Hello, marketers!

It’s not a secret that Google likes Squidoo.com and tends to rank it high in its search results. However many people are faced with the issue of their Squidoo lens ranking high at first and then going down to second page, third page and all the way to the last page of Google search results. There is a remedy to it.

I created a lens about a year ago and I wrote an article on EzineArticles pointing to this lens. The lens got in the top 5 results in a month or so and stayed there for a while getting over 100 daily uniques from Google. Recently the lens dropped to #7 in Google and I got 173 hits from Google in 24 hours.

Yesterday I decided to update the lens to see if this will help to bring it back in the top 5. I added one single text module with 1 paragraph of text, then I used Pingoat.com to ping the lens… and today at noon I have noticed the traffic from Google increased:

Almost 100 hits more from Google and it’s only noon! After doing a Google search for the main keyword phrase, I found this lens ranking as #3 and not #7 which proves that Google LOVES updates, especially when they consist of new, unique content! I am sure this applies to all websites, blogs, hubs and lenses! So don’t forget to constantly update for your own sake!

P.S. for those who want to know the results of the traffic - 3 recurring sales and 30 opt-ins to my list so far from this one lens for today.

Alex

90% of beginner marketers fail to make their first dollar online for one simple reason - lack of action. I am a regular poster on many Internet marketing related forums and I see this happening every single day; people complaining how they spend $1000’s on courses, e-books even seminars yet they can’t make money online. Every now and then I get e-mails from folks who purchased my One Month Affiliate video course: “Alex, I followed your course, one month passed and I haven’t made a single buck online!” - then they usually proceed by telling me how they made this blog with one post and … that’s where it ends.

Well, my friends, it takes more than one blog post. I mention it in my course, on forums, e-mails and everywhere else I can - it takes effort to make money. Internet Marketing is just like any other business, it’s not going to make you money if you don’t run it properly.

First of all, you need to advertise. This is where we could see the big difference between an offline business and the online business models. The one that’s online could and should be advertised and promoted for FREE. Using blogs, article marketing, social media such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter helps a lot! Yes, it takes time and effort but it pays off! One single 300-word article could bring thousands of people to a site and make hundreds of them purchase whatever you are selling - but you need to do the proper research and you need to write that article! It IS THAT SIMPLE.

So next time you are about to complain about not making money, ask yourself if you have done enough action to deserve that money. If your fingers are not sore from all the typing (or your wallet empty from outsourcing all the typing) then you probably haven’t done enough!

Now go out there, take action and make money (then paypal me half of it

Alex

Good Morning folks!

I would like to wish You and Your family a Merry Christmas! I hope Santa treated You well this year. I would also like to let you know something many don’t even suspect. During this Holiday season affiliate marketers made millions of dollars on the internet by simply helping people to make their family happy.

Thousands of iPods, Playstations, Guitars, winter jackets and many other gifts were sold online through affiliate links. New internet marketers tend to forget about promoting physical products and concentrate on selling Clickbank’s products only. Amazon and eBay are perfect candidates to promote before holidays. If you missed out on all the Christmas Madness (which I talked about in the Christmas Madness post) there is always the next year, besides there are many other holidays and celebrations throughout the year such as Valentine’s Day, Halloween… and you have plenty of time to put up a few free blogs to promote gifts for these celebrations.

I’d also like to talk to you about the Boxing Day.

I ran a Christmas Sale for my list of subscribers offering my two video products at a great discount and then I thought: “Well, my blog readers deserve to take advantage of this as well” - so I am offering One Month Affiliate and Local Business Gold at $27 each instead of the regular $67.77 and $97 respectively! This boxing Day Sale start RIGHT NOW and ends on December 26th at midnight! You must use the following links to get the discount because the HOME pages of both sites offer the products at the regular price:

One Month Affiliate Boxing Day Sale - Save $40!!!

Local Business Gold Boxing Day Sale - Save $70!!!

Once again, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Alex

People are scared of scams. Not only scared, people suspect everything is a scam even if they cannot possibly be scammed… Let me explain.

My site, Extra Paycheck and my Extra Paycheck Blog get a lot of hits from Google and Yahoo while people are searching this keyword phrase: Extra-Paycheck.com Scam and to be honest this is rather amuzing to me. As you are most likely aware, the Extra-Paycheck is a free e-mail course to making money online (mostly affiliate marketing).

SCAM, at least to me, means taking people’s money and running away with it without providing promised product/service, so even if I was not delivering what I promise, I offer it 100% free - no money involved… ever! All I ask for is an e-mail address where I could send the content.

After seeing these results, I hit the Adwords Keyword Tool and did a search on many internet matketing related products, free and paid and of course, most searches came using “Product + Scam” keyword phrases. Even the big names, such as Frank Kern, Jeff Walker and many others were searched with the word “scam” at the end.

I guess people do have the right to be scpetical about certain things, but when it comes to free newsletters that only require an e-mail address - how could there possibly be a scam? What do you think about people fear of “scam”?

Yesterday I was speaking to a fellow internet marketer/blogger/friend who told me an interesting story.

His blog got a lot of hits for 3 days, he knew it because he made a lot of affiliate sales for a specific product that he only advertised on his blog. However, he could not understand why all that traffic came to his blog all of the sudden and then disappeared. When I asked him to show me some stats - he failed to do so because he was not tracking the traffic to his blog. If he did, he would have probably gained many more visitors and certainly would have made more sales.

Myself, I started tracking the stats of most of my sites and blog only a few short months ago - and this little techniques already increased my visitors and my sales by a great deal, most importantly it is very easy to use.

I use statcounter.com to track all my visitors. This web tracker is free to use and does a very decent job. Of course it does not track every visit and all the details - but I am sure paid service can’t do it either. So, you get a free account, set up a tracking code and add it to your site or blog, but what can you do with the stats?

On the image above you can see (well you can’t really see but you get the point) where the visitors came from and on which page of the site they landed. This is very helpful if you wish to know where you efforts paid off and where they didn’t. For instance, let’s say you are using a signature in a forum where you post, well these stats can show if you are getting any traffic from the forum. If you are - then you need to post more often so you could get more traffic. If you updated your Twitter 100 times but you do not see any hits from there - that means you either are not posting what people want to read or you do not have enough followers… the list goes on, and you can track where you should put more effort and what should be ditched.

This second screenshot is called “Recent Keyword Activity” and it shows what keyword was searched on which search engine in order for a visitor to end up on your page. You will be surprised about some keywords… There will be a few keyword phrases that get quite a few visitors to your page - yet you did not even suspect the existence of such keyword, let alone ranking high in the search engines for it. Once you find out the often searched keywords - you could optimize some pages and post of your blog or site, which hopefully, once again, will result in MORE free, targeted traffic.

… this is not the only information you can get when tracking your site or blog. You can also see where the visitors cames from (meaning Country, City), you can see how long they stayed on your site, which page they landed on and the last page they viewed… this could be very helpful.

If you are not tracking your efforts - you should start doing it now, because you might be wasting a lot of your valuable time on useless tasks which do not help you out in any way.

What do you think of this?

Alex