Starting off in Internet Marketing can be quite a daunting task.  As you can see on IMReportCard.com, an entire market has emerged over the years which is full of “gurus” and coaches in order to help address how overwhelming the full scope of Internet Marketing can be to someone starting fresh.  Here are a few quick tips to help anyone looking for a push in the right direction.

Plan Ahead – Before you create your website, make sure to set specific goals.  Define what you want to do with the website; this includes the layout and design.  A well planned site will go a long way to help keep visitors on your site longer and keep them coming back.  A disorganized site will have visitors confused and clicking away from your site within seconds.  Make sure to have a strong landing page and grabs their attention!

Analyze your Traffic – Free tools like Google Analytics will help you understand exactly which pages on your website are performing and which ones you need to improve.  Also, using an analytical tool can show you the exact keywords and sites people are using in order to find your website.  This is very powerful data which can be used to increase traffic to your site.  Additional tools, like heat maps ( I like ClickTale for this) can give amazing visual insight into exactly what your visitors are doing while on your website.

Start a Newsletter – As covered in a previous IM Report Card blog article,  Add Email Marketing to your Internet Marketing Bag of Tricks, starting a newsletter is a simple and highly effective way to build your Internet Marketing presence.  A newsletter is not only a great way to send important information to your subscribers, but also to get them clicking back to your site.

Write Blog Articles – Take time out to compose at least two blog articles a month.  This keeps your website content fresh and gives visitors a reason to keep coming back.  To make your blogging efforts even easier, check out some of the helpful tools we reviewed in “Blog Your Way to Financial Bliss”.

Get Social – We all know that Social Media is a powerful medium for getting into direct contact with your target audience.  The obvious sites to engage your audience are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the like.  However, there are a lot of smaller sites which only cater to a specific niche.  A wise move is to look for those sites and get established as an active member of that niche.  Position yourself as a subject matter expert, if you can.

For more in-depth assistance with crafting your own Internet Marketing success story, check out our list of Top 25 People.

One of the most popular and rewarding forms of Internet Marketing is blogging.  Starting a blog is fairly simple, but earning money from it can be tricky and time consuming.  Earning an income by blogging about something you are passionate about is a wonderful experience, but with too much time invested trying to figure out how to monetize your blog it can become more like a typical 9-5 job.  Free yourself of the guesswork by trying out some of the highly rated blogging tools and training listed below and read the full reports on IM Report Card.

The $365K Blog Traffic Formula (1891 users graded this B-) is a program that allows the user to actually learn all the blogging tips and techniques used by seven of the most successful bloggers in the industry. Get the opportunity to sit down (figuratively) with each of these pro bloggers and learn everything they know and do to make their own blogs successful. Use of this knowledge will enable you to multiply the free traffic coming to your website without you having to work any harder.

WP Robot (174 users graded this A-) is an auto-blogging plugin for WordPress weblogs. It will enable the user to create targeted blog posts on any topic without having to write anything. Blogs will be set on auto-pilot and fresh content will be entered on a schedule that the user specifies and the posts can be on any topic and will be targeted to any keyword desired. Content can be taken from any source including Amazon, Ebay, ClickBank, and YouTube.

Dude I Hate My Job (81 users graded this B+) is a training course developed by 18 year old Adam Horwitz that will show you how to generate a large income by blogging about things you love. It is unimportant whether or not you have any online experience as long as you are willing to write about things that are important to you. You will learn how to brand yourself as an expert in what you are blogging about and how to monetize your blogs so that you can start to generate a large online income.

AutoBlogged (47 users graded this A-) is a WordPress plugin that creates blog posts from an RSS or Atom feed. This allows the user to easily add unique content to their blogs with no effort. With this fully supported software a blogger will be able to create a high content blog that will be able to generate income from advertising or links. With this software blogging can be put on auto-pilot that will enable the user to spend their time generating income instead of generating content.

What good is a website or blog without traffic?  IM Report Card has an extensive list of websites and programs that claim to increase and generate traffic.  Whether through SEO, link exchanges or more, there are several easy ways to start increasing traffic to your website today.  Here is a list of five of some of the highly rated traffic generation sites reviewed on IMReportCard.com.

Traffic Travis (A- grade, 148 reviews) – Experienced internet marketers know that SEO is not as easy as it sounds. For one, you need to have the right frame of mind and be equipped with the right tools. In addition, SEO can involve a lot of investments for tangible results to appear. Fortunately, Traffic Travis can help you succeed in whatever niche you’re involved in.

EasyHits4U (B+ grade, 376 reviews) – EasyHits4You is a traffic exchange that allows members to earn visits to their websites by visiting other members’ websites. This program also offers banner advertising and text ad advertising by assigning earned credits. Bonuses can be earned as well for viewing sites and simply for signing up, and traffic credits can also be purchased through the program.

Article Marketing Robot (A- grade, 17 reviews) – Article Marketing Robot is a traffic generating tool that will show you how to get traffic on complete autopilot through article submissions. Article marketing will not only get you ranked on the major search engines quicker, but it also helps you surpass your competitors. That is where the Article Marketing Robot software comes in, by helping you generate and submit articles that will get your website indexed faster and push you to the top of the search engine rankings.

247TrafficPro (A- grade, 17 reviews) – 247 Traffic Pro offers you quality traffic to help generate sales. Traffic exchanges can be tiring and boring; they make 247 Traffic Pro fun and exciting while delivering quality traffic to your website. To use the service, it doesn’t cost anything. 247 Traffic Pro is not a paid to surf program, but it is a traffic exchange program. When you refer people and they are your direct referral, you get paid recurring income.

Splash Page Maker (A- grade, 15 reviews) – Splash Page Maker is a web-based tool that helps you build splash pages. This program is intended to help Internet Marketers that use traffic exchanges to get traffic to their sites. For people who have no specialized knowledge of HTML or graphic design, Splash Page Maker will make creating your pages a breeze.

Having a blog is one of the top ways to make money online.  Having a successful blog opens up several opportunities for monetizing traffic and earning income.  To make blogging easier, WordPress is one of the favorite platforms that successful bloggers use.  However, having a plain looking blog (or one without much content) isn’t going to give off the best first impression for a new visitor and make them want to stick around or, even better, click around.

Here are some of the top rated WordPress Plug-Ins that have been reviewed and graded by IM Report Card and our valued members:

• WP Robot (A- grade, 161 reviews) –  Blogging taking up too much of your time?  WP Robot will help you generate fresh content without having to write a single word.  Enter some keywords and be on your way.  Several modules available to integrate top sites like Amazon, ClickBank, eBay, YouTube and more.
• Gravity Forms (A- grade, 98 reviews) – A great way to help make money from blogging is to collect visitor information and make an email list.  Gravity Forms makes it a snap to set up a form and start gathering email addresses.
• Autoblogged (A- grade, 43 reviews) –  If you want to go full steam ahead into monetizing your blog, Autoblogged will be your go-to WordPress plug-in.  Autoblogged frees up the time you would have spent creating content so you can focus on your monetization efforts.
• Press75.com (A- grade, 71 reviews) – Professionally created themes will give your blog the polished look that set you apart from the crowd.  Press75 is home to several premium theme starting at only $5.
• WordPress Crusher (B+ grade, 10 reviews) – If you want a truly unique WordPress site, then you will want to look into WordPress Crusher.  Here you will have immediate access to nine plug-ins, plus the ability to create your own custom plug-ins.

Additionally, we have just added two hot WordPress and blogging reviews – Safeguard WordPress and Blogging with John Chow.  These are so new that they haven’t receive any user reviews or grades yet, so this is a great opportunity to share  your opinion with the IM Report Card community.

One reason that you will see WordPress maintain its number 1 position as the best blogging platform in 2012 is due to the thousands of WordPress plugins available.  You can get plugins for WordPress for almost anything you would like to do on your blog. Of course you cannot use all the available plugins on your blog, so we’ve have chosen the 10 best WordPress plugins that any serious blogger should have.

1. All in one SEO pack: Get an automated boost to the first page of Google

Considering the stiff competition that websites have for the first page of Google, All In One SEO Pack is surely the best WordPress plugin for 2012. It stands out from many other similar tools because it is the most reliable, well maintained and easy to use, and does not require the user to have any SEO knowledge in order to benefit from it. What this plugin does is generate Meta tags and optimize your blog titles automatically, so that search engines can easily see your blog. However, it also gives one the freedom of manually including Meta tags for each page and post on the blog.

2. W3 Total Cache: Stop testing your readers’ patience

W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress plugin for helping your blog to load in the shortest time possible. Does anyone really need to be told the importance of a short loading time for a website? What this plugin does is that it caches the static versions of your blog which would improve the loading time of that page by up to 10 times.

3. Digg Digg Social Sharing: Exploit the full potential of going social

Digg Digg Social Sharing is the best WordPress plugin if you are looking for a way to get the maximum social traffic that your site can have. You must have seen a floating bar with social media icons to the left side of site content in many WordPress blogs and websites. This bar is powered by the Digg Digg Social Sharing WordPress plugin. With such a bar, it becomes very easy for your site visitors to click on the icons and help you promote your blog content.

4. WP Touch: Do not be left behind; go mobile!

In 2012, it is not enough to have a great site that is well optimized, loads quickly and has tapped the power of social media. You need to also optimize it for the viewers who will try to access it from iPhones and other mobile devices. Of all the plugins for WordPress that can help you do this, WP Touch is simply the best. With this plugin, you can do things like truncating your blog titles and hiding excerpts so that your site’s readers that use mobiles can view your content in a style perfectly formatted for their device.

5. The slide: Have your readers want to stay on your site a little longer

There are many plugins for WordPress but this is surely the most creative one. It is a slide that appears from the right bottom corner of the page, suggesting to the reader titles of other content within your site that may be of interest to them. This happens when the reader scrolls towards the bottom of the post.

6. WP-PageNavi: Readers want an easier time on your site

The WP-PageNavi is one of the plugins for WordPress that seek to give your site users an easy time. It does so by allowing you to move from the traditional “older posts – newer posts” links, to better looking page buttons that readers can use to navigate directly to the pages they are interested in.

7. Gravity Forms: Give your readers a chance too

This WordPress plugin helps you to give your readers a chance to give their feedback on the content you give to them. This not only helps you get ideas about what your readers think about your products but also makes them feel welcome, important and cared for.

8. MaxBlog Press Affiliate Ninja: Make more money in less time

This WordPress plugin is designed to help you considerably reduce the time you would need to promote your affiliate products on your website. With this tool, you will have all your affiliate links on your WordPress Dashboard so you can keep track of them without much hustle.

9. WP-DBManager: Do not risk; back up your WordPress site

WP-DBManager is the best WordPress plugin that gives bloggers a peaceful time as they go about their blogging business. Once you have this plugin installed, you can instruct it to back up your website at any time, or at certain time intervals. Should you lose your site content, the plugin will then email you the last saved version of your site.

10. Thank Me Later WordPress plugin

This plugin may not have made it to the list of best WordPress plugins a few years back. However, its importance cannot be overlooked today. The plugin sends a welcome email to the first time visitors of your website and you can also use it to invite them to connect personally with you.

Posted June 06th 2012 to Blogging,Internet Marketing • Comments (1)

Lots of discussions have recently been running concerning the recently introduced Google Authorship. It’s important to understand what Google Authorship is and how it affects your web page’s position on the search engine’s result pages, as well as the Google CTR (click through rate).

What is Google Authorship?

This is a method that Google introduced to give authors the chance to identify themselves as the real owners of a given piece of content. Using the “rel author” markup, you can associate a web page that you have authored with your G+ profile. Author information containing your name, image and G+ information will then start appearing on the Google search engine result pages that contain your web page as one of the search result.

How to implement Google Authorship on your websites

This is a simple process that only takes a few minutes. All you will need is a Google + profile. This is how to do it:

• Log into G+ and go to your profile
• Click on the Edit Profile button
• On the About tab, go to Contributor To link and add the URL of your website, set the permission as public and save
• While still on your profile, copy your profile id (a 21 digit number you will find within the URL in the address bar of your browser)
• In the following html code, replace “your-code” with your profile ID <a href=”https://plus.google.com/your-code?rel=author”>Add to the circle</a>
• Paste the html code with your profile ID in the header section of your website and wait for some time (about 24 hours) for your Google Authorship to start appearing on Googles SERPs

Benefits of Google Authorship to SEO and CTR

Improves Google SEO

Before the implementation of Google Authorship, the sites listed at the top of the SERPs are seen as most relevant and useful, without the ability for users to differentiate which sites are actually the most credible or trustworthy sources of information.  Google Authorship makes it easier for authentic and credible sites to be found.  Additionally, given the rapidly growing social media trends, Google Authorship is making search more social by putting a face and name to the website.

Increases in Google CTR

It is logical that readers are more likely to click on content that has its authorship known than on that which does not. The presence of a profile picture on Google Authorship also helps readers to easily identify your content. So if you have established yourself as an authority in your field, the click through rates even on the other pieces that you have authored will be increased.

Win, win, win?

Sure, there’s a clear objective from Google to build up its Google+ network using Google Authorship, but… so what?  This is a beneficial relationship for 1) people searching on Google and getting better access to relevant, credible content 2) content-based websites trying to rank on Google and 3) Google itself.  It’s an excellent opportunity for smaller blogs with excellent original content, but low rankings in the search engines to gain exposure for themselves in the SERPs and worth taking advantage of!

Posted May 21st 2012 to Blogging,Google SEO,Internet Marketing,SEO • Comments (1)

There are many ways through which you can generate traffic to your business website, but by far blogging is among the best methods to do it for free. Just by sharing your thoughts regularly through a blog, you can start increasing your fan base within a targeted niche and give your products and services massive exposure.

Here are some steps on how to increase your website traffic through blogging:

1.    Install blog software on your website through your hosting control panel. If you have your own domain name and web hosting provider, it is easy to install a third party blog platform on your website. This may sound a little bit technical but it is not. For example, if you are using Hostgator for your web hosting, there is an option for you to install a WordPress blog on your site for free. The WordPress blog will then be hosted on a dedicated folder within your website, and you can smoothly guide your online visitors to the blog through your home page.

2.    Start posting valuable content on your blog. Initially, after your blog is created, what you need to do is publish some content on it to get the ball rolling. The recommended amount is at least three to five blog posts before you start promoting your blog. You have the liberty to do the actual writing on your own, or you can outsource the entire project to an experienced blogger who understands your niche or industry. Make sure that you prioritize writing for your audience instead of the search engines.

3.    Bookmark and share your blog posts on social sites. After your blog has its initial set of blog posts, start generating some traffic by sharing your blog post links on social networking and bookmarking sites. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Linked In, are just some of the big social networking platforms where you can easily reach people when you post. When you socially bookmark your blog posts, you will not just be able to spread the word to hundreds of people, but you will also be able to alert the search engines regarding your fresh content.

4.    Give your blog readers an easy way to subscribe. When you promote and maintain a blog, your goal is not just to gain one-time readers. Rather, your aim is to generate subscribers who will regularly visit each time you post new content. Readers can subscribe through your blog’s RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication feeds). These are simple widgets naturally built within your blog that gives readers easy access to your most recent content either through their online browser or email address.

5.    Exchange guest posts with other bloggers within your niche. If you want to gain a bigger share of the pie of internet traffic within your specific industry, team up with bloggers in your niche for guest posting agreements. The easiest way to do this is to contact those bloggers via email or telephone and try to negotiate the terms on how you can make a guest post on their blog and promote your website links. Looking for guest posting prospects on an on-going basis is a great way to increase your traffic and become an authority in your niche as well.

On the other hand, if you do not have your own website yet, you can still start a blog by opening an account in WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, or any other free blogging platform.

Posted May 11th 2012 to Blogging,Internet Marketing • Comments (1)

Some people blog for fun, some do it to promote their business while others do it to make an income. Blogging can be a great way to earn some extra income. You can either make money from your blog directly or by offering a service.

A few ways to make money from your blog:

1. Place ads: You can place ads on your blog and make some money from it directly. These can be PPC ads, affiliate links, newsletter ads, or any other kind of ads.

2. Offer a service: You could offer a service which is relevant to the topic you blog about. For example if you blog about social media you could offer a social media marketing service.

3. Speak: You could offer a speaking service on the subject you blog about. People love to have experienced speakers speak at their events. If you’re an expert at a very popular subject it could lead to a lot of speaking opportunities. Speaking at events can be a great source of income and it could lead to better opportunities.

4. Sell a product: You could use the platform you build through your blog to sell relevant products. An example of a blog taking advantage of this is Copyblogger. On Copyblogger they publish articles on copywriting, writing, blogging etc. Using the platform they have built through publishing all this free content they sell tools which can help enhance your wordpress blog. You can do the same thing by creating products which are relevant to the subject you blog about.

5. Sell an ebook: Some blogs make high amounts of income by publishing ebooks. When you have already built an audience around a subject you blog on, the best way to make some money is to write an ebook on that subject and sell it. This can help you generate a lot of money. A blog that takes advantage of this and sells several ebooks is Problogger.

These are a few ways in which you can make a good income blogging.

Do you make a good income from your blog? Have you got some tips you would like to share with us? Please leave your comments in the comments box below.

Posted March 26th 2012 to Blogging • Comments (2)

We’ve talked about the benefits of inbound marketing in regards to generating leads, but there are several ways to use inbound marketing to retain your leads.  It costs 5-10 times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one.  With that in mind, it is definitely important to explore different ways to keep your existing customers happy!

Below are 4 ways to use inbound marketing to retain customers:

1)      Educate Customers- one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged is to provide them with educational materials to help them learn more about your industry and your product.  You can create educational auto-responders, update your blog, or even host an informational webinar to teach customers about your product.

2)      Use Social Media- Social media is a great way to build and maintain customer relationships.  You can social media platforms answer customer questions and provide a continuous stream of industry and product updates.

3)      Create a Forum- Customer support is crucial in retaining customers, but can undoubtedly be time consuming and expensive.  Letting your customers talk to each other is like having built-in free customer support. Who better to answer customer questions (aside from you) than other customers?   People like sharing their experiences with others and creating a forum is a great way to do that!  IMRC members have good things to say about How to Start a Forum (A- rating, 295 grades).

4)      Ask for Feedback- An often overlooked option, obtaining customer feedback is a great way to stay “in the know” about what your customers like, don’t like, want to see more of, etc.  Simple ways to obtain feedback include surveys, blog posts or via social media platforms.

Posted March 14th 2011 to Blogging,Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (1)

The thought of creating a blog has probably crossed your mind at one time or another. If you’ve been hesitant to start one, you may want to reconsider.

There are benefits of blogging that actually go beyond gaining readership (although readership is great for its own reasons). Search engine results favor websites that have new, relevant content. Research has shown that websites containing blogs- with or without readers- receive 55% more traffic than those without blogs.

How is this possible? For starters, blogs generally have optimized site architecture. Most are built with clear navigation paths and uncomplicated URL structures making it easy for search engine spiders to navigate through. Blogging also provides a great opportunity for internal and external linking. Creating internal links to other pages deeper in your site (perhaps to a product you’re selling), as well as, external links to other related websites will help build up your SEO. Lastly, you can use your blog posts, headlines, title tags and category names to naturally incorporate targeted keywords into your website.

With all that being said, you cannot neglect the importance of delivering fresh, quality content in your blog; updating it regularly makes search engine spiders happy. As for gaining readership, that will come in time as more and more traffic is delivered to your site!

Posted December 10th 2010 to Blogging,Internet Marketing,SEO • Comments (2)