Rafael Garrett

I buy a lot of domain names! Some I choose to keep and others I let expire, but I do buy a lot of them. If you’re serious about Internet marketing you have to.

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, you make your own lead-producing web pages, or you work with marketing systems that provide you with their own product or webinar sites, having your own domain name gives you credibility and an air of legitimacy that you just can’t get from an affiliate URL link. There is a big difference between marketing a short, clear, easily readable domain name that contains two or three words, and marketing a kilometric, unpronounceable hieroglyphic that happens to have a fortuitous “.com” at the end.

If you’ve been involved in the internet business industry for any amount of time, you have no doubt received countless emails from well-intentioned folks who are marketing all kinds of programs, services and products, (I know I have, and still do on a daily basis). Nothing makes me cringe harder than when I read a well-written, enticing promotional email from someone telling me to click on one of these kilometric, indecipherable URL’s. It’s very off-putting and unprofessional!

I should say that most people that come into this industry don’t set out to be unprofessional, (of course), but they do allow their enthusiasm to get the best of them before they have had a chance to learn anything, and this is the kind of stuff that happens. I’ve been there…Hence this article! };-)

The right thing to do when you are promoting an affiliate link is to come up with a domain name that reflects the benefits provided by the product or service that you are marketing. For example, say you are marketing an automated business system that does most of the hard work of attracting leads and selling itself to them, but the URL your company gives you looks like this: http://fiqsystem.net/landingpage1.php?user=six-figures-on-autopilot. The last thing you want to do is go out and start marketing that monstrosity!

What you actually want to do is get a domain name that you can forward to that web page in order to conceal the ugly and generic URL you’ve been given. You can come up with something like http://www.sixfiguresonautopilot.info, which looks much better and makes more sense to the brain as it tries to decipher the images it receives. And something else you should do is include one or some of the keywords pertinent to your offer in that domain name, so that when it gets indexed by the search engines you’ll have a better chance at achieving a decent position in their result pages.

Buying domain names and using them to your benefit is actually a really easy process, which I will cover in a separate article. For right now just know that, for the sake of your credibility as an Internet marketer, the indecipherable affiliate URL your company gives you should never really see the light of day!

Here is one of Steve’s quotes that I really love:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.

It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

… “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

- Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Time is the most precious commodity we have. It is the greatest equalizer. If you don’t admit this and start treating time with the respect it deserves, you will lose, and you will only have yourself to blame. Whether you’re rich or poor, healthy or sick, male or female, tall or short, ugly or good-looking, you only have 24 hours per day either way, and the fact is that you should always try to use them wisely.

We usually waste our time and energy mostly worrying and thinking about abstract things like how nice it would be to make more money or live a better life. And when we do this, we usually forget about the most important thing – employing the time that life has given us wisely. A wise man will always tell you: “You can always make more money, but you can never buy more time”.

How many times are you truly aware of the ways you spend your time? How do you choose to invest your time? The word “investment” is accurately used here, because the way we choose to spend our time is a true investment in ourselves and in our own lives. The sad reality is that you will never find the true value of time if you base it on the way most people around you act and talk.

People usually spend hours and hours in front of the TV, or they waste a lot of time surfing the Web with no productive purpose whatsoever. Some of us even try to steal more time at the expense of much needed hours of sleep. Sometimes people decide to go to sleep later and wake up earlier in the morning, so they’ll have “more time” to do things. Then they try to fix the situation by smoking a bunch of cigarettes and drinking a pint of coffee so they can stay awake. I don’t know about you, but to me that definitely doesn’t seem the right way to go about managing one’s time effectively.

There is a proper time for everything. The truth of the matter is that you will never start experiencing success or prosperity until you have disciplined and organized yourself enough to follow a daily regime that allows for enough time to get quality rest, and enough time to do quality work. Without that ability to exercise self-discipline and enact some self-organization, success and prosperity will keep eluding you regardless of whatever else you do.

Everyone is always saying things like: “I’m just counting the hours to go home” or “I wish it were Friday” on a Monday, and so on. These are just signs that those people are chronic time-wasters. Are you one of them? If you are, shake it off and snap out of it!

Organize your time efficiently, and make the conscious choice to engage primarily in activities that bring some immediate or long-term benefit to your business and your life. If the choice in front of you is to watch the latest Adam Sandler movie or spend a couple of hours optimizing your marketing blog, which one do you think you should take?

Whenever you catch yourself wasting time aimlessly, think about the Roman saying: ”Carpe Diem” – Seize the Day! It has great meaning for our everyday life! Or better said, (in a way that better fits our modern day lifestyles), “Organize your day”! Make it a point to analyze the way in which you choose to either invest or waste your time. And never forget that you can’t possibly know what tomorrow is going to put in front of you, so “Carpe Diem!”

Budgets and personal finances are not most people’s favorite topics, and certainly not one of mine. Even bank executives have problems in this area, but if you’re an entrepreneur so do you. You’re concentrating so much time on your business, your personal checkbook takes a back seat. Then one day you are met with the startling fact that you’re wasting too much money and not saving enough for lean times, so you panic.

Well, just apply your newly-found financial talents to the situation and become your own personal Chief Financial Officer. By viewing your situation with your CFO eyes, you will begin treating your business and personal budgets with the respect that they deserve.

To get started, here are 5 rules for treating your finances the right way:

1.  Be Your Own Board of Directors.–To make good decisions, you must know what you’re trying to achieve. In business, Board of Directors write mission statements to keep the company on track with goals. At home, it’s up to you to define your mission and make sure you’re fulfilling it by writing down your goals. Not just your financial goals either, but your “life” goals.

2.  Know Your Operating Costs.–Do you know what you spend every month on average? Businesses do because they base their budgets on historic spending patterns. Most people, however, don’t know what it costs to keep their lives running. You can make out detailed budgets, but find out at the end of the month that you haven’t stuck to it. So instead of doing a budget that dictates how much to spend, do a “cash flow statement” that records how much you actually spend each month broken into several categories

3. Know Your Net Worth.–Companies measure progress toward goals through balance sheets which list their assets and liabilities. Your net worth is your balance sheet where you list everything that you own. That means your checking and savings accounts, investments, car, house, etc. minus everything you owe. Track your net worth quarterly to make sure you’re moving toward your personal goals. Without this step, you might not see the impact of your money decisions until it’s too late.

4.  Forecast Money Decisions Results.–When a business makes important decisions, they use a process called “scenario planning”. They look at the possible outcomes of one choice compared to another. You can use the same process to make smart money decisions. For any choice, pick two options, and then look at what each answer would do to your cash flow and net worth. Remember, there are no “good” or “bad” choices – only choices that put you closer or farther from your goals.

5.  Track Progress by Annual Reports.–Just as companies assess their progress in their annual reports, you need to review your list of priorities every year. Have you accomplished any goals? Have your spending patterns changed? Did you spend less than you earned? Did you save as much as you planned?

If you are serious about being an entrepreneur and about conducting all of your finances with respect, you MUST start behaving accordingly. Give your personal and business finances the time, attention, and respect that they deserve, because in the end the time you spend doing this is really an investment in yourself and your dreams.

When it comes to time management, one of the most important things you can ever learn is how to avoid procrastination. Procrastination is one of the biggest reasons for loss of time. Do you ever feel like you work but get nothing done, plan to clean but never really finish anything, or start projects and never complete them? Chances are high that, just like me, you have a problem with procrastination.

The good news is that by acquiring proper time management skills and habits, you can overcome the problem of procrastination. Once you do, you can make these skills and habits work for you in all areas of your life: work, home, personal and more. You will then find that you are more successful in everything you do and you will also have more time for doing the things you enjoy.

When it comes to time management and avoiding procrastination, one of the first things you need to do is plan your day. When you have a schedule to follow it makes it much easier to make sure you’re staying on task and accomplishing things as you should be.

One common reason why people procrastinate is because they are working on a task that just seems too big or too daunting to complete on their own. This can be overwhelming, and it is difficult for the mind to figure out how to process the information. This is why you will typically put it off and avoid doing it. One way to resolve this is to break the task down into smaller pieces so that it doesn’t seem so difficult.

Another way to avoid procrastination is to set deadlines for yourself. You should set these earlier than the actual deadlines you have for work or other projects. This gives you some “wiggle-room” as they say, in case something comes up or there is an emergency of some type.

Another time management technique for avoiding procrastination is to reward yourself when you meet your goals and stick to your schedule. This can give you the motivation you need to stay on task. With all of these tips combined, you can stop procrastinating and start doing the things that are important to you. Your stress will be greatly reduced and you will feel better about life!

Increasing prosperity in our lives can be accomplished by having the right frame of mind. The truth is, our thoughts are very powerful. They are capable of influencing every aspect of our daily lives, from our physical health to our social behaviors. I’m sure you’ve heard the adage, “As you think, so shall you be.” If we want to improve our lives, we must first improve our thoughts.

Harnessing the power of thought in a positive way has the ability to create great change in our lives, including our financial well-being and prosperity. But how? How do we take something as intangible as thoughts, and manifest them into a physical reality?

We must first understand that being prosperous is much, MUCH more than just having a lot of money. Prosperity is a mindset, a way of interacting in our lives, and a way of thinking. Mastering this train of thought is not easy, but it is simple enough if we keep working on it consistently.

Following are some ideas to help you improve your thoughts, and ultimately attract more prosperity into your life:

Be grateful for the blessings in your life right now. Take a few minutes each day to express heartfelt gratitude for the good things in your life. Even more powerful, write a few of these blessings down each day. This helps to put your focus in the right direction — on abundance, not lack.

Use positive affirmations to begin training yourself to think positively. Think to yourself “I am” statements such as “I am worthy of all that is good.” It sounds corny and somewhat stupid, but I’ve tried it and it works. Write these statements down on a journal every day and repeat them nightly before you go to bed. Over time, doing this will implant these thoughts into your subconscious mind, and you will begin to naturally believe them.

Creative visualization can help you achieve prosperity by determining what it is you wish to achieve, and then thoroughly creating that image in your mind. This works in the same way that mental affirmations do. Our subconscious will fill with images of prosperity, and eventually these subconscious “truths” will manifest in the physical. “See” yourself as being prosperous, and you will become so.

Encourage yourself with the belief that you can achieve great things. This could also be one of your affirmations, but expand on it. If you know you can earn a certain salary, tell yourself you can earn more. Allow yourself to believe all things are possible, and you will gain the confidence needed to reach higher than you ever imagined you could. If you believe you can do it, you are more likely to take the risks associated with people who are highly successful. Prosperity and success go hand in hand, so take risks and aim higher.

Start a savings account. As strange as it sounds, think about this: Like Attracts Like. Even if you can only afford to put a few dollars into your account every month, it will begin to build up and attract more money.

Finally, believe you are already wealthy. The creative ability of our thoughts is such that we lend more power and energy to whatever we consistently focus on. Focusing on lack will create more lack. Focusing on wealth and prosperity will create . . . guess what?

Remember that this is a process. You likely won’t change your circumstances in one day. But over time, with consistent focus, your thoughts will begin to attract what you want. Once you master this power of thought, there are truly no limits to the prosperity you can bring to your life!

The answer to this question is yes and no and maybe. It all depends on the way in which a business owner utilizes Craigslist. Savvy Internet marketers who are able to identify their target audience and create sales copy which entices the reader may find advertising on Craigslist to be incredibly profitable. Conversely, careless Internet marketers that do not do their research and take a spamming approach to advertising on Craigslist are not likely to see significant financial gains. I have seen many network marketers that do exactly what I do achieve success using Craigslist, and they succeeded mainly because they did the proper research and used common sense.

There is certainly an opportunity to gain financial benefit through advertising on Craigslist. Advertising for all products and services is free on Craigslist, which makes it cost effective.

Additionally, Craigslist already receives extensive traffic with approximately ten million visitors generating four billion page views each month, so there is no need to worry about driving traffic to the website. While Craigslist offers many advertising benefits, these benefits may be wasted if the advertiser does not do his research or evaluate the competition.

Research before Posting on Craigslist

Advertising on Craigslist is similar to advertising in other forms of media. Despite the existing heavy traffic flows to the website, successful marketing campaigns require extensive research. This research should provide the Internet marketer and his staff with insight into where to post the advertisements to most effectively reach the target audience and how to word the copy of the advertisement in order to make it most appealing to the target audience.

If properly done, this research should also reveal which relevant keywords ought to be included in the advertising copy, in order to make it likely for members of the target audience to find the advertisement easily when they search for products and services offered by the company.

Research of this capacity can be conducted either online or offline. One of the most effective forms of this type of research is to have members of the target audience fill out market surveys. The answers provided by the participants should give the marketer a good idea of what the target audience is seeking. Incorporating this information into the marketing campaign can make it noticeably more successful.

Evaluate the Competition on Craigslist

The search feature on Craigslist gives an Internet marketer an excellent way to evaluate the competition to see what they are doing on a regular basis. Studying the competition is important because it can help you learn how you can be more successful. This increased success can be a result of determining successful aspects of your competitor’s marketing strategy and implementing similar strategies of your own, as well as determining faulty aspects of your competitor’s marketing strategy and avoiding them.

To get a good idea of the competitors who are advertising on Craigslist, use the search feature to search for keywords relevant to your own products and services. You will likely receive search results including advertisements from competitors. Next, carefully analyze these advertisements to determine how you can not only refine and improve your USP, (Unique Selling Proposition), but also write more engaging advertising copy.

Many wise Internet marketers have the reasoning skills necessary to properly analyze the advertisements created by competitors, but they often falter when taxed with the dilemma of creating better advertisements. This is why you might want to consider learning more about professional sales copywriting, (or, if you can afford it, consider hiring the services of a professional sales copywriter. I have found many such folks on Fiverr and they provided that service to me for a laughably low investment).

Search engine optimization (SEO) skills also become a vital part of the equation, and you can find that on Fiverr as well. The writer you decide to go with can use his SEO training along with his knowledge on writing advertising copy to effectively entice members of your target audience to either purchase your products or services, join your business opportunity, or at least investigate your offer further.

In today’s highly competitive internet universe, the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be overemphasized. Routing web traffic to your site can be your only means of survival, especially in the cutthroat world of e-commerce. Getting a high search engine ranking can be very difficult. But fortunately there are quite a few promotion strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website.

There are several strategies you can use, from paid advertising to affiliate marketing. However, most of these techniques require spending money. Nevertheless, there are ways to promote your website and increase your web traffic without spending money.

Writing articles is one of the best website promotion strategies you can use, and it can be very effective. How, you may ask, can writing articles help improve your web traffic? Here are the top seven ways in which this practice can help explode your business:

1.Reach more people

When you write good articles, you have a duty to share them with other people. You can post your articles in your website or you can submit them to other sites such as e-zines and online publishers. By submitting your articles to these sites, you give exposure not only to your ideas but also to your website. Simply include a link back to your site or include your information in the resource box. By doing this you get exposure and free advertising as well.

Submit your articles to popular e-zines and take advantage of their popularity. Other sites that find your article relevant may also link back to you. Thus, you will increase your link popularity, which is one of the most important strategies in the internet world. Remember that most people are looking for information online, and by filling this need with your quality article you may reap the benefit of more exposure and higher web traffic.

2.Free Advertising

Submitting your articles to other websites presents an opportunity to advertise your website without paying exorbitant fees. Although you should avoid marketing language in your articles and make them informative and useful to your readers, you can always include your site’s link in the resource box.

In addition, by making your articles relevant and helpful to your readers, you are making a good impression for your website, which could ultimately lead to a visit and hopefully a purchase. Good quality content in an article is far better and more effective than a few lines of ad space. You have a very special opportunity to presell your product or service to your prospective customer in a well-written article.

3.Gain High Search Engine Ranking

Create a new web page for your article in your website. Optimize your article to make it search-engine friendly. Use top-ranked keywords and Meta tags that can give your website a high search engine ranking. As soon as you upload your new webpage to your server, search engines will spider through it and you can gain an increase in search engine ranking. Remember that search engine optimized content is a very effective strategy to gain a high ranking in search results.

4.Increases Link Popularity

Instead of looking for other sites who would want to establish reciprocal links with your site, you can simply submit an article to other sites. Just don’t forget to include a link to your site in your resource box. When these websites publish your article you automatically get a link partner. Try to get as many link partners as you can. Link popularity is one of the factors used by search engines in determining search engine rankings. Make your article especially useful and appealing so that more websites will be encouraged to publish it.

5.Optimizes your site for improved search engine ranking

By making your site keyword rich you can greatly improve its search engine ranking. Remember that keyword density is one of the most important factors that search engines use when determining the search engine ranking of a website. However, you should always provide relevant, useful and pertinent information. Avoid the temptation to overuse keywords just to gain a high ranking, as this may turn off most web surfers. Relevance and quality are still the most important things to consider when writing articles, and it will be doubly useful to your site if you make these articles search-engine optimized.

6.Establishes a Good Impression and Reputation

By writing excellent, original, and relevant articles, you not only give your site exposure,  but you are also creating a good impression on your prospects. Encourage more people to visit your site and do business with you by establishing an impressive reputation through your articles. Be seen as an expert in the field and you will ultimately gain more customers eager to do business with you.

7.Enhances your credibility through references and testimonies

Your articles are probably going to receive feedback and testimonies when you publish them in e-zines and free article sites. Record the positive feedback and comments and use them as promotional material in your website or in any of your advertising efforts. Your credibility will be greatly enhanced by this feedback, as it will create a good impression on your prospects as well as your existing customers. In this highly competitive world, excellent credibility and trust may be the only things you need to attract new customers or make loyal patrons out of your existing customers. Original, relevant, useful and pertinent articles are important tools you should utilize to improve and explode your business!

In today’s net-savvy world it has become the norm for businesses to have websites that they use to widen their exposure and advertise their products and services. Conversely, search engines make it very easy for potential customers to search for the products and services they need online.

For a website to be successful, its link should land in the first three pages of the search engine, which should result in many visitors visiting the site. This can be achieved by implementing some search engine optimization on your website, which is popularly known as SEO. I thought I would explore the mechanics of SEO today in order to give you a better idea of how the process works.

SEO not only affects the search engine results, but also image search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. It determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a special software robot called web crawler or web spider crawls through the site’s pages to gather links, which lead to other pages in the site. Those pages are then stored on the server of the search engine.

The information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer. The indexer’s job is to extract information from the stored pages, (such as the keywords and their weights, the location of the page, and other links that are stored for the web spider to crawl through in the future).

In the beginning, the search engine optimizing algorithms were dependent on the keywords and other technical information provided by the Webmaster. The use of keywords was and remains an integral part of success, but the other technical information didn’t prove to be useful, because some Webmasters added irrelevant elements to it in order to increase the number of hits and earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML code of the web pages in order to achieve a good rank for the page, but these were instances of abuse that often resulted in the fetching of irrelevant pages.

Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithms, which were difficult for the webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated mathematically by functions using strength and quantity of the inbound links. The higher the rank of the page, the more chances it had to be viewed by a person.

Later algorithms were developed which considered various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as hyperlinks. Since the webmasters couldn’t manipulate the page rank, they began exchanging and selling and buying links, which led to link spamming and even creation of numerous sites dedicated for this purpose.

Algorithms became more complex every passing day, and top search engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased, advertisers were roped in to pay for it, and that finally resulted in high quality web pages.

Although investing in SEO is potentially very fruitful it can also be quite risky, because without any prior notice the algorithms being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing visitors to the page. Many consultants are available in the market that provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code in websites, affecting menus, shopping carts and sometimes even the content of the website to draw more traffic.

Search engines like Yahoo have algorithms that extract pages not according to the page rank, but according to the cost per click or set fee. If an advertiser desires for the page containing his ad to be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it. This is a point of controversy, as in many cases only the big businesses are fully able to increase the number of hits of their page using this method, but not the small businesses that might have a better quality page but a very small advertising budget.

Now that I’ve shared all that info with you, I must tell you to proceed with great caution when dealing with SEO service providers. SEO can be great for your online presence if you do your due diligence and deal with the right expert, but it can eat up your budget very quickly if you don’t, without any meaningful results…PROCEED WISELY!

If a person visits your website and leaves, chances are that he or she will not come back, especially if there are no compelling reasons to do so. After all, we all behave rather impulsively on the Internet, so much so that we can easily forget where we were 10 web pages ago.

But the bottom line is that your visitor may not come back to your website again. If 1,000 visitors visit your website, leave and never come back again, you can imagine the amount of potential revenue lost, simply because they do not come back. You could have converted a fraction of the visitors into your customers.

Some may say that creating unique content can keep some of the visitors coming back, but very often unique content is not the solution. The real, long-term solution lies in converting your visitors into subscribers of your mailing list.

Before your visitor leaves your website, you want to convert him or her into your subscriber via a simple opt-in to your mailing list. You do this by asking for your visitor’s name and email address through your opt-in form, (which is a MUST for every serious Internet marketer out there).

And if your visitor signs up to be on your mailing list, you can still follow up with him via email. You can send your subscriber a newsletter, get him/her to consider your offers, and share information and valuable resources with them in order to practice attraction marketing the way the top marketers do.

All in all, you want to convert as many visitors as possible into subscribers so you can obtain the potential revenue you rightfully deserve – the easy, wise way. Remember, the money is in the list!