The Internet has revolutionized business and you need a presence to make money in the digital age. With the worlds best Internet marketing tools, you can make a lot of money.

Worlds Best Internet Marketing Tools

Most businesses build sites without really having a clue regarding how to go about it. The first step in developing a business site is not building it. Instead, you have to focus on the internet marketing aspect of the business and design accordingly. To this end, there are two tools that can be considered the worlds best internet marketing tools.

The single biggest internet marketing tool you need to become familiar with is Wordtracker. This tool is the proverbial golden egg of Internet marketing. Wordtracker lets you take a keyword and find out all the phrases people are using that incorporate the keyword. You can then take the list of keywords and find out how many searches are occurring on any of the big search engines – Yahoo, Google and MSN. On top of this, you can also determine how difficult it will be to get top rankings for the keyword phrases through search engine optimization.

Wordtracker is a great tool because it allows you to determine if there is a market for your idea before you waste time and money on it. It can also be used to come up with ideas for sites. You simply type in a keyword like “travel” and see if there is a niche with a lot of traffic and a nominal amount of competition for rankings. If you find the niche, you tailor a business idea to it and make a boatload of money.

Wordtracker costs less than $8 a day and you can buy access for a single day. The better approach is to buy a year subscription so you can use it over and over as you build out your site. Used correctly, Wordtracker will keep you from wasting time on bad ideas while also giving you insight into the needs of your prospects. The key to making money is to simply solve those needs on your site. You can check out Wordtracker here:

Word Tracker

As if Wordtracker isn’t enough, there is a second tool that you will come to love. The second item of the worlds best internet tools is the article directory. Actually, there are hundreds of article directories, but lets focus on the concept for the moment.

The key to being really profitable on the Internet is getting free traffic. You do this through search engine optimization or by getting publicity. With either area, this has traditionally been accomplished through link trading. Essentially, you agree to put another persons link on your site in exchange for them doing the same with yours. As you might imagine, it takes a long time to build up enough links to get high rankings and publicity. Article directories solve this problem, which makes them great internet marketing tools.

An article directory is exactly what it sounds like. You write an article and deposit it in the directory. Webmaster and editors from all over the world search the directories looking for content for their sites. When they republish your article, you get free publicity. Even better, you will create links in the author area of your article and they will publish those on their site as well. A single article can produce anywhere from 50 to 2,000 links for your site. It beats the hell out of link trading.

Everyone has an opinion regarding the worlds best internet marketing tools. The value of Wordtracker and article directories, however, is not an opinion on our part. Their value is an established every time we look at our business bank account.

Ever inventive, Google has been sending out emails to select Adsense publishers regarding a new pay for action program. This is bad news for publishers promoting Adsense.

Pay For Action Adsense

If you are reading this, you probably know what Adsense is and are using it. If not, it is a program whereby Google allows sites to place ads from the Adwords program on their site. When a visitor to your site clicks one of the ads, you get a cut of the bid price from Google. It is a simple program that surprisingly generates a significant amount of revenue.

Google is now beta testing a new version of Adsense it is calling pay for action. While Google is not providing much information, the program apparently is an attempt to convert Adsense into one giant affiliate program. Instead of paying publishers for clicks on ads, the program will only pay a commission if a person clicks on one of the ads on your site and takes the relevant action on the advertiser’s site. In this case, it appears the action is buying whatever is offered or becoming a lead. In exchange for killing the click revenue aspect of Adsense, you apparently get a cut off the commission for whatever revenue is generated by the advertiser from your traffic.

There are a number of problems with this approach. First, Google offers no explanation of how it will account for sites that list phone numbers for orders, a method used by customers that Google can’t hope to track. Second, Google has offered no indication of how revenues will be generated from sites offering services such as lawyers, doctors and so on. A vast majority of people clicking onto these sites will telephone or email the business, which makes tracking a very difficult game. Admittedly, the program is in beta testing, so Google may come up with solutions for all of these issues. There is, however, a more fundamental problem.

The pay for action program contains one inherent flaw. It eliminates the motivation of the advertiser to have a good, fast site that converts and proper customer service. All indications are the advertisers will be able to use the platform for free and only pay commissions to Google which are split with us, the publishers. If so, what motivation does the advertiser have to improve their site? What motivation does the advertiser have to satisfy customers? In my honest opinion, the answer is very little. Yes, they want to get more sales, but what do they really care if they are getting a bunch of free traffic?

If I told you I would send you 100,000 visitors a day and you had to pay me a commission only on sales, how much would you work to improve the site? Be honest. Perhaps you would work on it for a month or so, but after that human nature would take over. We all know of sites out there that haven’t been touched in years because they have so many affiliates producing tons of traffic that they can just kick back and collect cash.

I fully understand that Google is trying to deal with click fraud, click bots and so on. Perhaps the pay for action program will be the solution when it is ultimately finalized. Perhaps it will be the greatest thing since, well, Google. My experience, however, is that a majority of affiliate programs are iffy at best, otherwise I would be promoting them instead of Adsense!

Again, it is to early to draw any conclusions regarding Google’s move, but people with Adsense ads on their site should take notice. This is a fundamental change that redistributes the risks and benefits of the Adsense program. I bet Yahoo is salivating about the prospects for its Publisher Network if Google goes ahead. Personally, I planned to stay with Adsense for as long as it was offered, but have my doubts now. If I wanted to partner with other sites, I would have done it a long time ago.

Why use online marketing? The reasons are plentiful, but the two biggest concern arrogance and leverage.

Why Use Online Marketing

You should use online marketing for a variety of reasons. If you can figure it out, it gives you the ability to spend your time, not your money, advertising your business. It gives you access to a much broader market than any brick and mortar business. It allows you to kick the crap out of big companies that just throw money at Internet marketing, a tactic often used to crush smaller business in the brick and mortar world.

When you get down to brass knuckles, online marketing not only gives you a level playing field with the big or bigger boys, it gives you an advantage. I like to call this the leverage and arrogance advantage.

Assume you write one piece of great software and try to start a small company in the brick and mortar world. If you are deemed to be a threat by the big software companies, what is going to happen? If you don’t get bought out, they are going to wipe you out. Since you have limited resources and little leverage with retailers, you are screwed, blue and tattooed. Not on the web.

Online marketing is beautiful because it flattens the playing field for all players, big and small. The key is search engine optimization. Regardless of how much money a dominant company in an industry throws at search engine rankings, they will never have an inherent advantage over you. They have no leverage, because there is nobody to buy off. The best they can do is buy advertisements, which most people don’t click. If you get the top ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN for your keywords, nobody can knock you off unless they do a better optimization job than you do. In no way, shape or form would this ever be possible in the brick and mortar world unless you have a monstrous amount of cash.

The second reason you should use online marketing is arrogance. Dominant brick and mortar companies use marketing firms to push their brands on television, billboards, magazines and so on. When the companies open a site, they often have these marketing firms handle their internet efforts as well. Crushing them on search engines is like taking candy from a baby. They haven’t a clue what they are doing, but their arrogance will never let them acknowledge they are paying triple the going rate for advertisements on high traffic sites. They just throw money at the problem, a strategy that fails every time on the web.

You, however, aren’t going to waste money by purchasing banner ads and other crap that will waste your money. Nope, you are going to pursue search engine optimization on your own or through a credible group. While the dominant company is spending $20 a click for their ads, you are going to be laughing your way to the bank as customers pour in from your top rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

How can a business that is already successful in reaching their local market extend their marketing reach online? The good news is that the traditional offline marketing that has always worked so well will still work at least as effectively to promote your online presence. The other side of the coin is that to promote your business online, the old traditions need some updating to keep up with online marketing best practices.
Any business should already have a marketing plan and objectives from their offline initiatives, so let’s jump straight into the technology aspects of online marketing. I generally look at the following things first, because they can be done at very low or no initial cost, and also because subsequent specialist marketing won’t be as successful without these things in place. Of course there is a huge amount more to online marketing, the extent of which could easily be justified as a full-time university course. This is the pre-school notes, to help get your site to a starting point on a low budget if you can’t quite afford to be calling in the big guns to market your site for you professionally just yet.

1. Site optimization

This is always the place to start, because the effectiveness of everything which follows is often dependent on this being done up front. When I say this, I include great content and intuitive navigation as the basis for everything. Only once your site has been optimized for intelligent visitors should you tweak it for search engines, but never at the expense of the former.

Search engines look at things like keyword density and how specifically a page matches a specific search term. Of course this is extremely over simplistic, but nevertheless a worthwhile starting point. By identifying 10-20 key terms you would like search engines to pick up on, and creating specialised pages with relevant information which utilises those terms in the right way, you will start getting much better results once your site has been indexed.

You will find that it is best to use specialised keyword phrases, for example “precision-engineered bolts” is likely to get better placement than a generic term like “engineering parts”. You should also work to create a single page for every key phrase you want picked up on, and include the key phrase in the title, meta tags and use all the words in the body of the page at a high density relative to other words. You should also preferably include the key phrase in the page title, as well as the URL of the page, for example, “http://www.mysite.com/precision_engineered_bolts/”. Each page should use a different title, specifically based on the key phrase utilised in that page’s content.

Your site should really be developed using XHTML and CSS these days, table-based design has numerous technical problems associated with it, and it results in a lower keyword density than the current standards.

Ideally you should use a content management system which incorporates and facilitates all of the above quickly and effortlessly, such as that provided standard with RealmSurfer sites. This will allow you to manage your own content optimization, with a bit of trial-and-error.

2. Linking and indexing

The next step is to get search engines to start to notice and index your site. Google, for example, won’t even look at your site until it has been linked to by at least one other indexed site. Paid inclusion (paying the search engines to index your site on a priority schedule) can be appropriate at this phase if you need to urgently accelerate this process, however it is not always necessary.

Especially useful at this stage can be participating in forums serving your primary target market. This has the dual benefit of creating awareness of your business within communities you would like to reach, and at the same time can help create incoming links to your site, something that search engines pay particular attention to. Ensure that your site details are included as a link in the footer of your posts.
Never use a forum to spam members or submit unsolicited advertising posts — that just has the opposite effect of destroying your business’ credibility. Some forums have a separate advertising section in which it may be appropriate to professionally post information about your services and products. Always make sure that your presence represents a valuable contribution to the community. Stay on topic and be professional, helpful and constructive.

Search engines take many factors into consideration when ranking a site. New sites, for example, don’t initially fare well, however you will find they will allocate some credibility weighting to you the longer your site is up and running. The biggest factor though, external to the site itself, is the number of inbound (preferably non-reciprocal) links from other sites, and the context and wording of the referring link, as well as the ranking of the referring page, and referring site. The popularity of those sites plays a big role, as well as how high up in the site’s own hierarchy the link is. By way of example, a link from www.news.com.au counts for much more than a link from a very deeply embedded page like www.somesitesomewhere.com/subdirectory/theattic/someoldforgottenpage .

3. Implement online marketing partnerships with high-profile online businesses

This is where you can really benefit if implemented successfully. When I was previously running the e-commerce business unit for a large company, rather than pay high-traffic websites to advertise on their sites, which can be very much untargeted, we offered them a percentage of sales. In other words, we provided them with the banners to promote the service, and implemented simple tracking of where our visitors were coming from, and then paid a percentage of the total revenue to the referrer. This resulted in very low marketing costs to us, and the referring sites started placing more and more emphasis on their side to ensure that we got top placement whenever they were low on paid inventory.

Another effective medium-term strategy is to provide content of value to sites which serve your target market. They benefit from your topical content, you benefit from the exposure and links.

4. Dabble in paid keyword advertising

Only at this point should you actually be starting to pay for online advertising. These forms of advertising, however, allow you to specifically target certain people, which means you get a much better return on investment than simply advertising to everyone. This can take some trial and error to find what works best, but the amount you pay should be less than the amount of business you generate, and should normally include full measurement and reports on a reasonably regular basis, preferably online.

For this purpose, I often suggest starting with Google. They are by far the most popular search engine globally, they have a very good reputation, provide reporting online, and are probably the most likely to produce results initially. Yahoo and MSN also have excellent paid link systems, and they keep getting better all the time. The latest offerings from all three are now also starting to allow targeting to specific demographics, a trend that is likely to become the preferred way to target online audiences once the capabilities for this type of targeting matures.

5. Involve an internet marketing specialist

At this point, you should be starting to see some results, and be in a good position to ask some intelligent questions. Preferably deal only with a business that has a good reputation (ask for client contact details so you can find out how effective they are), and has preferably has been around for at least a few years. They should also provide very detailed reports (ask for examples of these up front), and be able to explain in detail how they go about promoting your site, on which sites they do so, the number of views and clickthroughs per site per day, and how effective each promotion was relative to the next. They should also meet with you at least once a month to review successes and failures and involve you in the decision-making process of where next to promote your business. At least monthly, you should be in a position to evaluate your cost per sale for various promotions, and to change your focus accordingly.

Especially be wary of businesses who claim unrealistically quick results, or base their business mainly only on search engine submission, or use deceptive practices to try and “trick” search engines into ranking you higher. These usually at best produce no value, and can in some cases lead to your site being removed or ranked very low by search engines.