visible, negative press. So regardless of what else you monitor, you want to monitor websites for downtime.


Take a look at the various tools available and how they can be used to keep you current on relevant issues.

WebAlerts - Recieve email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. Alerts can be sent based on information in Google News, Google Searches or both.
http://www.google.com/webalerts

PubSub - PubSub matches your requests against new information as it appears real time. Searches can be categorized to search, blog entries, SEC/EDGAR Filings, press releases, news group posts or flight delays.
http://www.pubsub.com

Ego Alerts - Google news search turned into an RSS feed.
http://www.justinpfister.com/gnewsfeed.php


Ebay Alerts - Ebay Alerts monitoring will create an RSS feed to monitor Ebay auctions for specific keywords or phrases. When a new item that contains those keywords is added to Ebay you will receive notification via your RSS feed!
http://www.freebiddingtools.com

Amazon Alerts - Generate a URL which you can use to automatically search Amazon.com with your favorite RSS news reader. It will automatically update you when new items meet your search criteria. I personally use it to look for new books on topics I'm interested in, and I have the defaults set to do the same, but you can adjust it to search any of Amazon's stores. You can also adjust the search order and what kind of items you wish to search.
http://www.oxus.net/amazon

Internet Seer - InternetSeer remotely monitors your website to insure that your site is available 24/7. If InternetSeer is unable to reach your site, we will send you an immediate e-mail alert that your site is unreachable.
http://www.internetseer.com

NetNewsTracker - NetNews Tracker is a clipping service for Usenet newsgroups. Newstracker searches newsgroups twice daily for any specified words or phrases and delivers alerts via e-mail. Newstracker can be used to monitor newsgroups for names, company names, products, URLs, or any other topic of interest.
http://www.netnewstracker.com

Other Suggested Resources -
Monitoring Tools - Monitoring Tools is a directory of online monitoring tools and applications
http://www.monitoring-tools.net

Monitoring Software - Monitoring Software is a collection of downloadable monitoring software solutions.
http://www.monitoring-software.net

About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.netand FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com.

Kids & Online Marketers

Posted on 20th November 2009

Kids and Online Marketing

I’m sure many online marketers have kids and they often come over to the desk when you are busy working online to ask questions like ''what are you doing dad/mom'' etc.


How many of us actually tell them what we are doing or better yet show them?


I have been guilty of being ''to busy'' to answer questions or saying not right now daddy's busy.


All this changed the first time I actually took the time to explain to my daughter just exactly what I was doing.


My daughter has some ''challenges'' that I won't go into here but the result of me explaining a little bit of what I do and why to her has been no less than inspiring to me.


She took an interest in this whole marketing thing, especially wondering why people buy things and what makes them buy one item instead of a similar one.


We have had lots of conversations about this and looked at lots of products and ads, everything from tv, ebay, online sites and even the wso's on the forum. We’ve discussed Christmas and observed the transformation of stores and tv ads during the holiday season.


She has learned a lot about.


* Integrity and honesty in promoting a product and many of the various ways to get the attention of the viewer.


* How a buyer that feels fooled or cheated won't be back and will tell people they know not to buy from you.


* Wanting to belong to a group'' - she was sitting next to me when I signed up for the Alliance forum and witnessed first hand how building anticipation and exclusivity can work.


* Selling something you are passionate about - how it won't seem like work and you will probably have a better chance of success when the passion you have for a product show's through.


Soon all these evening conversations and lessons lead to Stephanie wanting her own website to sell something from.


First she needed some money to launch her site. At the time I was an active power seller on ebay. Her little brother Thomas James was really into Bionicles (a toy) and was always cruising ebay looking for a deal on the latest Bionicle. One night we were at Wal-Mart and as usual in the Bionicle section with Thomas. The little toys were on sell at less than half price. Stephanie suggested that we could buy them and sell them on ebay. We did, we bought them all and sold almost all of them at retail or above. She helped design the ad and suggested posing some out of the boxes for pictures and was involved in the design of the auction ad. Enough was made to start her website. More ebay auctions followed to raise a few more dollars.


After some discussion Stephanie decided what she wanted her website to be about.


She decided on:


* The pet niche - an area she is definitely passionate about (three dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, fish and turtles make their home with us).


* She picked out several private label products and click bank products to promote.


* She chose the domain name freepettips.com


* She bought the website to use a starting point for her site (she picked it out from ebay for $25). You can see the beginnings here. http://tomdean.net/Pets (it's not finished this is just the starting point) but it will be up and running soon on her domain.


Her site will be online soon and will include private label products about dog care, click bank products, resell rights products for dog/cat recipes, articles, adsense, and two of her very on products written for her but based on what she wanted them to include. One is on buying and caring for hamsters the other is on guinea pigs and includes plans for the guinea pigs home and an outdoor guinea pig play box. Of course I will be the one to finish up the site and get it on the web but the concept, product selection, chosen design and her products were all decided on by her. Think of all she will be learning from this process that she is involved with every step of the way.


Many of her own graphics will be used on the site and in the products. She went from coloring graphics with crayons (her other passion) to drawing them in a paint program using a pen mouse that she purchased from her ebay proceeds.


All of this from dad just answering some questions and deciding not to say ''I’m busy right now”.


I know we all get busy and stressed especially when that site is just not working out or your latest mailing didn't do much for you. But take some time when the little one ask what you are up to. You may be surprised by how much they are really interested in what you are doing and how much your time means to them. You will also be surprised with what they can teach you if you just listen.

* My daughter is 11. She is currently taking art class and learning to draw online with a mouse pen using photo impact and ms paint along with getting her website ready to launch.

Tom
(A proud dad)


About the author:
Tom Dean publishes the Viral Marketing Newsletter.
You can get Free Templates-Tools-Headers Complete Websites at his website
http://www.tomdean.net