Medicine is an Important Business Consideratoin

It may be a rather controversial statement, but humans are paranoid about their health. How else, could healthcare be such a massive business worldwide? Because of this many internet entrepreneurs miss this massive financial resource. Partly this is because many internet authors are wary of a 'scientific' subject in case they demonstrate their ignorance. There is also the issue of giving appropriate and accurate information in what could, for the reader, be a matter of life and death.

In this respect I may have an advantage over other internet marketers in that I am a card-carrying PhD in clinical medicine. So I am willing to go into areas such as Cancer Information that others might not go into. After all I have researched Breast Cander and I know what I'm talking about .

Yet, the area of medicine is huge and something like information on hemorrhoids can be researched simply on the internet and an article can be produced. Yet hemorrhoid treatment is a lucrative market and the AdSense ads you will attract to such a page can be very lucrative indeed. The same is even more true for medical areas such as hay fever (or allergic rhinitis to use the medical term).

Indeed, if you can think of a conditoin, no matter how trivial, then there will be a preparation somewhere to treat it. And if there is a medication then there is a company willing to pay for adversising which makes it worthwhile your effort to research the condition and to write a page about it.

Basically medical research is a massive and undeveloped area of internet marketing where, at the momet, your sole competitor for the number one spot in the search engines' listings is Wikipedia and if you're willing to integrate information from several sources you can even beat this behemoth of information to the top listing position.

Are Articles the Way Forward?

I've often presented the adage here that 'content is king' and as a person involved in an information-based site then I basically have to believe in that adage. If I didn't then I wouldn't continue what I was doing aht there would really be no point in my website Celtnet. It is my premise that it's possible to generate an income from the Internet using only information products. Basically it's the 'silver hat' version of 'white hat' marketing. Though to enable this one needs to be active pretty much every day to write and gain novel content. Here, novel content is the most improtant as it needs to be indexed by the search engines without incurring a penalty for being 'duplicate content'.

Then there's the need to advertise you site, to write articles that will get your site noticed and intexed. This is where article sites such as ezinearticles.com come into the equation. Here you can write articles on a myriad of topics and include your own links within the signature strip of the article. As these articles are published both on the site itself and are often used by others to pad their sites your URLs can gain a broad dispersal. This is both good for your own stragtegy of getting your site indexed but can be problematic if you use those selfsame articles on your site as you may well incurr duplicate content penalties in the search engines. As a result, by all means use the article sites to publish your articles and get your links known but do not publish those selfsame articles on your own website without significant modification.

If writing articles for your own website you should advertise them on the articles sites but to know which ones to focus your attention on look at the list of Top-paying Google Adsense keywords as these will give you the best return on your investment in the sort term. This is why, to go along with my restructuring of the Celtnet Information site I've now added a new section on Telecos (Telecommunications Companies) that focusses for the moment on AT&T and BT. AT&T accounts for a large slice of the best paying keywords so a history of both AT&T in general and Cingular in particular should lead to quite lurcrative AdSense advert palcements in the US.

But adding content is little good unless that content is indexed by the search engines, which is where article submissions to article sites can help. As always, it's a caso of write the content, sell the content.

Pile 'em High, Sell 'em Cheap

In the non-virtual bricks-and-mortar world of marketing the strategy of "Pile 'em High, Sell 'em Cheap' is arguably one of the most succesful in the retailing arena (after all it's what makes WalMart America's #2 company). But, almost without exception, internet marketers use the 'Premium Product' model to market their products. They treat them as if they were premium commodities and charge high prices expecting low-volume sales. So an eBook can retail for anything between $39 and $300; a software system will retail for anything between $97 and $997.

However this strategy goes against the way that most people think of 'value for money' where, at a psychological level, most buyers think that anything below $10 is cheap (hence the profusion of $9.99 offers on the high street). Anything below $30 is considered 'reasonable' as long as there's a reason to buy it, but anything over $30 is 'expensive'. This is why internet marketers selling their products as 'high ticket price items' need the employ the hard sell technique to shift their products. Even then they only sell afew items every month and this is why their products have to be so expensive.

If a technique works in the real bricks-and-mortar world where overheads are much higher then the same technique can definitely be applied to the virtual world of internet marketing. At least, on a conceptual level I was certain of that. It was only when I began the research for my article on models of internet sales businesses that I saw how scarce this sales model was in the virtual world. Then I came across the $7 Secrets eBook by Jonathan Leger. The eBook costs just $7 and it comes with php software that allows you to easily start marketing your own $7 products and the whole package is more than worth it for the software alone. So, I urge you to have a look at the $7 Secrets page now. Remember, just buing this for the software that comes in the package will more than make up for the $7 cost.

There is also the 7 dollar offers sites that sells other peoples' information products for $7 a pop. On this site affiliates make 75% of all sales with 25% going to site manager. There are almost no overheads for the hosting site as the products themselves are hosted by the original author.

What you see in the site described above is the WalMart marketing process in action. The model being: gain as many products as possible, sell them all cheaply as you can and take just a small margin yourself. You affiliates do the hard work of promoting your site and the money you make is pure profit with little or no intervention on your part.

Keepint the Momentum going

Today's post is all about perhaps the most difficult aspect of making money from the internet: keeping the momentum going. It's the usual story — you've been busy adding content and generating a flurry of content. You've added AdSense advertisements to your various pages and you're getting a trickle income. Buoyed by this you've started adding more content and affiliate pages to your site. You may even have minisites on your domain that target visitors to a given topic or keyword set. Maybe you've started an AdWords campaign to drive more traffic to your various pages.

Then the rot begins to set in. Though you're adding more pages you're not getting a significant increase in AdSense income and the rich pickings from your affiliate pages just aren't coming in. So you get disheartened and your momentum drops off. You begn to watch the various statistics in Google or your Affiliate partners' web pages rather than generating more content for your site. And, day by day, as little or nothing happens the disillusionment sets in.

Just remember that internet marketing isn't an overnight solution to your financial worries. There's no 'get rich quick' strategy out there that works. Rather, you have to work at it and you need to use all the tools at your disposal to improve your income. Read my Maximize your Web Traffic eBook to optimize your site and gain more incoming links and more visitors (this is precisely the same system I've researched and employed to increase traffic to this website three-fold in the past two months and I'm seeing traffic gains month-on-month).

I also strongly urge you to visit the Adwords Secrets page as the information here will jump-start any AdWords campaign you may be considering. Everything and anything you can do to drive traffic to your site is money in your pocket.

For this reason I aim on adding at least one page to my website every day (the real aim is five) and I aim to bring these web pages to the attention of the indexing engines by publishing this Blog at least every other day and by writing a publishable article to an article site at least every other day as well.

Personally I use ezinearticles.com for this purpose but I admit that I need to join other article sites so that I can submit at least one article a day.

In addition to this I also need to add at least one Affiliate-based page to my site every day. Today's being the Celtic Rings Information Page. It should also be noted that this page, with its reliance on images also uses novel CSS (cascating style sheet) code rather than HTML tables for the image layout. This code will be published as a page at Celtnet CSS Image Placement and this code will also form the basis of a new article on this technology. After all images and links are the basis of just about any successful affiliate campaign.

As a semi-professional photographer who used to make money from his photography I also intend to use this technology along with a shopping cart to make various images I have available through the web. Thus giving me an additional income based on stock photography.

Today's lesson is: whatever may be happening to you in terms of your internet marketing career don't get disheartened. The more you diversify and the more you keep on plugging along: both in terms of adding new content to your site, making sure you take advantage of all the free advertising resources available to you and adding new methods of generating income to your site.

Niche Markets are your Fortune

All the big interent marketers will tell you not to turn your hobby into your main website as this means you're far too focussed on the content rather than the money you can make from the website. To a great extent they are true: in that if you're writing aboout a hobby or interest of yours you will tend to get into the minutiae of what you're writing about and before you turn around you will have written a six-hundred page site and six months have somehow flown past.

That's definitely what happened to me. I was so focussed on adding good, useful, content to my website that I completely ignored the monetization aspects. I wasn't even concentrating on the SEO techniques that would actually drive traffic to my site. The truth is that I had a good site with solid content but everything else in the internet marketer's arsenal was missing. What I did next was undoubtedly arse-about-face but I slapped some quick AdSense banners up (pretty much randomly) then I began on the SEO. I learnt a lot about SEO from this and put those techniques into practice to drive-up my monthly visitors by more than seven-fold in three months (and the numbers are still increasing month-on-month).

Next I bagan playing with the placement of AdSense banners, which led to the writing of my internet advertising effectiveness page which gives you many tips and tricks on ad placement. The basic message is put a banner ad on your pages and add an ad on your right-hand sidebar. These are by far the most effective places for ads. If you have relatively long pages you can embed your third AdSense ad in the middle of the text (another effective strategy).

The other thing not to forget is to add AdSense ads on each and every page within your site. I forgot to do this and lost 40% of the possible clicks in my site. What I hadn't done so far was to add any affiliate marketing content. After all, much of the received wisdom about affiliate marketing is that you need a big but profitable niche to work in.

You need a niche because you need to dominate the area of Affiliate Marketing that you're working in. There's no point in making a 'me to' affiliate site as this is going to be dominated by the big players and you undoubtedly won't be able to compete with them. So you have to chose a niche but it needs to be a 'profitable niche'. But the question is, what's a profitable niche? My site was focussed on Celtic gods, Celtic texts and ancient cookery — could I do anything with those areas?

When I started doing my research it emerged that there were many Celtic-associated affiliate opportunities out there. These ranged from Amazon books (which is why I set up my Celtic Art Sourcebooks page all about sourcebooks and mothods for generating Celtic art) through Celtic clothing (hence my Celtic Sheepskin Company affiliate page) to jewellery and even gourmet meats.

Basically there was a huge range of affiliate products that I could use to monetize my site. What was better most of these fitted with the main content of my site. After all, if people were doing Celtic-assoicated searches on my website they'd be interested in Celtic-related products. And the point of the pages I was creating was to make real content that would be indexed by the search engines as well as ofering people opinions on the products. I was pre-selling here rather than selling. A good example is the Celtic rings page I'm working on now. This is based on the history and meanings of the Celtic designs and the rings are there to show good examples of what I'm talking about so people can buy them. The focus is on information and the products are only incidental. The same goes for my Amazon-assoicated Celtic Art Sourcebooks page. I'm telling people here the sourcebooks I use to create the artworks on my main Celtnet Celtic Information site and how I use them what I'm not doing is actively trying to sell the book.

It has to be said that for certain web pages I do go for the hard sell. An example is the AdWords Secrets page. Yet the focus of the page is how the product helped me and how it could have helped me even more had I bought it earlier.

The message of this posting is that you can make your niche profitable and your passion about your niche can be an advantage as long as you don't lose sight of your goals. Yes, you can monetize your hobby. But make sure that you keep your eye on the ball and write relevant content even when you're trying to sell something. If you have an information-based site use information to sell and promote the products by stealth. After all what you're trying to do is to get your visitor interested in the products. It's up to the site you're sending them to to do the actual selling. If they can't sell their own product then there's no point in having an affiliate partnership with them.

Don't Ignore AdWords

If you've been tracking (or even glancing) at this blog over the past couple of weeks you'll know that I've been playing around with AdWords campaigns. Some of the initial results are in and I've also been going through Google's own documentation on the subject. You can find a precis of what I've discovered and what Google themselves say on the maximizing adwords use and Selecting AdSense Keywords in the new Internet Marketing Information section of my site.

Basically I've now spent three months playing around with AdWords and I've made a whole bunch of mistakes and found ways to improve campaigns and cut down on my costs. All this information is given in the following pages: maximizing adwords use and Selecting AdWords Keywords. There's no hype and no bullshit involved it's all gold.

Still, I have made one major mistake and it's one I really should tell you about. And it's this:



Yes, I know, I'm advertising someone else's product and it you've been following this Blog then that's something I never, ever, do. So why am I letting you know about this product? Well, the truth is that 90% of all the products out there in the internet marketing field are complete and utter rubbish. They're selling vapourware to punters who can only recoup their money by promoting that useless product to sell it to others.

Perry Marshall's 5 Days to Success wiht Google Adwords course and eBook really is pure gold. And, yes, I did shell out the $97 for the product myself and to be truthful I was completely stunned. OK, so I'd managed to work out some of the strategies based on my own experiments and the documents that Google provide on their AdWords website (which are rather impenetrable but very useful if you work through them). But this isn't to say that I knew even 30% of all the things that I needed to know.

Perry Marshall's product may not make you rich. However, it will make your AdWords campaigns more efficient and targetted. If you're seriously going to use AdSense for your campaigns then you are going to need his eBook. All I can tell you is that within a day of reading the eBook I'd re-jigged a number of my AdWords campaigns and just that saved me the cost of his product so it's already paid for itself — and that's without the additional traffic that's already coming into my site. And I think that this is the best accolade I can give the product and why I am willing to endorse it both here and on my website — it works!



This is where my mistake comes in. If I'd bought Perry Marshall's product three months ago then I wouldn't have had to struggle to find out things that he already tells you and my AdWords campaigns would have been flying from the get-go. I would also have saved myself about five times the cost of his course in eliminating pointless clicks. Of course I know this now and I'm kicking myself for not not having purchased the product earlier. So, learn from my mistake, click on the links above and save yourselves a lot of stress and headache.

OK, so that's the rant about my own stupidity over. Please just learn from my mistake!

I have a few other goodies in the pipeline to do with Google AdWords. One of these is an automated web page that will take several hundred keywords and automatically add the phrase match double quotes and the exact match square brackets around them (if you don't know what these are then read my Selecting AdWords Keywords page to learn what they are and why you absolutely have to use them). There is also my existing Create Misspelled Keywords page. And if you want to know why mispelled keywords are important for your AdWords campaign, read my AdWords Tools and Resources page.