Internet Marketing with Allen Walton

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Today is day 15 of the 30 day challenge. That is officially half way home. But I say almost cause we’ve had some sickness hit the family today and so I haven’t been able to get day 15 done yet. But I will this evening.

So let’s recap what has been going on with the challenge. The first few days was all about research. Researching for - a Niche, a valuable Keyword and what the competition might be for your proposed niche idea.  The criteria was a bit narrow for my liking, but then I’m not running the challenge, so I decided if I was going to do it, then do it right. So I did my research. We were give a tool called ‘Market Samurai’ to use in our testing. Some bugs at first, but turned out to be a life saver.

I settled in quite late I might add, with the Niche ‘Concert Promotions‘…….To back up a second, the rules or guidelines I should say, were to find a Niche that had no more than 30,000 competing webpages for your specific keyword. But that keyword had to have daily searches  of about 100 a day only. I don’t know if you have tried this or not, but it ain’t easy my friend to adhere to those guidelines now a days.

Once we got all the research done we were introduced to ‘WordPress Direct’ which is a program that let’s you pick a theme template and then with just about one click of the button, install a completely search engine optimized wordpress blog. Regardless of what you may have heard you don’t have to have a passion for a Niche to blog about it. Concert Promotions is not a passion of mine. But I needed to select something to get started with as I was falling behind. I even thought how interesting it would be to do a blog about something I wasn’t passionate about and see how well I do with it.

After getting that done, then it was time to setup some bookmarking capabilities to announce to the world that I was on line. After that, we were instructed to put up a Squidoo lens about our blog and write a hubpage about it also. We opened a Tumblr account and announced our presence there too. I’m not sure where we go tonight to get something done. I’m convinced it will be fun and interesting though.

Okay, the idea behind all of this 30 day stuff as I have told you, is to get up a blog and promote it, get it ranked well in Google and other search engines, drive traffic to our site and sell an affiliate product and make our first $10 online. I just got my site up last night. Hasn’t been 24 hours even yet. And being a very impatient person, I said to myself…..self..let’s go see if we have been ranked at all or if Google has not found us as of yet. Remember we are trying to get good ranking for one Keyword that has about 100 searches a day and not more than 30,000 competing webpages…30,000 is still a lot though.

Well here is the results as of an hour ago..again less than 24 hours online……Google has ranked my new Concert Promotions blog at #14 and #15 for phrase “Concert Promotions”, which is on the second page. It blew my mind. Less than 24 hours up and running and I’m ranked 14 and 15….that’s jumping ahead of over 30,000 websites that have to do with Concert Promotions. And we still have 2 more weeks of doing stuff to improve our sites.

I don’t know about you but I find this amazing. Far outdistanced my expectations I must say! Day 15 exercise is ahead of me and I better get to it, before I get too tired.

Till Tomorrow.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

Are these really the top 5 tips for Internet Marketers? Hell I don’t know. But I do know that if you screw any of these up you are going to have one heck of a time making money online.

First one is really simple….Baby you got to have a plan!!! You need some reference guide by which to navigate the online waters. If you were a ship leaving San Francisco and were told to pull into China somewhere and you didn’t have any maps to guide you. No Chop Suey for you. Having a plan is at the very least necessary to get you out of port. The plan doesn’t have to be great in the beginning, because you can fine tune it as you go. But it will help you get out beyond the breakwater at least.

The quality of your plan will rest on tip or action item number two. In Real Estate…it’s location, location, location…….but here in the commercial waters of the Internet…it’s Research, Research, Research. If you don’t know where the hungry customers are, then having the greatest product in the world is useless. To find those hungry masses, you must get into doing research. And quality research at that.

Keyword research!

Customer research!

Market demand research.

But how do you know what to use or where to go to do the research, or even have much of an idea what that research means once you have a stack of numbers. Well, that leads us to tip number three. Have you ever heard the saying, “If you want to know what a millionaire knows, then take him to lunch.”  That’s really akin to saying find successful people and emulate them. Find out what they do and then you do the same things. maybe not on the same scale because you are just starting out. But at least get some activity going based on solid ground.

Now that leaves us with four and five. Let’s see I may need to make these up………..oh I remember. Break everything down into small bite size pieces. Don’t look at your project as one grandiose endeavor, or it may turn out to appear far too daunting of a task for you to handle. You know how you eat an elephant, right?  Yep, one bite at a time. So break your project down into many small pieces and tackle them one at a time. That way you will be able to build upon success after success after success.

Tip five is really important. You must have persistence and test. Test everything you do. For example, if you are running a pay per click campaign. The run two slightly different ads. After a suitable time period, whichever one is performing the best, it then becomes the control ad. Get rid of the loser ad, and replace it with another ad and let those two go at it. Again after a suitable amount of time, keep the winner and dump the loser and replace and test again.

It’s very important that you don’t give up. You must keep on keeping on as they say. Making money on the Internet is not a wham bam thank you mam process. After all, what you are attempting to do, whether you know it or not, is develop a business. Even though it may not be a brick and mortar building, it still is a business and if done right, can make you a lot more money with less risk than that stationary building down the block. And here’s the absolutely best part……Drum roll please…..You can sit at your computer and conduct business in your underwear. If that isn’t the greatest…..Well, if you have a regular job and are doing the online marketing thing in your spare time, try going to work tomorrow in your underwear and see what the boss says.

I know what my boss will say tomorrow when he sees me in my underwear…..Lookin’ Good Allen, because he’ll be speaking to me from the mirror, I am my boss!

Those may not actually be the top 5 tips, but they are up there close , so pay attention and go get em.

P.S. I hope you liked the video from the 30 day challenge. If you want to see some more let me know and I’ll put some more up here for you to see.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

ct,WordPress direct is a third party application that is being made available to the 30 day challenge participants during the 30 day challenge. Makes sense I guess…lol   I thought since I have spoken about being part of the program, that it would be nice for you to have a chance to view one of the videos from the series. If I get this right, it will be a video of Ed Dale talking about WordPress Direct and what it can do. He walks you through a demonstration of just exactly how it works.

Assuming I get the right video and get it embedded here correctly I think it will be a real treat. It will give you some insight as to what you can do with blogs and how this application can be a big help. So here goes…let’s see if I can get this right….

I have to be honest, for some reason I love the sound of an accent from down under. Ed is from Australia as you maybe able to tell. I really like British accents too.

I hope you enjoyed this video. I know it’s a bit long, but if you made some popcorn and grabbed a coke, then it was like going to the movies for free….now wasn’t it. Beside, I got up out of a sick bed to try and get this done so you could enjoy it.  Ok now lay on the sympathy….LOL.

Have to get some good sleep tonight cause I’m falling way behind and have to try and catch up with everyone tomorrow, or at least close to being caught up.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

There are certain mistakes that every online marketer must avoid. Some are more damaging than others like most problems in life, some are little and some are huge. In fact the Internet is more protocol driven than ever before. That may not seem right, but when putting up a website and trying to get traffic to it, then it really becomes true.

It’s more like a battle between the search engine guys and the webmasters. The search engines are the lords of the playing fields and the webmasters are more the alchemists, trying to take Internet lead and turn it into gold. The search engines will gladly give you straw but won’t let loose of their stacks of lead very easily. It seems as though they want you to make mistakes.

The first item on the webmaster’s list that should be taken seriously, is the domain name they choose for their site. That is almost a catch 22 right now. As more people become website owners and webmasters, the more the demand for domain names increase. Which in turn eats up inventory. But it still stands that to be as successful as possible, you must, if at all possible, choose a domain name that is extremely relevant to your site. As inventory dries up, or becomes harder to acquire, that proposition becomes even harder to achieve. So if you are putting up a quilting site, don’t expect to be successful with dogbone.com as your domain name.

It is best if you can get a domain name that will have your main keyword in the domain name. For instance, quiltsRus.com or something like that when your main keyword would be quilts.

Another mistake that should be avoided at all costs, is selecting a name for your site that is somewhat abstract in nature. If you have a quilt site, then you better have the word quilt in your site title. I would also have the keyword in the sub-header too. The title Lucy Mae Sews just won’t get it. The search engines will actually penalize you for irrelevant mish-mash of phrases. You may be proud you are Lucy Mae and that you can sew, but the search engines want to be sure that when they send visitors to your site, that it mentions quilts based on your keyword selection.

There is a big problem if visitors that are interested in quilts want to get to a site like yours, but the search engines see Lucy Mae Sews at dogbone.com……Don’t count on seeing any search engine visitors soon. Now my example here is really blown out of proportion, but it is to make a point. Search engine’s algorythims are getting more sophisticated all the time. Out fooling them is a constant struggle. Only the very hardy and clever webmaster is going to be successful.

Another pitfall to avoid is to make sure you don’t post just any old type of crap on your site. The content, whether it be a blog or a static site, needs to be relevant also. You’re committing Internet suicide if you put up content on a myriad of subjects. Especially if they have nothing to do with your list of keywords, or you overall subject matter. I’m speaking of commercial sites mostly. Personal blogs are just that, the personal happenings in one’s life. So the subject matter will vary tremendously in most cases. But that can’t be true with a site you are attempting to commercialize.

The three things I have covered may seem simple concepts and they are, but you’d be surprised how many millions of sites do just what I said not to do. When you do a search for say online poker, and you get a Google listing that says there are 280,000,000 sites, you can bet your last dollar that there are a bunch of them that are making these exact mistakes.

It’s a very competitive world out there. And only the strong and clever survive. You may not be able to rank like major competitors of yours, but with some very selective keyword research and doing things the right way, you can grab a nice little portion of the commercial business on the web.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

Another day has come and gone. I spent most of today in bed sick. Still don’t feel good but trying to catch up on the 30 day challenge. I’m two days behind from being sick. I’m sure I told you that the 30 day challenge is a free 30 day marketing course. If you missed that news, there is still time to get involved.

But you have to get on the stick and get some stuff done if you want to join. Go to http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com and you should be able to sign up. Again it’s free and is very neat. I’m going to go and see about getting day 6 done, then I can try and get 7 and 8 done tomorrow. Still don’t feel too well. But what are you gonna do.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

‘10 Commandments of Marketing Time Management’

Is an article that I ran across today and I thought was quite good. It is by a lady named Karen Whiting. Although it is in the context of marketing books, I thought it was still relevant to our goals to marketing on the Internet in general.

The first item she speaks about is keeping in touch.  “1. Stay in touch Customers should hear from you at least every 90 days. That is done with blogs/postcards/newsletters.”

She is so right on with this idea. You should never lose touch with your customers or audience or subscribers or whatever the case may be. One thing I have learned over the years, and it has been a tough lesson in many cases, is that communication lies at the heart of all successful moments. Whether in business or in our personal lives. If you don’t communicate, you might as well go live on an island by yourself. Because your life will be riddled with problems and needless stress.

Another aspect of her article that I think is very important is consistency.

“5. Be consistent
Schedule the time and consistently use it for marketing.
A little every day or a concentrated effort weekly will build your marketing efforts over time.”

While a cliche it’s still true, a journey starts with one little step and is completed with consistently taking little steps until you reach the end. If you’d like to read more here’s the link

Have to get to some research done for tomorrow’s 30 day challenge day 6.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

The thirty day challenge is going well. Just as a reminder, the thirty day challenge is a free 30 day seminar about developing a market presence in a niche market. It starts out from the spot that a brand new person who just discovered the Internet just about and goes to the final resolution of you making your first $10 sale.

That may sound almost a bit childish, but what is being taught is really interesting and entertaining also. The Market Samurai research tool that we have to use is in beta test mode right now, and some problems have popped up with it. So I’m having to do almost all of my research the long way…with SEObook keyword search tool and Google search. Takes much longer but no choice right now. Hope to hear from support soon.

To give you a bit of heads up, what we have done so far is get parameters to do our research in to find a niche. We are looking for a niche market that has about 100 searches a day for a keyword and has 30,000 or less competing web pages. Not an easy task. Today we we instructed to find an affiliate product that fits our discovered niche….I haven’t found one yet…..so we can test this week if there is a demand in the niche we have chosen. So if anybody has any ideas that might fit that set of parameters, please let me know.

I know there must be quite a few, but I’m trying to find somethng that I’m at least interested in somewhat. I will forge on and see what I can find. But I’m really open to any ideas kids…so kick up an idea if you can.

Till tomorrow.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

Another day of cleaning and changing to reach the best web 2.0 position we can. As you can see I dumped a bunch of useless links and added a Hot Links Category. I’m going to try and keep this as clean as possible with nothing but valuable links and info. You’ll notice that the only link there right now is Online Business Alliance.

This is a program that I looked at and found to my liking. I think it has great potential and a very neat concept. Quick sketch of OBA….. They have more integrity than about any business I have seen…and brother I have seen a lot. Like I said before, I go through 200 to 30o email pitches a day looking at different opportunities. Cash gifting, traffic exchange upgrades and referral programs…..selling cheap kids clothes from giant discounter to typing data online. You name it and I have read about it or have seen graphics for it.

The gentleman that owns Online Business Alliance, absolutely prohibits you from offering his program in any emails. Doesn’t matter if to a safe list or not. He will not tolerate one complaint about spam, regardless. No emails!! That definitely restricts marketing efforts, but that is okay. Nice and refreshing to see a guy who won’t put up with any bull crap,

Back to program….There are just a few quality books and a piece of software that are offered. Their value should range in the $25 to $30 area. But you can get them all for $5 each. Buy one or all doesn’t matter. They are loss leader items. Once you purchase an item you are entitled to lease out an adspace which will in time bring quite a bit of money back to you. Once you lease that adspace, then you are allowed to lease out another space and so on.

This may not make a lot of sense, that’s why it’s best that you go look for yourself. Just click on one of the links like this one Online Business Alliance and you will be directed to a page where you can read all about it. I believe in their program quite a bit. I think there is huge potential and an exceptionally easy way to start a small online business without spending much money. The rewards if you stick with it and promote it, then you could really take some nice income home each month. So take a look and read and see what you think.

Looks like the Adbrite people sold the top banner space for me. Plus I got the middle ad squared away too. So we are starting to look like a real web 2.0 site. Traffic here is growing nicely. Also the 30 day challenge is going well. They just introduced a keyword research tool called ‘Market Samurai’ which is totally cool. It will be free for challenge people to use for forty days. Then part of it will still be free, but a few more advanced modules will have a one time price tag. We’ll see what that turns out to be when they tell us.

I’m dumping the review sites tomorrow most likely. I am convinced that the review site wave is going to turn out to be a bust. Anybody with half a brain should know it’s just a straight marketing ploy for affiliates. At least with blogs like mine, we tell you straight up that we like a product and are promoting it. If there are some blogs that promote products but try and act like they are just casual observers, then I’d be wary.

But as you know, I don’t have any problem dumping on a product that I think stinks. SeNuke and Google Nemesis are two I can think of right off hand. To be fair to the SENuke guys, they have admitted they are having some problems and are attempting to fix them. If they do, their product may turn out to be okay. Their problem was bringing it to market with some major bugs, and not just a small hard to detect creepy crawly thingy running around inside. Their bug was the size of Godzilla.

Take care. And as was said in ‘ Shawshank Redemption’ “Get busy livin or Get busy dyin”

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
1 Comment »

Give a Monkey a crayon and let him loose and I imagine you are going to have a mess. As you can see at present here that someone gave me a coding crayon. I have twins selling something. What I have no idea. But there is suppose to only be one of them. So I’ll have to go check that out and get that straightened out here in a minute or so.

The big ‘Google Nemesis’ versus the homespun review site test is over. Neither site did squat. The GN site did worse considering it had a head start and had twice the views the homespun one did. What that tells me is exactly what I thought. That being these NEW review sites are a bunch of crap, which really makes sense anyway. Who’s going to put a review site trying to sell some software or program and tell you it’s a piece of sh-t. Nobody in there right mind. So it’s hard to take a site like that seriously. One thing I guess though, it still could be a good product, regardless if you found it through a semi-phony review site.

I’m taking a 30 day challenge with a bunch of people from all over the world. It’s a free program run by a guy in Australia. The program is completely free and they spend 30 days teaching people how to start an online business and make their first $10. It sounded cool and the price was right, so I decided to do it. I believe this is the 3rd year they have done this. As part of the program, I was introduced to a new browser called flock. It’s a browser that is web 2.0 friendly. Very friendly in fact. I’m very excited about using it.

The challenge starts today the 1st of August. I just found out about it last night, so I’ve had to scramble to get everything in place. Still not done but not much else to do. to get ready. I will report on how it goes. If it turns out to really be a cool program maybe I can set something up here similar and help some new people get fired up and moving. We shall see.

First I have to get rid of one of the twins hawking goods here on the site and get her replaced with another advertiser.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »

This will be short since it’s so late here. I got quite a few things done here tonight. There is some change to the way things look, but there will be more. This site is definitely an experimental project. Most of the changes I made turned out to be structural, meaning within the program itself.

I have added a deal of the day spot where different products will show up all the time. Plus added a Digg button and at the end of every post a bar will show up for you to bookmark the post if you want to…Hopefully some will.

I’m going to try and get a couple of other things done tomorrow and then we’ll see if there is much of a change.

Tags: Online Marketing by admin
No Comments »