The One Year Millionaire

When it comes to Internet Marketing and Blogging I know that there are a lot of things that will determine my success. I believe that to be successful in the business you will need to make connections with other people in the business and you will need to promote your own business actively.

While a lot of Internet Marketers promote their business with PPC and other common strategies, sometimes they forget that they should also think broader and go all out! In this issue of the ‘One Year Millionaire‘ I am going to talk about Internet Marketing Forums and list the best ones. One thing I’ve learned in my time is that you can promote your site greatly just by being active on a Marketing forum and you can also build some great Backlinks as a bonus.

Here is a list of 8 Great Internet Marketing Forums:

1. www.digitalpoint.com
   If you are looking to become active on an Internet Marketing forum; whether it is to promote your own business or to learn more about the business, this is probably the best place to start looking. The community on Digital Point is very friendly and extremely helpful when it comes to new members. The forum is broken down into different sections including ‘Google Adsense‘ and ‘Link Development‘ that you could spend time to read every day!
2. www.warriorforum.com
   This forum is much like Digital Point listed above except it is not as widely known. It is still a big high trafficked forum; however, you should be cautious about how you post and behave because other users may be tough, but helpful! One thing I really like about this forum in particular is that they have a section regarding “Success” which is a topic I write a lot about.
3. www.wickedfire.com
   When it comes to Internet Marketing forums with the most style and the most outspoken members I would have to give it to Wicked Fire! Some of the members are extremely brutal when it comes to newbies on the site and the forum encourages harsh critique. This forum does seem to have a lot of great information and members who can prove that they know what they are talking about when it comes to Internet Marketing.
4. www.v7n.com
   This forum is a Web Development community that has a lot of members who discuss different things including Web Design, Web Development, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Blogging!
5. www.ewealth.com
   This is an Affiliate Marketing Forum that concentrates mostly of everything to do with Affiliate Marketing. There are different sections geared towards members of different Affiliate Networks as well as a few sections about PPC Marketing and other useful Internet Marketing topics.
6. www.highrankings.com
   This forum concentrates on Search Engine Optimization which is great because a lot of Internet Marketers need to learn more about it in order to succeed. Use this forum for everything related to SEO!
7. www.sitepoint.com
   Site Point is an awesome Web Development Forum.. It doesn’t really focus on Internet Marketing at all, but I know personally that Internet Marketing and Web Development go hand in hand when you want to succeed in this business. One thing I would like to point out is that if you are looking to buy an existing established website or blog, check out Site Point!
8. www.internetmarketingforums.net
   This Internet Marketing Forum isn’t as active as all the ones listed above, but I can still find a lot of gems here once in a while. Also since there are a lot less users on the site, if you are looking for help from others or would like to share something it will be a lot easier to get noticed; whereas on other forums, your post could get flooded to the bottom in minutes!

Remember that being active on an Internet Marketing Forum can help a lot for your website’s exposure and you can learn so much! I spend about an hour everything other day on these forums to see what is going on and I feel that if I spent more time on them that my sites would grow faster. Check out these forums!

Have you ever heard of the term “ Self Fulfilling Prophecy “? It was an old term coined by Sociologist Robert K. Merton. It is basically a prediction that may directly or indirectly cause itself to become valid.

“The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come ‘true’. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.”

In this case, our original false conception is that it is near impossible for an average person with little knowledge of business to become a millionaire. If you say to yourself ” I don’t think I can become a Millionaire… “ then there is a high chance that you will not. Not only is the law of the Self Fulfilling Prophecy standing in front of you, but also your weak ambition. Success and Failure is a game of “ifs” and “buts”, nothing is certain and all you can try to do is increase your odds at winning. If you don’t believe in yourself, then you are already predicting your failure. Turn the tables around now. ” I believe that becoming a millionaire is within my reach! “. You may not just suddenly “Become a Millionaire”, but you will gradually see improvements in your work, your attitude and your life.

Go ahead and apply this theory to Internet Marketing. 9/10 Internet Marketers fail (or give up) because they either don’t have the time to put in work, they don’t know what they are doing, or they don’t truly believe that they can make it!

I have already stated several times that there are tons of ways to Make Money Online. There is Ad Publishing, Freelancing, Selling Products, Selling Services, and Affiliate Marketing. These are all extremely broad topics which cover many different Money Making Opportunities! Before you tell yourself that “Affiliate Marketing” isn’t for you, give it a shot! Most Affiliate Marketing programs have no startup costs so there is nothing to lose! When I started Internet Marketing I focused on one Business Model: “Make Money with Google AdSense” and I didn’t really make any serious cash. Once I started to diversify my work… the money started coming in!

In a work field where success depends completely on you and your own production: sky is the limit! If you work a boring 9 to 5 job at $12/hour then you can calculate how much money you can make on any given work week provided that your schedule is constant. When you step into a world of business like “Internet Marketing”, all your boundaries disappear and it is up to you to make it happen. The best thing about it is that there is no salary cap for your work!

If you want to be an Online Millionaire, you have to think like an Online Millionaire! In the end it could just be your Self Fulfilling Prophecy.

Have you ever stumbled onto a brilliant offer that you wanted to promote using your Internet Marketing tactics and after a day or two with no results just decided to give up on it? If you answered yes… then you could have possibly missed the chance at earning a lot of money online! In fact, it is quite possible that with the time you wasted and money spent that you have been losing money this whole time!

This is what we know:

• There are thousands of people purchasing products on the internet and probably half of them are products that people don’t even need.
• You can sometimes get lucky and sell a product with a horrible landing or sales page.
• What works today may not work tomorrow.
• There is tons of Money to be made on the internet!

Now that we have the facts… what do we do with it?

If I know that I am promoting a product/service/offer that can convert into big money and I don’t see results within the first 24 hrs I don’t just start panicking! I try and decide why it isn’t working so well and then I work on it to optimize it for maximum profits.

There are 3 things that are standing in your way when it comes to Marketing Affiliate products. Here they are:

Impressions
This is how many people are seeing the ads that you set up to bring readers to the landing page/sales page. This is usually in form of a banner or possibly PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. The best way to get a lot of impressions is to increase your traffic if you are displaying banners on your website or to bid higher for PPC ads!

Clicks
Let’s say that you have thousands of impressions and almost no clicks. You obviously know that something is wrong in the way that the ad appears. If you are using a banner on your website then it could be the banner’s placement and look that cause the problem. If you are running a PPC Campaign then it could be the “Title/Headline“,”Body Text“, even the “Display URL“! Keep testing these out to see how they work!

Conversions (Sales/Leads)
If you have a high CTR (Click Through Rate) then you know it isn’t a problem with traffic and clicks but something that lies in your actual sales/landing page! Some products/offers are just known to convert and usually Affiliate Networks will tell you how well they convert so you know your best bets! Obviously this isn’t always the case and sometimes it just isn’t that easy! If you optimize your landing pages to perfection then you are bound to Make Money!

If I am spending $0.50 per click, promoting a product that I can make $20 per sale, and my conversion rate is 5%. Then that means I am actually only making $10 per sale. If the sales or landing page is really bad then that it still really great.. it is even greater because you know that if you improve the sales page you will get higher conversions and Make a lot More Money! Feel free to check out an older article written about “Writing Flawless Sales Pages”!

One thing to keep in mind is that the “Research and Testing” process can take a while. Don’t ever just give up after a day and say that an offer isn’t working well. You haven’t given it a chance to show you how much money it can make for you! Sometimes it will take weeks to even gather enough data and statistics to even be able to tell how well something will do.

You should always take the time to keep an eye on your offers and try not to be too quick to pull one off the table!

I remember looking back a couple of years ago when surfers didn’t look so carefully at a web site’s URL before clicking a link to it. All of today’s browsers will show you the exact URL of a website on the bottom left corner of the window when you hover over a link. Many webmasters are using affiliate marketing to earn extra revenue to either make some money online or even just to cover their web site’s expenses. The problem is that anyone who has been using the internet for more than a couple days will be able to tell the difference between an affiliate URL and a normal one and nobody likes to buy a product if they know that the webmaster who sent you there will be making money from it!

The reason that people avoid clicking these links is because if they think you are an affiliate pushing a product they know that you are going to try to make it look good no matter what! This means that even if it provides useless information, outdated ideas or re-hashed material that you will still be vouching for it! I don’t know about you but I would think twice (or even three times) before I purchase something that I found through an affiliate link. This brings us to the topic at hand, cloaking your affiliate links!

Link Cloaking is basically the process of disguising your links so that surfers don’t necessarily know what they are being linked to. This is usually used for the purpose of hiding the fact that a link on your site is actually an affiliate link that you are making money from! The benefits of hiding it are listed below.

The simplest reason to cloak your links is to make your link much more appealing to potential clickers! If they don’t have fear of an affiliate marketer trying to scam them then the chances that they buy a product or even just click the link become greater! Surfers could just Bypass your Affiliate Link and go directly to the site that is selling the product and you will lose out on the commission! The second reason you will want to cloak your links is to make sure that the search engines do not penalize you for passing on PR to those websites. The reason that you signed up and registered to become an affiliate was to promote their products and make some cash, it wasn’t so that you could give them free backlinks to boost their Page Rank! The final reason that I think it is best to cloak your links is because it prevents hackers from hi-jacking your links and stealing your commissions!

Since I know a lot of people out there may not know everything there is about the internet and how to make changes to htaccess that is generally for advanced webmasters I will just explain the simplest way to cloak a URL: by using a cloaking service!

If you want to increase your chances of collecting bigger affiliate commissions then think about using a cloaking service. They are offered for free at compacturl.com and tinyurl.com! I know there are probably a bunch of others, but these two seem to be very popular and easy to use.

You can also cloak links manually by using a technique which displays a full page frame in your html page. The process is pretty simple but you need to know a little bit of basic html to do it. All you have to do is create a new .html or .php page and write a small amount of code in the of the page. It is easy to do and isn’t messy. For an HTML page use this:

< html>
< head>
< meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; URL=http://affiliatelink.com/affiliatelink”>
< /meta>< /head>
< /html>

or if you are using PHP you can paste use this:

$url =”http://affiliatelink.com/affiliatelink”;
header(”Location: $url”);
exit();
?>

So as you can see, it isn’t too difficult to cloak your affiliate URLs so that you can make the most out of them! Try it out and try to monitor the resulting change from before and after you made the change! I am sure that your conversions will be much higher thanks to a few lines of code!

In the next issue of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘ I am going to take a look at an easy way to gain more exposure for your blog: Pinging!

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