NOT MAKING MONEY - MARKETING TRENDS…INTERNET ADVERTISING

I always wondered why they called it jumping on the bandwagon. As a matter of fact, I looked it up and it seems that back in the 19th century, there were bandwagons that were used in the pre circus parades. The members of the circus would ride on top of these colorful bandwagons. As they passed by, spectators would notice and join the procession. The circus promoters would hope that this would encourage the followers to actually become paying spectators of the circus itself. That is how the term jumping on the bandwagon got started.

What does this have to do with marketing trends and Internet advertising? Everything. See, whenever somebody comes up with a new way of "getting the word out" everybody and their grandmother jumps on the bandwagon and uses that method of advertising to promote their product or service. It doesn't matter if the method has been proven or not. Once somebody sees another person using it, the bandwagon jumping begins because nobody wants to be left out of the "in crowd."










So, what are the top marketing trends for Internet advertising today?

Probably the most widely used method of advertising is, and will probably be for a long time, Google Adwords. This is a relatively inexpensive and effective form of marketing that precisely targets the people who you want to reach. That is of course assuming that you set your Adwords campaign up properly. Many have gone broke because of poor keyword selection, poor choice of bid amounts and just plain awfully worded ads. Google Adwords is by no means a sure thing if you don't know what to do with it.

Another form of marketing that seems to have created a buzz these days is Butterfly Marketing. This is really just another form of viral marketing where a friend tells another friend and so on. It's word of mouth with a few twists to it. Many Butterfly Marketing sites have shown incredible success, again if you set them up correctly.

Another big buzz around town is Bum Marketing. This is basically the practice of writing articles after doing careful keyword research on the topic of your choice, and then submitting those articles to article directories. The key is to make sure you have a resource box that contains a way for people to get more information through your website, much like this very article. It's actually very effective.

Of course aside from the "new wave" of marketing trends, there are still the tried and true methods like SEO, E-zine Ads and a host of other things that have worked since I can remember. The thing about trends is that many of them are really just reworked ideas of old methods. The ones that aren't, usually don't last very long because when all is said and done, the most effective forms of marketing have probably already been invented.











So, if you're looking for the "new" thing under the big top, you may not have to look any farther than optimizing your website for the search engines and taking out a few good solo ads in the better E-zines. Of course writing an article every now and then can't hurt.

It certainly hasn't hurt me any.

Not Making Money Online - Try Ebay - Part 1

If you were to take a poll on what was the most popular form of making money on the Internet, you’d probably get about a 50-50 split between affiliate marketing and selling on Ebay. From the people I have spoken to, Ebay seems to give them more of a feeling of really running their own business. I didn’t really get that feeling because I’d already created my own products to sell online. But I can understand their feeling of excitement. They had to jump through a lot of hoops to sell on Ebay, especially if they were into drop shipping.

Make no mistake about it. Selling on Ebay is a real rush. There power trip of being totally in control of everything is far beyond the rush you get from selling an affiliate product where you have no control over the commission structure, website or anything. With Ebay, you make or break it on every level.

However, with that kind of rush comes a great deal of responsibility. There’s nobody to lean on when you’re selling on Ebay. You are your own boss and everything falls on your shoulders. There’s no Clickbank to turn to for refunds. All refunds come out of your pocket and if there are enough customer complaints, you can be shut down in an instant. So you better make sure that you run a tight ship.

So, you want to sell on Ebay. Okay, if that’s the case, you better have a solid game plan. I don’t mean just what products you’re going to sell. I mean how you’re going to advertise, how you’re going to price, where you’re going to get the products from and a lot more. Everything will have to be in place and ready to go before you even place your first Ebay ad. Just one thing not taken care of and the whole operation falls apart.

If you’re really efficient and a quick worker, you can probably get an Ebay campaign going, depending on how complex it is, in about a week. Some take a month or longer to put together. My particular campaign, when I first started, was simple and took me a week. If I knew what I was doing back then, it probably wouldn’t have taken me as long, but everybody starts out somewhere.

One word of caution before you even venture into this territory. You’re going to have to be very careful about regulations. Ebay has a ton of them as does PayPal. They’re not going to care about your email to them that says “I didn’t know.” That’s why Ebay and PayPal have all these terms of service. They expect people to read them, even though they may take a year and a day to do so.

Having said that, it is not the purpose of this tutorial to teach you Ebay and PayPal regulations. That I am leaving in YOUR hands. This tutorial is simply to help you set up a business for the purpose of selling on Ebay.

In our next installment, we’ll get to the actual instruction itself.

See you then.