Bill McRea

In the early days of the web in the 1990’s the landscape was a bit like the wild, wild west. Marketers were figuring out how everything worked as they went along. As the personal computer revolution grew in momentum and more and more people got computers and then Internet access at home, and at work and the audience began to grow, Internet Marketing began to become more sophisticated, but the main through line for the medium seemed to be to meet and engage with users on the platforms that they used the most.

Towards the end of the 90’s we saw banner ads grow in popularity across the web. Back in the day when there was still the novelty factor, people actually clicked on banners, some of which enjoyed as high as 30% click-through rates.

Email, which got its start in the 1960’s in academic settings was adopted by the public and businesses in the late 1980s, and the early 90’s saw the beginnings of email Marketing.

But everything changed in 2000 when Google launched its AdWords PPC program making pay-for-performance online advertising mainstream. PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising was very popular and very successful for Google. Today it still accounts for the largest portion of their revenues.

In 2005 video marketing explodes on the scene and youtube.com and hulu.com experiment with business models while video advertising revenues skyrocket.

Concurrently with the rise in online marketing, the mobile marketing bonanza begins to gather steam. As mobile phones become more sophisticated and able to access the Internet, people begin to access the Internet using their cell phones more than with desktop or laptop computers.

When the iPhone hit the market in January of 2007 it was a game changer. With its sleek touch screen technology, and over 200 patents connected with the design, the iPhone was poised to transform personal mobile technology along with having a huge influence on the culture. Other similar smart phone devices came on to the scene and even more recently with the release of the iPad in 2010, tablets are changing once again how people relate to and interact with technology, which in turns influences how marketers try to get the attention of these tech-savvy users.

Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said, “The post-PC era represents a change in consumer behavior. It’s not just the device. It’s the social behavior. It’s a social trend. The post-PC era represents a social shift and a technology shift.”

Here are some fascinating mobile marketing statistics:

•87% of Americans own a cell phone, 95% of them have text capabilities

•84% of cell phone users have their cell phone within reach 24/7

•90% of text messages are read. Email compares at about 20%

•23% of text coupons are forwarded to friends

•text messages are green

•text messages out number cell phone calls 2 to 1

•10 million digital coupons were redeemed in the first 6 months of 2009 a 25% increase over 2008

Technology experts have predicted that by 2013 most customers will be online using their mobile devices rather than a computer !

250+ million Americans carry mobile phones—over 80% of the nation’s population

Source: CTIA Wireless Association

As more and more people move from computers to tablets and mobile devices—what Steve Jobs calls “post-PC era” products, the popularity of these products are changing consumer habits. Marketers will need to keep up or get left behind.

For more information about mobile marketing and  online marketing, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of tips and strategies for growing your business online.

You’ll be glad to know that there are several easy ways to monetize your blog, and we will discuss them later on in this article, but we are going to begin by talking about when the best time to monetize your blog is, and that is when you have built up a nice, dependable flow of traffic.

1. Create tightly focused content

To prepare your blog to make money for you, the first step is generating traffic. The best way to generate traffic is to create high quality, keyword optimized content that is narrowly focused on a specific topic but also delves deeply into that topic. It helps if you have a love or a passion for the topic or niche because that will help motivate you to write lots of fresh content for your blog. Your passion and enthusiasm for the topic will show in your writing and that will attract more visitors who will be more likely to share your great content with their friends who share their love of that topic as well.

2. Marketing your blog

Getting the word out about your blog will help attract more readers and subscribers. You can use the whole gamut of strategies that include:

• Creating and submitting press releases
• Article Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Blog Commenting
• Directory Submissions
• Submitting to RSS Directories

If you are creating valuable, link-worthy content on our blog you will start attracting a following naturally, but in the interim you can help that process along by establishing a daily routine of building links to your blog which will increase traffic, and SEO.

3. Choose a Blog Monetization Scheme

So, now we get to the good part. You’ve put in the time and your blog is getting decent traffic. The way you monetize it will reflect in large part the kind of content you are offering and the nature of your target audience. But in general there are three broad directions you can take when it comes to monetizing your blog:

1.      Selling advertising

2.      Affiliate Marketing

3.      Selling your own products

If your niche is underwater basket weaving, you could sell advertising space for the basket weaving supplies vendors in your industry. You could market the various books and basket weaving supplies and get a commission when your visitors follow the link from your site and make a purchase. Or, you could write a home study course about how to weave baskets for fun and profit. You could place a link to your downloadable course right on your blog and sell your eBooks around the clock.

The easiest of all of the options mentioned for monetizing your blog would most likely be to host Google adsense ads. All you have to do is sign up using your Google account and then place the ad codes on your blog. The ads that appear will fit in with the context of the content on your blog. This is an easy way to generate some money from your blog. If you want to make a lot of money with Adsense advertising, you’ll have to choose keywords that bring in higher click-through rates, and build a large network of blogs.

Are you tired of wasting time setting up your Adsense and ClickBank ad codes on your WordPress blog? Visit, http://passiveincometheme.com,  and learn how this amazing WordPress theme gets higher click through rates to help you generate more passive income online.

Website owners know that building backlinks to their website is one the most important tasks because the greater the number of inbound links the more important and valuable your site looks in the eyes of the search engines, and the better page rank it’s likely to achieve.

But the task of building links to your website can be labor intensive and time consuming. And while, in the end getting links help make your site better, the actual task is pretty boring and mindless. Website owners cannot afford to neglect this task because links equals traffic and traffic equals money. So, the question of what is the most effective way to automate link building for your website is an important one, and then answer is the topic of this article.

Let’s take a look at the most traditional ways of building backlinks.

Article Marketing
This is a tried and true method of building high quality, targeted backlinks, but it takes a large number of articles submitted to a lot of article directories before you start to see a nice flow of traffic.

Video marketing
Similar to article marketing in that it takes a bit of effort to create the videos, and publish them to the various directories before you start seeing the traffic flow. But once it does start flowing video is an excellent source of traffic. It’s just not an effective way to build automated traffic unless some of your videos go viral and take on a life of their own being shared by more and more people and sending traffic to your website.

Blog Commenting
This is another way to get some targeted traffic to your blog, and it’s also a great way to gain some exposure in your niche. If you target high page rank, authority blogs in your niche and consistently leave comments there you will begin to establish a relationship with the blogger and their community. This is an effective way to build back links to your blog, but you’ve got to be willing to invest the time and energy to create real relationships.

Social bookmarking
Using services such as ping.fm, or socialposter.com allows you to easily submit your URLs to social bookmarking sites such as dig, reddit, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and blinklist.com. This is a great way to generate some backlinks for your website.

All of these methods ob building backlinks work very well but most of them take a considerable amount of time and effort in order for them to produce the links that you want. The most effective option for building automated backlinks to your website is subscribing to a backlink building service or purchasing a software solution. As a business owner you do not realistically have to time to do all of those backlink building activities every single day.

When you are researching backlink building services you will find that there are several models of services available. You can purchase a single batch of links that are delivered over a period of time so that it appears to be natural, you can subscribe to a monthly service where you get a set number of new backlinks each month.

Now, are you ready to discover the real secret to automated traffic? Check out, http://autotrafficnirvana.com and kiss  your worries goodbye about struggling to generate website traffic, or fussing over SEO.

You know that video Marketing is sizzling hot and you are ready to jump in with both feet, but you are clear on the fact that the youtube.com player is not very professional looking and not customizable. You really want to be able to control who has access to your video and you’d really love a nice, slick player that you can brand, customize, remove the controls on if you choose to, and that works in a dependable way without a lot of advanced technical knowledge required to set it up.

In this article we will compare the features of two video players so that you can choose the one that suits your preferences for video marketing.

1. EZS3.com

The EZS3 player is a combination video player and a service that makes using your Amazon S3 account much simpler. In fact, without a service such as EZS3, you might not be able to figure out how to navigate your Amazon S3 hosting account.

EZS3 provides an easy interface that allows you to drag and drop files when you want to upload and download; it allows you to easily create folders to organize your files. Because it is a cloud storage solution, you don’t have to download any software to your PC.

With EZS3 you can control who views your videos, and the analytics package allows you to see who is embedding your videos.

1. EasyVideoPlayer2

Designed with video marketers in mind, Easyvideoplayer lets you embed a “buy now” button inside your videos, you can add an opt-in form, which lets viewers become subscribers to your email list, gives you analytics and the ability to split test your videos so you always know which one is the most effective.

For those who are running a WordPress blog, Easyvideoplayer has a plugin that makes it even easier to use.

With Easyvideoplayer you can also secure your videos against theft and add clickable overlays to your video presentations.

Each of these players works well with Amazon S3 hosting, which is a very popular, affordable solution for hosting your files for video marketing.

So, you see each player has its own features, and some will appeal to you and others won’t. Depending on your situation you will choose the one that best suits your needs. Ask around in your network and see what your colleagues have to say about the video players they use for video marketing. Test a couple of these solutions out to see which you like best and which performs to your satisfaction.

Video marketing is a lot of fun and it’s getting easier and easier to set it up and have videos streaming on your site drawing tons of traffic, boosting conversions and educating and entertaining your audience while you generate lots of sales.

Video sales letters convert like crazy. Discover how to set them up at the click of a button. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/VideoPlayer, and find out how this software also helps you build an automated email list quickly and easily.

The amazing popularity of online video can’t be disputed. With 1 billion videos served up daily from youtube.com, Internet video has emerged as a powerful force that you can no longer afford to ignore when it comes to Marketing your online business.

Video marketing is a powerful way to reach your target audience and engage with them in a way that you really can’t with just words on the screen. But until now, many people have been intimidated by video marketing saying how expensive the equipment is, and how they don’t want to appear on camera. But when it comes to growing your email list, which is by far your most essential business asset, using video is the best way to grow your email list. In this article we’ll share some tips about how you can use video to explode your email list.

1. Always include a call to action in your videos.

You’ve got to clearly spell out for your viewers exactly what you expect them to do next. When the purpose of the video is to grow your email list, then in your call to action you should direct them to the page where they can sign up.

2. Link to a squeeze page in the video’s description box.

Place the link that you want viewers to click on first in your video’s description box. Make sure you type in the entire URL so that it becomes a live link. For example, you would type, http://www.visitmywebsite.com, rather than just, www.visitmywebsite.com.

3. Spread the word about your videos.

Don’t just upload them and sit and wait to see what happens. Announce your videos on your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and all of the other social media websites that you participate in sending lots of traffic to your videos. Ask your friends and followers to share and re-tweet the link to your videos with their network.

Another way to build your list using video is to create a ‘how-to’ series of videos that share valuable information that your audience would really find useful. What have your readers been asking about the most? What information would they really go for? Use that knowledge and create a three or four video series, and then an intro, or ‘teaser’ video that talks about the content covered in the video series. Create a bit of a cliffhanger in the intro video that will entice viewers to sign up to find out the rest of the story or what happens.

Use the element of scarcity to create urgency for them to sign up. Announce that these videos will only be available for a limited time. Name a time and date and do a countdown to show how serious you are.

Using video marketing is an effective way to build your email list quickly and easily.

Are you ready for some amazing software that builds an email list on auto-pilot? Check out, http://mcreasite.com/VideoPlayer, and discover how you can easily create video sales pages and start making money online today.