TimArview.com

Say that five times fast.

Seriously, though, I want to take a minute here to tell you about a new blog site owned and operated by my friend and fellow RJer, Brian Owens.

Brian has recently thrown down the gauntlet and is offering to test ANY product out there, provided it’s relevant to Internet marketing.

Now, Brian’s an honest guy and he would rather tell it like it is than make a buck, but rather than explaining all the whos and whats and how-comes, I’m just going to give you the link.

http://www.tactictester.com

Give it a shot. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Tags: Brian Owens, TacticTester.com

So you ask, “Is it really possible to ‘advertise’ on LinkedIn?” The answer is, “Absolutely!”

In fact, if you’re in the “marketing to marketers” niche, you’ll probably have a better chance on a site like LinkedIn than you will on MySpace or Facebook, simply because your audience is more likely to be receptive.

Here’s how you do it.

First, find someone (a contact of a contact or something like that) who is currently unemployed and has had a lot of part-time or temporary jobs (or just didn’t last at many of them). These are people who are restless. They want something different all the time!

Send them a request to connect. Tell them the truth - that you have similar interests and would like to connect with them to talk about possibly working together on some projects.

Most of the time, they will accept your request simply because they are on LinkedIn to get those kinds of connections.

After they accept, send them a “thank you” and start working on the relationship.

Beyond that, it’s basic relationship marketing. Get to know them and market products accordingly.

Tags: Marketing tips, Relationship marketing

Well, I had hoped to be able to get back into AdSense full steam ahead with this latest addition. I must say I’m very disappointed.

Sites showing Google ads should be easy for users to navigate and should not contain excessive pop-ups.

• Publishers may not use online advertising to drive traffic to pages participating in AdSense for domains.
• Publishers may not deceptively drive traffic to pages participating in AdSense for domains.
• Sites participating in AdSense for domains may not be framed or displayed on other sites.
• Redirects are prohibited. We reserve the right to remove either redirecting or redirected sites from the AdSense for domains network.
• Sites participating in AdSense for domains may not be placed in pop-ups or pop-unders.
• Sites participating in AdSense for domains may not contain pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with site navigation, change user preferences, or initiate downloads
• Webpages participating in AdSense for domains may not be loaded by any software that can trigger pop-ups, redirect users to unwanted websites, modify browser settings, or otherwise interfere with site navigation. It is your responsibility to ensure that no ad network or affiliate uses such methods to direct traffic to pages that contain your AdSense code.

Come on, Google! Can’t use paid advertising to drive traffic? More vague rules about “deceptively” driving traffic? Who decides if it’s deceptive?

Google does, of course. And how do they make that evaluation? Based on user feedback. But here’s the problem.

What if someone doesn’t like what I’m going - even if it’s not deceptive - and decides to complain? (Don’t scoff; it’s happened before.)

I’ll tell you what will happen. You’ll lose your AdSense account, that’s what!

Guess I should have expected this. It’s tough when you know a way to drive a lot of traffic to a website, but can only use it long-term if the site’s not monetized.

Boo for you, Google. Boo for you.

Tags: AdSense, Google

Yes, once again, I have decided to get back to it. That’s the beauty of an online business. It’s always there, waiting for you.

A lot of you have asked me what I’ve been up to. As expected, many of you have asked me if there is anything new in the world of AdSense.

In fact, there are some changes. For one, Google has opened up AdSense for Domains and AdSense for Feeds - something they had toyed with in the past, but never kept available for long.

They both look very promising. However, I’m not doing a lot of AdSense anymore. I still have my sites and I’m still making “enough,” but I recently decided to get back to what I really love - coding.

I took a look at some of the scripts I’ve made over the past couple of years and revamped some of them to make them more “marketable.”

One such script I call TLink Cloaker (T for Tim, heh).

TLink Cloaker is my answer to the many affiliate link cloakers on the market. See, most of them don’t meet my standards of what a link cloaker should do.

In my opinion, a link cloaker should:

* Completely (100%) disguise your link so that it does not appear to be an affiliate link. No one should be able to figure out how to remove your affiliate ID and visit the website, without first clicking your link (which sets the cookie).

* Keep the visitor on your domain as long as possible. The more they believe they are reading pages on your site, the better relationship you’ll have with them. If they feel like you’re just trying to get rid of them and move them on to the vendor’s site, they probably won’t trust you much the next time they visit.

* Completely disguise the vendor’s page. If a nosy visitor views the source of the page, it shouldn’t identify itself as anything but a page on your site.

So how do we do this? Is it even possible? Many coders who write link cloakers tell you it isn’t. They lie.

I’ve actually accomplished this and I’d like to show it to you. Check out the demo here.

Eventually, I will have it for sale. Stay tuned for that information. My plan is to make it available through ClickBank and offer it for free to anyone who signs up as an affiliate. I’ll keep you posted on that.

(P.S. I’m currently setting up a domain to test out AdSense for Domains. I’ll be sure to pass along my experience in the near future.)

Tags: Affiliate marketing, scripting

Have you heard the phrase “long-tail keyword”? Do you really understand the concept?

In this post, I’m going to explain the idea behind long-tail keywords and how you can use them to triple (or more) the traffic to your site.

Simply speaking, long-tail keywords are longer, more elaborate phrases that relate to your chosen niche. For instance, let’s say your niche is relationships. Well, obviously, this is a very broad and general subject.

If we look at the kind of searches this niche gets, we see that “relationship” (singular) gets around 2.25 million searches per month while its plural counterpart gets about 1.25 million.

That’s a total of three and a half million searches per month! Even if you only got 1% of that traffic, you’re looking at 35,000 visitors per month!

While that’s great, it’s going to be very hard to get that kind of traffic because of the sheer quantity of sites related to the subject (about half a billion according to Google).

So how do you compete? The key is specialization.

Ask yourself this. Why would you only get 1% (or less) of the search engine traffic for relationship? Because not everyone who is searching for that term may be concerned with what your focus is.

Well, then, it stands to reason that the more you focus your keywords, the bigger percentage of the searches you will win.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re site is focused on online dating advice for men. Out of that 3.5 million searches per month for “relationship” and “relationships”, you’re only going to get - at most - 58 of them. (That’s the average number of searches per month for online dating advice for men.) That’s only 1/1000 percent!

But what about those who searched for “dating advice”? Our traffic is going to be .05% of the total “relationship” traffic. A big improvement!

And if we get even more specific by looking at “dating advice for men”, we can see even more improvement (1.6%).

But let’s face it. While the percentage is going up, the total number of visitors is going down. How to fix this?

Well, now that we’ve narrowed the focus of our search targeting, we need to expand the focus of our content. (This is why free blogs are so great.)

Create another site that relates to a similar long-tail, such as online dating advice for women. That could win us another 46 visitors per month.

Create another one for online dating profile advice (how to create your profile to be more attractive). Add another 58 visitors per month.

Continue the process until you’ve reached that magic 1% - 35,000 visitors - and you can be sitting on a network of sites worth at least $250 per month.

Tags: keyword targeting

One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is through PPC. But what if you don’t want to spend the money on an AdWords campaign? Is it possible to get the same kind of targeted traffic without spending money on PPC?

Yes, it is. In this post, I’m going to show you exactly how to get the same kind of traffic results that you’d expect from paid systems like AdWords.

The first thing you need to do is make sure your site has a good keyword density for your chosen term. (By “term”, I don’t just mean a single keyword, but a more targeted key phrase. I’ll explain more about this in another post regarding “long-tail” keywords, but for now, just realize that there’s a difference.)

How do you know if your site has good keyword density? The best way I know is to use a free online tool provided by SubmitExpress.com called the Meta Tags Analyzer.

After submitting your site, if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a section titled “Keywords found on page.” There are three columns to this section. You need to focus on whichever section has the same number of words as your key phrase.

For instance, if you’re targeting buy car insurance, then you need to check the third column. If you’re targeting niche blogging, then you look at the second column. Make sense? Good.

Now, look at the phrase at the top of your chosen column. The phrase at the top is what the search engines are going to consider the “most targeted” on your site.

Maybe that’s not the phrase you’re wanting to target. If not, then you need to increase your keyword density (that is, you need to increase the number of times that phrase appears on your site).

With a little tweaking, you should be able to get the phrases you want at the top of the list.

The next thing you need to do is get backlinks. But not just any links will do. You need to make sure that the sites linking to you are also using the same key phrases that you’ve chosen to target.

How can you ensure that this is done? By creating the sites yourself!

Yes, you read correctly. Create a system of blogs that all relate, in some way, to your chosen key phrases. But don’t just spam the links throughout the blog. While this is effective in the short term, it doesn’t do much for you in the long run, so let’s be a little smarter than that.

The most effective way to use this strategy is to create up to ten blogs per key phrase and have each blog link to your site in no more than five places. One or two is best.

So, let’s say you’re targeting buy insurance online and buy car insurance, with the former as the “main” key phrase and you have created ten blogs for buy insurance online and five for buy car insurance.

If each blog has two links to your site (using those phrases as the anchor text), that gives more “weight” to the main phrase, right? Right.

Remember, too, if you use Blogger blogs for your backlinks, they’ll get indexed by Google faster, which means you’ll see the results of your work faster as well.

Backlinks and keyword targeting are only a couple of ways to increase the traffic to your site. In my video series, The Beginner’s Guide to Niche Sites, I devoted an entire section to this subject.

An updated version of the series is available as part of your membership to AdSense Extreme, the ultimate resource for AdSense publishers.

Tags: keyword targeting, traffic

Most of you are probably familiar with John Reese, the author of Traffic Secrets, which earned him $1,000,000 (that’s one million for the numerically-impaired) in one day.

Well, several months after that wonderful day, a lot of people were wondering what was next for Mr. Reese.  He told us with the release of BlogRush, a 4 a.m. brainchild that was intended to help bloggers get more traffic.

The concept was simple enough.  You place a JavaScript code on your blog that was tied to a “feed” on the BlogRush servers. Using the feed, the widget would (theoretically) display the titles of the most recently updated blogs related to the topic of your own blog.

In this way, it would be a little like AdSense, but without the cost-per-click (and, consequently, the pay-per-click). But Reese believed it could fuel itself because it was shared traffic.

Unfortunately, the system was flawed in many ways, not the least of which was security.  It was very easy to game the system and spam bloggers were soon flooding the system.  While Reese’s team was doing their best to keep up, they ended up denying some blogs they should have approved.

This all eventually led to today, and an e-mail from Reese explaining that BlogRush was shutting down.

“Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs.  This was our primary focus.  Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else.  BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue.  We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later.  Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped.  (It happens.)”

Indeed, it does, to many people.  But John Reese?  THE John Reese?  The man who claims to have the secrets for getting thousands of visitors to a website?

Apparently so.

Now, I know that people all over the blogosphere are going to be sharing their own theories as to why BlogRush failed.  And some may have good ideas.  Most will be wrong.

Ultimately, Reese is the only person who really knows why it failed.

Maybe he’ll write a book about it and have another million dollar day.

Tags: BlogRush, John Reese

Before I start this post, I’d like to apologize for not posting the last few days.  I’ve been hit with a pretty heavy bout of the flu (or something like it) and I haven’t done much of anything for the last week.

Now, to the subject of the moment.

I have a little good news and bad news.  The bad news came as I was checking my e-mail this evening.  I got a notice that one of my AdSense Extreme subscribers had cancelled her membership.

Now, I just released it not long ago and this person was the latest new member, so I’m sure it was one of those things where she thought, “Hey, I can get the ebooks and watch the video for only$1 and then unsubscribe!”  Yep, you can.  And she did.  So that’s fine, even though she never even made a single post to the forum to even say, “Hi” or anything.

Oh well, right?  Moving on…

The good news came when I checked in on the forum over there and saw there was a post from one of the members titled “minor success.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing “minor” to success.  It’s either a success or it’s not.

Of course, I know what he meant.  He meant he hadn’t shown a BIG return yet, but he was happy to see that SOMETHING was working.

In fact, using the techniques he learned from my books and the video, he actually saw an 85% CTR for one day’s visits!  That totally rocks!

And, he’s in a niche that is looking at $5+ per click, so I’m really happy for him.  I have no doubt that in just a few weeks’ time, he’s going to be reporting even more success.

So, that news kind of made up for the member loss.  As they say, win some and lose some.  Although, really, which of us lost there?

Something to think about…

Tags: AdSense Extreme

Are you a salesperson or a marketer?  Do you even know the difference?

In our modern society, people are much more cynical and skeptical than they used to be.  No longer do consumers simply trust what companies tell them.  In order to win their trust, we have to be much smarter in how we approach them.

In a sales environment, there is no targeting.  To use the analogy of a military action, the salesperson throws a grenade in a building, not even knowing if anyone’s in the building or not.  Maybe he/she gets lucky; maybe not.  The success of the salesperson is dependant solely upon the number of sales opportunities available.

In a marketing environment, sales are specifically chosen.  To continue the analogy, the marketer is a sniper.  He/she is patient.  The target is chosen based on specific factors, including age, gender, previous purchases, interests, etc.

As a result, the marketer often experiences a much greater response rate, is less discouraged, and - in the end - makes more money.

So how do marketers gain this information about their targets?  There are two possibilities.  One is to use data that already exists.  This is the cheapest method, but provides limited data.  For instance, what if you wanted to know the gender of your targets, but the data didn’t provide that information?  It’s not very helpful, then.

The second possibility is to gather the data yourself.  This involves greater expense, but can give you much mroe specific data.  To do this, the marketer has to act like a salesperson in that he/she approaches anyone and everyone possible, but instead of simply trying to sell right then, the marketer only gathers information.

This can lead to many more sales in the future, whereas the salesperson will win one sale (maybe) and then have to start the work all over again for another sale.

Here’s an example to illustrate my point.

A marketer I know was doing some consulting for a music promotion organization.  They’re putting on a show soon and wanted to get the word out online.

Well, he noticed that two of the members of this organization were also members of a forum dedicated to the music they’re promoting.  And while they were talking about the show, they never once directed anyone to the website the marketer set up for them to sell tickets.

What made it worse was that the forum charged a fee for access.  Why did this make it worse?  Because this meant the people on the forum were:

1) Interested in the music;

2) Already online (which meant they could get to the website; and the most important

3) Comfortable with spending money online!!

This made the forum members a PERFECT target for selling advance tickets.

How does this differ from a salesperson?

A salesperson will hit every single forum (even those not related to music) and just get whatever sales they can.  As a result, most online salespeople get flagged as spammers.

So be smart.  Be a marketer.

Tags: Internet marketing, Marketing tips

A while back I did a product review for Equity Millions, but I realized that I was actually missing the big picture here.  You may or may not be interested in making money by “site flipping,” but I know for a fact you are interested in building your business.

Well, guess what?  Equity Millions can help with that, too.

Not necessarily through the hours and hours of video and training, the forum and frequent “flip alerts” sent through e-mail.  No, more than that, Equity Millions can teach you about building a business just in the very way they do business.

I’ve become pretty good friends with both Brian and Tyler and I know how these guys think.  And if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s that they know the importance of relationship marketing.

What is relationship marketing?

Well, as you might guess just from the name, it has to do with relationships…and marketing.  Yeah, that’s really helpful.

Actually, the real definition (in my opinion) is that it has to do with establishing a relationship before the marketing - not after.

See, businesses for years have talked about “customer service” and, for the most part, they all pretty much suck at it - particularly in the service-oriented industries (how’s that for irony?).

But these days, it’s about more than just “service after the sale.”  It’s about service before, during, and after the sale, and even after your customer is no longer your customer!

What’s that?  Service to someone who’s not even a customer?  Yep, you read that correctly.

You see, the traditional business model gives you a 5-20% chance of turning a prospect into a customer.  That same business model will give you a 20-40% chance of winning back a lost customer.

That means it’s easier (and cheaper) to win old customers back than it is to win new customers.

But that’s just using traditional business models.  What if you add that extra level of relationship marketing where you actually talk to your customers and treat them like human beings?  What if you tell them, “Look, I have the solution to your problem, and even though you may not be able to afford it, I’m going to help you out”?  What do you think will happen to your long-term bottom line?

I can tell you what will happen - it will skyrocket.

But too many marketers - and Internet marketers are the worst - are so focused on that quick one-time transaction that puts “cash in my pocket” that they forget about the millions and billions of dollars spent annually on the Internet.  They forget (or ignore) the fact that most people who shop online make $75,000 annually or more and could obviously afford something a little more expensive than that $47 ebook.

I would even go so far as to say that for most marketers online, the “lifetime customer value” of each customer acquired barely pays the cost of acquisition.

Many probaby don’t even know what their LCV is.

So what’s this got to do with Equity Millions?

Brian Owens and Tyler Ellison know what their LCV is.  They know what their long-term plan is for their business.  They’ve got the magic that keeps customers coming back month after month.

So I challenge you to learn something today.  Learn how to conduct a relationship-based business from two of the Internet’s finest.

Tags: equity millions, Internet marketing, Relationship marketing