Internet Mastery Center Blog

Not strategies or techniques, but business models in a more general sense. To give you an idea:

1. Affiliate type website.
2. Content website with Adsense.
3. Affiliate type + Adsense.
4. Your own product - membership site.
5. Your own product - ebook.
6. JV deals.
7. Your own product - software.
8. Directory type site.
9. Online newsletter.
10. Promote affiliate products using AdWords.
Bonus. Sell on Ebay + your own site.

The VERY top way is to create your OWN business and market it well. Find out what YOU are GOOD at, see if there is a niche, and start your business in that niche. Run it like a professional business with profit/loss evaluation, business plan, goals, etc. You can make a lot of money doing this, but most people won't take the time and effort to make it happen. Question is: Will you be the one to do it?

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Upselling is the art of selling the next consecutive product immediately after your customers have bought the first one. This helps you ride on his/her purchasing momentum.

The normal advice is that upselling occurs on the Thank You/product download page. Actually, if you can make a sharp distinction between the various Thank You pages you may already have on your site, you can advertise more products than you may think.

Here are some 'labels':

1) Newsletter Thank You Page
2) Paid Product Thank You Page
3) Members Area Sign-up Page
4) Use your 404 Code for your 404 error page at your site (sell a product every time visitors got your URLs wrong!)
5) Safelist Sign-up Thank You Page (if you run a safelist)
6) E-mail Confirmation Page
7) Opt-In Thanks You Page
8) Are there any more?

See? There are more places you can sell than you ever thought of. You can even include Adsense ads for additional income-by-clicks.

This is your homework: review all your Thank You pages and think of at least 2 products related to the subject matter of each page so that you can put them in.

Think of creative ways to make offers that are only exclusive to a few Thank You pages. Especially for the 404 error page, make your visitors feel they 'stumble' into a once-in-a-lifetime offer they can't resist, and you would hook them to a sale!

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

The rage to milk money from Adsense continues into 2011. While there are many different ways to do this, it's no secret Google is keeping a watchful eye on spam sites which automatically generate pages consistently on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Adsense 'experts' would introduce a 'fresh' new way of generating pages which Google "has not caught on yet", be it article, directory or backlink generators.

While these software are very good at what they do, you can't solely depend on them for long-term success. It's a natural tendency that automatically generated content just doesn't look like quality pages with highly informative, up-to-date content, but it's my personal observation.

Most run-of-the-mill, ads-on-topfold Adsense sites lack substantial sections and deeper structures to be interesting enough to make visitors think they should come back to check them out more often. While generating as many pages as possible is crucial to get them indexed and thereby build substantial presence in search results, these types of pages should only complement principal content that reflects what your site stands for and the selling point it serves to maximize its overall value. There used to be a question that goes, "Is building Adsense sites a business?" My answer is: Adsense is secondary.

Of course, like you I do want Adsense to be my primary source of income. The secret is in emphasizing content and value, not Adsense ads. You may have felt resigned to say, "Does that mean more work?" Not really. Here's another secret inspired by a quote from Albert Einstein: You can't solve your Adsense income challenge at the same level of thinking.

Truth is: I have build a good number of Adsense sites, but my main Internet Marketing site which I treat as my core business earns more than some of them despite my intention not to make it Adsense-focused, all the more so when it has absolutely nothing to do with high-paying keywords and the tremendous amount of time that goes into keyword research...which leads to the next secret: create a site with a subject or niche you know you can continually express and expand on instead of getting stuck with a 'lucrative' keyword you may run out of ideas on in the long term.

This is as good as saying Adsense is not just a keyword value game; it is still the classic "How do I get and retain traffic" game, and traffic is not some scoreline, but real people with genuine interest.

eHow.com is an incredible example. It's a free site that shows people how to do a lot of different things. The best way to explain the site is just for you to go have a quick look now. They have hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of content on all sorts of subjects and the way they get traffic to their site is through the search engines.

Every page on the site has an Adsense box on it and that's how it makes money. They also have a Alexa traffic ranking of around 2000 which is great.

Of course, it doesn't make sense to write or purchase that much content by yourself. eHow.com succeeds in getting its visitors involved in content contribution. There's also a wikiHow to get contributors involved in constant update of a common topic or article.

For a start, here are suggestions on the type of sections you can integrate into a site:

1) Lead capture page with freebies or incentives.

2) Article directory.

3) A 'Contact Us' page.

4) An 'About Us' page.

5) Forum: The challenge lies in the time and effort needed to build up momentum to encourage forum participants to write in.

6) An archive section of some kind, for selected articles for example.

7) Blog/podcast pages.

8) Reciprocal link directory.

9) Sitemap.

It doesn't take much to think of these standard sections. Even a products section makes your site look good besides providing another source of income, and then you replicate these sections site after site, niche after niche.

4th secret: Only sites with a general theme can afford to be massive-looking. Examples: Entrepreneur.com and Dogomania.com. Then you break the theme down into specifics like gathering them under an umbrella: dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits etc. Accurate targeting of Adsense ads depends on specific subjects as reflected on page. One thing to note is it is better that specific sections are inter-linked in some ways. If you run a site on everything about cancer, because "colon cancer" and "breast cancer" are not intrinsically related, visitors interested in one section may not want to take a first glance at another.

5th secret about content: write from a 'consumer' perspective instead of the 'opportunist' or "how to make money" perspective. What is it your visitors are looking to buy? Ads normally target and appeal directly to consumers. It's pointless to put up content about how to make money with car accessories when there are hardly ads on "how to make money". Stick to introducing car accessories and let the ads do the selling. If an accessory or equipment catch visitors' attention and they click on the ads, you got Adsense dollars.

That's about all the ideas I have at this moment. You should be confident now and maybe have some more new ideas I haven't thought of. For sure, Adsense is a major income source you should seriously explore and make it big if you haven't done so. This is one of those money machines that will make you money-on-demand pretty much for the life of Google.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Despite the so-called "Death of AdSense" (which happens to be a smart marketing ploy), there are still a few good success stories. At least, the marketers who carry the right beliefs within them know what they are doing to persevere and achieve desired results.

One of these correct beliefs is knowing how bid pricing works. Generally speaking:

1) If there are not enough ads to go around, that particular niche is too small to try.

2) If the "general economy" of the ads is rather low, avoid the niche too. That's why there are high-paying keywords and low-paying ones.

3) If one site performs better than a similar one in AdSense clickthrough rates, that site will be served better paying and better performing ads. That's how smart pricing works.

We're sure Google has many secretive and subtle metrics to disqualify junk sites and the corporation insists on surrounding itself with webmasters who are committed to providing quality work.

Going back to point 2), no matter how genuine sites are in providing valuable content, webmasters need to know something about the state of the competition related to a supposedly high-paying keyword.

There is a general belief that "certain keywords pay highly" (granted), like bankruptcy, cancer, lawyers etc., but without research to back them up, such a belief does not stand on a foundation.

Google does not take from AdWords advertisers the maximum bid price they put in their account; this is important to recognize. For example, the first-placed ad may have a max. bid of $12, but the max. bid of the second-placed ad stands at only $2. The top advertiser does not always have to fork out $12 to maintain his ad in first place. Google Advertising works such that it has a sliding scale for the bidding process.

In other words, you bid on the keyword 'bankruptcy' and you decide that it is only worth $1.95 but you are willing to pay up to $12 against your competition. Then one day, your closest competitor's bid is $2. Google will ante up 6 more cents on your behalf to keep you in the top position and continue to do so for as long as you can afford up to $12. Google sets these special perimeters when they set the account up for that keyword.

That means Google can only pay AdSense publishers as much as the next highest existing bid price. Then again, as you do your keyword research, Google only shows average CPC as the real numbers change dynamically. So it is crucial for publishers to appreciate the bid pricing gap between 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th-placed bidders to make an educated guess of how much they will be paid for certain AdSense ads.

With all that being said, AdSense is very much alive and well. The AdSense program is just an attractive incentive to make AdWords advertisers happy that their ads will be spread out with the help of publishers. Google Inc. can take down AdSense; it's their choice, but it's not helpful. Honestly, it's the publishers' fault that they abuse the system so the company fine-tune it...meaning, make sure the distribution of earnings is better deserved and justified to esteemed publishers.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com