Everything I’m about to show you is based on the methods I use daily to make money. These methods can be applied to any online market.

Internet marketing is about targeting hungry buyers in places where the traffic is easy to find and will yield a return on our time and investment. Nothing I am about to show you is complex however, 90% of people marketing online fail to understand these concepts and therefore struggle to make money online.

The methods I am about to show you will work and I am not going to hold anything back however, you will need to take action to make it work.

Everything I am going to show you is based on real world experience. It’s been proven to make money for me over the years.

I am going to use an affiliate marketing site because it allows me to focus on the most important part of a successful online business, which is conversion and marketing.

I will use the website http://www.siliconewristband.org as an example site.

By targeting affiliate marketing, I do not have to worry about;

1. Having a product of the of my own
2. Customer support
3. Merchant accounts
4. Accepting payments online

Our goal is to convert as many visitors into buyers.

We will be doing this by focusing our attention on a very small percent of Google searches.

We need to understand how search engines work but even more importantly we need understand how the searchers search.

I would guess that about 80% of the searches that take place on the major search engines are for research. These are people who have no intention of purchasing anything online, they are looking for information. Therefore they will not be of any use to us and we will not target them in our search engine marketing.

I would also guess that about 30% are looking for information for a future purchase. These people who may or may not make a purchase in the future, we will not target them ether.

The smallest groups of searchers are the ones looking to purchase something right now. They understand what they are looking for, have the money and are ready to make a purchase.

These people will search by product names, model numbers, and will use terms like free shipping, discount, and bonus and so on and so on.

These are the people we want to target.

Geeks on Steroids have spent the last 8 years building and selling custom website designs. It’s been a very lucrative as well as a very stressful business. One of the things I’ve always liked about building and selling websites is the community associated with web designing and online marketing.

It seems that someone is always giving away some form of opensource software that meets the needs of the next project you are about to undertake.

I’ve never really thought about the downside of this until late yesterday afternoon. I wanted to build three websites for myself and it was time for everyone to go home. Since there was no one around to build my sites I bought 3 templates from template monster and will have my guys customize them on Monday.

But this got me to thinking, for $62.00 a template there is absolutely no reason in the world why someone should have an ugly website design. Ugly websites just don’t work and some of the templates are darn nice templates, a couple tweaks here and there and you’ve got yourself a kick ass website design for under $200.00.

I am sure the custom web design industry will always be around but I am equally sure that the cheap templates have taken a bite out of the custom web design industry. This afternoon I decided to sign up as an affiliate an stick some template on my site to see how they do.

At this moment I have no idea how long I’ll be leaving them on the site but it does give me some incentive to do a little online marketing.

Online Marketing and Web Design

Believe it or not web design and marketing run hand in hand. It doesn’t matter how good looking your site is, if you don’t market it no one will find it and no matter how much marketing you do, if you have a crappy site you want make the sale.

I spend a good bit of time online and there are some really artistic people out there who lack the marketing side of the coin.

I’ve seen people point to and brag about web design companies like http://www.saizenmedia.com/nightwish/ where if you wait long enough for the website to load you’ll find that the site design tells you nothing about the topic of the site.

And if you use your computer to talk with clients, like I do, then you’ll find yourself shutting down browsers and telling clients to hold on as you try and find out where all the background noise is coming from.

I can only guess that this is the same web design company that built http://www.joinourclub.net/, where I spent 30 minutes just trying to figure out what the heck the site was suppose to be about.

In a world where people spend less and less time on a site and websites have to load faster and grab the visitor’s attention in a matter of seconds, I have a hard time believing these sites are doing any more than taking up bandwidth.

The graphical side of the websites get 10 from me but the marketing side would get a -10. If you’ve got a product to sale and want to make some money online, stay away from sites like these.

Las Vegas Marketing Firm

Well as faith would have it, it took me all of about 5 minutes to find a topic to write about. It seems no matter where I turn there always seems to be some YoYo trying to sale me and everyone one else on what they think is a competitive search term. Today the YoYo feels that the search term Las Vegas marketing firm is competitive.

While at the beginning he claimed that he could rank #1 for any term he wanted to rank for, when I checked he did not rank for Las Vegas marketing firm, yet claimed he did. None of the search terms he bragged about ranking for including Las Vegas marketing firm are well searched keywords.

Other words, ranking for all the search terms he listed might get me one customer a year, at best. I guess now would be a good time to link to my article on search engine optimization and once again state the fact that some search engine marketing companies are looking for a customer and not looking for a client.

Are you wondering what the difference in a customer and a client is?

A customer is a one time buyer and a client is a lifelong commitment. While Las Vegas Marketing Firm would be a good keyword phrase to add in with a list of about 1,000 others it’s not going to be much good with 3 or 4 other keywords.

It takes thousands and thousands of keywords to bring in the traffic needed to convert enough people to make a living. This guy or rather SEO company does not seem to understand that and those doing business with him are not getting the return on investment that they should be getting.

Just My Two Cents

I did a post the other day on custom web design and thought I’d take a moment today and add a little to it.

I was messing around on a forum yesterday and wanted to help someone out with some design changes. The site they were showing me just didn’t look right and they had been messing with it for the last couple weeks. I shouldn’t do this and I’m sure that someone is going to get mad but I took a screen shot of the site here.

Now the screen shot is after two weeks of making changes. And you can’t see it from the link but the products are all misaligned and crazy looking as we enter the content area. I decided to cut to the chase and had my guys design a site and gave to the guy. The site we designed is here.

Last I checked the guy has not implemented any of the changes that I gave him and that’s fine. However, we need to keep in mind that the custom website design is only one step in many when it comes to making money online.

If you’re serious about making money online call up a custom web design company, negotiate a deal for them to design your site and get it online. Once the site is online there will be plenty of time to make changes and start fine tuning it. And when there is a change that needs to be made do it or hire someone else to do it but get it done and out of the way.

You’ve got enough to do without spending all your time playing with the design.