Hi Marshall and Gary here

Life is pretty hectic here at Small Business Internet Marketing.  It is amazing the number of small businesses that we come into help who do not have a website, or have a very poorly optimised website, or are having the most cost inefficient Adwords campaign run that you have ever seen.  These are generally a symptom of not having an internet strategy and doing things piecemeal.

Anyway, today it is about affiliate selling online.  As you are probably aware, affiliate selling would be one of the biggest drivers in the growth of the internet.  The fact that so many products today are available digitally mean that the owners of the products are happy to pay away large commissions to sell their product.  This is because once produced, the cost to provide the product is quite often only the bandwidth to download it.  In fact, most internet courses (you know – make $5,000 a week from home for 4 hours work) recommend that you do not deal with products that pay less than 60% commission.   Many internet marketing based offerings pay at 75% – have a look at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm and search the internet category.

Continue Reading – Undisclosed affiliate selling – how to spot it

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

One of the reasons we run the Small Business Internet Marketing blog is that there are many people in the internet marketing space that want to make you an offer too good to refuse.  But as the saying goes “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!”.  One example we look at here is whether a high search engine ranking for an article with the rarely searched keyword combination of Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret will really assist your business.

We believe that our blog offers unbiased and sensible information and advice that can really benefit small business owners, business consultants and anyone wanting to use the internet for commercial purposes.  Have a read though our older posts – you will hopefully learn a few useful internet concepts.

By far the most common “great” offers we see revolve around 2 themes:

1. Get your website built for free;  and
2. Let me drive huge amounts of traffic to your website by achieving high Google search engine rankings.

We have no problem with these offers – when all is as it seems and clearly laid out – but it rarely is.

Offer # 1:  Get a free website built

Continue Reading – The Free offers that cost you

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we are members or associates of quite a few different professional and accreditation bodies.  So we get to see a lot of communications and offers that flow around.

One that seems to be getting a lot of airtime in many organisations is the pushing of reciprocal links.  Inevitably, the message starts off with something like “Improve your Google ranking” and then goes onto to offer an exchange of reciprocal links.  Whilst we have nothing against reciprocal links as part of a well thought out internet strategy, we have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not quite understand how they work.

One of our earlier posts had a long and detailed explanation about the Google PageRank formula – see How Googles PageRank fits in. If you follow the maths, it is obvious that links from higher PageRank pages will definitely help with your web pages PageRank. 

But a couple of very important things seem to get overlooked in the rush for reciprocal links:

Continue Reading – Beware of the reciprocal link merry-go-round

Hi, Gary and Marshall here,

With the growing popularity of the business and professional social networking site LinkedIn, it was only a matter of time before another powerhouse of the web2.0 world joined forces and integrated their services.

We’re talking about the WordPress application for LinkedIn.  With the WordPress App, you can now sync your latest WordPress blog post and all its content with your LinkedIn profile.  This means you can keep everyone linked to your profile up to date with your latest business ventures.

Once you’ve loaded this WordPress App. you can filter your posts with a special LinkedIn tag and even display your personal WordPress Gravatar (global avatar) with updates sent automatically to your entire LinkedIn network.

Continue Reading – Who’s Joined LinkedIn?

“IT CAN’T BE TRUE?”

Read on and find out!

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.  As we’ve said many times before here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we constantly use our own sites as crash test dummies for many of the latest online marketing techniques.  We also put ourselves through hours, weeks and sometimes months testing the barrage of new products that hit the market.  More often than not we trash most of them as quickly as we initiate them and put it down to good ole testing for the cause.

However, we’re glad to report to you a web traffic technique that is working an absolute treat.  As usual we’re fairly sceptical of any product or service that can claim they will send you 1 million (yes that’s 1,000,000) FREE visitors to your site in as little as 30 days…. Yeah RIGHT we thought. 

I was almost ready to hit the delete button when I thought…. Ah what the heck…. give it a go….. I’ve got a spare five minutes.  Well…. I’m here to tell you, I’m glad I decided to push on a give this program a go because its kicking butt.

Now before we all get overly excited, we have not yet received our GUARANTEED 1,000,000 visitors and nor have we increased our sales by 4000%.  What I can tell you though is we are not only experiencing significantly increased visitor numbers to one of our sites, but a rather pleasant spin off.

Continue Reading – How to get free traffic

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

All sorts of interesting bits and pieces exercise our minds here at Small Business Internet Marketing. It is said that inspiration comes from the strangest places. Well, talking about online marketing and internet marketing strategies is no different.

As I was driving my son to school this morning, I saw a learner driver in front of me. The company name on the car was something like AABEC Driving Company. I jokingly said to my son “I wonder if it is still the first driver teaching company in the phone book?” He, like all 16 year old boys, looked at me as if I was some kind of demented fool.

So I had explain the strategy of choosing a business name that was one of the first in the telephone directory (white pages) or was the first listing for the business type (yellow pages). You get it – the most “A’s” and “B’s” at the front of your business name, and bingo – you are first on the alphabetic list. It is one of the original “get your name to the top of the search pile” marketing strategies in the old world.

Continue Reading – Start at the top with SEO

Hi Marshall and Gary here

As you will know if you have followed our blog, getting a high ranking in Google exercises our mind regularly at Small Business Internet Marketing and we are always on the look out on how to improve a ranking. We generally use our Small Business Internet Marketing blog as a bit of a crash test dummy to road test various strategies.

One internet marketing strategy that we have been using for the past few months that has really worked for us is Google’s Local Business Centre. What this basically does is provides more like a Yellow Pages type of listing on a Google search query result based on a geographic modifier. In simple words, if someone searches for your business and then adds your location, Google picks this up and returns a result based on information you have supplied via the Local Business Centre facility of Google.

Continue Reading – Do locals get high?