Is Your Internet Business a House of Cards?

A couple of years ago more than a few web business owners discovered that their business was built on a “house of cards”. Could your Internet business come tumbling down too?

It all happened when Google implemented some changes to their AdWords Pay Per Click program. Countless Internet marketers went into a state of panic.

Many businesses, particularly affiliate marketers who were relying on Adwords as their primary, or worse, their ONLY source of traffic, saw their advertising budget explode or their traffic slow to a crawl. More than a few web business owners reported being dead in the water, or in effect, shut down.

But why?

If you’ve been around online for even more than a few months, you have to realize that in the world of Internet marketing, there is only one constant. That constant is “Rapid and Never-ending Change”.

Every month or two you can count on a new marketing strategy dropping into your email inbox. (Along with a product that shows you how to use it to earn quick and easy money.)

Remember FFA’s, or “Free For All” links? They were a huge phenomenon that met a rapid demise.

How about Popups? They’ve been dying a slow death for years now.

What about Blog and Ping? What happened to that surefire strategy? How come none of the experts write about it anymore?

Heck, just last year there was an RSS craze? I haven’t seen many marketers touting it lately. I wonder why? I’m sure the technology is being widely used. Maybe the buzz wore off and the “how to profit from RSS” products fizzled out.

So as a web business owner, what can you do about all this constant change?

The answer is simple really. You need to take TWO SIMPLE STEPS to ensure your business is setup to handle change automatically, as it happens.

STEP 1: NEVER put all your eggs in one basket.

I know, that’s an old adage. But it holds quite true in this new arena. The Adwords example above clearly shows you what can happen when you reply on just one strategy for your website traffic. A nightmare can eventually ensue.

With dozens of quality traffic sources available on the web, why would any business rely solely on one? It’s insanity.

A well rounded Internet marketing strategy uses at least 6 to 10 traffic generation strategies. I’ve been sharing these strategies with my readers for 10 years now. And yes, I’ve been using them in my own business. In case you are new to my newsletter, here are the “tried and true” marketing strategies that YOU control…

(These are the most effective low-cost and no-cost traffic sources available online, and I’ve been using them successfully since 1996.)

- Publish a free newsletter

Publishing a free newsletter is easy and even fun. It costs next to nothing, and it has many benefits. In addition to establishing yourself as an expert in your niche, a well-written newsletter will generate lots of traffic and sales for you.

Perhaps the most difficult and intimidating aspect of publishing your own newsletter is getting subscribers. This is something you can do on auto-pilot. Simply offer an irresistible freebie to your website visitors. Ask them for the first name and email address when they claim their freebie and your subscriber list will grow. You can easily add an opt-in form to your website by using a web-based autoresponder service.

I’ve grown my own list to more than 150,000 subscribers using this very strategy. If you have no freebie to give away, get a private label product from my friend Jeremy Gislason’s site.

- Buy email newsletter sponsorship ads and solo ads

This strategy has worked well for me for ten years. While it is not free, it can be quite effective. You simply subscribe to lots of email newsletters in your niche then advertise in the newsletters you tend to read faithfully. If you read them you can be sure that others do too. A well written ad can cost as little as $25 and can generate a few hundred dollars or more in sales. While that may not sound like much, you can multiply your profits by reinvesting in more ads that reach bigger subscriber bases. In my own newsletter I sell ads for as much as $675, and I have advertisers coming back over an over, so I know it is profitable for many of them. Depending on your budget, you can start small and work your way up. Or better yet, use the next strategy to have your ads placed at no cost…

- Start an affiliate program

Affiliates send thousands of visitors a day to my sites and result in close to half of my annual sales. If you have not started an affiliate program for your best products and services, what are you waiting for? Even if you attract just a few top affiliates with large newsletter circulations, you’ll get your ads in their newsletters at no cost, and you’ll see surges of sales every time.

Although there are some costs involved with starting your own affiliate program, it is well worth it. Justify the expense by telling yourself that you are hiring thousands of sales people and paying them only when they sell. A web based affiliate program is just that.

Remember, just starting an affiliate program is not enough, you need to actively seek out potential super-affiliates on a regular basis. Like with any marketing strategy, a pro-active approach works best.

- Get more inbound links to your site

Getting lots of incoming links to your site is important. Not only will traffic arrive via those links, but a site with lots of incoming links does better in search engines than sites with few links. The best strategy I’ve used to get links, starts with content… One great way to get inbound links is to write articles and use an article distribution service to distribute them far and wide over the Internet. One great service that does this at reasonable cost is: Article Marketer

- Grow your content

Regularly write articles based on your niche, post the content at your site AND share the content with other webmasters. You can do this “on-the-fly” by including a short footer at the end of your articles that tells webmasters they have permission to reprint your article at their website or in their newsletter. Be sure to let them know that they need to include a live link to your site. You may even want to tell them exactly how to link to your site. (Preferably with a short description of your site and a hyper linked keyword or two. This will help search engines determine that the sites are related and give the link more relevance.)

There are lots of websites in need of decent content. Supply it and you can benefit greatly – your links will grow continually with no effort on your part. And the beauty of this strategy is that only sites in your niche will use your content. This means your links will be high quality links from sites in the right ‘neighborhood.’ This goes a long way with the search engines.

- Submit your articles

I highly recommend this no-cost strategy. The traffic you get from this strategy is immediate as well as long-term. Every week, visit a few article directories and submit your best, current articles. Make sure the article is helpful and includes a small footer at the end, about the author.

Here’s a short list of article directories:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com

http://www.goarticles.com

You should also submit your articles by email, to ezine editors in your niche. This can expand your reach exponentially. To easily submit to thousands of sites within a few minutes use the services of
Article Marketer

OK, that covers step one. Now let’s get to step two…

STEP 2: Don’t fall for the “latest and the greatest”.

This step is much shorter than step one. And it requires only one thing… FOCUS. All you have to do is focus on what works and steer clear of unproven strategies.

Here’s what I mean…

Countless people doing business on the Internet follow the same pattern. They get excited about too many new marketing strategies as soon as they hear about them. They then buy a product touting all the inside secrets to using it, and worse, they invest long hours getting it up and running.

In most cases, the success they have with each new strategy is limited and nothing close to what they expected.

Within a few weeks or months, they get wind of another new system guaranteed to skyrocket their website traffic and income. Discouraged by the lack of results with the last system, they decide to let it rest for a while and try the new one. Back they go into the cycle of “try”, “get discouraged”, “discard”, and “try the next thing”.

And so it goes on. Months pass. Maybe even years pass. Meanwhile they struggle to pay the credit card bills mounting from buying into every new system that comes along… with very little money coming in to offset their ‘investments’.

If you can recognize yourself in this scenario, the good news is this: Now you know better. You don’t know what the next new strategy will be that’s going to set the Internet world a buzz, but you do know enough to stick to strategies that actually WORK.

That’s all I’ll say about this subject. I hope this issue of the gazette helps you focus AND USE strategies that actually work. If this makes any sense to you at all, you may want to print this issue of the gazette. Refer back to it next time you get a message revealing a new strategy to explode your profits. You may find yourself deleting the message and getting back to slowly growing your profits. That’s how real home-based Internet wealth is attained.

This article used with permission from JDD Publishing’s Internet marketing site. Their website marketing guide and Internet marketing news help you grow a business on the Internet. To get one of their $97 reports for free as a thank you for visiting http://CountonSuccess.Com go to Special Free Report GoldKey Free Report