According to comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, Google is the leader in US search market. In a search release it states that Americans conducted 14.5 billion core searches in February 2010, with Google Sites accounting for 65.5 percent search market share.

The share of top 5 search engines is as follows: (Total US searches performed in home, work and university locations)

• Google Sites – 65.5%
• Yahoo! Sites – 16.8%
• Microsoft Sites – 11.5%
• Ask Network – 3.7%
• AOL LLC – 2.5%

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Hello all my fellow SEOs, internet and affiliate marketers today I am going to discuss a very important and not only important but the basic idea after why we became or want to become internet marketers. This post seems to be little off topic but these are the basic points which makes a way for affiliate marketing.

But before we start on the topic let us have a look on a story of a young man named Joe. The fact which makes the story even more interesting is that Joe belongs to a middle class average Indian family and lives in a metropolitan city, say Delhi. His family is educated, and belongs to service class who are dedicated slaves of 9 to 6 rat race.

As Joe grows up in an environment where there is stiff competition and to overtake everyone in life is the only aim whether it is study or games.

His parents have a very high expectation from him that he will excel in studies and sports as well.

He has been brought up in an environment, where he watch his parents working 9 to 6 everyday and do not have any time for each other neither for him.

And as time passes some facts and points make a permanent room in his mind and soul. Some bulging points would be:

1. The life of an average person is very tough and you have to fight everyday to survive.
2. The work for a middle class family born boy is to grow up with good education and then find a good job to maintain social and financial status.
3. Work for full life until the age of retirement and then spend your life doing meditation and Pooja & Bhajans (service of lord)

Sounds familiar? Now who is Joe? I am Joe and you are Joe and every common man is Joe.

The story of an average American or anyone in developed countries might be slightly different but not much. The basics though which we all have is to study and do a full time job to gain social and financial stability.

So what are your reasons to start with internet marketing? Crossing all these barriers, find a new person in you; discover a new world through new vision.

There might be many reasons, from independence to flexibility of work or making more money or aiding your existing one, and I would love if you will share it with us.

Now comes the point what were the reasons behind my entry in the fascinating cyber world and internet marketing.

Freedom: The first and foremost reason for my entry into internet marketing is freedom. Freedom from whom – freedom from the mentality of 9 to 5 slavery. When I think what my life in real is. I wake up in the morning and start preparing to go office, whole day I work for someone else who pays me salary, in other words I am trading my time for money. I have 9 hour job, adding the time of commuting around 2 hours and the time to prepare myself physically and mentally before and after office around 3 hours. In total I spend around 14 to 15 hours a day for making a living from my full time job. I am not including the emotional stress and wear out I face in commuting, specially on the roads of New Delhi, where you will get a red light at every kilometer and jams every second one.

So I need to free my self from this time trading and rat race and I want to spend my time in a more meaningful manner.

More Free time: This is the thing which I need more badly than money. Not only I but I am confident that every human being and those who knows that a day only has 24 hours and a year only 365 days, need more free time to spend with his family or with their hobby. But if we want to achieve it with the traditional way of making a living (that is a full time job of 9 to 6) it seems an impossible task. I do not remember whether I took a week long vacation with my family in the last 3 years. So you need any other way (legally) and internet marketing is the best opinion, where you can do everything and all you need is a computer and internet connection.

More Money: I never thought that I can earn more money investing same time online (we all know time is money ) than in my regular job until I started myself in online marketing. The average salary of a highly skilled person with an experience of more than 5 years is around Rs. 2500 per day for a 14 hour job(with lot of tension: 14 hours = 9 hours job+ 2 hours in commuting+ 3 hours in other stuff related to my job). That barely converts to rupees 2500/14= 178 per hour (means merely $4 per hour, much less the money a pizza delivery boy in the US earns per hour)

So if done right, internet marketing can pay you 1000 times more than this average earning and without any hassle and pain which you face every day in your regular jobs.

So my second concern was more money, I do not want to open a SWISS bank account but I need more…. ( Yeh Dil Maange More… aaha … )

Lavish lifestyle: Just think of a life when you wake up in the morning after taking your full sleep and fresh eyes and no red lines in your eyes as you always did. After doing all usual stuff take your breakfast and then enter your home office which only takes a minute or two to reach. You chose your working hours and you never need anyone’s agreement on this. There is no one to complain that you are late and ask that you need to change your habits of regularity. You are your own boss and you can decide your working hours.

Just think of it and you will get immense pleasure, just thinking about it and if it becomes reality and what will happen if it becomes reality

Residual Income: Have you ever though how long can you trade your time for money, up to the age of 50, 60 or more …. OK Good and what after that. Some intelligent and money savers, save a large part of their income in various investment schemes for their retirement.

But a very simple question, if you spend Rs. 20k today to maintain your life style, keeping the present inflation and other factors in mind you will need at least Rs. 200k a month for maintaining the same lifestyle after 30 years.

So the fact is that we can never work in the same way forever. I do not have such physical, mental and spiritual strength to work for such as long time and I do not know about yours? Do you have it?

So what we need – residual income, means autopilot income, where you invest you time, money and intelligence one time and encash it for a long time and sometimes forever.

And internet marketing is the only way by which you can get residual income.

So friends these were the reasons why I chose internet marketing and I am confident that I will achieve all the points which I need for a happy life with the help of the very internet marketing…

I hope you all would like this post.

What are your reasons to join the internet marketing world? Post here and it will become an inspiration for others…

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This is the second part of series 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing, if you are new here, you can read the first part here at: 5 Tools you need for Effective Affiliate Marketing-1

Cloaking: you should know the importance of clocking… oh …oh… oh, sorry I thought you know about everything.

Let’s know what is cloaking? Cloaking is the word first used in the world of search engine optimization. It is a black hat SEO practice in which search engine bots and real world visitors are presented with different copies of a same website or webpage. The reason behind this was to betray search engines to gain higher rankings for some related keywords.

Now the question arises why that was done. Actually in olden days (not so old, just like 3, 4 years ago) search engines doesn’t had very sophisticated algorithms and which can be easily re-engineered to gain undeserved profit by some black hat marketers.

Some of the factors were keyword density, use of the specific keyword in the title tags, h1 tags etc. At that time there were fewer variables which were considered for ranking of a webpage. But as time passed search engines became smarter (black hat marketers too) and now these techniques doesn’t work. (And it should not because it was being happily appreciating wrong doers.) And the search engine algorithm has become much smarter and advance evaluating hundreds of factors while ranking any webpage.

Now when we talk about cloaking in affiliate marketing or affiliate links clocking, it is not related with search engines and something other than betraying however the reason behind is the same.

Actually the affiliate links are something like carrying a lot of variables, thus making it a mess. It does not give clear information where it is going to lead the clicker.

Example of affiliate links:

http://www.somewebsite.com/index.php?someid=some-numerical-value?sid=some-alphanumeric-value?trackid=some-numerical-value

For an example like an affiliate link of ClickBank:

http://AFFILIATE.VENDOR.hop.clickbank.net

It lefts the visitor in an illusion so as where are they going after clicking that link, and in this way the click through rate (in an easy word the chances the link will be clicked) becomes very less.

So we cloak the link to something meaningful, at least in the eyes of the visitors. Like

http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/go/xyzproduct.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/xyzproduct.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com/xyzproduct.html
http://www.yourwebsite.com/xyzproduct.php

So it was the first reason which was user connected. Now there is second reason and that is affiliate commission theft.

Some users, who visit the affiliate website, eventually are also the affiliates of the network of which the website owner is, so they can change the affiliate link to have the commission themselves for the product they are purchasing, that leads to affiliate commission theft.

So cloaking is essential for a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

There are several ways by which cloaking can be done. There are several tools and websites available using which cloaking can be done. But the easiest and most effective way is using redirecting script on your own webserver.

You can use HTML, PHP or JavaScript for redirecting visitors to your affiliate links

Redirection with meta refresh tag

Make a page with a name relevant to the product, for an example xyz.html And use the following code in between <head> and </head> tag

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://youraffiliatelink”>

Now upload the page to any folder or root of your domain and link your affiliate link to the same.

Like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html

and when clicked it will redirect the visitor to the affiliate link. In this way you can hide your affiliate links.

Redirection with JavaScript.

<HEAD>
<SCRIPT language=”JavaScript”>
<!–
window.location=”your affiliate link here”;
//–>
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>

There is an other way to hide your affiliate link visually:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html”
onmouseover=”window.status=http://www.yourdomain.com/‘; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=”; return true;”>Click Here</a>

If you use this code and when the website visitor hover mouse over the link it will not show the affiliate link instead it will show the url which you set in the window status.

This techniques can hide the link visually, means if any one wants to see the actual link, they can do this by viewing page source.

The only problem is if the user has turned off the JavaScript, this code may not work properly.

Redirection with PHP

<?
header(”Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/xyz.html“);
?>

How to add and use the redirect code:

Make a simple html or PHP page and name it related to the product you are promoting.

Like if your are redirecting the clicker to a product named Dreams Come True. Make a page and name it dreamscometrue.html, and upload it to your root folder, so that it makes a url like.

http://www.yourwebsite.com/dreamcomestrue.html

Now use the appropriate redirection code in the dreamscometrue.html page. I personally use and prefer JavaScript redirection. So I will write something like:

<HEAD>

<SCRIPT>

<!–

window.location=”your affiliate link here”;

//–>

</SCRIPT>

</HEAD>

Save the page and upload it to the root folder, now wherever you have to insert your affiliate link, use the link http://www.yourwebsite.com/dreamcomestrue.html, and whenever user will click on it, they will be redirected to your affiliate page.

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Are you just starting in the internet business world and just going to start your first website or blog?

You have already decided your niche, market and audience and now you need to research keywords for topics to include in your website?

Sounds familiar?

If the answer of the above question is YES, then you must be in the confusion about choosing keywords for starting your new web project.

Most Common Mistakes an IM Newbie Makes:

The most common mistakes which the beginners make while starting their very first project is choosing a highly competitive niche, whose main keywords are very hard to rank. Let’s move forward in the discussion of choosing niches and keywords and what to consider while doing research.

While choosing a niche you should keep the below points in mind

1. Are there good affiliate programs in the niche? the more the better
2. Average payout of the affiliate programs
3. Are there good number of paid results in Google Search ( there must be good number of AdWords advertiser, you can also check Yahoo and Bing Results also)
4. Use Google Trends to analyze about the trends of the main keywords of the niche, Is it stable (is it getting almost similar number of searches for whole year, or is it seasonal)

If you get positive result for all of the above points, it confirms the niche has potential for making good money.

Do not get afraid about the competitiveness of the niche at this point of time. We will discuss about that after a short while.

While doing niche research, the only aim in you mind should be about the profitability of the niche and not about competition, because if any niche is highly profitable, then it will surely have a lot of micro niches, where the competition will not be much higher and can be easily dominated.

For an example “Weight loss” is a very competitive niche and highly profitable too. Now as we know this niche is very profitable (using all the four points we discussed above), we will try to find out smaller niches in this broad niche. If we do a little research there are several smaller niches, like

Weight loss using exercises
Weight loss using yoga
Weight loss using green tea
Weight loss using hypnosis
Weight loss with walking
Weight loss with dieting

And lots more…..

Now find a smaller niche for you and start to delve deeper in it.

Use keyword tools to find more keywords related to your main keyword.

Now visit different forums (you can find them easily by using Google typing “your keyword” forums), Yahoo Answers, AnswerBag etc and try to find out different topics people are discussion.

Now do some more brain storming and try to find out some more relevant keywords.

Hope you got the point

A simple trick to gather more keywords for you niche:

Visit ArticlesBase, for those who are new in internet marketing, it is one of the best article directory which receives a lot of traffic and there are millions of publisher who submit and publish their content daily.

Now search for articles related to the main keyword you decided for your new website and open articles and see the author’s bio box where you will find links which will lead you to the author’s website for which they are doing promotion.

Try to find out which type of promotion they are doing on their website, affiliate marketing, Adsense or something else.

Now come back to the article and see the article tags section and you will find numerous keywords related to that article. Repeat this step for 10 to 15 articles and you will get a bunch of keywords to start with.

After gathering keywords, again use keyword tool to find more.

The key here is, if the person is promoting any affiliate product, they must have done a lot of keyword research in the niche and we can use it for our advantage.

For some persons this trick would seem wrong and unethical, but one point to remember is that we are not stealing anything and these article tags are publicly visible.

So now you got the way to find out some micro niches in highly competitive and profitable niches.

So how many keywords we need to start:

In my opinion you should start with around 50 keywords and further add 30 more in the period of every six months.

As the time will pass, you will have ample content on your website and with proper off page promotion you will gain authority status on the micro niche and completely dominate it.

So start finding your niche keywords today. If you have any question or comment, then please post it here.

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This post is in continuation with my previous posts on off page search engine optimization. If you are new here you can read those posts here at: Off Page Elements: Increasing your Web Visibility and Reach Part 1, Off Page Elements: Using Articles and Blogs

Today in this post we will talk about benefits of link building, blog comments and the various ways to accomplish the task.

First we shall have a little discussion about various types of links we can have for our website and easy tips and tricks, both manual and automated to build them.

Types of Links:

Basically links are categorized on the basis how they propagate link juice to a web page in consideration. Links or backlinks are mainly of three types one way, two way or reciprocal and three way links.

One way Link:

One way link, commonly known as backlinks is a link which is pointed to web page with out the page linking back to it. For an example if there are two web pages A and B, and if A links to webpage B but it does not links back to it. These types of links are known as one way link. These links are most powerful and beneficial for boosting search engine rankings and page rank.

Two Way or Reciprocal Links:

When two web pages link each other mutually, these types of links are called two way or reciprocal backlinks and the process is known as link exchange. There are many automated ways by which this process can be done but the quality of the link they provide are of very less importance. High quality two way links can be made by finding useful websites related to your website topic and calling or emailing the webmasters for mutual link exchange.

Three way Backlinks:

Many a times when we contact any webmaster for link exchange, they give us a proposal of three way link exchange in reply. Suppose we have two websites one related to jewelry and second to mobile phones and the webmaster in consideration also has the same situation, he has one related to diamonds and other with electronic gadgets. So he links us from his diamond website to our jewelry website and we link from our mobile phones website to his electronic gadget website or vice versa, in this way making a triangular linking pattern. This way of links is known as three way linking. If the websites involved in the link exchange are hosted on different IP addresses, the links are treated as one way links in the eyes in the eyes of search engines, thus giving ranking boost in the search engine result pages.

Contacting Webmasters for Link exchanges:

The right way of doing link exchange starts with doing emails to the webmasters of relevant websites. For finding relevant websites you can use Google. Just type “your keywords” add your link, “your keywords” add your url. In this way you can find relevant web pages for doing link exchanges.

How to write emails:

Start with a right salutation and write a personalized note. While finding the contact details, try to find out the names, so that you can personalize the note to them. Explain them the reason of contacting them, many of them do not know the profit of doing link exchange, so explain them a little about the profits of doing link exchange not only regarding search engine but also in reference of the website visitors. Explain to them how their visitors will be benefited by visiting your website. In this way, you will increase your chances of positive response and successful link exchange.

Spying your competitors:

Find the backlinks your competitors have. Google does not show all the backlinks of a website. So use yahoo for this purpose.

Try to find out all the websites which are linking to your competitors and find ways to get links from same website. Just do the same they are doing but do better than them. If they are getting good rankings, it shows that they are doing the things right, so copy their strategy and you will get good return on your investment, in the form of good rankings and traffic.

Using Blog Commenting:

Blog commenting is an easy and effective way of building one way backlinks to your website. Find relevant blogs using Google either using Google blog search or doing the following query:

“your keywords” inurl:blog

Find relevant blogs and contribute valuable comments, but keep in mind DO NOT SPAM. Read the post and collect some idea to write comment, most of the people just write “great post” and similar garbage. Please do not use such things, contribute value to the post. This will not only help in adding value to the post but also increase the chances of your post to be published.

Some more posts about off page optimization in coming posts. See you soon. Until then implement the strategies taught in this blog and you will see good rankings for your keywords in the search engines.

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I got a very informative article about how Google crawl and index pages and how it serves results for a user query. In this article you can get insight of the basics of the mechanism of search engine and can find hints to optimize your WebPages better. Hope you all will find it useful.

When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you’re almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (”served”) to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

Crawling

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving results

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.

You Can Visit Source Here at Google Webmaster Support

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Article marketing commonly known as bum marketing is a very effective and common way for marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. It is a very good tool to bring loads of traffic to your website. Actually the visitors coming on your website after reading your articles are more targeted and more likely in the mood of doing purchase or any other action because your article has already done preselling on your niche topic.

Below are some points applying which you can make your article marketing campaign more effective.

Unique Content: Unique content is the key for a good article. Spun content is of no use, first it will be very hard to be accepted by article directories, second the page views and in turn the click through rate (CTR) will be next to zero. So always use unique content for your articles. Try to keep your article around 300 to 325 words as these articles get high CTR. Articles more than this word limit become boring and the reader loose the interest, second thing internet users do not have patience to read an article of 600 words. So keep it sweet and short.

Catchy Title: Make your title catchy; add some spice to the title of your article. Long title having how to, x ways to, do not, exposed, scam have better click through rate. Treat the title as an ad published in a news paper or magazine. Think yourself “will you read any article having old dull title” the answer is “no”, so try to generate curiosity by your title.

Working on Summary: keep the same points in mind while writing your summary and try to give a glimpse to your readers about the content of the article.

Flow of the article: The flow of the content must be natural. There is an old rule of writing article. In starting of an article “tell them what you are going to tell them”, in body “tell them” and in last paragraph “tell them, what you have told them”. Always keep in mind you are not there just to provide information, instead you are trying to presell them. So give some information in the article and try to generate curiosity, so that they click and visit your website.

Spicing your author’s bio box: The author’s bio box is the most important element from writer’s perspective, because they can put links to their website in it. Use call to action words, try to use “emotional words” which will attract visitors to click and visit your website. Instead of writing “click here to visit weight loss website” write something like “click here to lose weight starting today without the pain of exercising”. Giving emotional touch to the author’s resource box will help you to improve your CTR.

Using ezinearticles.com: This is one of the best article directories over the internet; you can get one way back links to your website. Many webmasters publish your content on their websites from ezine articles, thus giving more links to your website. Along with back links you get a good amount of traffic from this article directory.

Submit your article to ezinearticles.com, once it is published, rewrite it and submit to articlesbase.com and goarticles.com for maximizing results

Hope these points will help you in your article marketing campaign for getting better results.

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What is a market or niche?

According to wikipedia “A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.”

In short a niche can be defined as a smaller segment of a market which is super targeted around a specific topic.

For an example in the health industry or market “acne” or “anxiety” is niche markets.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to the definition of niche. Everyone has own understanding and definition.

But I like to call an area as “market” and a specific area in the market as niche.

Niche and micro niche

A niche is a specific are of a market on which product or services are focused, as defined above and micro niche is an another focused area in the specified niche.

For an example “health” is a market and “weight loss” is a niche. Now more specific areas in the niche weight loss is “weight loss using pills”, “weight loss using exercise”, “weight loss using yoga” and more are micro niches.

Hope this would clear the difference.

Finding a Market and Niche

For finding a market for affiliate marketing there are some very good places from where you can collect ideas. Think about your hobbies and problems you or any of your known people has and try to research on the topic. Like someone has problem of “weeds in his lawn” or “pest control” etc.

There are many resources on the internet where you can find different ideas for you niche website.

Dmoz.org

Dmoz is the largest open directory project on the internet, apart from serving as a directory it can also be used for niche research. Delve deeper into the categories and you will find many.

Just open Dmoz and start your research, I am sure you will find several niches; some of them may be even untouched.

Shopping.com

Shopping.com is one of the largest shopping websites over internet. You can just surf it and find the hot keyword ideas.

Amazon
The largest seller of books and nearly every physical item on the internet. This is a very good resource for finding a niche, just browse the best sellers section and you can find gold

Ebay

I think nearly everyone is familiar with ebay.com, you can find out the hottest selling stuff at eBay by visiting pulse.ebay.com

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is the largest article directory on internet, you can use it for your bum marketing campaigns, for finding ideas related to a topic. More than that you can find out different niches using it and in most cases the niches would be profitable because internet marketers and others are already using it for their campaigns

Google Trends and Google Insight Search

Google hot trends and Google insight search are very great places where you can find trends over time and if done properly finding good keywords for CPA and affiliate campaigns is not tough. Just use your mind

Testing a Market and Keyword Research

Before you jump to any conclusion and finalize your keywords, just try to find out the need of your targeted audience. Visit different forums related to your niche, read articles and blogs to delve deeper in your niche. For reading more about this topic, visit my previous posts about keyword research here:

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path Part 2

Using PPC to Test a Market

After you have finalized your keywords and ready to shoot your campaigns, build your landing pages and try to test a market using PPC. In this way you will find out whether the market has the potential. Do keywords level tracking and you will find out the keywords which trigger sales. After you have found sales keywords or gold keywords, build more pages; invest in SEO for long term profits.

But be cautious if you are new to the PPC market, because a little mistake can ruin your pockets.

Using SEO for Growth and Long Term Business

You cannot solely depend on PPC on a long term, so invest in SEO for long term profits. Build more pages using your gold keywords, use variations and always try to test new keywords. Rinse and repeat your action and you can have long term profits.

What do you all think in this regard. Have i missed something, please provide your feedback.

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This is a continuation of my last post about role of internet in marketing. I have discussed many points about benefits and role of internet in marketing and its increasing avenues. Today we will discuss some more points.

You can shop nearly every product in just few clicks from the comfort of your bedroom; all you need is an internet ready computer and a credit card or some other medium to make payments online. In this way you save yourselves a lot of time and energy which you would have been wasting in visiting your (even) nearest physical stores.

Now consider the sellers perspective

Internet marketing eliminates the need to have a physical store (the conventional way of sales process). In this way the wholesaler or dealer saves the amount which in other case he shall be spending on the rent of his showroom, maintenance and staff salaries. So using the way of internet marketing and sales, the overhead cost of the product nearly becomes zero and the sales price of the product comes down, which is ultimately beneficial for the buyer

Some products are exclusively internet based, mostly information products comes in this category (e-books, readers, software)

You can compare the price and quality of products offered by different online stores without having the pain of visiting them physically.

In a nut shell internet marketing is the need of the hour and in coming days more and more people will be using internet as the medium of transactions and sale/purchase.

Have I left some point? Might be the case, I would like to have your feedback.

What other points do you consider about the role and benefits of internet in marketing?

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What is marketing and Role of Internet in Marketing!

According to wikipedia.com “Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.”

I am in a no way any research scholar in marketing neither I want to explain it in detail. In my opinion a process before the actual sales starts, that includes knowledge propagation, brand building, creating or funneling a user base. Creating an environment, in which actual sales takes place is called marketing.

These lines may seems confusing to a newbie, but you need not worry much about the theory portion, because it is very necessary that you know more about implementing this practically rather than theory, particularly in the arena of internet marketing.

In coming days we will discuss several aspects related with marketing over internet.

Marketing starts with a product or service available for sale. Be it physical products, digital products or information and counseling.

Reach to millions of people

Some years before United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia and some other developed countries of North and South America and Europe were considered the exclusive avenues for internet marketing and ecommerce, because they had the privilege of high speed internet and other ecommerce infrastructure like online payment processing etc.

But as the electronics and communication is developing at a stormy pace. New markets like India, China, Malaysia, Philippines and other South East Asian countries and some countries in South America are emerging as new avenues for online business. Even internet users in China and India will exceed US in coming few years.

So in this age of global economy, every barrier is broken and internet presents a vast geographical market to the prospective provider or seller. This creates a competition for local providers as well and this profits the prospective buyer or user.

Below are some stats of internet users and internet penetration in relation to the population which will makes the situation a little clearer.

(All figures are of March 2009, unless specified otherwise)

Above statistics will make it clear, and the most exciting fact is this user base will almost become doubled in coming 4 to 5 years.

Now a days, the purchasing power of the average population has increased considerably, in turn available free time reduced

Now people have more money and less time, so they want some solution for their daily chores, from paying bills online to shopping they are trying new medium (of course internet to save their time and efforts)

So in a nutshell we can predict that internet will become the medium for almost 50 to 60 percent of all ecommerce transactions in the known world (I cannot predict for the unknown ones)

Role of Internet in Marketing Part 2 ( Coming Soon)

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