INTERNET INCOME.

 

Lesson #86—Lasting Principles -- Part 2

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN To avoid the inherent obsolescence that preys upon any attempt to capture the workings of the Internet, the Internet Income Course has attempted to deal with lasting concepts. In this second lesson of the final section of the course, we continue to remind you of some of the most important lasting principles that have been highlighted and explained during this course. LASTING PRINCIPLES OF AN EVER-CHANGING INTERNET Keywords No discussion of the lasting principles of Internet Marketing is complete without coverage of keywords and key phrases. We began this discussion in the previous lesson and continue it here. While it is correctly stated that the search engines rely less and less on the keywords contained in metatags, keywords remain integral to the process of developing your content nonetheless. Effective content development always involves the process of choosing the right words and the right combination of words to best express your thoughts. Notwithstanding that search engines may now largely ignore your metatag keywords, it still makes sense to create them and place them in the metatags as well as the content of your site. Search engines must, of course, search the content of your site. That is how they work. Integrating key words that you expect to show up in searches into your site's content, if done correctly, will always be a viable strategy. Thus, we review in some detail here the process of creating and using keywords for your Website. Developing your list of keywords and key phrases is the first step in the final design of your Website. To develop your list of key words and key phrases, you need to define your target market. Defining your target market involves a process of elimination and a process of inclusion. Decide who will not be interested in your site and decide who specifically will be interested. Think of the words that your target market will likely search for on the search engines. Think of the words that will exclude the disinterested. The process of generating keywords is both creative and critical. You have to be creative initially to come up with as many words as possible. Starting by analyzing your target market, you then use that starter list to generate many more potential keywords by reducing your starter list to the root words and finding as many derivatives and synonyms as you can for these words. Next, by using index cards for each root word and laying them out in various orders, you find as many key phrases as you can from these words. You try to order your words so that each word can be a part of at least two different phrases, due to its relationship to the words before it and the words after it. Finally, you critically cull down your list of keywords and key phrases by checking them against actual search engine traffic statistics and eliminating the ones that will draw little or no traffic. You are now ready to type in the title, description, and keywords metatags, as well as the comment tag, for each section and page of your site. In creating your final content, keep it simple. Keep your pages short and to the point. Don't obsess with it, but be mindful of keyword-density, cross-linking, and outbound-linking issues and their effect on search engine ranking. Let your primary guide be to create a useful and informative page to the persons who will be reading it. Carefully and economically include your payoff links–no more than one per page–and keep them on topic with your content as much as possible. Advertising – Free Ads Free online advertising can work for affiliate marketers provided they are properly prepared and the process is approached correctly. To be prepared, you need to have an effective ad, you need a target URL to which the ad will point, and you need to be prepared for the posting process. This includes having a secondary e-mail account and a tracking system in place. Finally, you need to understand the process of finding effective locations to place your ads. Finding locations on which to place free ads is a continuing process. Nothing worthwhile is entirely easy, but it can be a fun and rewarding process if you apply a little creativity. Put yourself in the shoes of people you are trying to reach. Anticipate what they will search for on the search engines. Search with those same terms and look for sites in the results that allow you to place free ads. Stay focused and keep the process moving. Keep notes of anything interesting you find that would be too time consuming now and come back to it later. Look at the links on sites for an indication whether they allow free advertising. Do not confuse free ads with reciprocal links--they are somewhat different animals. In coming up with search terms to use, be creative and use your imagination. Blogs The emergence of Blogs in the late 1990's as a new form of Internet publishing was exciting for a number of reasons. Blogs, by providing a form of expression that easily integrates with other sources and other perspectives, marked an evolutionary step in the progress of the Internet. Blogs, when used properly, can be an effective e-commerce tool. Appropriately placed affiliate links, flowing from the context of the Blog entries, can be a powerful marketing tool. With Wordpress becoming one of the most popular content creation tools, Blogs have by now (late 2013) become almost synonymous with Web pages. In-Context Link Placement An individual working from home with limited resources can do something very powerful. You can create the need for the product and close the sale all at the same place and the same time. By placing direct product links to Tripleclick products in a manner that brings those products to life, you can effectively sell products and build an income with the SFI affiliate program at the same time. The trick is to work the discussion of the product into your content. Google now claims to look for and penalize this type of link placement, but its effectiveness outweighs that concern in our opinion. If done professionally, with the primary design goal being to provide useful information, this strategy should continue to work indefinitely. Be Efficient To be profitable, you should take a systematic approach to Internet Marketing. Being systematic means counting, measuring, and comparing what goes into your system; how it flows through your system; and the return that flows out of your system. It means, as much as anything, paying close attention to what you are doing and what is happening as a result of your efforts. If you are not getting the results you desire, identify the part of your system that is failing to perform to expectation and then fine tune it. Always strive to fine tune your entire system to achieve greater efficiency. An efficient system is the key. Brilliance is not required. Luck is not required. Efficiency is required. Understand Information Processing In order to reveal and understand the lasting principles, we have often turned to science and the underlying technology to provide the background for an effective approach to Internet Marketing. You can obtain useful insight by reflecting on how information and information processing plays a vital role in every aspect of our lives. To be truly successful in business, you must take time to reflect upon the information processing skills that you employ in your business. To be truly successful in an Internet-based business, you must take time to think about the information retrieval systems that form the foundation of the Internet. To become a true search engine expert, you must have some understanding of the information retrieval techniques upon which the search engines are based. Some familiarity with the science of information retrieval that drives these developments is well worth a little time and effort also. Understanding Databases The more efficiently we process information, the more successful we will be. Database applications are much more efficient than word processing applications for dealing with certain types of information. Database applications are very useful tools to store, organize, process and retrieve structured similar information (such as records of our products or records of our prospects). Using ODBC and SQL, we can share database information across other networks. Additional applications such as ColdFusion or PHP allow us to share and work with database information on the Internet. As we determine our information processing needs, we can design tables to record the characteristics that are important for each item in the records that we need to keep. When necessary to avoid duplication of data, we can create additional tables that relate back to records in our primary table by using primary and foreign keys. We use forms to input data and reports to retrieve and sort the data. For our reports to be accurate, we must input the data accurately into the database. Our reports can retrieve and sort data in numerous ways depending upon our needs at the time. Database applications can make us much more efficient in running our businesses. Searching Text Some familiarity with basic concepts of Information Retrieval Science can help you to perform better searches as well as help you better optimize your own Website. You should explore and experiment with the advanced search features of the major search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google. Identify the keywords you are targeting with your Website and experiment with different searches using these keywords. Examine the pages that rank high in the results of your searches. See if you can calculate keyword density, term weight, and keyword co-occurrence for the pages that rank high in your searches. Remember that keyword density is a measure of the concentration of the use of a word on a page. Term Weight is a measure of the use of a word in one document to the use of the word in all other documents in the collection. Term Weight can be used to rank documents with relation to a particular search. Term Co-occurrence is a measure of how often words appear together in a particular document with respect to how often those words usually appear together. It is another way to test the relevancy of a document to a particular keyword used in a search. Understanding how searches work behind the scenes is important to Internet Marketing. CONCLUSION In this lesson, the second in the final section on lasting principles, we have revisited Keywords, Free Advertising, Blogs, In-Context Link Placement, Efficiency, and Information Science, including databases and text searching. These are strategies that have always been, and will always be, important. While the details may change, the principles should remain the same. WHAT'S COMING NEXT In our next lesson we will continue highlighting important lasting principles of Internet Marketing. by George Little Copyright 2013, Panhandle On-Line, Inc. License granted to Carson Services, Inc. for distribution to SFI affiliates. No part of this work may be republished, redistributed, or sold without written permission of the author. For more information on the Internet Income Course and other works and courses by George Little, see www.profitpropulsion.com. For Web Hosting services specially designed for SFI affiliates, see www.profitpropulsion.com

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