Bill McRea

In a business like Internet Marketing where stories of overnight success are legendary, even more are the stories of those who have failed miserably having spent thousands of dollars on courses, hiring the wrong coaches, and chasing every hot trend that comes along. There are a few commonalities among the mistakes that new online marketers make. In this article we will explore just eight of them and how to avoid them.

1. Your website looks unprofessional

With competition as steep as it is online your website must look professional and you must appear trustworthy or else visitors will click away. No one will take you seriously if your website looks sloppy and unprofessional. This is not an area to cut corners if you want to make money online. Spend the money and hire a designer.

2. Starting out with ideas that are too complex

Keep it simple when you are first starting out and then build on your small successes. Don’t aim to create a site to compete with Amazon as your first project.

3. Failure to focus

Because the Internet moves so fast and there is so much going on people can easily get distracted and want to drop what they are doing and jump in on the next, “Big Thing.” You will never find success if you do not focus on one project at a time until you achieve the goals you have set.

4. Failing to keep your website updated with fresh content

You can’t just build a site and then sit back and wait for sales to roll in. In order to attract traffic from the search engines, and attention from your human visitors, you need a steady flow of fresh, relevant content on your site several times a week.

5. Neglecting SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is critical if you are going to rely upon organic search engine traffic to your site. One of the biggest determining factors to search engine ranking is how many back links your site has.  Either spend the time building backlinks or hire someone to do it for you or your site will flounder and never reach page one in Google.

6. Attempting to go it alone

Internet Marketing can be a challenging thing to try do all on your own. Having joint venture partners, and networking with other marketers is a great way to gain support and encouragement, get exposure to other audiences and learn new strategies.

7. Neglecting to build an email subscriber list

This is a huge one, and it should be closer to the top of the list. Ask any successful marketer and they will tell you that they would be dead in the water without their email subscriber list. This is one of those rare cases where size does not matter. What matters is the kind of relationship you have with your list. If you maintain a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship with your subscribers, your email list can be a lucrative resource.

8. Giving up too soon

Here’s another big mistake that would-be marketers make and that is to give up before they give their project a chance to reach success. So many new marketers jump from project to project without seeing success simply because they did not invest enough time or have enough patience to see it through.

If you want to avoid common mistakes and learn some powerful Internet marketing strategies, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover how you can build and grow a successful business online today.

Webinars, which are the Internet version of a live seminar, can be either a live event where the presenter and participants are interacting in real time, or they can be pre-recorded and then replayed several times. Webinars have become a powerful way to reach lots of prospective customers at once, but they are also a great format for selling downloadable information products online. In this article we’ll take a look at how you can get started using webinars to sell information products.

What product will you be offering?

The first step in selling information products using webinars will be to decide what product you will be offering to your audience. The type of product will have some bearing on the format of your webinar. For example, if you are selling a ‘how-to’ course, the webinar might be instructional where you walk participants through how to do a specific task.

Choosing a webinar service provider

There are several webinar service providers and you can choose the one that best suits your needs and your budget. Here are some of the top webinar providers:

• Cisco’s WebEx
• Go to Webinar
• MegaMeeting

Some of the features of these webinar providers include:

• Real-time screen sharing
• VoIP
• Webcam Compatibility
• Embedded video sharing
• Full duplex support (allows participants to communicate at the same time)
• Polling (allows the presenter to poll the audience and present the results in real time)

Composing your presentation

You can use any kind of presentation software such as PowerPoint, or some of the free, online solutions such as Prezi, SlideRocket, or Google docs Presentations.

As you prepare your presentation, remember to keep it as simple as possible so that you do not distract viewers with flashy graphics. Be sure to include lots of relevant content that your participants will be able to use immediately. If it turns out to be an hour long commercial for your product, people will not be as happy to buy from you. But if you provide lots of value, and they come to know, like and trust you, then they are more likely to want to purchase what you have to offer.

Marketing your webinar

Once you have finished putting the presentation together, you’ll want to spread the word about your event. Create a landing page where participants can register for the webinar by leaving their name and email address.  You can also request a phone number and send a text message reminder to their phone before the webinar starts.

Next you would set up an email list which you can use to keep in contact with subscribers. Be sure to send out reminders to ensure the highest attendance possible. You can offer to send a link to the recording of the webinar only to those who have registered. You can also use email to follow up after the webinar is over, send them a link to the replay and invite them to your next webinar event.

Webinars can be a fun way to make money selling information products. Take the time to research the various providers, and practice your presentation and soon you will have a winning program.

There are lots of other ways to sell information products online in addition to webinars. For more information you are welcome to visit http://mcreasite.com/blog for lots of tips and strategies for making money online.

When you think of video Marketing online, youtube.com is where most people think to go first. It’s been around a long time and now that it’s owned by Google it’s one of the most popular video sharing sites on the Internet. But it’s not the only one. There are several viable alternatives to youtube.com  when it comes to video sharing sites for video marketing. Let’s take a look at seven of them in no particular order where you can host marketing videos and include a link back to your site.

1. Metacafe

Metacafe’s  content is carefully cultivated and reviewed by an 80,000 member viewer community.  With 38 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, your video hosted at Metacafe will get viewed.

2. Revver

Revver provides a way for video producers to generate revenue with their videos. They attach a contextual ad to the video and the more the video is viewed the more revenue it generates. All of the videos are rated similar to movies with a G, PG or PG13 rating system.

3. Daily Motion

DailyMotion is a video sharing site that puts a lot of emphasis on building community by incorprating some social media elements to their profiles such as the ability to create a contact list of other DailyMotion members and share your feedback with them about the videos that you watch.

4. Vimeo

Vimeo allows users to create channels for sharing videos among groups. They have a video school to help you improve your skills, and Vimeo has an app that lets you watch, upload, edit and manage your videos right from your smart phone.

5. Blip.tv

Blip.tv seems to attract webseries–webisodes and other kinds of video series. You can sign up for an advertiser account and split the revenues 50/50 with Blip.tv. You’ll find analytics and other useful tools on their user dashboard.

6. Veoh

Specializing in long form videos, Veoh does not restrict the size of your videos when you are uploading them. They do not have the vast audience of youtube, but they feature high quality content.

7. Viddler

Viddler promises to help you build your brand using video marketing with a bias toward larger corporations as opposed to home grown videos produced by individuals.

All of these alternatives to youtube.com are video sharing sites that offer free memebrships. They may not have an audience to rival the millions at youtube.com, but some sites emphasize the power of community, and cultivating quality content for a more satisfying user experience.

A good video sharing site should be intuitive enough for a newbie to understand, have helpful features and available support to answer questions and concerns.

Video marketing is a powerful way to get lots of exposure and targeted traffic to your website. Making short, engaging, entertaining and educational videos will attract prospective customers and help you to expand your brand online in a cost-effective manner.

So, there are just a few of the alternative video sharing sites that you can try instead of or in addition to youtube.com for attracting traffic and getting exposure using video marketing.

When it comes to building a buzz online about your business, video marketing is just one strategy. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of additional ways to grow your online business.

When it comes to buying advertising space for mobile devices you’ve got lots of options, but one of the major players in this space is admob, which was acquired by Google last year. In this article we’re going to look at how you can place ads for your products and services on this mobile ad serving platform.

Jason Spero, of AdMob, in his article, Mobile: It’s Not Too Late to be Early, “Most (businesses) have not yet meaningfully engaged with mobile consumers and adapted their strategies to capitalize on the mobile opportunity. But, it’s still not too late to be early to mobile.” Spero goes on to share these tips for businesses looking to explore the possibilities of mobile Marketing:

1. Create a mobile website
2. Focus on local marketing
3. Get personal with your audience
4. Track your mobile site separately from your website
5. Iterate, change, evolve

Source: techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/mobile-its-not-too-late-to-be-early/

AdMob

If you have used Google’s AdWords program before, then signing up with AdMob should be simple for you. Simply fill out the standard registration page and you will be brought to the AdMob marketplace where you will have the option to either, ‘start advertising,’ or ‘monetize your sites.’

You will find five tabs in the AdMob Marketplace:

• Campaigns

Under the Campaigns tab, you will find new advertiser training videos, which will walk you through the entire process of setting up your ads, an advertiser starter kit with tips for optimizing your campaign, and the AdMob help section. You’ll see the, ‘Create a new ad campaign,’ button, and a list of all of the campaigns that you have in operation.

• Sites & Apps

Under this tab you can add a site or an app and integrate the AdMob install code for monetization.

• Reporting

Here you’ll find Campaign reporting, sites & apps reporting, manage reports and site geographic stats.

• Tools

Under the tools tab you’ll find app conversion tracking, AdWhirl, which is an open-source, mediation layer that allows you to allocate your traffic across the various networks, and the AdMob API, which is still in beta.

• Account

The account tab is where your billing management takes place. You’ll find an account summary, transfer funds, add funds, adjust notification settings, and edit your account information.

Placing your ads on mobile phones and tablet devices such as the iPad is as simple as using any other online advertising platform. Google makes it simple for you by providing tutorial videos that walk you through every step of the process, and there is a support forum where you can ask questions and get answers while you are creating your mobile marketing ad campaigns.

Don’t wait any longer to get your ads in front of your target audience using the powerful medium of mobile. People take their phones with them everywhere and they are interacting with them constantly throughout the day.  Today when you want to capture eyeballs and attention, gain more exposure, increase revenue and engagement, mobile marketing is the prime medium to achieve those goals.

Now that you are clearly ready to learn more about mobile marketing and what it can do for your business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover lots of tips and strategies for growing your online business.

Google+ is Google’s hot new social network, which  is available now to people who have a Google account, and it is becoming one of the fastest-growing social networks.  It is estimated that it has grown to 10 million users already.  Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at launching a social networking platform Buzz and Wave just didn’t catch on as they had hoped.  So far it seems like people have stopped asking if this is going to be a Facebook killer. But it’s just getting off the ground and people are discovering what this new social networking platform has to offer. The UI is simple, intuitive and familiar, if you are used to the other social networking platforms, but there are a few unique features that will set Google plus apart from Facebook and Twitter.

+Circles

Circles makes it simple to quickly assign people to groups. You might have circles of family members work colleagues, college friends, business associates, sports fans, hobbies and other interests, etc. When you add a person to your Google+ you will assign them to one or several of your existing circles or create a new one to add them to. When you share content on Google+ you are asked to choose which circles you want to share that content with. You even have the option to share it with your e-mail contacts on Gmail, who have not yet joined Google+.

+Hangouts

Google+ launched hangouts, which is live video chat that can include up to 10 people at once, a full week before Facebook was set to launch its similar product in partnership with Skype. Hangouts have great potential for bringing online users together in real time.

+Sparks

Sparks is a massive feed of content from across the web that includes video and is available in over 40 languages. It provides a way for users to find and share interesting content from a wide variety of categories with their circles within Google plus.

+Mobile

The Google+ Android app allows users to take all of the functions of Google plus with them on the road with the exception of hangouts. But that functionality may be coming to mobile sooner than later. Instant uploads is supposed to make sharing photos from your mobile phone to the web super simple. For now the iOS app for Apple’s iPhone devices is not yet available to the public.

+1 Button

Now that Google plus has launched the +1 button takes on a whole new meaning as you collect book marks for pages that you like across the web. The +1 button collects all these links on a single page in your G+ stream. So if you want more traffic and more people sharing stuff from your site, be sure to add the +1 button to your website.

G+ hacks and tips

• To mention people in your posts on G+, add an @ or a + in front of their name

@Tom Jones or +Tom Jones

• Make a message private by only sharing it with one person and disabling re-sharing.
• Add photos, links or videos to your posts by dragging them directly to the share box.

*word* = word

_word = word

-word = word

• Clicking the +1 button on a post is the same as the ‘Like” button on Facebook.
• Clicking +1 on the web will add that post to your +1 page

Taking a look at Google plus in these first opening days it doesn’t seem like it will replace Facebook and twitter, but rather, they can all coexist happily as people adapt  to using the different platforms for different reasons.

Source: plus.google.com

If you’re looking for more information about how you can use social media marketing to get more exposure for your website, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to find a ton of tips and strategies for Marketing your business online.