How to Become an Expert in Internet Marketing
Posted on October 1, 2007
Filed Under Blogging advice
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”
Niels Bohr, Nobel prize winner for physics, 1922
If you want to become an expert in anything, not just internet marketing, you need to try your best to do things right by focusing on 3 keys.
You need to experiment, make mistakes and learn from these mistakes.
I first instinctively used these principles when I was learning to play competitive tennis.
I would play practice matches with my friends and think to myself: “Let’s see what happens if I approach the net with a cross court shot. I’ll do this about 10 times and see whether this will work in the long term or not.”
After that, I would also try aother approach such as coming to the net aiming for a winner down the line. I’d try that a few times and determine how successful each tactic was.
I deliberately experimented even though I KNEW that some of these tactics wouldn’t work. And I didn’t know which ones!
Eventually, I figured it out (approaching the net down the line, by the way 
), learned to play better and became an expert tennis player.
These same principles apply to the online game as well.
Are you experimenting and testing new ideas in the online world?
Are you trying different tactics and comparing them to see which one works better?
Here are two experiments I have done lately:
1. I did keyword research trying to find keywords (technology-related) with at least 20 daily searches according to Wordtracker and less than 100 competing websites searching with quotes in Google.
I found 5 keywords, and ordered 5 articles and their rewrites.
These articles were posted on a free new blog site with their rewrites submitted to ezinearticles.com.
I wanted to see 2 things:
a) How well could SEO-optimized articles located on ezinearticles.com rank in Google relative to my competition (backlinks, pagerank, …) and how many visitors would that bring to my website?
b) What would be the pagerank of my 5-page blog after a few months and how many visitors per day would it get?
This experiment cost me 5 x $5.50 for articles and 5 x $4.50 for their rewrites, totalling around $50.
Result: My short 5-page blog now receives anywhere from 15 to 50 visitors per day, is getting free search engine traffic and will probably show some pagerank if Google ever decides to update the toolbar again.
Here is a no-follow link to it: Techno Whiz
By the way, I haven’t yet monetized. If I put Adsense on it, Google would smart price me. Any monetization ideas?
2. The second experiment was a little pricier. I built a 40-page website about paper shredders, which is surprisingly high-paying keyword for Adsense.
What I wanted to find out was how high I could rank with this website if I didn’t do any link exchanges and only got my links with directory submissions and article marketing.
(I actually exchanged 1 link and pointed 1 link to the shredder site from one of my other websites.)
Why would I want to know that?
Because getting links is the most tedious and boring part of internet marketing and I wanted to know how much of that process I could avoid and still get some decent traffic to my site.
I did 2 things:
a) I ordered 500 directory submission packages for $85 and submitted the website to 10 paid directories with high PRs (one-time payments)
b) I asked for 10 rewritten articles of my main pages and then submitted them to ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articledashboard.com.
Result: My traffic grew nicely until I reached a point where Google started to send me less and less traffic.
The Google Alerts for this domain name kept showing me new links that Google had found in some of those (worthless?) 500 directories to which my site was submitted.
I was getting more links and less and less traffic. ;(
Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz recently wrote a great article about Google penalizing big directories and my conclusion is that Google is onto these smaller directories too and knew exactly what I was trying to achieve.
So now the site barely gets any traffic from Google, although it does well on MSN. Moreover, I monetized the site with only Chitika ads to avoid being smart priced in Adsense.
The total investment was around $500 and I’ve earned about $44 so far with Chitika.
I’ll add an article per week to this site and see if the traffic eventually goes up. I still haven’t submitted all my rewritten articles to ezinearticles.com so there’s more traffic on the horizon.
I believe that in the long term, this site will recoup the total investment and then bring extra revenue once I add Adsense.
Here’s a no-follow link to the site if you want to check it out.
Please don’t click on the ads unless you are really interested in getting a new paper shredder.
3. My third experiment will be to build a large website (I’m already adding articles), submit the link ONLY to highly trusted directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, Joeant, Chiff, BOTW and a few more, get a few links from high-ranking related websites and submit newly written (not rewrites!) articles to article directories.
I’ve done comprehensive keyword and competition research before starting this new Site Build It website and I have no doubt that it will get a lot of traffic in the long run.
The only question for me now is how the relatively low number of trusted links will affect my rankings in Google and how long it will take to rank my primary keyword.
I’ll keep you posted.
Remember that regardless of which game you are playing – the tennis one or the online one – the principles of experimentation, willingness to making mistakes and learning from them apply to both.
The ball is in your court now.
Have you done any experiments lately with your online business?
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[...] Mencinger presents How to Become an Expert in Internet Marketing posted at Financial Freedom [...]
[...] How to Become an Expert in Internet Marketing posted by Tomaz Mencinger. [...]
[...] Mencinger presents How to Become an Expert in Internet Marketing posted at Financial Freedom [...]
[...] Mencinger presents How to Become an Expert in Internet Marketing posted at Financial Freedom [...]
Great advice. So many people start out thinking “If I just follow this path, I will have a million dollars in a month!” You’ve shown the reality of internet business. Trial and error. We have to keep up with constantly changing markets, advertising opportunities, and finicky search engines. Well put.
[...] Mencinger presents How to Become an Expert in Internet Marketing posted at Financial Freedom [...]
Unique content is king! As a directory owner, one of my main concerns is duplicate content. I have found one company, Unique content wizard, that probably does the best job of all of the auto submission services.