Willie Crawford Over the past 10 years, I’ve had dozens of friends, who had successful online businesses, tell me that they were going to quit the Internet marketing business and do something else.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve gone to hundreds of websites to discover that the owners of the sites had left the online world… simply packed up and quit. Some of them explained why they quit, others simply allowed their domains to expire and quietly faded away. Many of the people, in both of the cases above, simply experienced «Internet marketing burnout.» They no longer enjoyed Internet marketing and so they went on to do something that they enjoyed more. Let’s briefly examine some of the causes of Internet marketing burnout and perhaps address how you can avoid it! One of the most prevalent causes of Internet marketing burnout, that I’ve noticed, resulted largely because people were selling thing that they really didn’t believe in. They simply tired of trying to «convince» people that they needed and wanted products that they didn’t honestly believe were a good value. They were selling products that they made good money from, but that they weren’t convinced improved peoples lives. The solution to avoiding the type of burnout described above is very simple. Don’t sell anything that you wouldn’t buy yourself. Don’t sell anything that you feel somewhat guilty about offering to others. It’s that simple. Get a sample of any product that you are thinking about selling, examine it end to end, and ONLY offer it to your market if you’re convinced that it will add tremendous VALUE to your customers’ lives. A second thing that burns Internet marketers out … especially consultants and coaches, is dealing with people who ask you for help but won’t commit to helping themselves. You throw your heart and soul into giving someone the best advice that you have. You spend a lot of time and effort helping someone to research a project and come up with a great plan – only to have them not follow through. That burns a lot of people out over time. The way to avoid encountering this type of burnout is to be very selective in agreeing to work with clients. Interview/screen them and confirm that they have the habit of completing tasks. Confirm that they have a strong enough «reason why» that they will NEVER give up on a dream or a project.
These are the people you want as clients. These are the ONLY people that I currently work with – because my time is very limited and I only want to work with people who are willing to help themselves. You should do the same! Many Internet marketers burn out after growing tired of pushing product after product to a «jaded» market. They see new products «coming down the pike» every day, and they are asked to promote many of them. Some can’t resist this temptation. The problem arises when they realize that MOST of their customers, who buy product after product, NEVER actually use most of them. This becomes disheartening and can lead to burnout. The solution is to be very selective and to only sell things that that you believe in. Once you have a product that you really believe improves your customers’ lives, don’t just promote it for a week or two. Develop a long-term plan and promote it until it’s no longer a timely and appropriate product. Most of your customers will only buy that product after hearing you talk about it over and over again. So, do repeat mailings for the same product rather than promoting 100 different products. You’ll find that more satisfying
Many people burn out because what they’re doing online doesn’t fit in with what they see as their «purpose.
» When you do a job that has no real «meaning» to you, you soon get bored or tired of that job. The solution is to do something that fits in with something in your life that has meaning… something bigger than just the act of making a few short-term sales. As an example, I help with a project that, on the surface, sells cookbooks and is producing a television show. When you dig deeper, the project (at http://TheDevotionalChef.com) is helping to build and fund a homeless shelter… perhaps two homeless shelters, in Baton Rouge Louisiana. That project has a LOT of meaning and purpose to me because I’ve known so many homeless people… some whom have died largely as a result of being homeless. I enjoy that project because I can see the «good» that it’s doing. Not every project has to take on such significance, but when one does it’s a lot easier to see it through to completion. It’s a lot easier to enjoy working on a project like that, even when the going gets tough! Another way to avoid Internet marketing burnout is to take control of your time and lead a balanced life. One of the elements missing from many Internet marketers’ (that I consult with) lives is that they have no real social life.
They spend all of their time sitting in front of a computer and interact with other people face to face very little.
That can turn you into a very lonely place. You can deal with the «lonely computer person» syndrome by making a conscious effort to get out and do things with neighbors, friends, and relatives. You can also make new friends who share your interest in Internet marketing by attending more Internet marketing seminars and conferences. You can form deep friendships at these events as well as meet new potential business, and joint venture, partners. A good place to locate Internet marketing events is: http://InternetMarketingSeminarSchedule.com There may even be inexpensive seminars and conferences within a convenient driving distance from where you live
Another cause of Internet marketing burnout is the feeling that you are not making any real progress. This is often due to the fact that, without a boss watching over your shoulders, you have very little discipline and therefore VERY low productivity. The solution to the low discipline, low productivity problem is simple… guard against things that decrease your productivity such as instant messenger type programs, hanging out in forums too much, playing games online, etc. If you need to, eliminate… or at least schedule when these things will fit into your day! Take a course or read a few books on time management. This will help you to see how others gain control over their time, and get much more done.
My favorite book on the topic is by Dan Kennedy, and is called: «No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs – The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Guide To Time Productivity Sanity.» I bought a copy off Barnes and Nobles. Get a copy, read it, and apply some of what Dan teaches… it will free up an amazing amount of time for you. While you’re learning from Dan, also grab a free 3-month subscription to his newsletter. It will continue helping you to get a grip on your use of time, and also revolutionize your business. You can get a free 3-month subscription at: http://www.dk3monthspecial.com/best_offer Grab it NOW
The final cause of low productivity that we will examine is lack of focus and trying to do too many different projects at the same time. You begin to feel overwhelmed and that you are not getting ANY project finished. The solution to this one is amazingly simple too.. Focus on one thing at a time and see it through to completion. This gives you that much needed sense of accomplishment AND also gives you some cash flow. Half-completed products can’t be sold. After you’ve complete a given project, only then do you allow yourself to even NOTICE the next project. I’ve just shared with you some common causes of Internet marketing burnout, and how I, and my clients, avoid them. Apply the appropriate ones to your life today, and you can easily avoid this business killer!
Tale Chaser Publishing, Inc. This change is permanent: Marketing your website without taking advantage of RSS feeds will be the biggest mistake you can make in 2006 and beyond. Microsoft is unleashing a new OS (Vista) that will plug into the web via RSS in a very profound way. If you haven’t been keeping up on Vista (formerly Longhorn) developments because you thought it was of no consequence to you as a marketer, think twice. Vista will revolutionize the way everyone syndicates their content and markets their websites forever. RSS is fast becoming the backbone of the web. Sites are organically syndicating content around the web through RSS search engines like this one: http://rssfeeds.contentdesk.com. Feeds in RSS directories then get picked up by publishers looking for good headline content for their sites. The major search engines also pick up those feed listings and often discover new sites and spider them faster than any other form of content syndication including articles and press releases! How To Create A Feed For Your Site First off, if you are not blogging, you need to.
Every type of site imaginable can produce a relevant blog with topics related to your main content. It doesn’t matter if you simply sell furniture on your site – you need a blog! Imagination is all that is required to create a blog featuring the almighty promotion power of an RSS feed. In the furniture example you can blog about interior design and any number of topics. Notice that the big sites (that were formerly simple shopping cart sites with little content) are now putting up articles and blogging about the topics surrounding their products. They are not stupid. They know that creating content and feeding it around the web is a major traffic source and they’ve been switching to richer content models for well over a year en masse. Most any major shopping site you land on nowadays has rich content somewhere on the site. And they have a feed their visitors can subscribe to and that they can market with. For the smaller mom and pop shop, a WordPress blog is all you need to plug into the RSS world and fill your site with rich content (not just product descriptions and sales letters) that the engines are looking for, as well as the major part of your market who want more information before making purchases.
A review site is a very popular model.
Lots of surfers want to read about 3rd party experiences with products before deciding on purchases. Again, this model is not new and it is not an afterthought marketing ploy. It is major business to the sites who have mastered the art of filling direct sales sites and shopping cart-run sites with deep content. With Microsoft Vista, all PC users are going to be able to detect feeds on every site they visit and subscribe to those feeds. Very soon the days of «Give me your email address and other private information» will be a thing of the past. Smart marketers are going to adopt the RSS information delivery model because surfers will quickly begin to ignore email subscription forms while looking for the simple and completely anonymous RSS subscription model. So if you haven’t started planning a marketing campaign utilizing RSS delivery of newsletters and updates over email, you had better get started understanding RSS and its eventual replacement of the traditional email list. Critical mass tolerance of spam and giving out email addresses has been reached in all markets. Only in very tight niches in special circumstances where there is instant trust and credibility conveyed by a site will you find decent optin rates. Everywhere else the optin rate for any kind of email notification list is at rock bottom. Add to that a dismal delivery ratio of emails due to overzealous, catch-all spam filters from the ISP to the user level, and the writing is on the wall: email is on its way out as a viable tool for a successful marketing campaign.
The change is happening now and it will be permanent. RSS will eclipse email lists and it will be the new defacto method of content syndication around the web by the end of 2006. Tracking what your RSS subscribers click on and do through your RSS feeds is the problem many geeks are working on now. We will soon have more accurate and more in-depth tracking available through RSS subscription and sydication than we currently have with email marketing. Once marketers feel comfortable that they haven’t lost any tracking ability that we currently enjoy with email, the game will quickly accelerate into a whole new type of competition for eyeballs. Watch also for a whole slew of new marketing courses and materials that teach how to dominate a niche with RSS marketing rather than email marketing. «Growing Your List» and «Syndicating Your Content» is going to be done by RSS more and more by regular website owners as this year progresses. That includes your competition! Vista will be a massive feed detector/reader available to all PC users very soon. This means that you can have a feed on your site for visitors to subscribe to, or you can see for yourself how many of your visitors choose to ignore your email subscription form and your content because you are not Web 2.0 enough for them. So, are you set to take advantage of RSS as the impending dominant tool in your marketing campaign?
Are you marketing in just one language?If so, you are missing out on 64.
8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages. One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffic is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. Not to mention, the competition in foreign search engines is much less competitive than the search engines of the United States. Foreign language markets online are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets. You have the opportunity to tap into this market while it is in an exponential growth phase. Below is a complete plan to getting your web site translated and into the foreign search engines and directories.First, you must make a list of all of your keywords in English. These are the phrases that people use to find you in the search engines. You can extract these keywords by going to your web site’s statistics program. To optimize your web site for foreign search engines, you must identify equivalent and related terms in that language. Many of the English keywords may have multiple translations in another language. For example, if you are optimizing your web page around the keyword “socks”. You will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French because there are two common words for socks in the French language: “bas” and “chaussettes”.After you create a listof targeted keywords, you will need to find out which of these search terms are worth pursuing. You can do this by doing some research with Overture and Miva. Both of these pay-per-click search engines offer search suggestion tools in a variety of languages. Finally, you will need to group the search terms together into similar terms and assign each group to a specific page on your web site.Step two is toplace these translated keywords on your site.
There are two ways of doing this. You can translate each page into a specific language. Once you have all of these pages translated, you will then need to link them all together from your home page. Each of these pages will need to be optimized for your targeted keywords. You do this the same way that you would for an English site. Place your keywords in the title tag, meta keywords tag, and the meta description tag. You’ll also want to plug these translated phrases into the body of the text and headlines of your pages, especially the first 200 words.However, the best way to translate your site is by creating a completely new site for each translation. Doing this offers a variety of benefit, one of these being the ability to register a country-specific domain for each of your web site translations.For example, if you currently own www.companyname.com and you are translating into French, it would be appropriate to use www.companyname.fr. This country-specific domain lets the search engines know that you are a French web site. By setting up a new web site for each language, you will also be entitled to additional directory listings in the country specific Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and other high–profile web site directories in that language. Creating multiple sites is also beneficial for your linking campaign. People will be more likely to link to you if your web site is entirely in their language. Because link popularity is such a crucial ranking factor, creating separate web sites would be best for your business.Step three in our multilingual strategyis to submit your newly translated site to the foreign search engines. Many of the major search engines have regional versions of their web site so that they appeal to visitors in various countries of the world. They include AOL Search, Alta Vista, Excite, FAST Search, Go/Infoseek, Google, HotBot, Lycos, MSN Search, Northern Light, Open Directory, Snap, WebCrawler, and Yahoo.
You can find a complete list of the top foreign language search engines at http://www.allsearchengines.com/foreign.html Another opportunity that has been opened up by multilingual markets is that of pay-per click search engines. Using pay-per-click search engines is one of the fastest ways to start funneling targeted traffic to your website. While most of the pay-per-click engines in the United States have been flooded with competition, many of the foreign pay-per-click search engines have untapped opportunities. English language search terms can often be five-times the cost of Spanish language bids. For example, the keyword phrase “internet marketing” cost $2.09 for the number one position in the English version of Overture. However, if you place an ad in the Spanish version, it would only cost you 50 cents for the very same position.Keep in mindthat when you translate your web site into a different language, you must be able to offer customer support in that language. If you are not fluent in the language yourself, this will be something you need to outsource. Many web surfers located in countries other than the United States and Canada do not trust web sites as much as Americans and Canadians do.
This is largely because the internet was first introduced in English.
Because of this, visitors from other countries will want your online business to have a personal touch. You can do this by providing local contact information and an address in the footer of each of your pages. Your visitors need to know that you are a real person that can be trusted. If you decide to translate your web site, do not take this task lightly. There are many considerations that must be taken into account. It is important to steer clear from automated tools to translate your site. Instead, use local translators who fully understand how business works in their country and make sure you have local sales staff to support each of your customers.Your online presenceis just as important as that of an offline business. You need a customer support staff that will be available to your customers at all times. You are not just translating your business, you are establishing an online business in that language and a local presence in the country you are targeting.
Trade is a key factor in economic development. Successful use of trade keys can boost a country’s development. Today the world of trade markets has boomed up due to major contribution of increasing online trade portals.
These markets provide you with Opportunities and Challenges and definitely prove the theory of “Survival of the Fittest Fastest” in today’s scenario. Internet has helped to promote products and reach people around the globe in a matter of seconds. Trading over the Internet has undergone a paradigm shift over the past few years with the upcoming of various trustworthy and friendly portals, offering desired commodities to traders across the Globe at best prices. Online trade portals are a great source of information and sourcing of a wide range of products. Such highly recommended online global trading portal having a very wide range of technology products to offer to its clients/customers. This type of online portals offers trade facilities for Recycled Products, Energy Products, Electronic Products, Etc, which can meet the demand of the consumers. Products like Used / Empty Printer Cartridges, Mobile Phones, Metal Scrap, Plastic Scrap, Oils and Waxes, Metals, Alloys Ores, Communication Network, Entertainment, Security Systems, etc are in great demand today. To meet the demand of products around the world, they are exploring new business opportunities and new markets with sustainability as a key driver. As the economy metabolizes more and more metals and other raw materials, the damage mounts. Although recycling is typically justified as an economically attractive alternative to rising landfill costs, it also greatly reduces ecosystem damage. Such Portals usually ship worldwide and pride themselves in supplying the best latest technology products enabling trading fastest and time saving technique. Changing the way traders used to trade a decade ago. You can visit Tekxchange at www.tekxchange.com for more information and online trade.
