Internet Mastery Center Blog

In English idiom, "2 left feet" refers to an inept dancer and generally, a clumsy person. Putting this meaning aside, I wish I had 2 left feet so that I don't have to worry whether to go left or right, so I'll just stick to left and let Life happens as it always does, and if I walk left long enough, maybe enough people will start to question, "Does this guy ever turn right?"

Regardless of what 'success' means to you, for everyone reading this, it is a plus, not a minus. Success is a profitable endeavour. No intelligent people on earth would insist on walking from circumstance to circumstance getting pulled down all the time and still declare themselves a 'success' if that's fine with them. Well, it's fine with them, but I call it 'stubbornness'.

Success is not hocus-pocus; it's all about FOCUS. Just how many people had faltered in time past, thought twice and diverted when success was just a block away or around the corner. Consider the total revenue (in US$ billions) amassed by Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola. Pepsi bought over Taco Bell, KFC, Domino Pizza and owns a range of soft drinks like 7-Up, Miranda and others, to name just a few.

Come to think of it, so many 'advisors' in the world say you shouldn't put your eggs in one basket; that's why you diversify your attention left and right. Here is one very great example of why putting all your eggs in one basket can earn you 10 times more. Coca-cola may not be good at mergers and acquisitions, but it has transcended that kind of business. It has become such an evangelistic institution that it conquers India faster than you can say 'Christianity'.

It's the same with McDonald's. McDonald's stick to 'McDonald's' and The Mac--small and big--becomes such an indispensable identity, people cannot "think outside the Mac". Today, many food franchises have emulated McDonald's franchise/food delivery system, but it is still the largest food chain in the world and will remain that way for a good while.

You can be a successful entrepreneur and feel relatively secure in life. You may no longer need to worry about maintaining your home or the welfare of your spouse and kids, but the level of success enjoyed by Coca-cola and McDonald's is something on a scale that cannot be contained by family life, not saying that family life may be a hindrance too. To rise to that level, surely more work needs to be done on building up current flagship products and foundation.

So do you start to walk right? Not really. Success is really achieving one thing and using that as a stepping stone to achieve something else. It's no secret, but oh, how many CEOs do not have the wisdom to appreciate it. For some reasons, they thought having only one type of product is not enough to provide a sense of security, so 'expansion' means 'diversification'.

Creative Technology might have a better bet sticking to its "digital home entertainment" concept. It could have built on the SoundBlaster to move closer to that vision quickly rather than to dabble with MP3 players and optical disk drives. The MP3 player market already belongs to the iPod, no matter how technically bad it is compared to other players while Creative had to write off its disk drives in the late 90s due to excess inventory, remember? It wins some, it loses some, but has the company learnt its lesson yet? Someone must go to the main headquarters in Jurong and tell Mr. Sim Wong Hoo about it.

Netscape Communications came very close to that level of success, very close. It collapsed on itself by expending all its energy on suing Microsoft because it must have thought "the Internet and the browser market is mine, MINE! Muahaha". Instead of improving its own backyard, it got distracted by another company's presence and competition. What does that tell you about not having enough faith in oneself? Now Microsoft and Google are encroaching in each other's territories so we shall see how history repeats itself.

Friends, be focused! The center-point of your attention and the jewel in your eye is the most profitable of them all. Your family members and a few close friends may know you for many good and bad secrets, but most people know you for only one thing. I know nuts about the ingredients that go into making Coca-cola, but the impression is it's better than Pepsi. Creative Technology is known for creating beautiful sounds on the computer. Bill Gates got rich making software. Michael Jordan is the king of basketball, so is Muhammed Ali for boxing, and either have tried baseball. The late Peter Drucker is the founding father of management consultancy and much less well known for his infatuation with Japanese art. Who cares about Japanese art until someone comes along and proactively promotes it like a loudhailer all his/her life?

If you want to catch the attention of as many people as possible, you simply cannot diversify. Do not be tempted left and right but ponder the narrow path right upon your feet in front of you. Here are 3 ways you can build up your ultimate success through focus:

1) Build on your strength. Each and every person has a set of different capabilities, in which some are greater than others. Do you know what you are already good at? Do you have a revenue model for your capabilities? Start building up those good ones to a commercial level with more practice and research for better revenue generating methods in exchange for your products and services which arise out of your capabilities. The beginning of an unsuccessful business is when you become a jack of all trades and master of none.

2) Build on your uniqueness. This refers to natural talent. Beethoven composed his first symphony at the age of 4. You call that 'capability' or 'talent'? The question is: what are the few things you can do brilliantly without pushing too hard? While others find it difficult, you find easy. When you find something that gets you excited and passionate about, business becomes play instead of work.

3) Build on your life purpose. For a great many people, money is a stumbling block. We are constantly trying to ensure that our deserved payoff matches the amount of effort we expend, no less, but yeah, more would be a bonus, thank you very much. If everybody thinks and acts like this, we will all be a step closer to hell really. There's no greatness in living a life as suckers. Truth is, living a purpose-driven life is most profitable at its heart when you feel you are really alive doing the things you love to do and knowing that your contribution to the people around you will make you great, without ever thinking so much about payoff.

You only have one life to live, so what do you want to be remembered for before you die? Think about it. Life is full of all its joy and pain, and consequences whether you do certain things or not, but until you gain a sense of direction as you ponder every step of your feet, you wouldn't have known how wonderful 'progress' means to you. Achievement is a great feeling; don't indulge in it though, it's only interim. There's always another level of success ahead of you...yet.

All roads lead to Rome; that doesn't mean it's necessary for you to go to Perth. But if you have no choice but to go one big round through Perth, you will have to do it if you seriously want people to remember you for your one and only Rome.

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

1. Use the addition (+) sign to make sure you get all the terms in your search results. So: '+internet +marketing +strategies' will get you results containing all those words, leaving out web pages that only contain 'internet'.

2. Use the subtraction (-) sign to exclude references that you are not interested in. For example, if you are not interested in web pages that talk about viral marketing, enter: 'internet marketing strategies -viral'.

3. Sometimes, your search terms may be far off from one another on a web page. To ensure your terms appear together in a phrase, put them in double quotations, like this: "internet marketing strategies". This is also useful when you want to look for specific topics, such as "how to remove spyware", rather than having the terms scattered all over.

4. If you are looking for a word definition, Google has a tool for you. Just type: 'define: widget' to get a definition of the word from online dictionaries and glossaries.

5. Google even performs calculations. For example, enter '1+2+3' and click 'search' to get the result. It can also perform unit conversions such as from miles to kilometers. Enter '10 miles to kilometers' and you'll get 16.09344 kilometers.

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

It is a missed opportunity for businesses not to promote on the Internet. For those which are already doing it, it is another challenge to execute a geotargeted marketing campaign to accurately attract location-based leads. In this article I will write about the key steps and tools a webmaster must know in order to harness them for such a campaign creation. Google, being a global, multinational corporation, does not have just one search engine at google.com. There's google.de in German, google.es in Spanish and so many other languages. To learn of all the available languages, visit Google's Language Tools.

So what's the significance? If you should do a quick search with, say, the term "Internet Marketing" you'll find both sets of results in google.de and google.es are different. The similarity is each contains some numbers of sites based on their native country-specific domain extensions and languages. This is Google's attempt at presenting the best possible results based on localization and as you can see, it also becomes possible for you as the business owner to take note of the combination of factors that enables your localized site—if you should design one—to rank high in the "localized Google".

Possibly the most influential factor is, as mentioned, the country-specific domains. Invest in website.co.in when there is a compelling reason to target the India market. You can still take on the lesser recommendation of sticking to just one domain. Some corporate websites I've seen have subdomains created to represent their various country offices e.g. india.website.com or website.com/india.

The IP address of the web hosting server with which you run your website also contributes some weightage to the localization effect.

From the SEO point of view, it is more effective to publish content in the local language since localized Googles run on the same language. Though there are many free and paid translation tools, you cannot afford grammar and vocabulary mistakes and miss out on subtle nuances of language when you're in business. It pays to get a professional human translator to edit the content.

The benefits of inbound backlinking to increase PageRank still applies.

So far all that's being said refers to on-page optimization to influence free traffic. In Google AdWords there's also some work to do for geotargeting ads. However, AdWords have always been well known for ease of use so you can clear this hurdle in minutes simply by clicking on "Edit Campaign Settings" in your campaign and modify under "Target Audience" section.

Here's the interesting part. Consider 2 phenomena in searches:

1) The unwritten rule of thumb for conducting a localized search is to input "(keyword) (location)" e.g. "plumbing london".

2) Let's say you live in the UK. Have you noticed whenever you access Google you are redirected to google.co.uk instead of the presumed 'default' google.com? That has to do with your web browser's IP address, which becomes part of a range of addresses that is assigned to a region or continent, and the Google search engine has been programmed to act accordingly.

When you geotarget AdWords ads, it's not necessary to put in location to the ad's title, but consider carefully whether your business should accommodate travelers. Travelers would have done their homework before they make their travels, so you cannot restrict your ads from appearing depending on where these would-be travelers conduct their searches.

Example: your business may be renting out vacation homes in Florida, but surely it's not only the Florida natives who rent vacation homes. What about the Brits?

Unless you're highly aware of where your overseas sources of customers are likely to come from (Google Analytics will be helpful for tracking), you can switch off geotargeting option and put in title "Rent Vacations Home In Florida". You may also put in negative keywords for locations where you know you won't convert.

Alternatively, create and geotarget a separate ad appealing to British travelers for Florida vacation homes.

Let me end off by saying this post does not end conclusively and I'm sure there's more to geotargeting strategies than meets the eye. I'm writing as a creative response to a query by a client of mine about targeting specific crowd and demographics, and I hope this article contains enough information to get you on a good start.

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

In case you haven't heard of Google Sitemaps (BETA), it is a new program set up by Google to encourage webmasters to create a special XML-format sitemap file for Google to spider through. If you go through the official page, you will find yourself boggled if you are not very good at programming.

Thankfully, here's a very simple method for you to create such a sitemap in 7 easy steps so you don't have to spend $97 on some software that purports to do the same thing automatically. You betcha, people are charging a premium for doing the thing which you can without taking out your wallet.

So, to create a Google sitemap:

1) Create an xml sitemap at http://www.sitemapspal.com.

2) Simply type in your url address and click submit.

3) Copy and paste the code into a new HTML file and save it as sitemap.xml.

4) FTP it to your host.

5) Go here to log in if you already have an account: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login using the same username and password as you would to log in to GMail. Ask for invitation.

6) Inform Google about your sitemap location using the HTTP request, like this: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.gz and wait!

7) After 10-24 hrs, do your URL search on Google.com. Index page should be picked up.

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