The following wisdom is from my long time business partner Jon Arnold ......
It takes a lot of work to be successful at anything, whether that is to create a successful relationship, a great marriage, or anything else. Michael Jordan did not just wake up one morning and decide to shoot some hoops. Liberace did not wake up one morning and decide to diddle with a rendition of Chopsticks. It all took work to achieve that success. It does not just happen because you happen to show up and are taking up space and using good breathing air.
As has been said many times, life is much more than just "showing up". Life is not a spectator sport where you just take your place on the bleachers. It has been said that there are three types of people: those who MAKE things happen, those who WATCH what happens, and those who wonder WHAT happened. Endeavour to MAKE things happen. Whatever you do, do it because you have a passion for it, which will almost ensure your success with persistence. Anything worth doing at all is definitely worth doing WELL, and anything done with a grudging or half-hearted effort will inevitably yield low and half-hearted results. You will find this to be true in virtually ANY aspect of life, whether it is relationships, your marriage, your job, your church, and yes even your efforts with Internet promotion and marketing. Take the time to learn what you don't know and learn how to improve what you already know, becoming a student of your endeavours and passions.
Internet Marketing & Backlinks ......
Everyone always talks about TRAFFIC as being the holy grail of Internet marketing success. But backing up a step, how do you create traffic? You could have the most beautiful and technologically advanced site on the face of the planet, but without traffic, marketing, and promotion, all that beauty and site effort have gone completely to waste. It is true, without quality traffic, your site is dead and your income level is lower and flatter than a heart monitor in the morgue. Additional tweaks and improvements to your site will be of minimal interest to the rest of the online world if they cannot determine where your site is or find it in the search engines somewhere north of page 100 in the search results.
Backlinks are one of the main keys, and turning your attention to backlinks is the best vitamin you can provide for your sites to create better health and better results. Backlinks are not the ONLY solution and remedy, in the same way that vitamin C is not the ONLY vitamin your body needs to maintain good health, but backlinks are definitely one of the primary ingredients.
So how do you create more backlinks for your sites? There are many ways to do this, and a Google search will reveal more ways to get backlinks than you would have time to implement in a lifetime. But you need to START the process to gain additional visibility for your sites, since any journey starts with the first step. One of the best, FREE, and easiest ways is to write some articles and submit your UNIQUE and NON-DUPLICATED article to ezinearticles.com and others. To do this, create a title with your selected keyword in it (i.e., "Why A T1 Line Is So Much Better Than DSL For Business", where the keyword in this example is bolded), use the keyword within the first 10 words of your first paragraph, 2-3 more times in the middle paragraphs, again within the last paragraph, and then your anchor text and URL in the "author resource box" of the article. A typical author resource box might read like this:
If you are looking for the best pricing from quality carriers on a T1 Line which is backed up by our Low Price Guarantee, be sure to visit http://mysite.com for the best prices nationwide from amongst about 30 quality carriers.
Note that in this resource box, the keyword "T1 Line" is used as anchor text and the site is given again with the URL.
Your article needs to be UNIQUE, it cannot just be copied and reworded from the publications of somebody else. But this is not hard, not even close to rocket science! The minimum article length (not including the author resource box) at one of the top article directories online today (and also viewed as an AUTHORITY SITE) is about 250 words at ezinearticles.com. 250 words! You should be able to crank out a useful article with 250 words or more during commercials on NCIS, right? There is NO CHARGE to submit an article to ezinearticles.com after you have signed up (free) to be a contributing author there. And the link juice that this published article gives you is incredible.
Taking this a step further, write more articles, perhaps on even the same topic (but not duplicated) and submit to other article directories for the same kind of benefit, and again, it is FREE to submit your articles to these directories and get that link juice working for you and your sites. There is goarticles.com, articlecity.com, articledashboard.com and literally hundreds of others, but stick with the top ones to maximize your link juice power. Hubpages.com is also an excellent resource for these links and is also known as a coveted authority site.
Make the article useful, informative, outline the BENEFITS to the reader and finally provide a way (i.e., the author resource box) for the reader to go and actually be excited to use this new information he has found. The article needs to be good but it does not need to be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize documentary. In the leads that I see in my inbox, I know a few of you are already doing this, since I can see the "referring URL" in the lead record, and many come from ezinearticles.com or other article directories.
As you write more articles, vary the KEYWORD that you are using for subsequent articles; i.e., use "T1 Line" for one article, use "Bonded T1" for another, use "Ethernet Services" for another, and more. Become a student of article writing and keyword research, put it to use, and the benefits of doing that are yours.
For keyword research, I have many tools that I have used over the years but the one I keep coming back to is Google's own tool, which is at:
Google Keyword Tool
A common mistake, however, that many people make in using this tool is that they select the highest ranking keywords with the most traffic. What's wrong with that, isn't that the goal? Yes that is the goal to get as much traffic as possible, but FILTER that fact with the additional fact that the highest volume keywords also have the most competition from other sites, probably people who have been doing this much longer than you. So you may want to consider going after the "long tail keywords" where there is not as much competition but where you stand a much greater chance of being ranked well for that term.
Another very inexpensive way to get backlinks is a service I found online a few years ago called "Angela's Backlinks". For a lousy $5 a month (FIVE DOLLARS!), Angela sends you a list of about 30 sites (most of them PR4 and greater) where you can get a one-way backlink, frequently with anchor text. The PDF she sends outlines exactly what you will see at each site, making is basically as "stupid simple" as something can get. If you are willing to put in the sweat equity required (I can usually go through this in a couple hours or so), it is the best $5 you will have spent all month. Check it out at:
Angelas Discount Market
There is also a relatively new service that you should be aware of that I have used with a high degree (not 100%) of success called Fiverr, naturally to be found on fiverr.com. This is a list of countless things that the publishers will do for $5 (FIVE DOLLARS), quite simple. Topics are all over the board, like "For $5 I will wear a sandwich sign saying ABC Company is crap all day long" or "For $5 I will jump out of a cake at your girlfriend's workplace in greater Los Angeles" or other such silliness. But there are also some golden nuggets there, like if you search for "backlinks" or "article writing" or "site promotion" or similar topics. There are several publishers who will write quality articles for you, which you can then review, tweak as necessary, and then submit to an article directory with YOUR keyword and URL as the author, which is entirely legitimate since it would be unique. Again, $5 invested well into your business, creating the backlinks that will be so valuable to you. Some of the fiverr's available will also create the link wheel I described to you in my previous newsletter, and if you do not have the time to do this yourself, whether backlinks, link wheels, or article writing, this can be a superb investment of $5 to jumpstart your marketing efforts.
There is a saying that I learned at the airport when I go out flying that says: "Never let your airplane get somewhere that your brain didn't get to about 5 minutes earlier". The words of wisdom there are that your brain needs to be at least 5 minutes ahead of the plane, and you need to be fully aware ("situational awareness") of where you are, where you are going, and how you are going to get there, having a viable and workable plan already in place. Waiting until you actually get there to figure it out is your worst possible option because you may actually be headed in the wrong direction, or when you DO get there, you are going to have other duties to contend with that you need to be prepared for.
The same is true of your marketing efforts. You need to be every bit as aware of where you want to get to as well as how you are going to get there. "More money" is not a sufficient direction, any more than "up" is sufficient when I am flying. Simply submitting your web site to the search engines is not sufficient to get you where you presumably want to go, especially since you are then competing with a SEVEN FIGURE number of people taking that same very lax approach.