You Deserve Higher Returns

How often do you log in to any of your contextual advertising accounts, only to be disappointed by your earnings total? Well, it’s happened to us all. You signed up for an account, created a campaign, added the code to your webpage and went to bed with a smile on your face. Next morning, before you’ve even grabbed that first cup of coffee, you jump online to check your stats, ‘knowing’ you found the perfect answer to an explosive income stream, the night before. Eagerly logging in, your heart sinks – ‘where’s the cash?’, your account totals a big fat Zero, or a few pennies at most.

Now, don’t get me wrong, contextual advertising has it’s place and works very well for some…

But, even if you’re receiving clicks, you’re maybe earning a few cents each time. Your visitor clicks an ad and makes a purchase – do you see any commission for setting up the sale? No, of course not.

So, wouldn’t you rather use a system, that’s so simple it effortlessly replaces your Contextual ads with your Affiliate ads? Of course you would!

Now we’re cooking with gas! Heck, you could be earning up to $100, from just one ad!

As it happens… (ahem), I’m about to show you such a system – Ok, so now you’re thinking this is going to cost a fortune, time to move on…

But, hang in there.

Adabulus isn’t $197 or $97 or, ok cut to the chase… it’s only $17. But I’m willing to let you try it out for… Nothing, Nada, Zip, Zilch.  If Adabulus isn’t for you, no problem – you won’t even have to ask me for a refund because there’s nothing to pay upfront to evaluate this amazing software!

So how does Adabulus actually work?
Ad units are made up of simple text files. Just enter suitable advert text into the file like the example shown below...

Build An Easy Koi Fish Pond
Easy To Build Backyard Koi Fish Pond With Full Illustrations
http://ClickbankID.ProgramID.hop.clickbank.net/

Fantastic Fish Ponds
Have The Fish Pond You Have Always Dreamed Of - Guaranteed!
http://ClickbankID.ProgramID.hop.clickbank.net/

Fish Keeping Secrets
Definitive Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Keeping Fish!
http://ClickbankID.ProgramID.hop.clickbank.net/

This example contains three ads related to the example niche of "fish ponds".

Each ad has a title at the top, then the ad text, then an affiliate link.

It's pretty quick and easy to create a text file like this. It's also very versatile, allowing you to take any affiliate link and quickly create a short ad for it.

Now you simply upload the text file to your web host and Ad-Abulus! instantly turns the text ads into complete ad units, like this:

You can select the ad unit size and layout, the text color and font to suit your web pages and all the ads will be automatically formatted – and you can use it for any affiliate ads, not just clickbank.

This highly versatile system allows you to just slot your own ads in place of any existing ad unit - and instantly start benefiting from high commission payouts.

Take Ad.abul.us for a totally free test drive

Enjoy! And don't forget to leave your comments below.

Steph.

Quick Tips for Affiliate Marketers

The promise of earning high profits without really doing any work has temped many to 'have a go' at affiliate marketing, and will continue to do so 'till the cows come home.

It's a common misconception that all an affiliate has to do is place a merchant's advertisement on a website, and bingo! the checks start rolling in...

So if that's the case, why do so many people do just that and barely make enough for a decent cup of java?

Affiliate Marketing, just like other forms of marketing takes work. Period.

Successful affiliates don't just sit back and wait for the money to roll in, they promote their merchant's business and products, while consistently working on building lists of buyers and prospective buyers.

When promoting 'think outside the box'. Marketer's who think differently are often more successful than those who seem to be walking, talking and working on autopilot. Wouldn't you rather listen to someone who opened your eyes to a different angle? For example: You're selling an ebook about gardening, the sales letter talks about learning what soil to plant your begonias in and how to build your own decking. Now take another view, 'when you master the basics of gardening, sit back and enjoy homegrown veggies cooked on the bbq your just built, while relaxing on your new decking, etc...' See the new angle you've just introduced?

If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing and if you want to continually grow your affiliate checks, you've got to be prepared to put in the graft.

Here are a few tips to help you to continually grow your affiliate checks:

Know what you're talking about and become an expert on your chosen affiliate product
After all, how can you expect to sell something that you know nothing about? Purchase the affiliate product yourself and put it through it's paces.. Tell your customers the products good points and bad points from first-hand experience. Most importantly – do your research!

You need your own website
Or at the very least, a short, easily remembered domain name. Affiliate links are ugly things and so often hijacked and your commissions stolen. Cloak your links and setup separate directories on your server for each affiliate product you're promoting to make your links clean and easy to remember.

Write your own affiliate ads
Write a review, submit a testimonial – in your own words. Entice your prospects by giving your honest opinion, telling them why you think your affiliate product would benefit them. This way, you're not putting on any 'hard sell', and your prospects will be thanking you for selling to them!

Visit forums, discussion boards and social networks related to your product
This can be a huge drain on your time, so be careful not to spend too long chatting and reading. Simply adding a signature to your posts directing people to a free report, your opt-in form or even your sales page can prove to be very effective. (Care must be taken to read individual forum's terms and conditions of adding a signature).

Publish a free newsletter or ezine
The purpose of your online publication should be to inform people about your relevant subject, lightly scattering your affiliate links in appropriate places. Don't go overboard with links; this will undoubtedly annoy your subscribers – there's no quicker way to make them ex-subscribers! Don't forget to put an optin form for your publication on your website and blog.

Create a short report
On the same subject as your affiliate product and offer it to your prospects for subscribing to your free ezine or newsletter.

What's important is that you are able to attract more traffic to your site and stimulate visitors into clicking your affiliate links. If you can master this, then your affiliate marketing efforts should prove fruitful.

ARM Your Affiliates: June's Featured (free) Software

This month's free software download 'ARM Your Affiliates' has been designed to quickly and easily create your affiliate promotional pages.

Building an Army of Hungry Affiliates increases your sales and profits. So make it as easy as possible for your affiliates to promote your products, by supplying them with a wide array of ready made tools.

Arm Your Affiliates takes you step-by-step through the process of creating text links, email ads, signature ads, pop ups, image ads, articles and pay per click ads.

Plus, your affiliates' ID is automatically embeded into the promotional tools you provide, with just the click of a mouse.

ARM Your Affiliates comes with Master Resale Rights and is ONLY available to The Smart Marketer's ToolBar Community, for at least one month. The ToolBar is totally free (you don't even need your email address), and provides you with bonus downloads throughout the month, brand new software each month, social media, tons of tools and hidden resources and the best blog posts you'll find.

Give yourself a head start selling ARM Your Affiliates before anyone else gets thier hands on it! (Or give it away to build your list).

Install The Smart Marketer's ToolBar and gain instant access to ARM Your Affiliates as well as previous software including; 'Kontent Klone Killer', 'Optin Fuel', 'Directory Submit Pro' and 'Smart Squeeze Page Generator'.

Speak Soon,
Steph.

Smarter Marketing: TrendWatching

If you’re anything like me, you’re always on the look out for hot new trends. What are people searching for? What do they want? What do they need?

But what is a trend? And how is it different from a fad?

Unlike a trend, a fad is a short lived ‘craze’, within a relatively small group of people. Recently The BBC reported live videoblogging from a mobile phone, as a current fad.

Only a small number of phones actually support this function and many people don’t blog or vlog at all, so the chances of live videoblogging becoming mainstream are fairly remote.

However, live videoblogging may be an up and coming trend amongst tech savvy mobile bloggers with Nokia phones!

Trends tend to appear over longer periods of time and are adopted by the mainstream. More of a general tendency. The TimesOnline reports of an increasing use of virtual reality to treat medical conditions. As a general enhancement to our lives, the use of medical technology continues to grow in the mainstream.

Applied to Internet Marketing, fads and trends can be observed here too.

Take Social Media. The likes of Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg (and I could go on…) have truly revolutionized the way we use the internet today. Making friends and chatting as we work, swapping ideas, asking (the Twitterverse) for answers, links and solutions.

A good example of an IM fad would perhaps be pixel ad websites.

Back in 2005, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old entrepreneur from the UK, hoped to pay his way through university by selling a million pixels as advertising space on his Million Dollar Homepage. He actually went on to sell all million pixels for a dollar each (you do the math:)

Many cloned Alex's idea as these strange looking ‘mozaic’ type pages sprung up all over, – but none (to my knowledge) were ever as successful as the original and many ended up giving pixel ads away.

Can you imagine Social Networks going the same way? No, neither can I.

Now we’ve established trends from fads, I’d like to share with you some of my favorite ‘TrendWatching places’…

SiteVolume takes up to five words you want to compare and shows a graph of how many times each word appears in Digg, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.


SpringWise has a global network of ‘spotters’ who scan and report inspirational new business ideas.


At Epinions users submit reviews on millions of products and services. Scroll down the page until you come across the ‘Epinions Top 10’


HobbyThing has a tag cloud dedicated page. The bigger the tag, the more popular the subject.


Check out Amazon Movers and Shakers for hot software, apparel, video games, music, electronics, cameras and phones.


And not forgetting ‘popular’ categories on some of the more well known services …





Flickr Tags

Blog Catalog’s Tags

Del.icio.us Popular

Digg’s Most Recent

Technorati – What’s Popular

AOL Hot Searches

Ask Top Searches

Yahoo! Buzz

Google Hot Trends

Article Marketing: Your Questions Answered

Article Marketing is one of the most effective link building strategies in existence. You see, article directories allow you to include a resource box at the end of each article you submit. Used wisely, a resource box can drive Quality Traffic to your website. That’s a free backlink for every article you submit. Ten Articles equals ten backlink! There are thousands of article directories online – thousands of backlink! Of course, your articles have to be quality pieces to be accepted.

Many article directories have a high Google page rank – PR4 or PR5, and some are even PR7 or PR8. Backlink from a high PR website are looked on very favorably by the search engines, giving your site a significant boost in the rankings.

So why isn’t everybody achieving great success with article marketing?

As with any other traffic generating strategy, article marketing takes WORK! This is one area of Internet Marketing where Private Label Rights (PLR) products don’t get you an easy ride. Duplicate content is cursed by article directories, and many ghostwriters who sell PLR packages stipulate their articles may not be submitted to directories ‘without Significant’ rewriting.

To be successful with your article marketing campaigns, you need to be Original and consistent in your writing.

So if I submit the same article to many article directories, won’t it be classed as duplicate content by the search engines?

No. Since we’re dealing with high-ranking websites, search engines will assume that the submitted content is their original work. So directories can be quietly confident about the articles they display. However, directories don’t want to be seen as a dumping ground for junk, so PLR articles and articles highly peppered with affiliate links, just won’t make the mustard.

So that means I can display my submitted articles on my own web pages, right?

Wrong! Since the search engines will assume that the higher ranking websites are the originators of your content, you may be penalized for duplicate content, which could mean being ‘sand boxed’ or de-indexed and your pages will no longer show up in search results. Not good, not good at all.

Should I submit many articles to many article directories?

Absolutely. This is exactly how a traffic building strategy works. But remember, write great content, don’t include tons of affiliate links and be as consistent as you can – success doesn’t happen overnight.

Build your backlink slowly and steadily. Search Engines, particularly Google, are wary of websites whose backlinks suddenly explode. Make it look natural. Submit an article, and then wait a couple of weeks before submitting a new article.

But does Article Marketing really work?

Yes it really works!

If you’re not experiencing steady traffic growth, ask yourself…

• Is the subject of my article interesting?
• Does it cater to my target audience?
• Is my title enticing enough to draw my readers in?
• Does my article offer value to my readers?
• Is my article comprehensive?
• Is it easy to read and digest?

These are the most common factors, which may contribute to low traffic statistics. Try re-editing your article, spell-checking and improving grammatically or adding new content.

Another factor to take into consideration is the popularity of the article directories you’re submitting your articles to – some have thousands of readers, while others much fewer.

Ok, my article’s good to go. How can I be sure that my work will be kept intact by other publishers?

You can’t be sure, but you can run a check from time to time searching for unique phrases in your article. Determine if the Webmaster is honoring their publishing rights. If not, contact the Webmaster directly and politely ask for your resource box to be included – if this doesn’t work, you can file a complaint with the article directory and they can act on the matter.

I hope this post has answered some of your questions about article marketing. Please feel free to add a comment below and continue the discussion.

Regards,
Steph.

P.s. If you’re looking for free software to compare articles for duplicate content, or a directory submission tool, look no further! Kontent Klone Killer and Directory Submit Pro are downloads of the month for Feb and May respectively. Install The Smart Marketer’s ToolBar and download your article marketing tools today!

Do You Twitter?

Social Media Rocks.

Whether you love or hate the likes of MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Flickr, etc, they're here to stay. So if you can't 'beat 'em' do you 'join 'em'?

One of the most debated of hot apps is Twitter.

So What Is Twitter?

Twitter is a MicroBlogging platform, described by some as "stupid" or "time-sucking" and certainly the latter can be true - in fact Twitter can be quite addictive!

But the simple beauty of Twitter is your ability to communicate, in Real Time on a global scale with people from all walks of life, young and old, rich and poor. How or where else can you do that?

What people 'tweet' about varies enourmously, from mundane daily taks and occurances to a new blog post or website announcement, offers of private beta invites, quick polls, joint venure opportunities, births and birthday wishes, good news and bad news...

Many bloggers make announcements FIRST on Twitter, even before mailing thier subscriber lists, often giving Twitters a golden advanage when early adoption is paramount.

Let's have a look at few examples of the diversity of Twitter...

In 2007 @nateritter tirelessly tweated updates about the Sandiego Fires. For several days Nate gave out phone numbers of emergency shelters and aid, warned of impending evacuations, kept the world informed on the progress of fires, linked to pictures and help pages and even let people know when it was safe to go home.

@andybeal over at Marketing Pilgrim put together an excellent list of interesting and informative marketers worth following.

@SethGodin follows no-one, but more than 4,000 Twitters follow his wise words.


@drmani raises awareness of his work with The Congenital Heart Defects Foundation.

@CaseStevens keeps the community informed of useful links and additions to his valuable blog 'Affordable Internet Marketing'.


@WarrenWhitlock and @CoachDeb are currently creating 'The Twitter Handbook' - collaborating with Twitter users, via Twitter, for 'Twinterviews' and other ideas for the book.


@JeremyPalmer has a dedicated Twitter account set up for his @blackinkproject students.


Other brands feed Twitter automatically from thier blog's rss feeds, like @bbcnews


So how do YOU use Twitter? Not started twittering? Why not give it a whirl and let me know what you think and leave your comments below?

@Riquochet

...And don't forget to get your copy of The Smart Marketer's ToolBar - May's Brand New Software will be uploaded in a couple of weeks.

The Smart Marketer's ToolBar - Launching Tomorrow

I've been 'missing in action' for the past few weeks, but I've not been sitting around twiddling my thumbs!

I've been working hard on a new tool for you - actually it's a whole host of tools. Think of it as a free membership site, continually growing, with all the tools and resources available to you right from your browser, without the hassle of navigating to the site or having to login...

Introducing... (drum roll please:)

The Smart Marketer's ToolBar is already loaded up with all manner of useful tools and resources - and just about everything is free.

Some of the tools available...























Items marked with a '' are gadgets or widgets that open in thier own space...

...and can be left open, moved around your desktop, minimized or closed with one click.

Every Month your ToolBar is loaded with a Brand New Free Software Title - February and March's software is installed right now!

Top Blogs from around the net are aggregated and categorized in your ToolBar. That's some seriously good information at your fingertips.

Search The Web, Riquochet, Dictionary, Stocks, Weather, Encyclopedia, images and more. Click the highlighter to pick out your search words in results.

Click the down arrow, next to Riquochet's logo, to reveal a comprehensive menu. From there you can reach support, our knowledge base, Tell a Friend and Refresh your ToolBar to keep you up to date with new additions.

'ToolBar Options' is the place to go to customize your ToolBar. Add an email notifier, radio or shortcuts to applications.

Ready to add The Smart Marketer's ToolBar to your Marketing Arsenal? Wondering what it's going to cost?

It's Free!

Launching Wednesday 19th March as part of The Easter JV Giveaway 2008. Register (you can pre-register now and be one of the first through the doors) for The Easter JV Giveaway and Stake your Claim!

See you soon,
Steph.

P.s. Like the screenshots? You'll find the software we used in your ToolBar.

Even The Guru's are buzzin'

Remember me? The cynical one?

I've just been blown away!

I recently uncovered a storm that is brewing fervently, quite by chance, and I'm not the only one who's been caught by surprise.

Have you taken measures to ensure that you're the first and not the last? Because, my recommendation is that you better act fast.

This storm is going to be the latest marketing trend that is already starting to rise in the Internet world and it's about to cause an explosion in the online marketing scene - it's called 'S-Buzz Marketing'.

So, what's this storm all about?

Imagine being able to brand the latest and most useful softwares in the market with your very own affiliate links and distributing and marketing it using viral marketing strategies!

I've been exploring the Internet Marketing scene for quite some time - searching for the latest products, affiliate programs and marketing strategies and I must say that this is something really new, impactful and innovative for any online business.

From the looks of it, I know it's set to take viral marketing to a whole new level and this is really something you want to take a look at before everyone else does!

The power of S-Buzz marketing has just been unleashed, you should check out the IM Buzz Software Membership, set to become one of the most powerful membership sites on the planet!

Given the current membership status, it's evident that people are starting to hop unto this bandwagon really quickly. I kid you not - when I saw what was on offer I was so excited at the boundless opportunites, I simply couldn't resist!

Alright, Calm down Steph, what's the deal?

Every month members recieve...

• a brand new, top-notch Viral Buzz Software - complete with 100% Re-branding Rights
• the latest IM related eBooks
• an extensive library of S-Buzz Marketing Training Videos
• attractive commissions
• access to exclusive JV opportunities
• closed door 'beta testing' for future products
• special discounts on future products

Just mentioning all these is good enough to get my adrenaline pumping!

It is bound to drive tons of traffic, exposure and profits for any online business! And I know that it's a great opportunity that you should not miss!

So do hurry! Join me and others who have already caught hold of this new marketing revelation now before you're the last one to chance in on this new viral phenomenon!

Trust me, you will not be disappointed.

Hope to see you join me as a fellow S-Buzz marketer soon!

Steph

*Note: Membership is limited to 1000 members, to retain exclusivity. You can get in now for less than the price of a pizza - or wait until the price tag rises!


Check out this Free S-Buzz Marketing report which reveals everything to you... You'll probably want to grab a copy NOW, to understand the immense impact that S-Buzz Marketing is going to have in the online marketing industry.

"An Obvious Truth"

With the New Year upon us, people have been discussing what will be "hot" in 2008.

One of the most common topics has been VIDEO.

That's no surprise really but I think the difference is HOW video will be used.

That's why so many are talking about the significance of the video I'm about to show you.

It gives tremendous insight regarding the emergence of entertainment and marketing working together in the same video.

Armand Morin has put together something very similar to a "movie trailer" which is generating a lot of excitement - especially when people are finding out that it leads to a TON of free video lessons.

So here's what you should do:

1) Watch the video and learn
Notice how it creates an element of "curiosity" and draws you in - very powerful for maximizing conversion.

Ask yourself this - how could I use a similar approach in 2008?

2) Claim your free video content
After you watch the video you'll be redirected to an optin page where you can claim an entire month's worth of free video content.

Armand has already posted 10 videos and he's adding more throughout the month of January.

BTW - don't forget to comment on the blog as Armand is frequently responding to thoughts about each video (you'll see his response outlined in blue).

Now Click on the image below and download Armand's Free Report

"An Obvious Truth"

I have to tell you though, Armand pulls no punches - he tells it like it is, as controversial as it may be. Go ahead and discover what the "CRAP" system is about!

When you've devoured all 51 pages, come back and leave a comment...

That's all for now.

Steph.