Getting started with a business is a very difficult process. The average entrepreneur only has a very limited amount of time during the day in which they can work on their business. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of startup businesses fail within their first year.

Most entrepreneurs fail at what they do because they simply don’t take the time to draw out a business plan. If you’re going to build a business you absolutely have to create an effective business plan. Starting an online business is no exception. If you are reading this because you are desperately trying to start your own online business then today might be you’re lucky day. Today I am going to share with you a surefire plan to get your online business off of the ground.

The first thing you are going to need to do is to uncover some sort of problem or need within a target market. This is your market research phase. You’ll need to spend some time hanging out in forums, discussion groups, and networking sites to get a feel for your target market.

A target market is anything like pet owners, single working moms, archery enthusiasts, artists, etc. Just about every target market you can think of has some kind of online community. After you have spent some time studying a target market online you will eventually discover some kind of common problem or need. If you decided to target artists, for example, you might discover that many artists have a hard time seeking out employment and this could be a problem you could try to solve.

Once you have discovered a common problem within a target market you will have actually completed the most difficult step. The next step will be to find information that helps solve this problem. Your ultimate goal is to put together an information product that solves the problem you discovered within your target market. Selling information online is fantastically profitable and owning your very own information product  is best way to start making real money on the internet.

If you did indeed discover that artists commonly had problems finding employment you would then start digging up information that helped them find employment. The trick would be to find out how artists seeking employment can find employers who want to hire them. By doing a little more research you could easily uncover such information. This information would then become your product. You know exactly what your target market needs and so selling your product would be easy.

Many online entrepreneurs are scared to create information products because they are not very good writers. Admittedly, it does help to have a writing background but not being able to write very well should not stop you from creating your own information product. There are many highly skilled writers online who can write your own information product for you. All you have to do in most cases is provide them with the necessary research.

There will always be people who have problems and these people will always be willing to pay for information that promises to solve that problem. Selling information online is the best and easiest way to start an online business. Best of all, creating and marketing information products is sustainable business model that can easily build you a fortune if done correctly. Once you have a great online business plan mapped out, you’ll need hosting. We recommend TSEL(EN) for the most powerful and best value-for-money hosting available, specifically for internet marketers.

So I wake up early in the morning and while preparing my hot cappuccino, I get excited wondering where my websites are ranking on the search engines with those new keywords today. I turn on my computer, log in to my Advanced Web Ranking account and go directly to my ranking charts… Believe me, there’s no better feeling than watching those graphs displaying my website ranking higher every day.

While I’m there, with a click of a button, I also get to spy on my competition and see what keywords they are trying to rank for. Sometimes I discover they are trying to rank for the same keywords I am. Now I can make an informed decision whether I should keep trying to rank for these keywords or simply try some new ones. Anyway, it’s so easy to find profitable, easy to rank keywords with this search engine ranking software!

First Thing’s First… Find The Right Keywords!

Since keyword research is the most important thing you should do before trying to rank your websites high on the search engines, the first thing I do is find the right keywords. In the old days, I used to do this manually and it was, well, time consuming and tedious! It was plain boring. Today, I use Advanced Web Ranking tools that makes things easy and fun. For example, I use the Keyword Research tool to find these excellent keywords that people use a lot to search for the products and services I’m promoting on my websites.

That’s the great thing about Advanced Web Ranking because it integrates so many tools in one place like Google Suggest and Wordtracker which are considered industry standard keyword research tools. This makes keyword research exciting! Before using this program, I had to do everything manually and believe me, it takes days to do the same thing Advanced Web Ranking does in hours.

There’s another tool I use a lot, the Keyword Builder. If I find, through the other tools, a good keyphrase I want to target, I use the Keyword Builder to find lots of other possible combinations.

Now that I got all the keywords I want to rank for, to further optimize my on-page SEO, I use the Keyword Analyzer tool to find the right keyword density and occurrences in the anchor texts. I can also analyze and compare my sites with my competition and know exactly what to do to outrank them on the search engines.

Show Your Website To The World!

Ok, what do website owners and webmasters want MOST for their websites and blogs? TRAFFIC! That’s right, without traffic, your website is dead. The best way to get traffic to any website or blog is through the search engines. Period! So now that I got my websites optimized, I have to let the search engines know they exist.

What I do is let the search engine robots and spiders that crawl the web find my website so it gets indexed as fast as possible. For this to happen, I have to submit my sites to all the search engines possible. Many people say that Google, Yahoo and Bing are enough, well, too bad for them and great for me! That’s precisely why I also like to submit my sites to about 400 other search engines out there that people actually use. These have the least competition so I have better chances of getting traffic from these too. I see it this way, I simply have to take advantage of every single opportunity that produces traffic to my sites.

Advanced Web Ranking includes a very user-friendly search engine submitter that facilitates the task of submitting my websites and blogs to the 400+ search engines I talked to you about a few seconds ago so this is a very easy job that will help me get more traffic.

Another thing I like to do is find other webmasters that have websites with content relevant to mine and trade links. If you check the PR5 at the homepage of this blog you’re reading, it’s thanks to a link partner that has a PR6 Website. Before trading links with this website, I had a PR of 2 and was ranking pretty well on some keywords but after Google upgrading my PR to 5, I began to rank with a lot more keywords I didn’t even know about. That’s how important it is to find valuable link partners.

To make this job easy, I use another awesome program called Advanced Link Manger.

With this tool, I do several things:

1. I find the inbound links of the websites ranking in the top 5 places on the search engines. I’ll obviously try to negotiate a link from the same websites as well.
2. I’m able to keep track of the link popularity of my websites and blogs by finding all the inbound links to see what others are writing about my sites and what anchor texts they are using.
3. I schedule the task of gathering all important information of the inbound link prospects before I negotiate trading links with them. Information such as domain age and page rank is gathered in the scheduled task during the night so when I wake up to prepare my cappuccino, I have my reports warm and ready to analyze.

It is very important for me to have valuable link partners and one way inbound links to my blogs and websites and this awesome link manager software makes this job a breeze.

Where’s my Website Ranking?

Remember I told you at the beginning of this review that the first thing I do when I wake up early in the morning, while preparing my delicious cappuccino, is check my website ranking charts? Well, this is the part I like BEST because I can see all my websites and blogs climbing steeply all the way to the top of the search engines. The awesome thing is that I get to see this in a graphical way for every keyword, search engine and website.

I also schedule these tasks to be done at nights and have my reports ready in the mornings. These reports have become my morning newspaper with a big difference: I get to see many more GOOD NEWS than bad. Bad news? Yes, website rankings sometimes drop and it’s normal but guess what? Advanced Web Ranking always has the right tools to take immediate action and revert that bad news to good news which would be bringing those rankings back up.

I added some of my family blogs to this program and the beauty of this is that they (my family) receive these same reports on their email too all on autopilot! Why do I mention this? Because if you have (or want to start) an SEO business, Advanced Web Ranking Enterprise is what you need. You’ll want to take it to the next level bundling it with Advanced Link Manager Enterprise. Your SEO customers would be so informed and happy with you, believe me! (psst, and remember, all reports are done automatically and on autopilot!). Even if you have customers on the other side of the world, no worries, each project can use a different proxy integrated with Advanced Web Ranking and they’ll get the report results they can check using their country browsers.

Conclusion

The combination of Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager is ALL you need to have much more information than you ever thought possible. Now you’ll be able to make the right decision at the right moment.

The monitoring chart system combined with data tables and ranking visibility gives you an overview of the *BIG PICTURE* and allows you to see where your websites and blogs stand.

Whatever you need to do to improve your rankings, these program have the right tool for you.

Both programs are constantly being updated to keep up with the search engine changes.

Whether you have one website or blog you want to rank with the right keywords or you have an SEO business with hundreds of client websites, these programs are robust enough to handle the job.

I’d easily pay more than twice the list price for these babies because they simply OVERDELIVER.

Whatever grading system you’re used to, I give both programs an A+ or a 10!

Many experienced internet marketing professionals list autoresponders as their must have internet marketing tool. An autoresponder is a prewritten email message that is delivered to a prospect after they have opted in to receive certain information from you. Autoresponders are primarily designed to turn prospects into sales and a series of autoresponder messages essentially works on autopilot. Autoresponders allow you to automate your internet business and build your all important list for you while you sleep.

It is well known that most people who visit a website do not end up making a purchase on their first visit. If you can capture the email address of each visitor to your website, you can eventually turn many more of your uninterested web visitors into paying customers. Skilled internet marketers understand that capturing their visitors email address is vitally important to the success of their business. This is why many internet marketers offer some kind of free information in exchange for their visitors email address. The free information is almost always delivered automatically by means of an autoresponder service.

Once a visitor has opted in to receive information they are typically added to the website owner’s mailing list. By adding the visitor to your mailing list it becomes possible to make unlimited follow ups with the prospect unless of course they unsubscribe from your mailing list. After the free information has been delivered to a prospect a series of autoresponder messages typically will follow that are designed to bring the visitor back to the original website. Studies have shown that it takes an average of 7 follow up messages to turn a prospect into a paying customer. This is precisely why a good autoresponder will typically contain at least 7 messages.

Autoresponders are surprisingly easy to set up, even if you are one of those people who happen to be freaked out by technology. If you are using an autoresponder service like Aweber.com you can set up an autoresponder with no knowledge of programming required. Aweber is one of the best autoresponder services in the business as they allow you to build unlimited lists for just $19.95 a month. In addition, Aweber’s customer service is exceptional and you can chat with a live representative during the day time. Aweber’s creators understood the needs of newbies and designed their service to be easy to use by newbie internet marketers.

There’s no point using an autoresponder tool however if you don’t have proper business intelligence in place. You’d be wasting your money otherwise, frankly.

That said, it’s entirely possible to make a small fortune with just an autoresponder and a website. Once you start drawing traffic to your website your autoresponder will build your list and convert more of your traffic into paying customers. An autoresponder is essentially a must have tool for any truly serious marketer and is well worth the small monthly price tag.

In real estate there is a saying that property selling is all about “location, location, location.” In the world of internet marketing and ecommerce it’s all about “traffic, traffic, traffic.” It doesn’t matter what you’re product offering is or how nice your website looks unless you have a plan to get traffic. You need traffic to succeed in this business and the more traffic you get the more money you will be able to make.

The trouble is that many would be internet marketers simply don’t take the time to draw out a plan to get traffic. There are several ways to get traffic to your website that won’t cost you much of anything.

Trading links with other similar or related websites is a great way to increase the volume of traffic to your website. Generally speaking, the more reciprocal links a website contains the more authority is given to that website in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).

The higher the authority of your webpage, the more traffic you will receive. Most experienced webmasters understand the importance of exchanging links and are therefore more than eager to share links with other webmasters. You can actually find link exchanges all over the internet by performing a simple search. Most link exchanges are free to use although some do charge a small membership fee.

Blogs have become increasingly popular over the years and many internet surfers only search for blogs when doing a search for information. Blogs have become popular because they are considered trusted sources of information, much more so than commercialized websites.

Starting a blog related to the theme of your website will draw traffic and direct them to your main website. By far the best choice for your business blog is Wordpress which is free and can be installed directly into a sub directory within your website’s domain. Social bookmarking is all the rage right now and having a blog will allow you to more easily take advantage of social bookmarking traffic.

Online forums are great places to network and meet other people who share your common interests. What many people don’t know is that forums are also great places to bring targeted traffic to your website. Before you can start using forums to pull in traffic to your website you’ll first have to find a forum that is relevant to the theme of your website. Most forums allow you to receive traffic by permitting you to use a signature file within each of your posts. Your signature file contains a link that directs people to your website. Like link exchanges and blogs, most forums a free to join.

If you’re looking for the most effective way of getting traffic, you’ll need AdWords Keyword advice and go down the PPC route.

If you’ve ever been interested in the blackhat, albeit rather pointless art of artificially increasing your Alexa count, here’s a method that our local internet marketing buddy dropped in to teach us. Take in away David!

THE FIRST APPROACH – iFrames.

< iframe src=”http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.YOURSITEHERE.com“ width=”1” height=1” >< /iframe >

And it’s as freakin’ simple as that (remove spaces from inbetween tags). Everyone who visits the page where the iframe is embedded counts (in the eyes ofAlexa) as an Alexa toolbar hit. But why stop there when there are so many more ways to game the system? Blackhat as hell? Sure, but if everyone BESIDES you is doing it, it’s nothing more than the industry standard.

The iFrame may slow down loading times slightly, so place it right at the end of your “body” tag as to not cause content loading delays. The pixel height and width are set at 1×1 in order to make the frame practically invisible as not to arouse suspicion or generate interest as to what the little box is doing there. Only somebody viewing your source code should notice it. You’d be surprised at how many of the high-rank sites on Alexa are using the tactic.

THE SECOND AVENUE – Proxy Scripts.

Go and visit a gazillion-and-one proxies using the Alexa toolbar. Waste an afternoon doing crappy manual labor, constant refreshing and trawling through proxy lists. But WHY? Using proxy scripts that retail for $10-$40, you can get little pieces of software which load up lists of proxies and bombard Alexa on autopilot.

I’m testing out five or six of these little applications on my desktop right now as I type this and over the past few days I’ve seen spikes as high as 60,000 on one of the site’s I’m testing. Was I to run the scripts non-stop, 24 hours a day I’m sure that I could quite easily bump this up to 30 or even 20,000.

I won’t be naming names of software used for the purpose of testing here, however a few well-planned Google searches should hand you all you need. Make sure to only purchase software product that offer a moneyback guarantee as I can attest to the fact that around 60% of the programs I tried didn’t work at all. Perhaps once upon a time, but algorithms change… baby!

THE THIRD ADVANCE – Redirection.

Using the meta-tag code for your pages on your site, you can effectively route any visitors through the Alexa link and then back onto your site. Quite simply – how? Glad you asked… After the title tag in your “head” section, just put in this code.

< META http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;URL= http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.YOURSITEHERE.com/” >

This can be done in a variety of different ways, including using JavaScript, an embedded flash application (not recommended in event of visitor not having required components installed) or through cookies. I prefer the meta approach to it’s simplicity. It works in the same way as the iFrame assault, apart from instead of opening an embedded hidden window, the whole browser re-directs through the alexa linkback. You can use it in tandem with the iFrame tactic for a double-whammy on Alexa. All you need to do is feed in a tonne of proxy traffic and you just generated yourself one helluva ranking.

Trust me. It works. That said, there honestly is NO need to artificially boost your Alexa rank. It has NO value at all. It’s a fun little tool that webmasters look at when they right blog posts to slag off their competition. It’s an annoying little graph that changes sporadically and unexpectedly, giving you spikes on low-traffic days and flat lines on some of the busiest traffic days you come to see. It’s an infuriating “tracking” program that at the best of times fails you outright.

Alexa is worthless, and Amazon will love me for saying it. Take the rankings and ratings with a grain of salt and try only to use it when showing how your superior blackhat gaming skills are getting you rocket-fuel chart positions in comparison to your brother-in-law’s measley 9,455,234 score. Muhahahaha!

Alexa just got MAULED. Use these tactics at your own risk.

Internet marketing has emerged as a fantastic means of generating passive income. Internet marketing allows ordinary individuals to apply basic marketing techniques to the internet and ultimately generate a profit. In contrast to a brick and mortar business, internet marketing has very low barriers to entry and relatively little risk. However, in order to succeed with internet marketing it’s still necessary to understand the basic rules that govern the internet marketing process. Failure to grasp these rules could lead to total disaster.

While internet marketing has relatively little associated risk relative to other kinds of investments, it’s important to understand that there still is some risk involved. This is true even if you are following a ‘cookie cutter’ internet marketing strategy outlined in an ebook. Things on the internet have a way of changing very rapidly and what works extremely well one day could be completely ineffective the next.

With the internet marketing the risk of failure is actually very high. However, the costs associated with that failure are notoriously low (unless you don’t have proper adwords keyword advice in which case you may lose out big, should you use PPC). Generally though, it’s cheap to try and if you fail initially, you can try many different things without going completely bankrupt. Whatever you do, don’t let a single failure discourage you as there are arguably thousands of different internet marketing models to experiment with.

You can substantially reduce your risk and overall monetary losses by testing your business first before committing more resources. Suppose you were interested in selling wholesale physical goods on Ebay (a very good business model incidentally). Before purchasing huge amounts of merchandise and hoping that you sell them for a profit you should instead evaluate the market place and run several test auctions first. Ebay currently allows you to run an unlimited number of test auctions at very little cost. If you are planning on making a killing with information products, it would be a good idea to start by writing articles first and then testing to see how much traffic you are able to generate.

Knowing how to minimize your losses and leave a market is called an exit strategy. Even if your test marketing is successful, it’s still a good idea to have an exit strategy in place before you commit your time and resources. Returning to the example of the Ebay business, an exit strategy would consist of a plan to liquidate all merchandise if need be. In order to do this you would need to learn the minimum price you could obtain for each item which would in turn give you an idea of what your losses would actually be. Remember that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.