Since the methods didn’t work like they had hoped it would, they go back to forums and waste another few days reading every post, searching for that one flawless method that will solve all their problems. This type of behavior is commonly refereed to as “Analysis Paralysis” in IM circles.

Believe me I know exactly what its like because I wasted my first 2 or 3 years in IM doing just that. I knew all the IM methods, could mentor a guru but never actually put any of my IM knowledge into practice and I didnt TAKE ACTION.

Nothing is free with IM, do you think your time is worth $0/hour? The less you invest with currency, the more time you will have to invest to make up for it. E.g. The minimum award wage in Australia is around $18.00/hour, im not a good writer so it would take me around 45 – hour to write an informative 500 article, so around an $18 article. I can go on freelancer.com and have articles written for $1.50 – $2.00 each. So to invest $50 and have 30 articles written, that would have taken me 3 days to write, so it is a great investment.

The articles are definitely an investment, if you cant at least double, triple or quadruple your initial investment for them, there is seriously something wrong.

Few tips that might give a newbie a better chance of succeeding in IM.

1. Break free from the analysis paralysis and TAKE ACTION, good way to start is by banning youself from forums, they are very addictive and waste tremendous amounts of time reading info that you have already read before and your only really getting money making tips from newbies that are in the same position as you. If you want to learn real techniques, download an rss reader and subscribe to some gurus IM blogs that focus on the method you enjoy most, e.g Article Marketing, Blogging, Video Marketing, List building, etc, etc.

2. Make sure you focus on one project at a time. You spread yourself way to thin when you are trying to market using all the  methods youv learnt at once. Your 100% better off starting one project and finishing it, then working on 5 projects at once and completing none of them. – This was my second biggest issue as a newbie, head was bursting with ideas and I wanted to get them all going  asap but never actually finished any of them.

Are you a Newbie thats read about so many different marketing techniques, that you have no idea what marketing path to take?

3. Iv been doing IM for over 8 years now and have mentored a few people. The one method I teach them when first starting out that never fails when done correctly and has proven itself over and over again, is good old bum marketing (article marketing). A mistake a lot of bum marketers make is giving away their precious origional content to the article directories for a bust of traffic without stamping their name on it.

The correct way to do it is, invest the $9 on a domain name and the $4/month on hosting, install wordpress and publish your own articles first. Wait a few days for Google to index you articles then go to the big daddy article directory, Ezinearticles.com and submit your articles there, link the article back to the same Article you published on your site with anchor text that contain the keywords you are targeting with that article, this will make your article appear as the origional copy and prevent it from being filtered out in the Google dupe content filter.

Ezinearticles are very strict on article originality and uniqueness, they will accept it if its only been published on your site first but will deny the submission if its been published to 5 – 10 other places before hand. Now search google for a list of the top 10 article directories and social media sites e.g. Squidoo.com, hubpages.com, scribed.com wordpress.com, etc, etc. Now publish your articles to all of them, dont stress about the Google dupe content filter, just make sure that you change the title of the article with each submission and maybe write a unique intro to each article, this is all thats needed to avoid the Goog Dupe Con Filter.

Remember every article thats submitted has to link back to your original article with keywords that you are targeting, which is usually the title of your article. If you are unsure what anchor text is, heres a quick example. Articoolz.com is an article directory, if I wanted to link to that site from my article, instead of linking to it with its name “Articoolz.com“, I would link to it like this, “Article Directory“. The anchor text is the phrase “Article Directory” while the link still points back to Articoolz.com.

Anchor text from a backlink is much more descriptive than a link URL on its own, this inturn helps Google determine what niche your original article is targeting and what keywords it will rank the article for, since the anchor text from the articles submitted to the directories matches your original article title, Google has more confidence in ranking the article higher for those keywords.  The article post title will become the words displayed in the search engine listings.

For people that cant get their head around the importance of obtaining backlinks to gain higher rankings, I will try and put it in a style of Laymans terms, this could be interesting. Imagine if all the websites targeting a specific keyword were to have an election to determine Google rank, each backlink to a site was considered a “Vote” towards the site in the election. In 2004, if your site had more votes than  your competitors site, your site would have always been ranked higher than theirs, Google wasn’t as smart then and votes where more evenly valued, this ment you could get 10,000 backlink votes to your site and dominate a niche overnight. Ahh those where the good old days when you could rank for any keyphrase you wanted. You may remember how awefully untargeted and spammy the search results were back then as well.

Google has since devalued the power a backlink has in the ranking algorithm on its own. They now have focused a lot more on the authority and trust of the sites that supplied that backlink.

Looking at the backlink as a vote once more with the addition of trust and authority factor. Lets say, there were 2 websites ranked 1 & 2 for the keyphrase “Best Dog Training Guide”. No.1 ranked site has 100 votes and No.2 ranked site has 1000 votes.

You maybe shocked and wonder how that can happen when No.2 ranked site has 10X more votes.

No.1 ranked website obviously has obtained votes from more powerfull (high authority) sites. E.g. The President, the pope, the Queen and 97 other saintly people vote site No.1 as the best dog training guide, but site number 2 has managed to get 10x that number, obtaining 1000 votes from terrorists, rapists, murderers and a heap of other unsavory type people.

Obviously if you were to choose whos opinion you trusted more, you would go with the President, the pope, the Queen and 97 other saintly peoples opinion. So even though the other site has 10x as many votes, Google still chose to trust the minorities opinion over the majority. This is known as trust rank. You see this all the time now when analyzing the SERPS. There is no way you can convince me that PageRank isnt worth anything anymore.

Google simply trust the judgement of the President (high authority site e.g. CNN.com)  and hold his opinion in much higher regard than a Terrorists (malware website) opinion.

In 2004, the rapists and murderers vote held a similar value to the Presidents. Since the rapists and murderers where a lot easier to get votes from, this is where many blackhat and even whitehat SEO’s went to source their backlinks. Creating software to run day and night, getting links through blog comment spam, doorway site networks, torrent sites, etc, etc. Thank heavens for the nofollow link, the SERPS are much cleaner and now the sites that carry real value rank the highest.

I hope that doesn’t make the whole backlinks and SEO theory even more confusing, I think it might have, im even confused, hehe.

So at the end of this stage, you should have each of your original articles appearing on 10 – 20 high authority article directories and Social Media sites. Remember each time you submitted the article, you used a different title, targeting the long tail keyphrases (4 or more words in the title). Never ever use the short tale (any less than 3 words) in an article title. The more words in your title, the less competition there is to rank against for that keyphrase. The less words, the greater the competition. A longtail keyphrase “Where Can I Buy a Cheap Sony Playstation” is also going to convert into sales 10X more often than short tail keyphrase “Sony Playstation”. More is not always better when it comes to website traffic. Laser targeted traffic that have their wallets out is the key.

HUGE bum marketing tip for everyone. Your article titles should mirror what you would expect people to type in Google to find what you offer. Don’t try to add fancy words and humor. Your potential customers are looking for a solution to their problems and you have the solution they are after, don’t make it hard for them’

Here is a quick example of a bad phrased article title “It’s Friday Night! Will You Get Lucky? ” nobody would search that keyphrase. They would search it from their point of view instead, “It’s Friday Night, Will I Get Lucky”. That simple little tweak of the title can be the difference between ranking for a keyphrase with much higher search volume and not ranking.

Final step is to join up to 10, 20 , 50 of the best social bookmarking sites and bookmark every single article you published on your site and every article that was published to the other directories and social media sites, all the trust and authority of the social bookmarking links with flow through to your articles which inturn will flow through to your site. The largest social bookmarking sites like stumbleupon.com and delicious.com get a huge amount of traffic so bookmarking is very beneficial.

www.incansoft.com has the best bookmarking software that I know of, called SocialBot, there was a WSO on warriors ages ago, selling it for $7, if ya want to automate bookmarking go to that forum and search the WSO section, also remember to close your eyes when you go there coz its easy to get seduced by all the “make $10,000 while taking a crap” WSO’s that are published to take advantage of the big dreaming newbie.

Finally in conclusion, With the initial investment of $15 for domain and hosting, $50 for 30 Articles, you have leverage what you had to the maximum. Created a website that you have full control over, 30 articles published to 20 authority sites each, ranking for indervidual keyphrases that people search for 20 x 30 = Articles = 600 keyphrases = 600 high authority backlinks to all areas of your website with targeted anchor text. Large amounts of traffic flowing through those links to purchase your solution to their problem. Those 600 articles each been bookmarked to 50 of the top Bookmarking site. Each bookmark is indexed in google, (50 x 600) + (50 x 30) = 31,500.

So thats around 31,500 references to your site that are indexed in Google, all leading back to your site, announcing that you are the authority in your niche and to pay attention Do that once a week, after 3 of 4 months when Google gives new domains more trust, your site will have that much authority that you will rank on the first page of Google for any article you post.

Now you have a truckload of traffic, its time to monetize the website, but I have wasted to much time here already and I doubt many of you would have made it this far down my post. Sorry for the long one.

What niche would you guys target in this situation? How would you monetize the website?

Firstly have to determine the keywords you want to target (known as categories in local listings). Most businesses have no idea about this and dont take advantage of the categories section in their listing profile. You can use up to 5 keywords, choose them wisely. Just like organic seo, the shorter the keyphrase the more competition you will be up against. The larger your locations population the more comp also, try to target longer tail keyphrases until your citations and ratings have jumped, then shorten the keyphrases.

I heard a great way to put it in laymans terms, a backlink is considered a vote for a website. The more vote your website has, the higher you will rank. Some peoples votes are trusted and worth more than others. When it comes to local businesses, who better to ask than the master Yoda of local search, the yellow pages directory.

Every business that appears in the printed version also appears in the YP online directory. Usually cost thousands of dollars for a business to place their ad in the YP directory ($40,000 for full page ad in my city), obviously is would be trusted info to Google.

Firstly make sure the local business is actually listed in the online Yellow Pages directory, if not submit it using the exact address that was used in your local Google listing. If the business is listed, make sure it also has their website listed. Most dont. This counts like a vote from the president for your site.

The address listed in the online yellow pages listing works as a citation to confirm the address of the local Google listing.

Lots of cities have multiple yellow page style directories. Submit to all their online directories and always make sure you use the exact same business name, address, phone numbers and website in all. Once you done them, submit the business to all the local online directories, again keeping the info exact. Every country and city has dozens of local business directories online. Start from the most popular and work your way backwards. The big authority directories like DMOZ and YAHOO are also very good for citations and votes.

Who better to rate these local businesses than the citizens that live there. Comments and reviews help a lot with local listing rankings. Get the business to contact their regular customers and ask them to rate and review their listing. Now with easy internet browsing on cellular devices, the business owners can ask their customers to rate and comment on their local business listing, while they are processing their enquiry or transaction.

IMO they are the strongest factors when ranking in local business listings. links and citations from international directories, forums and websites will count for little with local listings. Thats like an American tourist trying to vote in the Australian federal election and expecting the vote to count, not gonna happen, hehe

Other factors that play a part in local listings are keywords in your listing title and domain name.

You ask yourself, Is it really worth $20,000? Isn’t there a better way?

Like expected, you hear that little voice in your head “I know you cant afford it, it may be the last roll of the dice, but you have to do it, there’s no other option, just pay the 20 grand and hope for the best”.

Ok, now hang on a minute. What decade are you living in? I don’t care what you say, the 80’s and 90’s aren’t coming back into fashion. Keep up with the times, dude.

Let me be the one to tell you, if the yellow pages haven’t already been pronounced dead, they sure haven’t got long to go. They simply don’t work as well as they used to.

People don’t use the yellow pages anymore. Well maybe a little but not enough to condone spending 20 grand for a half page ad or 40 grand for a full page.

Customers are moving with the times. As technology develops, people are looking for faster, more efficient ways of finding what they want. For a business to thrive, they need to move with the times also.

Did you know that 79% of Australian’s have an internet connection in their place of residence and 96% of Australian’s have access to the internet in some form or another during their daily lives (i.e. Internet cafes, libraries, schools, mobile phones, etc, etc).

I conducted a paid poll asking this question “Internet Search vs Yellow Pages, what service do you prefer when searching for local businesses?” The results are what you could call “Eye Opening”. Obviously I am slightly biased when it comes to the Internet but the results even shocked me.

80% of the people that took part in the poll answered with Internet Search, while 17% went with yellow pages and 3% chose other services.

Here are the results

As you can see this is a paid poll that cannot be manipulated.

The poll results show that neither male or female are similar with their preferred search method.

There is little variance between age demographics.

As a business owner, I hope this was a bigger eye opener for you than it was for me. I have been into internet marketing for years now, so I’v always known the potential of internet search for offline businesses.

The problem is a very high percent of business owners have no idea. 60% of businesses don’t even have a website let alone know about Optimising their sites to rank in the search engines.

Like Nike always says, “Just do It”. Will be the best move you will ever make for your business.