Internet marketing and article marketing are not the same thing, because internet marketing is a broad concept with many smaller concepts beneath it, and article marketing is one of those smaller facets of internet marketing. The reason why these two concepts go hang in hand is because no internet marketing campaign is complete without some form of article marketing. Internet marketing and article marketing go hand in hand because using articles to market yourself, your website or your affiliate products is absolutely vital in creating a complete internet marketing solution.

There are numerous different types of internet marketing that you can take advantage of to get their name out there. However, most forms of internet marketing have costs of some sort, because advertising isn’t free. That is, advertising isn’t free unless you are advertising through article marketing. This unique form of marketing was popular long before ecommerce was a big thing. For as long as mass print methods have been available, businesses have been marketing themselves through article creation, by offering something of value to print medium like widely read newspapers in exchange for a byline or a small advertisement. When it come to ecommerce and internet marketing, article marketing is an excellent means for getting information out there and creating powerful links back to your website or affiliate products.

When it comes to article marketing, there are numerous benefits and features to consider.

• This form of marketing creates powerful links from popular websites back to your website or affiliate products. The more links you have coming to your website from other sources, the more powerful your website will be in search engine page listings like Google.
• By providing value in the articles that you create, you will be establishing yourself as a trusted authority on the keywords, niches or subjects that you are writing about. When readers know they can count on you for real, honest information, they will keep coming back for more.
• By adding a byline or resource box to your content you will be giving potential customers a way to contact you after reading your valuable content. Not only will this create powerful links, but it will also help connect additional traffic to your website that you would not normally be able to get.
• By creating articles optimized for search engines you will be improving your overall traffic and even your overall page rank by submitting to content sites with high page ranks and authority.

For these reasons, it is absolutely vital that article marketing be a facet of any internet marketing plan that you put together. While there may be a variety of different ways to market your internet site, one of the most powerful is to use valuable, easy to read article content with a call to action for readers who appreciate your work to visit your website for more information, products, a newsletter, and so on and so forth.

Tags: article marketing, blogging, Internet Marketing

This post is in response to the comments made on my previous post #moonfruit Dominating Twitter With MacBook Pros.

There have been a couple of comments about going after the freebie seekers.

I did reply to these comments and I am going to elaborate here.

MoonFruit’s business model is targeted at freebie seekers.  They work with a free sign up and upsells, this means they are building a list of people that kind of fit into there target audience.

You will notice I said, “kind of” this is because the Twitter following they are building are people looking for a free MacBook Pro and not necessarily looking for a website.

With that said if they can get their followers away from the giveaway page and to their homepage they might end up with a decent sign up rate.

The service they provide is good for what they do but they aren’t promoting their service as much as they are the giveaway.  Most people don’t even know that they are also providing 5 years of their premium service.

This is the only area I see where they are missing the bus and I will grant them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they have their advertising push scheduled for after the giveaway is done.

But I still think they should make the point that they are giving away 5 years of their premium service a little more noticeable in their giveaway campaign.

This would get more people looking for the MacBooks reason to check out their Free Service offer.

Overall I think there are things they could do better, hopefully they do too, but the fact that they dominated the trending topics in twitter for two days with a term that most people didn’t know is still very impressive.

One other thing to point out is that of their 30,000+ followers most of them are real people.  Whereas I would bet that at least 20% of my 10,000+ followers are robots or people that never read the tweets.  I would also bet that the 20% is a very conservative number.

I would love to see a case study on this in the near future to see how well it did or didn’t work for them.

What about you?  Would you like to see a case study too?

Tags: business plan, marketing, moonfruit, twitter

Now I thought I was doing pretty good with twitter.  After all I have over 10,000 followers since May 18^th.  Roughly 6 weeks.

Most people would be happy with that.  But I want you to look at the top Trending Topic.

You might be like me and wonder what the heck is #moonfruit?

I honestly didn’t know and they have been around for ten years and they provide a website creation/hosting service.

Now you might be wondering (like I did) how did they get to be the #1 trending topic for two days in a row (so far)?

Simple they are giving away Free MacBook Pros! I will tell you how to get one later but for right now let me show what this has done for them and why they are dominating twitter.

First to win the MacBook Pro you have to be following them on twitter and this has resulted in their following growing by 30,000 in two days and still growing every minute of every day.

Now you might look at that and for some strange reason say, “That isn’t 30,000” as if 23,000 in two days wasn’t enough.

You are right that isn’t 30,000 because twittercounter.com doesn’t do live updates but here is a screen shot of their twitter account within minutes of capturing the counter you see above.

Now you see the 30,000 in two days and I guarantee that number is a lot higher now.

Remember this is being done totally within twitter.  Not with some big press release or a hugh email campaign or a ton of JV partners.

Now yes this will cost them roughly $20,000 because they are giving away 10 MacBook Pros and 10 – 5 year accounts with their service.  But in the long run it will most likely pay for itself because of the advertising they are getting on twitter.

I didn’t know what MoonFruit was and you might not have either but now at least 30,000 people do and have tweeted about it.

Do you want the chance to win a free MacBook Pro?

Here is what you have to do:

1.) You must be at least 16 years of age

2.) You must have a twitter account

3.) You must be following moontweet on twitter

4.) You must tweet at least once with #moonfruit in the tweet

That’s it! You can easily tweet it just by clicking on one of the twitter meme buttons at the top or bottom of this post.

By the way this only runs until July 10^th so if your are going to try to get one do it now.

Now if you don’t have $20,000 to spend to get a promotion like this together you might want to take a look at the Twitter Online System it won’t build your followers at a rate of 30,000 in two days but it will get you going the right way.

For more detail you can see the give away page here

Tags: advertising, MacBook Pro, marketing, moonfruit, twitter

Before I get into the details I want to make sure you realize this is not a free blog service.

This is an established blog already getting thousands of visitors per month and making an income.

It is on it’s own domain name and it’s own hosting.

Here is a screen shot of the traffic that I took today:

You can see that it averages over 100 visitors per day and all that traffic is coming from the search engines or social bookmarking sites as seen in this screenshot:

If you do the math you will see that the total from the search engines almost matches the total visitors exactly.  These are not people I am sending to the site from my list.

Don’t worry if you are the lucky one to get the site you will be able to look at the full stats from your control panel.

Now comes the big question, “Why am I giving away a profitable site?”

There are a couple of reasons the first reason is that this is in a niche that I don’t have a true affinity for  and the site could be doing so much better if some one that enjoys this niche or is willing to learn this niche was working the site.

The second reason is that I am using it as promotion for my Blogging Beginners site.

At Blogging Beginners we teach the exact methods I used to create this site in under a week and then not do anything to it for months and still get traffic and income.  Again the income and traffic would be much higher if this was a niche I enjoyed working in.  I even have ideas and suggestions that would raise the income level on this site that I will share with the new owner when we give it away.

Now a little more about the giveaway.

This won’t be a random giveaway, we are looking for someone that will take the existing blog and use the techniques we teach at Blogging Beginners (yes, we will be giving away a Free Platinum Membership too)  to make this blog even more profitable.

You have to be a member of Blogging Beginners to be eligible for the giveaway but this isn’t a problem since you can sign up for free.

We will be giving away the blog on July 31, 2009

If you are interested just click anywhere you see the link to Blogging Beginners to sign up and get the case study for the site.  More information will follow after you sign up.

Tags: free blog, giveaway, money making blog, profitable blog

There are a number of methods that will make you money with Adwords but for every one that creates profits there are four or five that will put you in the poor house.

In this post I am going to talk about a couple of very popular (at least right now) adwords courses and let you decide if they might benefit you.

I will be talking about

The ClickBank Code and Keyword ESP.

Now by the name neither of these seem to be Adwords programs.

The ClickBank Code is actually a course that shows you how to make money with ClickBank using Adwords and Keyword ESP is actually a tool to help you optimize and set up Adwords accounts and the landing pages for those Adwords accounts.

Now on the face of it you would think that there isn’t much to compare with these two products but I will find a way.

First we will cover the main thing that sells products but doesn’t deliver to the end user, Hype.

This will be rated from 1 to 5 with 1 being no hype at all and 5 being a ton of hype.

HYPE

The ClickBank Code – 5 *****

Keyword ESP – 2 **

The ClickBank Code – This sales page is all hype.  I have purchased this and I have gone through the videos and I will tell you this read the sales page closely and anything that might be hype is.

We will start with the “newbie” claim right in the headline.

There is no way a “newbie” to Adwords made $11,000 in the first week using the techniques taught in the course unless they spent that much.  Look at it closer, it says, “ClickBank newbie”, not just newbie.  This is a person that already had experience marketing and probably a lot of experience with Adwords before he started promoting Adwords.

It is even quoted on the site, “But I’d never used Clickbank before February 09.” But he isn’t teaching ClickBank he is teaching Adwords. This is similar to a race car driver changing from Ford to Chevy and winning the first race he drove the Chevy in saying, “Newbie Chevy Racecar Driver Wins Every Race” even though he had years of experience with Ford.

The next item $48,506.88 first month – first month of Adwords or first month using his already established Adwords campaigns to promote ClickBank products.  This is one of those typical things where they show you the gross income but he doesn’t show you how much he spent on Adwords and any other expenses he might have had.  For all you know he spent $50,000 to make the $48,000.

Keyword ESP on the other hand has very little hype besides possibly exaggerating the ease of use of the software.  The software is easy to use but your landing pages do take a little more effort than it appears on the sales page.

They don’t even imply that you will make a fortune with this but they show you how to get more click thrus and lower you cost at the same time.

Winner of Hype Keyword ESP

Content

The ClickBank Code – 3 ***

Keyword ESP – 3 ***

The ClickBank Code has some excellent information on how to rate keyword campaigns before you launch them.  They even provide an Excel spreadsheet for you to test them before you actually launch the campaign, this is not an exact science but it is a great way to get idea for which way you should go.

The ClickBank Code would be higher except there are a couple of things in the content that a newbie shouldn’t apply unless they have a lot of money they can afford to lose.  For example they tell you to set your daily budget at $500 per day to test a campaign.  They also tell you to use, “hundreds or thousands” of keywords.  If you do this you will spend $500 per day with Adwords and who knows if your conversions ever make enough to pay for that.  This is the biggest reason people fail at Adwords is because they spend more then they can afford without having a proven campaign.

Since the sales page hype is targeted at newbies the content should be targeted at newbies and not be recommnend $500 per day to test a campaign.

If you avoid the high spend rates and the tons of keywords you can learn a lot about researching your campaign in this course.

The videos are easy to follow and stream nicely online but the download versions didn’t work for me.

One other thing to remember if you use this method to set up is that it takes about six weeks to get your first payment from ClickBank.  But you will get your bill from Adwords in four weeks or less so don’t plan on ClickBank money paying for your first bill.

Keyword ESP – this content is actually a bonus for buying the Keyword ESP tool.  With that said the content is broken down into four sections – Part Time adwords, Full time Adwords, Advanced Adwords and Dominate Organically.

This is all good information for a newbie starting out with Adwords he is careful to keep you controled while starting your account and testing your campaigns at lower levels before you commit to them but still provides the information to move you along to bigger and more profitable campaigns.

The one problem I have is the content is only available through the software, it is recorded in HD and not optimized for the internet.  This means with my DSL connection (not too fast in the islands) it takes me about 45 minutes to download and view a 15 minute video.  If you have dial-up you will have to wait a long time to see these videos.

Overall Keyword ESP wins this competition but they both have good qualities.

Personally, I think you should use the testing methods that are taught in The ClickBank Code and use the Adwords methods and the tools from Keyword ESP together.  But that would require purchasing both products.

If you are a newbie and just starting out and you were going to choose one of these two products I would recommend Keyword ESP because following these methods you are less likely to loose your shirt in Adwords fees the first month.

Either way if you are new to Adwords you should watch the Keyword ESP Video.  It is 68 minutes long and will give you some great content on how to start out.

Tags: Adwords, hype, keyword ESP, review, the clickbank code