Finding Ideas

A lot of people wonder how some of the “guru’s” come up with their ideas. I would imagine often times, like the rest of us, it is a spontaneous thing. There is also the ability now to get ideas down and marketed very quickly. If you look at the backed area of some of the latest e-books you will find it is exactly the same with only the content changing.

Some guru’s often times just take other peoples ideas and rewrite them in their own way. Nothing wrong with that either. You will find as you read reports there are always some points that come up, so it isn’t stupid to believe they are influencing each other.

I have only really had one idea I heard that really grabbed my attention and if I had money to invest in it I would because I think it is a wonderful one. The kicker being, it didn’t come from a guru, it came from a comic.

Many of you know the comic Gallagher I’m sure. He is known for his Sledge-O-Matic routine and for running in the race that saw Arnold elected governor of California. Well there is an idea he presented when he came out to Wenatchee where I live and I have it on You Tube. The video is bad but you can get the idea and the audio, for being taken with a small digital camera is quite sharp.

the idea is this. Take an old building, or build one, and turn it into a place solely dedicated to family reunions. I think the idea is quite neat and hopefully watching this so will you.

Author:Matt Ulmen
Website:Internet Marketer Tips

Thoughts On:One Time Offer (OTO)

OK I won’t lie and say I don’t see the point in having One time offers, more commonly known as OTOs, they can give you a way to take advantage of offers you might not be able to get in on otherwise. Still do we need so MANY of them?

I’ll give you an example. I just joined the Internet Marketing Success Formula affiliate program and ended up seeing 3 OTO offers before they were done. One I can see…MAYBE two depending on the program. One example of how you could get away with two is if you offered a deal on a subscription, once at a yearly price then the next one would be at a monthly price.

Again as with the rant I posted earlier sometimes so many offers can get people turned off depending on their financial situation. For me right now thanks to a absurdly large phone bill I can’t do anything really this month. The problem is just because I’m broke doesn’t mean the world moves on so I end up signing up for things for free when I might have been able normally to get in on some of the deals they are offering. I know this is just me personally for that instance but there are probably others who are trying to get in on deals and the more offers they are forced to pass up the less likely they are when they finally do get the product to really look at it because if they couldn’t afford just the little stuff, why would they be able to invest more later?

It is a double edged sword using OTO offers, if you over do them you could drive off the very people you are trying to get.

Author:Matthew Ulmen
Website:Internet Marketer Tips

Rant:Don’t be a tease

I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to come up with a Rant category for this blog. What has set me off? False advertising.

I recently got an e-mail talking about online survey sites. How this didn’t work and that didn’t pay out like it said yadda yadda. The point of it was here was a free service you could sign up for and have people pay you for your opinion. OK that doesn’t sound so bad. So I start the sign-up process.

Name, e-mail…same deal as many others. Choosing who I want to take survey’s from. Nothing new so far. Get to the last page and hot damn come to find out nothing is still going to change. The “free service” suddenly has a monthly fee of $39.95, of course I can get in for the first week for $2 and WOW I even get a “Free” bit of software that will auto fill out forms form me…how kind…

I see this garbage so much, it is one of the things that drove me out of Internet Marketing to begin with. People flat out lying about start up or sign-up fees at the front page only to grab you with fees for something you have already done all the sign-up steps for.

See this is another reason I rarely read safe list ads or read sites in traffic exchanges, there is little truth in those that they send out. And that isn’t the marketer’s fault so much as it is the owner who wrote it thinking people will be roped in by the free services tag enough to not mind paying something once to get that “free” stuff.

My first move on ANY website is to scroll down to the bottom and check the price. Anymore than $25 and I don’t bite, pure and simple, and most times I don’t even have that much. Sometimes $5-$10 is to much and boy does that make me feel worthless. All these one time offers or OTO as they are called, on safe lists, traffic exchanges, etc. and not being able to do a thing about it. It wouldn’t bug me so much if the link to move on wasn’t so insulting. Instead of a simple “No Thanks.” They have to write this paragraph going “Oh yes woe is me I’ll never see an offer for a toaster that can tell me sports scores, shine my shoes and surf for me for $50 ever again…oh the pain…”. Sounds stupid doesn’t it.

So yeah that’s my rant done with. I was going to say there is one last bastion of the survey/quiz type site but apparently It Pays to Learn got bought out some time ago and now to join you have to take an offer on their main page. So yeah I goes it does pay to learn, them of course, not you.

Author:Matt Ulmen
Website:Internet Marketer tips

Internet Marketer Tips-Safelist Tips

OK If your just getting your feet wet then you might not know what a safelist is. The quick and dirty explanation is that safelists are a way for you to send e-mail ads to people without getting reported for spam, hence it is a e-mail “list” that is “safe” to market to.

Usually how it works is you sign up and provide two (2) e-mail addresses. One is for contact purposes such as Site news or sometimes solo ads, basically ads people pay for to send to the entire list. You get MAYBE ten (10) e-mails a month on this. The other one is what they call a list e-mail. This is, quite obviously, where all the e-mail from the safelist comes to. this can average from as few as fifty (50) e-mails a day to over two hundred (200) a day. Your best bet is a free account such as Yahoo Mail or GMail.

Mails coming to the list e-mail will contain credit links. This is how you earn the means to send out your own ad. Some safelists like AdTactics well let you send only to people of your membership level or below, so upgrading is recommended more, while safelists like Elite Safelist Will let you e-mail to everyone a certain number of times a day depending on your membership level.

That is the plus side. The minus side is that safelists have been around for quite some time now and, well I hate to break this to you, not many people read the ads anymore.

WHAT? No I’m not joking and here is how I know. Its the old saying “If one is doing it, others are as well”.

I’ll be honest, I am right now using two safelists, AdTactics and Elite Safelist, for my advertising, and they both are good for getting clicks to my website. The downside is, as with anything involving click for programs is people are out to get as many credits as they can so they can send out their own ads.

This makes safelists a bit confusing now. Some people I’m sure still read as many ads as they can, and that is admirable. Many though just click the e-mail, scroll to the credit link and click.

So how do you get sales like this? Simple and here is a tip you will be able to apply to anything involving credit based systems weather they be traffic Exchanges or safelists or any other program.

Tip:Watch the Timer.

Say What? OK the way safelists work is people have to wait to get their credits. you can’t just click and move on. The average time for this is about 15 seconds. Now if you have someone like myself I will, once I’ve clicked, check out the site. The larger the site though the less time you have to hook someone on your product before the timer runs out. So what do you do?

This is where experience comes in handy. The smaller the page the more time they have to click through. If you have a page that takes 10 seconds to scroll from top to bottom your lead won’t bite because there isn’t enough time to read it all. IF you put up a graphic ad, and many products have them now (an example can be found here) or a splash page (example here again a lot of programs have these now, some are even customizable) you can get their attention, often with saying a lot of what you said in the e-mail in the first place.

So keep things like this in mind when using safelists and you should end up having a easier time of things, and who knows maybe you will sell a bit more.

Author:Matt Ulmen
Website:Internet Marketer Tips

I can find that for you

One thing I like to look at every now and then is an e-mail I get once a week from Word Tracker telling me what some of the top search terms are. There are sometimes some obvious ones, the top for this week for example is Sarah Palin. One thing never ceases to amaze me though and that is the tip I’m going to write about today.

Here are the top 10 key word searches for the last 48 hours. I will warn you now that Red Tube is NOT safe for work, I’m including it only because it is one of the ten, though it also fits the topic in this case.

1 4675 sarah palin
2 3929 redtube
3 2668 myspace
4 2650 funny videos
5 2443 google
6 2152 breaking news
7 2072 yahoo
8 2058 youtube
9 1919 ebay
10 1851 white pages

Now then looking at that list I can tell you easily how people could have found these sites with no search involved, with the only exceptions being funny videos and for some odd reason Sarah Palin.

Are you ready for this shocker? Here is the tip that will make you look a lot smarter, and will work a great majority of the time, and if it doesn’t you can marvel at how someone hasn’t grabbed an obvious site yet.

The Tip: Simply type the phrase into the address bar, no spaces, and add .com.

Yup that’s it. If you look at the other eight keywords in that list all of them, including breaking news, which was a find for me writing this, can be found simply taking the words and adding .com after it.

Simple isn’t it? Now go and impress your friends with it. And if you want to have some fun yourself with getting a keyword list like the one I mentioned go to Word Tracker and sign up for the Free Keyword Expert Newsletter. It comes out every Tuesday and is quite an interesting read.

Author:Matt Ulmen
Website:Internet Marketer Tips

Internet Marketer Resource:Site Meter

Welcome to the first post from the Internet Marketing Tips blog. I will be updating this as often as I can, putting in recommendations, resources and tips that I think will help people getting into this whirlwind of a profession.

The first resource I want to showcase is one I have been using for many years and is called Site Meter. This is a free resource that does a lot of things free that others will try and charge you for such as:

Where did your visitor come from? What website referred them to yours.

What domain referred them? A more specific version of above. An example would be a hosting site like GeoCities.

Who are they surfing with (what ISP are they using)? I’ll be honest I don’t know how this would be used but it is a neat thing to know how many people use which providers.

Where is your visitor now (Where geographically are they surfing from)? Where do they live or connect to the internet? this is good if you are thinking of targeting specific places.

There are even more detailed stats than this you can learn. Stuff like:

What Operating System do they run? Good to follow if you are working on a tech site as you will be able to get an idea of what people might like to look at from what they already have.

What Browser are they using? This is good to know because some browsers can be incompatible with some types of code. Keep an eye on this as you can make money more easily when people can Access everything easily.

What is their Language? VERY eye opening believe me. English isn’t the dominant language on some sites and knowing how well your visitors can understand your message can lead to you earning more income in the future.

What Time is it? yes you can see what time you have the most visitors and again don’t be surprised if it isn’t when you are nessecarily the most active in promoting it. Some of mine are busiest when I’m asleep.

Do you Like Java? Or more importantly do your visitors. this gives you a report on what version they are running, as with the browser and OS information, this could explain if some of them have trouble with your site, though unlike the other two this one isn’t one you can do much about except maybe put a link to Java on your site. Unless it is really script heave though this shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Now then the other benefit of Site Meter is that it also doubles as a web counter. Not many people use these much anymore as with the invention of Auto Traffic exchanges the count is easily driven up. I think this maybe why Site Meter hasn’t, to my knowledge at least, been very popular as people only see it as such. that just means that the rest of us have a step ahead of them.

So there you have it. Site Meter to me is a resource defiantly worth learning as the faster you can get in tune with your visitors the quick the income will start coming in.

Author:Matt Ulmen
Website:Internet Marketer Tips