Affiliate internet marketing

Are you on the hunt for a free paid survey list? Are you confused by the many websites offering to sell you one? Can you tell the difference between a legit site and a bogus operation? You need the best list possible, but you don’t want to get scammed!

If you are looking at sites that promise the best most up to date listings for free paying surveys on the net, but require a fee to access that information, forget it. You are in the wrong place! The best survey sites are working as the go-between for the research company and you, and won’t ask for a dime.

Sites that claim to have special information or unrealistic results are simply trying to take you for a ride. You should never hand over money for the privilege of getting a job - the point of employment is for you to MAKE money, not to spend it! There are plenty of sites out there that have free paid survey lists.

It is nice to be able to find a free paid survey list prepared for you, but you shouldn’t have to cough up cash for it! The middlemen from the survey sites are already getting a kickback from the research companies for providing survey takers. Don’t let them double dip off of you!

Don’t be fooled by sites that try to sell you ‘free’ paid survey lists. If they are dishonest enough to try and charge you, then some of the surveys they offer may not be legit either! You have to keep a lookout for scams to avoid being taken advantage of. Find the right site, on the other hand, and you will have more free paying surveys than you can handle!

A good sign when you are looking for free paid survey lists is a solid description of each company listed. Avoid ones that don’t give pertinent information, like average pay per survey, or time between taking the survey and getting paid. They should also tell you up front if you will be expected to participate in any offers to qualify for the survey.

Double check the lists from the survey sites with your own research. Even the best site can mistakenly include a new free paying survey that turns out to be a scam! Make your own list of the most promising companies and check them out online to see what kind of experiences others have had with them.

Finally you are ready to start taking free paying surveys! Once you’ve made your choices of companies to work for, get yourself registered and prepare to fill out profiles. The more time you spend on these now, the more money you can make later! Once you become established, you can be cashing out weekly just from taking surveys!

A problem that plagues many bloggers who want to attract visitors to their web site is how to write the perfect blog post. Itas not hard to get lost in a jumble of words when you start blogging, especially if your thoughts are typically scattered in your every day life.

To keep everything linear and organize everything you want to say and piece the puzzle of your thoughts together. Making clear and coherent, entertaining sentences. Your personal style will come naturally and keep your blog post from sounding too forced.

Before you start writing, THINK! Take them fingers off the keys and do not just start typing. Whatever comes to mind is a jumble mess of thoughts that only you can understand. You need to have a message and a way to convey it. When it comes to a log of your day, please start at the beginning. Whenever discussing something that could be thought of as controversial remember that the whole world isnat going to agree with you. Try writing with the goal of convincing the reader.

Bullet points are your friends, when organizing your thoughts. Also, bold lettering can show that something is important. Remember that you have tools available to you other than just plain text. If you post is boring looking possible readers wonat read it. How exciting your blog looks will determine how excited your readers will be to view it.

Illustrate your post with the help of imagery and photographs. This can add a personal touch, so that your readership will have you in mind. Video is a way for you to forget about all the typing and just speak to your audience. They will get to see and hear and understand your message

Getting your readers involved in the conversation you are starting is key, and rather its more important than a perfect blog post. Think about using a website traffic generator to get more hits, if your blog isnat quite popular yet. Finding free website traffic is possible online.

Commenting back to your readers messages, and continuing discussions with your active readers is huge. They will feel like they are important to you, and like they are having their voices hear. They are your repeat customer and an asset.

These guidelines are the key to helping you to have much better posts. Better posts and higher traffic are the first steps to becoming an internet sensation. Remember you audience, think carefully about your message, and convey things in an organized way.

Hey wanta hear something odd?

I went to a car auction today. While walking past the auctioneer, he made this funny joke about wouldn’t wanna make the big guy angry at me or anything. My head spun around looking for the big guy that the auctioneer was discussing publicly on his mic.

I blushed as I realized, gosh its me!

About an hour later, a 2004 Chev Impala came down the line of cars and I heard from across the large auction area that it was going for 1600. I quickly shouldered my way thru 2 lanes of cars and people to see it.

By the time I got there, a horde of people had descended on it and the bid started moving quickly upward from 1800.

I walked quickly around it and by the time I had done that, the price was 2000.

I looked in the window at the odometer and the price went to 2100

I paused 2 seconds to make a quick decision and the price went to 2200.
I started putting up my hand and the darn price went to 2300.

The auctioneer noticed my hand up, set the price at 2350, everyone looked at me and the bidding simply stopped.

The funny auctioneer tried for the next 30 seconds but no one would place another bid on the car. Finally, he made some joke about big arms frightening off the competition and stopped the bid.

So, I got this medium mileage 2004 Impala, worth about 7,000 for a mere 2350.

Wow, sometimes size does matter. lol

So, what’s the point of this?

I told a friend of mine this story and he said that would not have happened if the auction took place online. And he was right. As an online marketer, seller or buyer, you can do everything in your pajamas, without your makeup, hair piece or eye shadow. You can’t be intimidated by someone else’s physical presence, their perfume, suggestive clothing, aggressive stance or any of those other human aspects.

You have the freedom of choice and that choice is yours. To succeed or not is entirely up to you. Picking up a niche market that you believe in, doing some research on it, getting a domain name and using a cms like joomla or wordpress to quickly put up a site ( No html skills required ) then actively marketing that in similar discussion boards and other blogs is — in one runaway sentence **all you need to do**

Running an online business from home is like a dream job. Demanding, sometimes frustrating but definitely worth the reward for the 5% who figure out how to make it work.

With an online business, to get out of bed or not is entirely your choice. You can work with your computer on your lap, snuggled up nice and warm under your blankets while others are fighting snow drifts trying to get to work…

Or, and this is my favorite - Get yourself out on a beach somewhere warm, bring your laptop and try not to let your annoying Attention Deficit Syndrome get the better of you as the scantily clad bodies get between you and your view of the blue, blue water, ahhh I mean your computer screen.

Adwords or Overture which is better? The result may surprise you.

Overture is Yahoo’s equivalent AD display and back end management system.
In truth, Overture was a search engine in of itself at one time. Some users may still remember it as go.com

Amongst online marketers ad agencies and others, there is this oft repeated question, “which is better ?…”
Google’s Adword or Yahoo’s Overture ad management system.

Well there is no doubt that at the moment, Google’s management system is significantly better despite Yahoo having had just as much time to get their system up and sparkling.

Significantly better… but what does this mean and if i said, significantly better, I would expect a few of you out there to say, significantly better for what and for whom.

Ahh, now we are getting down to the crux of the matter.

For straight up analysis and backend reporting, I doubt that i will get flamed ( much…) for repeating what many technical adcopy and ad agencies already know. The Google backend system is tops. In the sincerest form of flattery, it is the de facto standard and everyone and their brother who runs a search engine and is selling traffic is either attempting to emulate, reverse engineer it or using it as their benchmark in terms of the feature set and analytical tools.

So, does this mean its very, very good - this backend management system?

Well that’s an opinion and not easy to answer definitively. Google’s adwords management has benefited from an incredible amount of usage and finetuning. Google’s internal usability testing also appears to be significantly better than that of most other fortune 50 web companies. So the ad management backend has become the system to beat as a benchmark and has stayed that way for quite some time.

Many long time users who are pay per click specialists could give you a quarter dozen very valid ways of improving the Google Adword system, so it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is well thought out and quite the formidable 600 pound gorilla in this arena

I digress here, but if your company sells an instant gratification product and you knew for a fact, that you rarely if ever received sales between 3pm and 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, perhaps you might turn off your advertising during that time or at the least tune it down significantly. Why, then is it that Google only recently allowed you to see this, and why is it that you still need to do a highly customized report to even easily see this type of trend.

Ahhh, well, some might say, its because the search engines really did not want you to know this level of detail …

All this “shadow confusion” did, was to give room to 3rd party groups like Atlas to build a better mousetrap, ha ha.

But, does the fact, that the google adword system in general have the upper hand over Yahoo’s overture system mean that Acme’s widgets should use this in preference to Yahoo?

Most Pay per click specialists would wisely tell you as a customer.

Test them both, because experience has shown us that its a different set of customers ( demographically ) who use google vs. yahoo.

I have visited this topic once before in this blog and my results then showed that some decision makers appear to inhabit the Overture spectrum and thus several of my customers who were B2B ( Business to business ) had conversion rates on Yahoo that were more than 250% better than Google.

In contrast, a particular customer who ran limousine services seem to do so well from google that there was no persuading this guy to spend one single penny on Yahoo.

In truth, unbeknown to this customer, I tried just to see what might happen and it flopped. Overture would not convert well for this type of business.

So, the answer to this question, is still not black and white.

So, today, you’re about to say, hey buddy since you haven’t given us any really new information why bother waste our time.

Well, I am here to tell you that from November 2007 thru to June 2008, many of my Overture Results have outgunned, outrun, outmanned, outmaneuvered my google adwords by a factor of 1-300%.

After scratching my head for a while and digging around in my campaigns to find out what had gone ( wrong ) or right, i came to the conclusion that a significant number of advertisers bidding on the overture terms had simply gone away, leaving bidding at an all-time low for many of these terms.

So, where had my bidding buddies gone? Well, over to Google of course - i think, hey well i didnt go over there and really check… but what i know is that they are simply NOT in overture!

Check out the Google vs. Yahoo financials over the last quarter and see if that doesn’t bear out my theory.

Google has done such a fine job of branding that every Tom, Dick & Harry ( Apologies to Tom and Dick and Harry ) thinks that they absolutely have to be on Google.

Well, my boss says we have to be on those google ad thingies to get the first position so that’s why i am gonna do…

Well, it could also be that too many of us are tired of using the rather anemic yahoo ad management interface… and it could also be that if any of you were running ads last year this time, you would know that ads promoting retail products did extremely well while b2b business offers going into the XMas season did quite pathetically for many of us.

It could be all of these reasons, a combination or perhaps none at all, but if you are currently running overture ads and google ads, go and check your own results. Depending on the industry that you are in, you may be in for a pleasant surprise.

As of February 2008, I would certainly review moving a significant portion of my B2B advertising back to Overture simply because it appears as if the sheep have done the opposite.

And for the uninitiated, you never want to get into a bidding war with the sheep. So, the less bidders ( sheep or otherwise ) the better the chance of getting a reasonable or outright low bid for your very valuable keywords.

Btw, sheep always think that they need to be in the number position. Or sometimes its the sheep’s BOSS who thinks so, but in any case, you never want to get into a bidding war with the sheep, it just too rarely ever pays.

So, Overture/Yahoo has finally put a better management system into place and things are hopefully… looking a little better for both Yahoo and their ad customers.

As an update it appears that after Yahoo and Microsoft fell out of love, Yahoo has made a deal with Google that will give Yahoo another 450Million annually in advertising Revenue and hands Google 80% of the ad market online.

Since the users of both systems will not necessarily migrate from one system to the other, what I wrote above still holds true.

Adios.