If there was one thing I could change in the past, it would be that I wish I had started internet marketing sooner, knew the information I know now, and had initially taken it more seriously.

In case you haven’t already noticed, internet marketing is completely different from regular jobs. The only similarity between the two is that they are both ways to make a living.

One major difference is timing. Internet marketing is moving forward by leaps and bounds. I’ve heard comparisons that say one year in the internet business is the equivalent to five years in the regular business world. That’s how fast internet marketing is moving. It also shows that there’s no better time to start internet marketing than today, not tomorrow.

By starting today you’re already one-step ahead of everyone who starts internet marketing tomorrow or later. If you can’t start today, think of when you can start then look at that date on a calendar and think of how much information you would know by that time if you started today.

If internet marketing has taught me one thing, it is to jump on an opportunity as soon as I see it. Here’s my view: If I know of an opportunity and I decide to delay it for a month, when I do get started, I see myself as being a month behind. That’s a month’s worth of income lost, not to mention the possible ideas I would have missed by not starting sooner.

So if you’re teeter-tottering with starting today or tomorrow, do yourself a huge favor and start today. You might see it as eating dinner 30 minutes later, missing your favorite tv show, or skipping the trip to the grocery store; but I see it as you missing out on an opportunity that could change your life forever because you were hungry, bored, or in a rush.

Ok, I know we have all seen them. You go to a website, look at the product, hit the back button and you get two windows that popup. The first window is an alert window telling you to stay on the page and the second window is a pop-up chat with automated text offering you a discounted offer.

I’m not saying that all pop-up chats are bad, just the ones that pop-up/appear when you’re attempting to leave the site.

Here’s a picture of one of these pop-up chats:

So why are these pop-up chats a bad thing? Don’t they save the sale?

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t recommend these chat windows, and just so you know…I’ve actually used them in the past so I’m speaking from both a user and a visitor’s experience (I don’t use them anymore).

1) They may save the sale for the merchant, but not for you. When I had this service they asked me how I wanted to give credit for the sale. They gave me three options:

1. They would remove the affiliate cookie so I would get full commission
2. They would replace the affiliate cookie with their own so they would get the sale (and I wouldn’t be required to pay for their service…they would be paid in saved sales commissions)
3. They would leave the cookie alone and would give the sale(s) to the affiliate that earned it.

So the first reason is, depending on the merchant you’re dealing with…you may or may not get credit for the sale. I know of several merchants who have used this software and had the affiliate cookie removed.

2) These popup windows are annoying. When you attempt to leave a website, it’s annoying to be prevented from doing so. It would be one thing if it just prompted you to stay, but it’s another thing to make you read their alert windows so you can actually leave their site.

3) They are strictly against Google and MSN’s terms of service. If you’re an affiliate an you promote a site that has these popup windows, then your advertisement is against their terms of service and it will be disabled as soon as they realize this. These popup chat windows break the following terms – No popup windows on site and the visitor must be able to easily get back to the original search page from the destination page in one click.
So, these are some of the reasons why I don’t recommend promoting websites that use these popup windows.

In case you’re wondering, I told them to give credit to the Affiliates and I also only had the popup window activate when people exited from the “Download” page this way the website wasn’t breaking any search engine terms since the popup wasn’t activated on the destination page.

Most of you have probably already assumed this, but some of you may have not. Since ClickBank offers a lot of different seasonal products I thought it would be best to explain how to recognize a seasonal product and how to make more money from it.

First off, a seasonal product is any type of product that has a peak sales period in the year. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the product won’t sell at any other time of the year (although this can happen).

One good way to find out if a product’s seasonal or not is to use common sense. If you’re selling a product on birds, remember that this product won’t sell well at all in the winter because birds hibernate. This is also true with most wild animal or outdoors products. You should also know that entertainment type product sell best during the holiday season, while make money product sell best before and after the holiday season (go figure).

If you can’t figure out if the product you’re promoting is seasonal or not based on the product theme, another good way to see if it’s seasonal or not is to look at the trends. To view the product trends I recommend using Google’s Trend tool http://www.google.com/trends
Below is a picture of three trends.

The blue trend is for the keyword “hummingbird”. You can see that hummingbird searches peak in the summer months, but decline in the winter months. This means you will make the most money with humming bird products in summer.

The red trends is for the keyword “skunk”. You can see that this subject is searched steadily year round, which means that this type of product will make consistent profits year round.

The orange trend is for “copy dvd”. You can see that this subject is searched most often during the holiday season, meaning that you will make the highest profits during winter.

So incase you haven’t realized it yet I did the Bum marketing experiment in the past…6 months ago to be exact. So here are my results from November 2007 to May 2008.

I wrote 5 different articles all on a subject I’m familiar with so the content would be valuable enough so the readers would click through to the URL provided. 4 of the articles were accepted, but 1 article would not be accepted no matter how hard I tried (I still don’t know why they wouldn’t accept it).

The articles were viewed 1,006 times and of those viewers 134 of them were interested enough to actually visit the website. Of the 134 visitors 16 came from EzineArticles.com website and the rest came from Google searchers. Out of all the visitors I made 1 sale, which is normal for Google Money Pro’s conversion rate (it usually converts 1:100 – 1:200 visitors).
So does it work? Yes, it definitely works.

Is it worth it? Maybe…then again maybe not.
Even though I did manage to make one sale, it took me 5 hours of work to get that. Because of this, it didn’t make this worth my time, but it was interesting to see how everything works. If you have zero resources to invest then this may be a good way to start your internet marketing ventures. Also, as with most things, if you keep working at it you will learn how to become better and more profitable with the strategies. I definitely think that if you worked very hard at this you would be able to make $100 per week, but I think that $1,000 per month would be stretching it for just about anyone.

So I decided to give Bum marketing a try just to see what type of results you can get. Most Bum marketing guides give you a few different “Article Websites” to use for various search engines. I mainly wanted to target Google.com since they are the biggest and the article website Google likes best is EzineArticles.com.

I decided I would try to write articles on Google AdWords and see if any of the articles produce a sale for my ebook. Since my ebook Google Money Pro isn’t cheap, it would give me a good idea of the quality of traffic coming from this technique.
Step 1) Finding The Keywords
Finding the right keywords to use with Bum marketing was more tricky that I thought. Yes, Google loves EzineArticles.com, but only enough to rank your article on the first page of Google search results if there are less than 10,000 pages found by Google for that particular keyword. This was a bit tricky for me since there are a lot of articles about Google AdWords. The hardest part was to find keywords that gave less than 10,000 webpage results but gave enough traffic to make a sale. The technique I used to find these keywords was a combination of WordTracker and Google’s Keyword Tool. Most of the guides recommended purchasing a tool to find the keyword for you, but I wanted to do the whole thing for free. I mean, isn’t that what Bum marketing is about?

My technique for finding the keywords was a balance between WordTracker’s free tool and Google’s Keyword Tool. I would use both tools to find keywords to use, then I would use Google’s Traffic Estimates tool to estimate the number of searches in the USA, because my article would be in the USA search results. Overall it took me about 2 hours to find 5 keywords to use. At the end I was wishing that I had bought the keyword tool the guides recommended. I think that if I seriously pursued this, I would have found a good technique for locating the keywords more quickly.
Step 2) Writing The Articles
This is another tricky part of this technique. This part requires writing a good article centered around the keyword you chose. But it has to be more than 250 words, convince the reader to click on the link to view your product, give accurate information, and be solely about the keyword you’re using.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention if the keyword you chose is used too much in your article then your article will be rejected by EzineArticles.com and Google won’t give you a very high ranking.

So my technique for this was to keep my keyword within the 10-15% range, meaning that 10-15% of the words in my article would be or be similar to the keyword of my choice.

It probably took me about 20 minutes to write the article and about 5 minutes to get a good title. You want your title to contain your keyword and make people want to read your article. The title of your article will be what people will see on Google. This sounds easy, but it can be a little tricky if your keyword is “AdWord Google Profit”.

Once I completed the two steps above I submitted my article for review and waited for it to be accepted by EzineArticles.com

So far I had spent about 5 hours total on Bum marketing. This includes writing the articles, developing a strategy, and finding the keywords to use.
My next post about Bum marketing will give the results of my experiment.

Probably not, but maybe some of you have. Basically bum marketing is a technique used to get free quality traffic to a website or product. There is a lot of information on bum marketing online and most of it is accurate, although some of it is inaccurate.

First, I’ll give you the no-fluff background information of bum marketing. Bum marketing techniques get all the traffic from Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but unlike most SEO techniques, you don’t use your own website. Basically you use article/directory websites which are websites where people write articles on various subjects so they can get noticed, have their article used in a reputable website, or get free traffic from the article.

Here’s how it works. Google and other search engines like high content websites, and these article websites contain thousands of different articles on various subject, so of course the search engines love them. So the idea is you write an article for a very specific subject and the search engine then lists your article at the top of the search results for the main keyword covered in your subject. This will generate traffic for your article. Your article’s purpose then is to convince your readers to click on the link at the bottom of your article to visit a product that you recommend.
So I started reading articles on Bum Marketing and got a general idea of how it works and I decided to give it a try to see if it’s worth everything people are promoting it to be. After all people are claiming to be making $200+ per day by doing this. So over the next few days I will post my experiences with bum marketing and I will tell you my strategy as well as my results.

In the past one of the big pay per click advertising strategies was to use common misspelled keywords. The idea was that while some advertisers were paying big bucks for first page positions for the most popular keywords, they were leaving the misspelled versions of those keywords untouched. This meant advertising using common misspellings of the keyword(s) was a new niche.

So does this still work?
Yes and no. First off, there are hundreds of ways you can misspell any word and attempting to find the correct misspelling is as hard as finding a new keyword niche yourself. Also, a majority of the search engines now automatically re-direct a misspelled keyword search to the correct spelled version without telling the web surfer. There are a few exceptions, like very common misspellings are still not corrected by the search engines, but they are common enough misspellings that most advertisers already have ads on them.

Generally when I’m creating a keyword list, I don’t use any misspelled versions of the keywords (unless they are very common misspellings). I feel that if your text ad contains misspelled words it can make your product look unprofessional, plus I don’t want to fill my keyword lists with hundreds of misspelled words. Probably the best search engines to try this technique on currently are the smaller search

Recently it’s been a popular email to receive that you can get ads on Google AdWords for free. Since many people have been emailing me asking me about this, I decided to write a small post about it.

The truth is that unless Google gives you a credit or a free advertising voucher (they don’t freely hand these out), there is no way for you to get Google Ads for free. All the products and ebooks that tell you that they receive Google Ads for free are a little inaccurate.

Basically, here’s how these products tell you to get Google Ads for free…

First off, you have to own the website you’re advertising otherwise this doesn’t work at all. If you own a website, but can’t update specific sections of the website you’re advertising this won’t work either.

Secondly, they don’t tell you how to prevent Google from charging you for your advertisements on AdWords. You still pay Google every penny for your advertising costs.

Since you now know this, you’re probably wondering “how do they get Google Ads for free?”. Basically, their theory is that if you sell enough advertising on your website by displaying banners, text advertisements, links, etc. you will make enough money from those advertisements to offset your advertising costs on Google.

It will work, but their technique is a little vague on their website. Using this theory I can advertise Google Money Pro as “Get Google Ads Free” and just say something like “you will get Google Ads free by making enough money by selling products to cover your Google fees”.

The current real ways to get free Google advertising are either by getting a Google coupon from Google themselves, Getting a Google Coupon from a Google Advertising Professional, or by getting an AdWords Credit from Google if they overcharge your account for fraudulent clicks.

More and more people seem to be producing their own products promising success online. Although I’m sure that some of these products are genuine a lot of them are most likely scams or just people trying to slap stuff together without actually knowing how to succeed online.

A good way to stop these out is see if they offer proof screenshots. First off, you should know that proof screenshots can easily be edited to look like they are genuine so when examining the validity of these products you should take a close look at their proof pictures.

Here’s what you should do to see if the proof pictures have been edited:

• See if the sales figures added together match the total amount displayed (if not, see if there’s an explanation).
• Make sure the dates are all accurate.
• If it’s a proof check, make sure the dollar amount equals what is written on the check.
• See if the picture is blurry, unclear, or of poor quality.
  Also, if they are selling a product that claims to show you how to make money every single day through a steady and reliable traffic source, then their proof pictures should show steady and consistent daily income levels. If there are two days with $300 in sales and then one day with $2,400 in sales there’s a 99% chance that person send an email blast telling people to purchase their product.

  Usually, if the website or service offers a video proof of their income level then you should know that it’s valid and accurate.

  Here is an example of a fake proof picture as well as a proof picture displaying an email lauch.