The Internet has become an abundant well of opportunities for individuals interested in starting their own business from the comfort of their homes. It is difficult to imagine living our lives without the Internet and the services it provides for us, and because we are at such ease with using it, we may overlook the fact that it takes certain kinds of skills to efficiently run an online business. Just like specific knowledge and experience are needed to be a successful offline entrepreneur, your online business may throw unexpected challenges at you, as you strive to stay on top in the ever-evolving online marketing world. In fact, an affiliate marketer’s training is never truly finished, as new tools and online mediums are constantly being developed. Let us imagine that you have a brilliant idea and you’re planning to start a website or blog – but what kind of knowledge will bring unquestionable value to your project?

1. SEO skills

Unless you’re already a celebrity, it is practically impossible to succeed with a blog or website without good search engine optimization to boost your rankings within search engine results. Studies have indicated that over 80% of internet users, that end up purchasing a product or service, start off by performing search engine queries. This means that you could be missing out on a huge number of potential buyers if you do not implement a smart SEO strategy for your website. Major search engines like Google and Bing use social media websites (such as Facebook and Twitter) to establish rankings, so a strong social media presence is an absolute must. Other components of a SEO strategy include relevant, quality content, keyword research, conversion optimization, tag and meta-tag optimization, social bookmarking and directory submissions, XML Sitemap feed creation, backlinking and many more.

2. Understanding Web Analytics

There are two ways of performing web analytics: one (off-site) is to look at the internet as a whole, with the intention of measuring potential audiences, visibility and buzz (what people talk about the most, what the trends are); the second (on-site) implies looking at a user’s actions once they land on your website. You’d be observing conversion rates, click rates, impressions and your website’s overall performance in accordance with key indicators to determine a campaign’s efficiency. Analytics are very useful in setting the direction your website should be taking, considering market progression, search engine trends and user response. Google Analytics is a very popular service offered free of charge, that enables a user to access detailed statistics about their website’s visitors.

3. Web Development skills

A working, user friendly website that is both fresh and involving can mean a world of a difference, especially for a new business. Creating and maintaining such a website demands web development skills, which involve several sub-areas of expertise, like web design, scripting, server configuration, coding, web application development, e-commerce development and more. It is very difficult for just one person to master all of these areas, so an online marketing agency with teams of professionally trained web developers is often employed by businesses to tackle every aspect of website creation and maintenance. However, some degree of understanding of web development is a definite plus, as it may come useful in elaborating long term business strategies, or evaluating costs and risks. Web developers can also add a wide range of exciting, interactive content to a website, including flash applications, motion graphics, animations, and sounds.

4. Social Media Marketing Skills

A seamless marketing strategy, which compiles various avenues and tools that work to amplify your impact on potential consumers, is truly the driving force of commerce. Social Media has really created a whole new dimension to internet use and has pushed online marketing toward engaging, new horizons as far as business opportunities are concerned. Social Media implies near instant access to an incredibly resourceful community of active internet users – the ones who essentially dictate what is hot and what is not at any given time. Every marketer’s dream is to tap into this resource, use it and become part of it as these networks expand. Places like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube and Google Plus are immensely popular and can be used in a coordinated manner to launch influential campaigns. Social profile creation, research, social media audit and analysis, blog design and installation, video creation and optimization are all important facets of a powerful social marketing plan.

5. E-commerce Skills

Purchasing and selling products and services online, or e-commerce, entails more than just the sale and the acquisition themselves. Complex processes of developing user-friendly interfaces (such as online shopping carts), marketing, delivery and payment must be carefully elaborated for a successful sale. On top of that, online stores take into account some “offline”, traditional concepts like supply chain management, along with new notions, such as online transactions, electronic money transfers, data collection and processing, electronic inventory management and several more. The visual aspect is essential in influencing a person’s decision on making a purchase, and an unappealing or unfriendly website can lose you a customer. What is more, good SEO allows for efficient pay per click management. This refers to a very popular advertising model by which an advertising company pays hosting websites for each instance when their ad is clicked on. Keywords relevant to the target market are very important in determining the number of clicks an ad can attract.

6. Focus on User Experience and User Interaction

To the responsible entrepreneur, the success of a product or service is usually dictated by the degree in which it can respond to and satisfy a consumer need. To determine this, you have to consider how you can improve or optimize the user experience of your customers. Similarly, the way your potential customers interact with your website can also be optimized, and a clever interaction strategy can even guide customers to perform specific actions. In this respect, an appealing, interactive website coupled with a goal-oriented strategy are key for improving the online interaction that the users are having with your business. And when customers feel involved in a purchase, they are more likely to mention the purchase to their friends, or even become loyal consumers. Much like tending to a garden, continuous improvements and maintenance are important in keeping this experience real on the user’s end.

7. Online Reputation Management

Online visibility is everything to an internet business, and for this reason, e-marketers have elaborated procedures to monitor and mitigate brand mentions in online media. This can typically be done by creating and spreading positive or neutral content to counter any existing negative mentions. However, Online Reputation Management (ORM) works in contrast to traditional e-commerce strategies (which seek to improve results with a specific web search, to obtain more page views) by downgrading top ranked negative results. Consequently, ORM can generate an overall positive environment for a specific brand, and can prevent or stop reputation threats. While SEO and ORM are closely knit, their immediate goals are entirely different. A good ORM plan will be proactive and able to quickly provide responses to criticism, either by generating positive comments, or by offering free samples to interested reviewers. More extreme forms of ORM will involve notices to take down disparaging comments and, in some cases, even lawsuits.

Since all of these skills are important and can play a part in the destiny of your online business, various companies that provide unified internet marketing solutions can be hired to collect and interpret data from web analytics services, perform web development, create elaborate SEO strategies and coordinate online marketing campaigns with a high guaranteed success rate.

More info: Running An Online Business – Guest Post

When I create a PPC ad on Google or Bing I generally use just one keyword per ad group. And in my ad, I try to use the keyphrase in the title, the ad itself and in the destination URL.

Passing The Keyword For Dynamic Insertion

Now, for the landing page, I like to pass the keyword to it from the ad. That way I can dynamically use it on the page, plus use it for tracking. I use the passed keyword in the title, the meta description and the H1 tag.

It is effective to also have the keyword in the URL for better Quality Scores (in general you pay less per click and can get higher spots when you have a decent quality score). You can get fancy with .htaccess and Rewrite Rules, or if you take EzineArticles as a cue, it would appear as though using a keyword in the querystring is the same as having it in the URL and it doesn’t have to be part of a file name or subfolder.

Then you can pull the keyword from the querystring and dynamically insert it into the page. This way you are able to optimize your page for virtually any keyword, essentially having unlimited landing pages for PPC. It gets tricky when trying to use the keyword in a sentence when doing it dynamically but it works well for putting it in the title and h1 tags, which I feel is enough to get a decent Quality Score.

When linking to the page for SEO, don’t think that you can have unlimited landing pages like with PPC, because of duplicate content. They simply will not rank. Only one will, so treat it as just one page when trying to get organic listings. Use your best keyword as the “default” keyword that gets dynamically inserted. Then sprinkle some related terms throughout the content (which will help with SEO and PPC for relevance), as long as they make sense and don’t appear “stuffed” in. Then when linking to the page from other sites (I’m not talking PPC here, I’m talking article marketing, etc.), use various keywords as anchor text that you want to rank for, but use mostly your main default phrase.

Additionally, having some extra pages attached to your landing page is effective for both SEO and Quality Score. I’m not sure what’s considered the best pages to have, because I hear different things all the time, but I usually include the following: About | Contact | Privacy | Terms | Disclosure | Disclaimer as links in the footer. Also, in the footer, I use the keyword to link back to the main page. Plus I’ve found it effective to attach a blog to the site. I just install it in a “blog” folder and link to it from the footer. I also place my business (or site) name, address and phone number in the footer.

Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion In Conjunction With Tracking

When passing the keyword from PPC ads for dynamic keyword insertion and tracking, only one querystring parameter is needed, so use the one that your tracking software uses. Even if you are using Rewrite Rules and .htaccess you can do this.

In the sample landing page that I created for you to use, I made it ready for using Prosper202 (free tracking software) by using the ‘t202kw’ querystring parameter.

Making Your Own Landing Page For Dynamic Keyword Insertion

This example uses PHP to dynamically insert keywords into the title, h1 and meta description. It is also ready for tracking using Prosper202.

Include the following chunk of code at the top of your landing page…

<?php
 
// default
$mainkeyword = "Wordpress Geo Targeting";
 
if (isset($_GET['t202kw'])) {
	$mainkeyword = preg_replace("/-/", " ", $_GET['t202kw']);
	ucwords(strtolower($mainkeyword));
}
 
$pagetitle = $mainkeyword . " Script";
$metadescription = $mainkeyword . " script to automatically determine the geographic location of your site visitors and display location-specific content to them.";
$h1 = $mainkeyword;
 
?>

In the above code, you would give a default value for your keyword. That way, if nothing is passed from PPC, or when linking for SEO, then the default will be used.

In the square brackets next to ‘GET’ is the querystring parameter used when passing the keyword from the destination URL from the PPC ad. I used ‘t202kw’ because I use Prosper202. You can change that to whatever is appropriate for your tracking software.

The next bit of code removes any hyphens from the keyword if there are any (it’s largely unnecessary but I include it anyways). After that it puts the keyphrase in proper caps since it’ll mostly (or only) be used as a heading or title rather than part of a sentence.

Most of the time you can just make the page title the keyword but you can also prepend or append extra words. You have to be careful with that though since sometimes the passed word may not make sense in your chosen sentence.

Optionally you can include a meta description which includes your keyword, however you may run into the issue where other keywords may not make sense in the sentence.

Now you just have to plug the variables into the appropriate spots in the content using PHP echo statements like below:

<html>
<head>
<title><?php echo $pagetitle; ?></title>
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $metadescription; ?>" />
</head>
 
<body>
<?php echo $h1; ?>
</body>
</html>

That should do it. Here’s an example of a landing page… you can download a zip file containing the php files and images used in the example, at this link (the files were safe and virus-free when uploaded to my server, but you accept any risk with downloading and using the files).

After unzipping the files, open and edit each of the files in the “config” folder. It might be best to upload all of the files to your server first, then edit one at a time to see the effects of each change as you go along. You’ll probably want to start by editing “config.php” as it contains information that is used by some of the other files.

“footernav.php” doesn’t have to be edited, it’s just in there in case you decide not to attach all of the extra pages (disclaimer, etc.).

The rest of the files should be obvious what they are for. For example “about-content.php” contains the content that will be used on the about page. The only two files that might not be obvious are “content-left.php” and “content-right.php”. Those files contain the content for the main page (the landing page).

You shouldn’t have to edit any of the files other than the ones in the “config” folder.

I attempted to use a script for the contact page that is generic enough to work on most linux servers. It works just fine on GoDaddy servers. Be sure to test it to make sure it works. You could change the link in footernav.php to a mailto: link direct to an email address if all else fails. Don’t let the contact page stop you from getting your ads running.

Some PHP files get messed up in Notepad, so you might want to download a more advanced editor, like TextPad (it’s free), to edit the files.

Please use the comment section below if you have any questions.

More info: How To Create, Use And Reuse A Landing Page For PPC and SEO

And, since you can potentially get traffic at a penny per click at 7Search for some high traffic keywords, you are looking at possibly getting 10,000 targeted visitors to your site for just $25!

I realize the image says “$75 MATCH”, however, my sales rep sent me an email saying the advertiser just needs to deposit $25 to get the $75. To hold him to that, here’s a snippet of the email ;)

Sign Up Now – Use Promo Code OCT2010

What’s In It For Me? To be completely transparent, I am an affiliate of 7Search. Any new advertiser that signs up using my link I will earn 10% of their ad spend for the next year. For some referrals that turns out to be $0. For others, it turns out to be a lot… which tells me something.. those that actually take action see a ROI and continue to spend money on their advertising.

I wrote a few posts in the past about 7Search if you want to brush up on what’s offered over there…

• Get Targeted Traffic That Converts… For A Penny A Click
• Still Getting Targeted Converting Traffic At A Penny A Click

Not only is it a great way to get your feet with PPC, 7Search is another great traffic driving tool for experienced marketers. It’s such a simple interface to use, it makes it a breeze to setup campaigns. Learn More Here

More info: Potentially 10k Targeted Visitors To Your Site For $25

Besides the cheap targeted traffic, here’s a few other reason why 7Search is a great place to advertise.

• 7Search Advertisers can start an account for just $25.00 U.S and get started driving quality traffic in minutes. With a minimum bid of just one cent, advertisers can count on a lower cost per visit and more affordable overall acquisition costs than high profile networks can provide.
• 7Search currently serves advertiser results for over one billion searches per month.
• 7Search protects advertisers from poor-quality traffic with extensive data validation and a patent-pending fraud detection system.
• Two points of contact are provided for each account; access to the business development office to help your website grow and a designated campaign support person to help you manage your account available by phone, live chat, and email during business hours.
• Providing pay-per-click solutions since 1999, 7Search has been an innovator in the pay per click advertising space and has been granted two U.S. patents with eight patents pending for search marketing.
• 7Search can help reach a wider audience than your competitors. Every one uses the top tier search networks. 7search can help you get an edge on your competition by targeting a new crowd.

More info: 2 Targeted Clicks For A Penny

BTW, did you notice that I added a couple extra sections to the manual? I will also be covering SEO and PPC keyword tracking. Also, I will explain how to add phpBay code into your themes and give an example of when that might be useful. Those sections will be up in a few days. So far, I have had the luxury of having these posts pre-written because they exist already in a PDF manual I wrote. The new ones however have to be done from scratch, plus added to the PDF. I shouldn’t be delayed too long, if at all, I still want to try and get a post a day out to you. Anyway read on for the steps…

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation/Activation
• Configuration
• Testing
• Per-Post/Per-Page Settings
• Geo-Targeting
• Making The Images Clickable
• Replacing WordPress Search With eBay Search
• Inserting phpBay Code Into Theme Files
• Buy phpBay Pro (20% off coupon: DA9CD69F42)
• From Picking A Market To Building/Managing Your phpBay (Or BANS) Site

Making The Images Clickable

To make the images in your auction listings clickable you just have to make a quick change to one or two of the template files that phpBay provides.

There is one file to change if you use columns and another file to change if you don’t. It doesn’t hurt to change them both in case you switch between a single column and multiple columns on occasion. Here’s how…

1. Download the files ‘template.ebay.results.html’ and ‘template.column.results.html’ located in the ‘/wp-content/plugins/phpBay/templates/’ folder, to your computer.
2. Open ‘template.ebay.results.html’ with a text editor. If using TextPad, right-click it and click TextPad and it will open with TextPad. If you double clicked it, it will likely just open in a browser and you won’t be able to edit it, so you will want to open it like mentioned.
3. Locate the line with the code: (it’s all on one line, it’s just wrapped in the image below)

   

   and change it to: (again, it’s wrapped)

   

4. Save the file and re-upload, overwriting the existing file.
5. Now open ‘template.column.results.html’ with a text editor.
6. Locate the line with the code:

   

   and change it to: (wrapped code below)

   

7. Go back to your test page and Refresh (F5) it to see your changes.

Next we’ll replace the WordPress search with a search that displays phpBay results instead.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Making The Images Clickable

They are giving away $1000 ($250 to 4 different people) during the month of July… just for becoming a customer.

So, if you were sitting on the fence, hop off, signup, drop in $25 to start things off (full rules here), setup a campaign (only takes a few minutes with the easy interface)… then you will be automatically given a chance to win a VISA gift card worth 10x your initial deposit! Use promo code: CASHCOW.

More info: Free VISA Gift Card For You!