Internet Marketing Strategies and Marketing Tips by Neil Shearing

…so I thought you may like to see it too…

I’ve been amazed by the response to my last email… tons of you accepted my Article Underground recommendation… I guess the offer of huge amounts of quality content PLUS a traffic generating system is almost irresistible!

BUT, if you haven’t yet joined me on the inside, you’ll have to be quick… I’ve just heard from Mike in a personal email that there are only 98 places left in “phase two” and they’re going fast… if you want a place, don’t delay!

Oh, Mike also said he was not sure about *ever* offering another place… “I will take some time off before offering a 3rd phase, IF I decide to add it”… were his exact words.

The Article Underground gets my highest recommendation. If you place your order today and manage to get in, email your purchase receipt to: nsbonuses AT googlemail.com and I’ll send you…

… My 20-minute movie on my personal money spinning system built around Article Underground…and…

… My personal answers to the “duplicate content problem” *and* how to make the most of the 400 articles you get from Article Underground each month!

I look forward to seeing you inside the Article Underground!

But don’t forget… as of right now there are only 98 places and this email goes out to about 25,000 people!

Here’s the link to click…
http://www.scamfree.com/articles/

PS, I spent several hours today building sites around my new system. This is what I’m doing *right now*… and I want to share it with you!

Was I in at the beginning of the Internet? The “big bang”?

Take a look at this past article… it mentions DVD’s as “new technology” and also VHS (gasp!)

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Niche It, Niche It Good!

A key to online success is to work the small, profitable niche’s.

I’ll give you an example.

I wanted to buy a DVD player. Yes, I’d held out long enough and was ready to embrace the “new” technology!

BUT, I didn’t want another box under my TV. So I went looking for a DVD/VCR combo.

I found one I liked and took it home from the store.

I’m a happy bunny. The Lord Of The Rings is just spectacular!

OK, back to the niche.

If you search Google for “home business” (without typing the quotes) you get 6.8 Million results.

If you search Google for “DVD VCR combo” (without typing the quotes) you get 61,000 results.

Now, if you earn 2% per sale on a $400 DVD/VCR combo from your local electrical retailers website, that’s $8 per sale.

And there’s very little competition.

Work the Niche

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Now, let’s look at that again, doing the same searches today… home business and DVD VCR combo. I’d say the web has become a little bigger since I first wrote that article!

When you retire, you expect residual income from your investments, right? That’s what your pension is for… to provide an income stream when you retire. But can your online business provide you with residual income too, and is it important to try to build residual income streams? Well…

If you have a job, you have to keep working to earn money.

If you have a business, you have to keep selling to earn money.

But, if you sell a product through recurring billing, or if you sell products as an affiliate and earn residual income, you can reach a level of success which will enable you to stop working!

For as long as the person buys the product, you take a slice of the revenue.

Even if you sold to them five years ago.

Of course, if you’re an affiliate, you have the same risks that the merchant may go broke.

And if you’re the merchant, you still have to provide the service which the customers are paying monthly for, and provide customer support.

But the fact is that building a residual sales income will provide greater stability and revenue than making continuous sales.

Try to build a residual income stream into your business, and let me know how you get on

I hardly know where to begin.

Lots of people took me up on the ArticleUnderground offer… which is great.. so I’ve been emailing them their bonus movie! (it’s not too late if you want to jump on board… see this post).  I also heard from lots of people who were already members and who wanted to know if they could get my bonus… well, of course! Next time, I’ll be faster to do my promotion and not wait weeks before my “lightbulb” moment.

I added my own Incomemax.com RSS feed to the regular pages on Incomemax.com using something called Feedroll. You can see the blog posts at the bottom of the pages. I like having editorial control over my sites. The idea of adding other people’s RSS feeds makes me nervous… so adding my own seemed like a better plan.

I also changed a Meta tag in the Incomemax code I wasn’t previously aware of.. “revisit after” was set to 15 days (!)… no wonder I had to wait so long for Google to come back to my site… they were staying away for two weeks at a time because I was asking them to… unknown to me! I’ve changed that setting to one day! Oh and, also at Incomemax, I changed the meta description and made it longer. Google seem to have taken all the meta description and the first image alt tag as their search engine description for the site… which wasn’t good. So I wrote a longer description.

What else? Oh yes, I tried out the new and improved Article Announcer… it’s a great tool, but (through no fault of Article Announcer’s) the first time you try to submit an article at a site they ask you to fill in a form, then confirm your email address, then pick a pen-name, then submit your article. I can’t wait until I’m done “registering” with each site and can just run around submitting articles… that’ll be fun. Today I think I registered at about a dozen sites and submitted an article at each… which took a few hours!

The article I submitted was the first I’ve ever had ghostwritten! I’m very excited… getting brand new, original content and then leveraging it for inward links to Incomemax.com which use the link text I define. Hopefully, the new inward links plus the on-page RSS feed and the increased spider visits because of the revisit change and the meta description change will all add up to more traffic for Incomemax!

So… phew! How was your day?

In response to my promotion of ArticleUnderground, Bill asks…

“I’m a long-term subscriber of yours, also one of Michael’s too. I’ve seen a lot come and go and I am finally starting to get interested now. What worries me about AU is, what about the duplicate content problems you’re going to come up against? You’ll be publishing the same articles as other people, republishing bits of those same articles again in the blogs as most likely will other people; how are Google going to rank any of these without penalising them for dupe content?”

My answer…

The research I’ve done seems to indicate that very few people actually use the things they buy. Mike limits the sets of articles to 350 members, so if only 20% of people use the articles (a generous assumption, I’d say it’s more like 10%), then only 70 (35?) people will have that article on their sites.

Just add a personalized intro, a comment in the middle and a line at the end of the article and I wouldn’t expect any dupe content problems. If you want to use a few original sentences to do the blog promotions, that may be a good idea.

I think the fear of dupe content is out of proportion to the facts. For instance, someone issues a news release and it’s picked up by hundreds of sites. Are they all blacklisted for dupe content? I don’t think so.

Also, Andy Williams (ezSEO) gave this example…

“One of my articles was published on my own site.  Google indexed the article, and my site was the only place with that article.  Searching for the title, I was the only site listed in Google.  I then submitted that article to  ezinearticles.com.  I waited for Google to find it, and then searched for my title again.  Guess what? Ezinearticles.com was listed as #1 and my site as #2. Even though Google knew the article originated from my site and therefore ezinearticles had “copied” it.  Google still ranked the ezinearticles duplicate ahead of mine.  If there is a duplicate content filter then it certainly did not apply to ezinearticles in this instance”. (page 126 of his Fat Affiliates ebook, available for free from here)

Also, Andy has 13,000 instances of one article distributed across the net and indexed by Google. If there’s a dupe content filter, why does Google display 13,000 pages indexed for the same identical article? Are all those people using it being penalized? I doubt it.

So, firstly, I don’t think many people will be using the same articles as you if you get the ArticleUnderground bundles and secondly I’m skeptical about the overblown fears of duplicate content filters.

Have you ever been given something important, but your brain hasn’t let you see the true potential? You put the thing aside and then, months later you come back to it and slap your forehead saying, “Oh My! Why didn’t I realize how important this was months ago?”

Well, I had one of those moments… in fact lots… over the last 24 hours. I got an email reminder from Mike Liebner who runs ArticleUnderground which was recommended to me by Michael Cambell. Because of my friendship with Michael, I took a look a few months ago and didn’t really see the potential. Well, yesterday I went back and, wait for it, actually watched the help tutorials and case study movies.

So, having started watching the movies, I couldn’t stop. It was like Mike was slapping me through my monitor saying, “you see the value in this now? C’mon! It’s not that hard to see this is amazing!”

I have to agree. I kept watching movie after movie. I sat and watched them for two or three hours. Now I “get it”.

Article Underground is a monthly members site where the members get 400 articles per month (there’s a maximum 350 members per set of 400 articles/month). That is a MASSIVE amount of articles. They are all quality articles written around top paying keywords that have been painstakingly sifted out from tens of thousands of keywords people are searching for. The articles are written by professional ghostwriters… they read well, they scan well, they look great. All you have to do is put a few of these articles on your sites and they’ll get traffic which you can monetize via Adsense, affiliate links, pay per lead or direct product sales… the monetization is up to you.

BUT… here’s the “slam dunk”. Mike has TWENTY TWO different blogs that you can announce your article pages on. You, as a member, just log in and make a post. It can be as simple as taking a snippet from the article and saying, “click here for the full article” and link the quote to your webpage. These blogs are pagerank 4/5/6! They get spidered all the time… so you get links into your article page and have it visited really quickly… bingo, it should be in the search engines in almost no time.

The articles AND the blogs makes this a really smart system. It’s encouraged me to start building my own web content sites. I’m sure, with Mike’s resources and my own little extra trick, I’ll be cashing big checks in the near future.

If you want to know my “little trick” (which is really my “start to finish” system for building and promoting quality websites and ways to monetize them) sign up for Mike’s ArticleUnderground and I’ll send you a movie going through my step by step process. I haven’t made it yet, so don’t expect instant delivery, but I have finally distilled the process into something easily understood and if you join ArticleUnderground you’ll be one of the first to know my personal system!)

I’ve written hundreds of articles about making money online, working from home and all aspects of running a home based business in the past ten years, many of which are sitting mothballed on my computers or web server. From time to time I’ll be digging some out and posting them here just to give them an airing and get rid of the cobwebs. Obviously I’ll post the ones that are still relevant. I won’t be posting the ones about how great and innovative x.com is. (they were bought out by PayPal in March 2000 , in case you were wondering) Boy do I feel old!

My good online friend Dr Mani (who has been known to visit this blog!) told me he “lost” his list of contacts recently. Since having a good list is of primary importance to doing business online, Mani has been forced into desperate action. He’s offering over $200 dollars worth of his own original info-products for just ten dollars in order to rebuild his lists.

Mani knows he’s making a crazy offer here, but he really wants people to take his products at such a low, low price. I think he said it’s for a very limited time only, so if you’re interested, click here to check it out. You’ll then be able to get your hands on all these original product for a total of just $10…

1. Info-Product Profit Blueprint

This report outlines a step by step process you can implement in ANY niche market – and use to create your first info-product quickly… in just weeks, if not days!  Price: $27

2. Hot Email Headlines

A collection of 40+ attention-grabbing email headlines guaranteed to get your emails opened and read. Price: $9.95

3. Hot Email Sales Letters

A set of 23 tested and proven email sales letters that you can model and base your email promotions and solo ads upon. Price: $27

4. List Builder Profits

A unique technique to build your list fast – and even profit as you do it – by tapping into OTHER people’s lists, ethically and with mutual profit! Price: $47

5. Forum Fortunes

Some novel twists that will let you maximize the impact from any time you spend posting on forums and participating in online discussions. Price: $5

6. How To Track Ads

A basic primer on setting up ad tracking systems that let you see exactly where your advertising dollars are being spent – and calculating your return on investment. Price: $5

7. Ezines ‘r’ EZ

A 7-day email tutorial to plan, create, publish and promote your email newsletter – and get your first subscribers – quickly and easily, starting from scratch.  Price: $24.97

8. Instant Upsell Generator

A useful online tool to help you craft an ‘upsell’ webpage to complement your info-product sale, and boost your profits effortlessly. Price: $27

9. Content Profit Secrets

How to use keyword-loaded content-rich websites to attract search engine traffic and visitors to your new website – and profit maximally from your content. Price: $27

10. Refund Profit Secrets

How to turn ‘lost’ sales into continuing income streams – easily! Price: $8.50

Click here for full details.

As some of you will know, I highly respect Paul Smithson who created the XSitePro software that helps people with no HTML knowledge build superb professional websites quickly and easily. Paul demonstrated the software to me in my house last year and I was blown away by it. It’s incredibly well designed and the sites you build with it are purposely search engine optimized so that you have a better chance of all your pages ranking highly.

Paul has just let me know that the suite of eleven help movies and tutorials created just for XSitePro users are being made available free to charge to everyone. If you’ve ever wondered how good the software is, and if it would suit you, check out these videos and you’ll see exactly why I rave about this software.

I jumped the gun with my previous post containing a picture of the Affiliate Classroom product, the Affiliate Manager and had to censor myself!

(you could say I gave you a world exclusive for a short time while the uncensored image was up!)

Now I’m officially allowed to show you this quality product in all its glory… sitting on my kitchen worktop…

(click to enlarge)

I’m still working my way through this huge package… it’s a tour-de-force of information about starting an affiliate program, managing affiliates and finding and recruiting super affiliates. There’s also a huge amount of additional information such as categorized links for every topic relating to affiliates you can think of. A great resource. You can find out more, and get a free report by clicking on this link.