Google has just released or should I say, added search volume data to its free keyword search tool.

Many internet marketers use keyword tools such as WordTracker to find out what the best keywords to use for their websites and for pay per click marketing.

The problem is the search volume is considered not accurate since Google, the biggest and most used search engine in the world, does not display its search volume statistics to anyone.

All that is now changed.

Google’s free keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal used to show colored bars representing the popularity of search terms. Now it actually has numbers for approximate search volume for the past month and on average.

For internet marketers who do keyword research, this change is huge. It will eliminate a lot of the guessing and now you can know quite confidently which keywords are getting typed for your niche.

If you are doing article marketing for instance, then this data is valuable for you to see which keywords you should concentrate on writing.

Take a look at Google’s keyword tool now and check up on the volume of searches your keywords.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Internet marketing is portrayed as a relaxed, lazy man’s way to riches. Just a click of a button and the money will come in. If you’re a serious internet marketer, you’ll know that it’s a lie.

Internet Marketing is like any other business. It requires hard work, research, studying new marketing methods and planning. All this takes up a lot of your time especially if you’re not good at doing the tasks.

Let’s look at what an internet marketing involves:

1. Research of a product/service.
Make sure that the market has a need for it and research on what price you can sell it for. Understand what your deliverables are. eg. mp3 audio, pdf book, printed manual, membership access etc…

2. Development of the product
Write the content for your product. Do screen captures using Camtasia or video record scenes if needed.

3. Testing and proof reading your product
Make sure that everything is smooth and work as expected. Ensure there are no flaws that will cause major customer dissatisfaction.

4.  Copywriting – Writing the salesletter
Write a kick-ass salesletter for your product so that a high percentage of targeted visitors will become customers.

5. Graphics for salesletter
Create eye catching graphics for your salesletter to increase conversion and to capture the visitors’ attention

6. Writing Articles
You need to write articles and submit them to article/ezine  directories to advertise your new product

7. Write Press Releases
You need to write a press release to tell the world about your product. This improves SEO as well.

8. Posting to forums.
Start posting to the forums related to your niche regularly. You want to tell the world about your product, especially the people who are related to your niche.

9. Pay Per Click Marketing
This is a big one. Research relevant keywords and write ads for them. Look after your daily expenditure and see if the visitors convert to buyers. Test out other pay per click search engines as well. There are many more apart from AdWords, Yahoo and MSN.

10. Write an autoresponder series
You need this to follow up with your visitors after they subscribe to your course which you offer in your salesletter or in any part of your marketing. Promote your product again in your autoresponders. You need at least 10 messages in your autoresponder

11. Help Desk
You don’t want your customer’s inquiries to be missed. You need to setup a help desk system to track the tickets opened and you need to reply to their problems quickly (usually within 24-48 hours) and handle refunds.

12. Search Engine Optimization.
This is a continuous effort. You need to build links to your website daily and hopefully there comes a day, where you don’t need to spend pay per clicks on keywords which you are ranking high for.

13. Create affiliate program
To increase sales, you need to create an affiliate program. This virtually puts your marketing on autopilot. Creating an affiliate program involves, choosing and installing the software, writing promotional material for your affiliates to use and marketing your affiliate program

14. Accounting
You need to fill in your expenses, income, assets etc… so that you can do your taxes later on.

15. Tracking and Testing
You need to always keep tracking and testing what is working and what is not. This will increase your profits tremendously.

16.  Blogging
Blogging regularly is essential to market your website. Content rules on the internet and nothing is better than a blog to regularly pump out content to the search engines.

There are many more tasks to this list. Such as setting up aweber, for different lists you have, regularly sending out good content and promotional material to your list, continuously reading up on the latest marketing methods, commenting on other blogs, creating a Squidoo lens, social marketing etc…

How the HELL can someone say internet marketing requires not much work? Does all the above sound easy to you? What if you’re not very technical? You don’t know how to upload a website, don’t know how to setup a blog, don’t know how to blog, don’t know how to setup an autoresponder using Aweber etc…

Internet Marketing is a business with mammoth tasks.

Just writing for your salesletter will take you a whole week. Not to mention the testing and tracking you do later on to improve its conversions.

Do you know why so many people fail with their internet marketing businesses. They think it’s easy and require no work.

For those that do manage to do everything by themselves, they are working full time. They are working their asses off. But bear in mind they need to do a good job with all the tasks for their business to work.

Can you seriously say that your graphic designs are good, your writing is great and converts customers, you have sufficient technical knowledge to handle all the tasks, you are great at customer support etc…?

This is why you must treat your internet marketing business as a proper business.  That is how you succeed.

Look at any decent software development company or any company that provides good service. Do you think it’s a one man job? Or a two man job? Nope, they hire experts to work for them.

For the marketing department you need a marketing team, for the sales department you need a sales team, for the accounting department you need an accounting team etc…

Internet marketers need to manage their time if they want to succeed online. They need to outsource using the cheapest way they can. After they have some success, then they can hire more talented people to help them. But you must outsource with an internet marketing business.

If money is a problem and you are new to outsourcing, you should list out the tasks which you are poor at and also the tasks which are taking most of your time. Then go to forums and ask around for recommendations on outsourcing. Try to get the job done by someone better than yourself and free up your time.

For me, I’m crap at graphics. That’s why I choose Anthony Fesalbon of HyperCover and Dee Ferdinand of MiniSiteGuru to help me to my graphics on the sales page.

If you really hate writing, then outsource it. Get someone to blog for you, or write articles for you. Though I recommend this is one task that you should get good at yourself.

For setting up websites, paypal buttons, camtasia videos and any other task which will take you ages to do, outsource it. The people will do it better than you and quicker than you.

So what should your task be?

1. You should be training up the outsource individual or team which you hired and make sure they do the tasks properly and up to your standards.

2. You should be monitoring the sales and notice any spikes or declines and continuously improve things.

3. You should be creating relationships with other people in your niche and exchange ideas or do joint ventures.

4. You should be controlling the expenses in your business and think of ways to keep costs down while not affecting quality.

5. You should be look out for new opportunities for your business to expand.

6. You should be thinking of new products to create and how to sell more of your existing products.

7. You should be thinking of ways to improve your customers’ experience

Look at all the points above. Does any of them require technical work? Zilch.

But let’s say you’re good at doing graphic headers, ebook covers, overall website designs. Should you be doing it?

The answer is no. Your time should be spent on the above tasks. A business owner should not do his own graphic designs. He should spend his time on increasing sales and taking care of his business which he cannot outsource.

You can hire a mentor for a few months, but you cannot outsource your job as an owner. No one cares about your business as much as you.

“But hey, it’s easy to say but I have no bloody money to outsource.”

Then you should think about putting most of your income back into your business. I’m not saying you need to outsource all at once. Just do it gradually.

The main thing is to think about your business like a real business. You need to hire people to work for you gradually. At first you’ll have no personal time as you’re training task and also doing all the business tasks yourself. But know what your goal is at the end. Become the owner of your business and leverage off the expertise of other people. You’re building a business.

The online payment method which is most common on websites has to be Paypal. It’s easy to set up and has a trustworthy brand. But if you stick with Paypal as the only source of online payment method, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Paypal has its disadvantages.

1. It is very convenient for the buyer to get a refund for their product or service.

2. Paypal does not agree on some make money online sites which they assume are get-rich quick schemes. They advise you to take their order button down.

3. Paypal has been known to freeze your account if it suspects fraud (you’ll have this problem if you’re doing a big launch).

4. Believe it or not, some people still don’t know what is Paypal. They get confused when they see a the PayPal logo.

5. This is the big one. Paypal charges expensive fees per transaction.
For example, in Hong Kong, the transaction fee is 3.4 % of the transaction.

I’m not saying you should ban paypal as your online payment method. It definitely has it’s advantages. Some people have a balance totaling up in their paypal account and are more willing to pay for services using Paypal.

They also find it very convenient as they don’t need to type in their credit card every time they make a purchase online.

The solution?

Make two online payment methods available on your website. I would choose powerpayamerica.com which charges around 2.24% per transcation  plus $0.23, if you choose authorize.net as your payment gateway (which is around $19.95 per month).

If you are doing sales every day then the fees do add up. Plus you also get to capture buyers who don’t like paying via paypal.

So if you’ve good sales and you only have paypal as the online payment method, check out http://www.powerpayamerica.com You’ll be surprised with the increase in sales and profit margin.

Ever since the Internet came into existence and people began looking for ways to increase web traffic into their website, link exchanges have taken place.

At first, these were generally done on a one-to-one basis and it was of mutual benefit to everyone involved.  Even the search engines loved this kind of activity and they would quickly rank anyone who had incoming links, even if they were exchanged with another website.

That simply doesn’t work as well as it used to and search engine’s have begun to ignore link exchanges for the most part. Does that mean that there is no way to benefit from this?

Actually, there are several ways that you can benefit from a traffic exchange. First of all, you may be able to get direct traffic from another website if you exchange the right kind of link with them. High traffic websites are often willing to exchange links with other high traffic websites and put them in a prominent location on their main page. You would be surprised with the number of people that you can get your website, simply by exchanging links in this fashion.

Of course, you’re going to have to give them back something in return. That something usually comes in the form of a high traffic link on your main page.

It’s also possible for you to get a lot of traffic in a short period of time by joining an automated traffic exchange program. Although these have come and gone in popularity in recent years, they’re still a viable way for you to get mass traffic in just a little bit of time.

You can either join a free program and begin sending them traffic in order to get traffic in return or you can purchase credits through these traffic exchange programs in order to instantaneously get people to your website.

Unless the traffic exchange program is extremely targeted as far as the type of websites that are allowed within the system, you may not get a lot of people outside of tire kickers.  Still, having a massive amount of people come through your website in a short period of time can do wonders for you, especially if you have something that is of interest to a general audience.  The only way that you are going to know for sure is to try it for yourself.

There are many different ways of getting traffic. Some people do it with banner ads, some people concentrate on Adwords, Search engine optimization, article marketing and forum marketing. You need to choose the method that is suitable for you. Once it works for you, then spend the majority of your time on it.

Web Traffic Course, Traffic Secrets 2 is starting the launch today. No doubt internet marketers will be sick of receiving promotions for this course. After all, it’s the most anticipated web traffic training course.

Traffic Secrets, the original course that was released a few years back, made headlines throughtout the internet marketing industry. It made sales of $1 Million in 24 hours. Something unheard of in the industry. Especially the price…being a $997 information product where others at that time were selling ebooks from $47 to $97.

The most astounding thing was that the feedback from the course was almost 100% free of negative comments. Many have testified that they have made earned many times back their investment. John Reese, the owner of the course, of course permanently stamped his name as one of the most successful internet marketer ever, in the internet marketing market.

Traffic Secrets 2.0

It’s surprising to know that Traffic Secrets 2.0 will be launched to the public on July 15th with a…..$397 price tag.

John Reese mentioned that he wanted this web traffic course to be available for those who cannot afford the expensive price tag. Big product launches like this one are now normally in the $1497 or near the $2000 price range.

[tag-tec]Traffic Secrets 2.0[/tag-tec] will be concentrating on web 2.0 strategies and other traffic generating techniques that will be effective now and in future.

There is a preview video available for Traffic Secrets 2.0 which is posted online for free. You can check out the video and see the free tips which John is giving out for free on how to drive targeted traffic to your website. Go and watch the video and get a taste of what the excitement is about.

The video is free and I suggest you to apply the techniques John is offering and apply it to your business now.

Go and watch the video at http://www.trafficbeast.com/go/trafficsecrets2.php

Article Marketing can easily have one or two mistakes (such as in the title or resource box) and you can kill the response from the reader. There are several parts to article marketing and each part is just as important if you want to effectively drive those targeted visitors.

Below are the top 3 killer mistakes [tag-tec]article marketers[/tag-tec] make when writing articles.

Article Marketing Mistakes

1. The article has no goal in mind and it’s not written in an attractive manner.

For example, the content of the article is confusing and doesn’t have a clear purpose. The article is also written in a boring way and not speaking to the reader directly.

The reader might read through the whole article if they’ve got some time to kill, but they’ll shake their heads throughout the process.

This is the best scenario for a badly written article. The reader has read through the whole thing but they sure have no respect for the content they’ve read. Think they’ll click on your resource box?

The content of your article rules. Provide some good points and tell it in a funny, interesting or compelling way and you’ve got a great article that will be appreciated.

2. Your article title does not convey a benefit or it does not shock the reader.

We all begin to read things by being attracted to the headline. We read the content of certain parts of newspapers because we’re attracted by the headlines, we buy magazines a lot of the times depending on what headlines are on the front cover.

Think headlines are important? They either make or break your article.

Your article titles are the headlines in this case. Brainstorm some article titles for the topic you’re writing about and choose the best one which communicates the benefit of you article. Or choose the one which is the most shocking.

People love controversy but make sure that your shocking article doesn’t piss people off so that you’re left with a bad impression. You’re writing to be respected and be followed – you’re not writing to create enemies.

3. Your article shows signs that you are desperate.

What do I mean that you are desperate? If you hype features up, then it’s a sign of desperation. For example, “the software is so magnificent, you’re crazy if you don’t go and buy it now”.

People reading your article know straight away that you’re trying to sell them stuff and you’re being very biased.

Another sign of desperation is writing a crap article with no clear value, but yet you have a good resource box. People know if you’ve spent time writing on an article. They know if you’ve thrown some shit together to create a so called article just to get your resource box out there.

Conclusion

A lot of people don’t know why they’re writing an article. If they get this straight, then their article marketing performance will not be as bad they currently are.

Understand you’re writing for a human being to read so that they will click on your resource box link and sign up for whatever you have to offer. That is the goal.

Other things like backlinks and anchor text come second. They are also important but they are second on the list.

What this means is you have to make sure that a human being will love what you are writing. This is the key. You are not writing for a search engine.

Get this to click in your head and you’ll be successful in article marketing.

Just wanted to let you know that Traffic Beast has successfully moved to the new server which is my own dedicated server with Liquid Web.

The process began on Monday and the longest part was actually backing up the blog and other relevant pages and videos and then uploading the backup to the new server.

The time of the process depends on the speed of your connection. This is one of the reasons I have the best ISP in Hong Kong. Since my business depends on the web, it makes sense.

The migration of Traffic Beast was smooth as a baby’s bottom. The thing that delayed the migration was the DNS entry being updated around the world.

The only hiccup during this migration was my last minute decision to change the ip address to a dedicated one. This also delayed the the correct resolution of trafficbeast.com being propagated around the world.

Right after I acknowledged that I’m accessing trafficbeast.com from the new server, I did numerous checks and was happy with the end result.

I’ve read on a lot of forums that people dread moving their websites and blogs to different servers. For those of you who are thinking of making money online by offering services, this can be one of them. And believe me, it’s not hard.