Using Magazines To Uncover Smoking Hot Niches!

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Aren’t you glad that the social networking sites are making it more difficult for marketers to use stealth tactics to market to (and spam) its members?  Even if it’s fruitful for you, it never makes you feel good to deceive customers and annoy the masses.

In 2009, Facebook really took off, replacing MySpace as the marketer’s adult web 2.0 playground of choice. There were some drawbacks, though. You had people complaining that their friends were only talking about business opportunities – and some complaining that they didn’t care to know the personal aspects of their friends lives because they were there to conduct business.

Many marketers decided to clean their friends’ list and open fan pages instead – reserving their official Facebook profile for close friends and family only. Facebook has a lot to ensure their income continues to soar with this influx of non-college students.

Their estimated revenue for the year 2010 is over $710 million. They’ve grown to over 350 million members and that number will continue to soar. While it’s traditionally been a closed site, Facebook is now working to connect its own member content across the World Wide Wide, enabling members to share on their own websites or blogs via Facebook connect.

Facebook will continue to lead the social networking scene when it comes to globalization. It started with a nifty translator that enables you to participate on the site in more than 70 different languages.

One thing is for sure. Facebook’s going to have to find a way to help its members avoid spam. Right now, anyone can send you a message without even having you confirm them as a friend.

That means you’ll get all sorts of spam content – from the long lost relative with the same last name who wants you to pay her $14,000 so she can transfer $1.4 million into your account to the cutesy women who want to chat with you, big boy!

Users of Facebook will be hyper-sensitive to any changes the site makes in regards to the privacy of their content, after 2009’s fiasco of announcing they officially owned your content and then going back on that statement to put out all of the fires that started.

Advertising is rampant on the site, so more marketers will be looking for ways to pay to play there. Right now you can run an AdWords-like campaign on Facebook, targeting individuals by age, location and more. Then you create an ad, choose PPC or pay per impression and track your conversions. Competition is heating up, so learn to tweak your campaigns early on.

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There’s not a marketer on the planet who prefer to pay for something when they can get it free. Free marketing tools are getting better and better – with developers often making money on the ad slots they provide in and around the site or on the tools themselves.

If you’re watching pennies, or just like to get a good bargain from time to time, consider these five free tools for marketers that you may need :

1.) CamStudio for Video Screen Capture Marketing – http://camstudio.org/

Camtasia can be pricey ($299) when you’re just starting out. But luckily for you, there’s an open source project called CamStudio that allows you to make an endless number of screen capture videos for free!

Pair your version of CamStudio with some free audio recording software at http://www.audioflash.org/ and you can create very professional videos to help you generate interest in your products and services.

2.) GIMP for Graphic Creations – www.gimp.org

Photoshop is often very hard for some non-tech savvy individuals to learn. And when you spend money on a tool like PhotoShop, you want to have the shortest learning curve possible.

Now you can take your time and use GIMP instead. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and you can use it for free, along with their thorough documentation, to make call to action buttons, minisite graphics, ads and more.

3.) WIX – Free Flash Website Design Tool – http://www.wix.com/

Flash sites are so expensive when you’re searching for a company or professional freelance individual to create one for you from scratch. With WIX, you can customize a template or make your own.

With a WIX site, you’ll have drawbacks, such as WIX ads being placed on your domain – and the domain won’t be your own dot com moniker, but you can upgrade when you have the money to invest in it and remove ads and use your own domain.

4.) WordPress – Free Blog Software http://wordpress.org/

Chances are you’ve heard of this one before, but some people still think they have to pay for a WordPress blog. Not true. You can either host a WordPress blog on their dot org site, or install it free on a domain that you own. As most marketers already know, WordPress is loved by Google if you utilize it right by posting relevant content on a regular basis.

5.) MailChimp – Free Autoresponder Tool - http://www.mailchimp.com/

This tool is great for those with no list or a very small list to begin with. You can use MailChimp for free to store up to 500 contacts and send out up to 3,000 emails per month.

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If you’re looking to make money online in internet marketing, you’ve probably heard recently of the power of Twitter, and you may be wondering how you can make it work for you.  Twitter has been one of the fastest-growing websites in recent memory, and it turns out it is works really well in communicating with people and building followings.  It can be a challenge to make real money from Twitter, but if you follow some basic strategies, it’s possible that someday you, too, will be able to make money with twitter.

The Basics

First, it’s important to understand how Twitter works.  Like many similar social networking sites, Twitter is founded on the principle that everyone can form their own, free, personal profile that represents either himself or herself as a person, or a their company as a brand.  People communicate with each other by the use of “tweets,” which is Twitter talk for short messages.  Each tweet is limited in length to 140 characters.  The word tweet comes from the fact that the message’s short length might remind you of a bird chirping.  These brief messages also allow the reader to follow an immense number of people while quickly scanning their dashboard.  That’s why the site is used by many different people to follow celebrities, news reports, or even to get advice from internet marketers.

How to Get Someone to Follow You

There are many people who suggest that you use software to gain a great number of followers on Twitter, but this can be risky and get your account deleted.  Plus, with such a random sampling of followers who don’t know you, it’s unlikely that you’ll have a great click through rate on your posts.  Instead, build a following the natural way, by having real conversations with people and by offering real value to those who do follow you.  If you have something original to offer, it will only be a matter of time before you develop a huge following!

How to Convert Your Followers into Sales

Just like in all forms of internet marketing, the real key to getting sales is to offer immense value.  Spend most of your time offering things for free: short tips, links to educational articles, and free reports.  Then, every once in awhile, send people to your information products or affiliate links.  If your followers are already convinced that you are looking out for their best interest, they will be eager to see what you have to offer, and will end up buying your product in droves!

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It is helpful if you are planning to make some money from CPA to know exactly what someone is saying to you. There are plenty of expressions with which you will be familiar, of course. CPA (you’d hope) is an easy one to understand. SEO, and perhaps PPC as well. However there are some other expressions it is important to understand – which may not be immediately as straightforward.

Cloaking is a practice indulged in by some SEO practitioners who trick a search engine into reading keyword-laden content and directing anyone who clicks the link to a site showing something else entirely. It’s a crude trick, but advocated by some people – avoid it because Google and other search engines crack down on it and remove your site entirely.

CPM, CPC, CPS and CPL are all terms which relate to the parent term “Cost Per Action”. Because CPA marketing does not necessarily depend on people purchasing, it is important to define the actions which will lead to payouts. CPL means Cost Per Lead – when people come through the page you have made to declare an interest, you get paid. CPS is Cost Per Sale – fairly self-explanatory.

CPC means Cost Per Click – it is usually a statistic more than a price. A high CPC means that you are getting paid regularly from people clicking on your promotion to read more. CPM, finally, means a payment for every thousand times your page shows the advertiser’s banner to viewers. It means “Cost Per Thousand Impressions”, the letter M being the Roman numeral for a thousand.

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If you’re not familiar with Google Labs, you need to go to http://www.googlelabs.com and bookmark the site so that you can check back and get in on whatever Beta functions they’re allowing you to play.

Google has this experimental section open to the public so that they can have their users test out applications, allowing them to weed out problems and get feedback on how to make it better before it officially launches.

Now we don’t know what’s on the horizon, but it’s important to check in frequently so that you can test features that may be limited to a certain number of people or may be pulled without warning before you got to try it out.

Here are some past examples of what’s come out of the box for you to have fun with and utilize in ways that help you reach your target audience:

Social Search – This cool new feature lets you see results pages that are in line with what your social circle has created. That circle is made up of people in your Gmail account – chat buddies, friends, family, groups and even Twitter and FriendFeed.

Related Links – This is a neat gadget that lets you present a bunch of relevant pages within your own domain that your visitor might prefer to go to. Instead of clicking out if they don’t see what they need immediately, Google helps them find what they do need without them having to conduct another search.

Google Audio Indexing – Did you know that Googlebots can crawl your YouTube video and index it based on what it hears you say? Not only can people find your video through this tool, but they can jump right to the point in the video where you speak a certain keyword phrase. Many say this will eliminate text tags in some instances and will force marketers to be honest about the content of their video.

Google Checkout Store Gadget – This lets you have an online store without having to know complex code. Use a simple Google Docs spreadsheet and in under 5 minutes, you’ll have code you can cut and paste into Blogger, Google Sites, and your own domain with ease.

This helps many marketers who are on a shoestring budget get started. For example, using Google Analytics lets you analyze the traffic of your website for free while others are paying an arm and a leg for similar tools.

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If you’ve spent a good deal of time in the Internet Marketing arena, trying to get up and running and feeling like you’re spinning your wheels, then you may be looking for a personal mentor and coach for the coming year.

Learning the marketing ropes on the ‘net has evolved from advice being shared sporadically in forums to the development of how to guides people could tackle on their own.

But lately, there’s been a movement toward more hand-holding and direct one-on-one interaction between student and teacher. To date, only the very rich could afford the high-priced coaching opportunities that top marketers offered.

And in some cases, that will still hold true in next year. But here’s the good news: You can invest in coaching like you’re building a ladder – moving up one rung at a time until you’re able to pay for top tier mentoring at the level you need.

For example, let’s say right now you’re a total newbie. You know nothing – you’re clueless about how to choose a niche, you don’t even know what a keyword is, and when it comes to launching a website, you’d prefer to run outside and bury your head in the sand like an ostrich.

You can get by with hiring a more affordable online mentor. You’ll want someone who has more experience than you, who is making money online, but who isn’t priced so high you’d have to take out a second mortgage just to spend 30 minutes on the phone letting them ask you questions about your dreams and desires.

Then as you progress, if your coach has taught you all that they can, you move on to the next tier and the next, until you yourself are considered an expert marketer in your own right.

When you search for a marketing coach for your 2010 business pursuits, look for someone who does not have a one-size fits all approach to teaching. You want someone who isn’t multi-tasking during your time with them, whether it’s on the phone or chatting via Skype.

On the initial communication, you should both be analyzing each other – the coach should see if you’re a good fit for what he or she teaches and you should consider whether or not they seem like a good fit when it comes to how you learn best in terms of sharing knowledge and even how your personalities mesh.

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The biggest problem I see from people who come to me for sage advice on Internet Marketing is that they can’t seem to figure out what to do next. Not only that, but the path they’ve left is swerving all over the place – from trying to learn Pay per Click to launching new Squidoo lenses to working on an info product of their own.

It’s called information overload, and clearing out your hard drive doesn’t solve it – it only makes more room for you to buy other stuff you don’t need yet. There is a better way, if you’re willing to look ahead for 2010 and make a plan now instead of planning as you go.

Part of the problem is that you’re like a kid in a candy or toy store. You’re looking at one shiny new object in aw of it and suddenly see another new shiny object out f the corner of your eye, so you run and grab that one. The object in this case might be a new eBook, personal coaching lessons, or a strategy someone mentioned in a forum.

For 2010, let’s do it better! Sit down with a calendar and map out your plan of attack month by month. You have 365 days to fill – and make sure you leave some room for time off, because everyone needs that in order to perform at his or her best.

First consider what kind of business you want to build. If it’s info product creation, then you’ll want to brainstorm a list of all tasks you have to do that are associated with that, such as: niche market research, keyword list building, outline and creation of the info product, sales copy creation and tweaking, affiliate recruitment, list building, etc.

Organize the tasks in a certain timeline – what comes first? Do

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