There’s a lot of internet marketing courses for sale on the internet. Some of them are pretty good and others are complete garbage. Some are cheap and others will cost you five figures. Yikes!

However, I can give you some advice that should be able to save you a lot of money, when it comes to buying products online.

Let me ask you this – do you have a business plan? If you’re trying to make money online, it’s important that you treat your efforts like a business. Otherwise, it’s a hobby. And people rarely get rich off of hobbies.

Alright, so if you don’t have a business plan, then you need to create one. Why? Well, if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how you get there. In other words, all kinds of different courses on internet marketing are going to appeal to you.

The problem is, you’re unlikely to stay focused on any one of them, because you don’t have a final destination. This is your worst enemy.

The first thing you need to do is sit down and ask yourself this -where would I like my online business to be in five years? Come up with how much money you’d like to make, and also what you’ll do to make it.

Then come up with an idea of where you’d like to be 3 years from now. Then one year from now. Then 6 months from now.

Okay, so now that you have your 6 month plan, it’s really easy to determine if the next hot internet marketing course is right for you. Just ask yourself this question – will this course help me get closer to my business goals, or will it just distract me? Yep, it’s that easy.

Now, I’m sure you’re begging the question – if it’s that easy, how come nobody does it? Well think about it – how sexy is it for these big gurus to market goal setting and business planning. It’s much more sexy to talk about the latest, neatest online tricks and tactics.

That’s why the important stuff gets glossed over. But I guarantee that you go to these top marketers and ask to see their business plan, they’ll be able to whip it out and show you in a heartbeat. They do it, and you should do it to if you want to get the results they get.

Then, you will be able to create and sell your own internet marketing course.

To do all of the things we’ve talked about you’re going to have to be able to stay focused. To check out one of the few full guides out there on staying focused as it relates to your internet marketing business, take a look at IM Focused.

If you’ve ever built a successful mailing list, you already know that it’s all about the opt-ins when it comes to earning income on a consistent monthly basis. Getting those opt-ins into your list isn’t always as easy as it sounds though; it’s quite simple to come off as annoying and get added to spam filters and ignore lists. But now, a new plugin from WordPress can help cut through all the nonsense and get the job done for you.

If you want to boost your opt-in conversions without the pop-ups, you should at least give this a try seeing as you only get one shoot to grab a visitor’s email addy. Getting rid of those pesky pop-ups increases your chances of doing this tenfold.

Don’t Let Your Online Marketing Fall Prey to Pop-Ups

It used to be the fact that you could simply build lists with pop-ups and pop-unders on the old Internet browsers, but today, Chrome, Opera and Firefox make it easier for consumers to avoid advertisements. Throw in pop-up blocker extensions, Ghostery and AdBlockPlus, and your campaign could be a complete waste of money if it’s built around pop-ups. Now, smart online marketers are forced to think outside of the box.

For some, this works. Pop-ups can still be used effectively, especially for marketers who already have enormous lists built; they aren’t bothered by such trivial things. But for mid-level and slightly higher self-marketers, you need to really reconsider your strategy if you want to succeed in this ever non-marketing-friendly Internet world.

Welcome Redirect From WordPress

One of the best ways to get around all of this is to use the Welcome Redirect plugin from WordPress (or similar tool depending on your platform) which will get you a fantastic list assembled in a relatively quick amount of time. The way it works is by using cookies to figure out if a visitor is coming to your page for the first time or if he / she is a repeat visitor to the site.

What this does is ensure that each new visitor to your page opts-in with whatever data you request from them, PLUS it requires no changes to your current site. Essentially, it gets what you want, from whom you want, when you want, with zero hassle.

The only catch is that you have to have an AWeber account in order to collect the email addresses, but seeing as that’s the preferred company of most Internet marketers and entrepreneurs, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Advanced List Building Tip

Before you go through with the installation and connection to AWeber, be sure your auto-responder emails are setup. This will make sure that the second you launch the plugin on your website, you can collect email addresses instantaneously and begin to market them the second they come in.

For alternative software that you can use on either WordPress sites or stand alone sites to create all types of great looking lightbox style opt in forms that can’t be blocked by pop up blockers (since they aren’t really true pop ups) you’ll want to check out Pop Up Domination.

If you sell products online, you need traffic to your website. You can buy it with advertisements, or you can get it for free from search engine traffic. In this article, I’ll show you how to do exactly that.

Search engine traffic is ideal. Think about it — they put in a search term, and then they actively click on your website. This is highly targeted traffic. If you get high rankings for the right search terms, that you know convert searchers into customers, you can make a killing.

What if you got a high ranking for 100′s of these keywords? Can anyone say market place dominance?

Okay, so here’s how you get search engine traffic. It really boils down to two things – on site optimization and off site optimization.

You have to understand what the search engine “sees” when the visit your website. It’s just a bunch of code to them. So you have to make what they read in the code match what they are looking for. And what search engines want is to the deliver the most relevant results.

So you have to demonstrate that your site is extremely relevant. This means your header tags should have those keywords in it that you want to rank high for it. This means that the majority of your content on your page must be related to the keyword you’re seeking high ranking for.

Not just the keyword itself, but also phrases that are semantically similar to it. For example, Pasta is semantically similar to spaghetti. So you have to optimize your pages so that the search engines say – hey this would make sense to rank this page high for a certain term.

But that’s only half the story. Probably more important than what you say about yourself on your own website is what others are saying about you on their website. The search engines keep track of this through links.

Who’s linking to your site? In general, the more links the better. And even better still, a link from a powerful site like CNN or MSN is going to carry more weight than a link from my grandma’s blog.

So if you want to get search engine traffic, you need to figure out what the major things are the search engines would like to find when they come to your site. Then, you also need to do a link building campaign to get links coming in from other relevant and authoritative sites.

If your websites are WordPress blogs, you’ll probably want to pick up the “SEO Pressor” WordPress plugin that helps with Google rankings for your blog (even after the Farmer update).

Mobile apps are the new marketing wave of the future, what with everyone having tablets, androids, iPhones and the works. The Internet has become a handheld technology that is on the move with the world—and that’s just where you want your money to be coming from. Now, we’re not going to get into making mobile apps, that’s relatively easy. But learning how to monetize those apps can be the tricky part since it seems that everyone and their mother has one nowadays.

With over a billion apps already downloaded from the Apple app store, the annual growth of mobile apps doesn’t show any signs of slowing down anytime in the near future. This market is too big to let go untapped so if you’re not plugged in, you’re bound to be left out in the cold during this mobile revolution. Gone are the days where you could simply ignore this facet of online marketing because you don’t understand the technology; the strategies are here right in this article and they’re yours for the taking.

How to Make Money from Mobile Apps

There are a few ways that money is generated from mobile apps. Starting with the most basic, you can simply sell your applications through the websites such as Apple and Android which have already been established and are proven money-makers. Millions of app users visit these sites daily, searching for ways to better their businesses or personal mobile uses. You can easily set up stores in both of these websites to monetize your mobile apps.

But because there are so many apps out there in the sea, you’re going to have to use some advertising strategies to gain more income out of these apps. One method to doing this is to advertise websites through your apps. There are many companies already set up that make this extremely easy for you by serving advertisements to developers or to companies with pre-developed apps. You can pull in tons of commission just by displaying your ads through pay-per-click (PPC) and CPA ad campaigns. Check out sites such as:

- tapjoy.com – admob.com – 200youappi.com – mmedia.com

Making Money From Within the Mobile App

Another smart way to make money with your mobile app is to follow in the footsteps of real estate or technology industries and charge a one-time fee or monthly fees for your app. While many decide that they’d rather forego this method and simply provide free downloads, if you package your product correctly, you should have no trouble at all making money from the actual app itself.

The key here is not to be afraid to charge for your product. For starters, it lets people know that your product is worth something right off the bat. Consider some sort of special sales incentive that will help push the mobile app onto consumers, helping you to make those ever important conversions.

This style of online mobile marketing is known as in-app billing. There are various methods and providers that can facilitate the monetization of your mobile app from the inside, allowing you to set up your own account that will accept customer payments. This is works almost exactly like any other merchant account, right down to the payment processing fees (in most cases). Check out some sites like these to help you get started:

- bango.com – fortumbo.com – txtnation.com – cashlog.com – boku.com

For a course on how to profit from the Mobile App market check out the Mobile App Business Start Up Kit. Check it out now.

When it comes to lead generation, there are certain concepts that we’ve come to take for granted since they were passed down to us from some wise and mysterious “experts” that blog on internet marketing sites. Of course, that should immediately beg the questions of who are these experts and what’s to say that they aren’t feeding us bad information to worsen their completion (read: us)?

Well, it turns out that they are—at least in some respects. Here are three misconceptions about lead generation we aim to set the story straight on right now.

1) Higher Work Rates Equal Higher Revenue: FALSE

Far too many people get caught up on their sales representatives’ work rates, a metric that barely correlates to what actually matters: the revenue. Your sales team should be focusing on generating revenue by working leads, not the other way around. To fix the problem this misconception has caused, start from the bottom up and grow your line by increasing close rates, not work rates. In essence, it’s still quality over quantity so we’re not sure where work rates became such an important metric—they’re not.

2) Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Leads are the Same Thing: FALSE

No matter what type of qualified leads you think you’re generating for your sales team as an Internet marketer, you need to understand that your sales team should be the real stars of qualifying. Sales qualified leads generally always trump marketing qualified leads—that’s not even up for debate. What is up for debate is what this means: the common misconception here is that you should somehow spend more time qualifying your marketing leads when in fact, you should really just concentrate on giving your sales team as many leads as possible. Open up their options and let them decide which leads they feel most comfortable with. Giving them wriggle room will increase the sales team’s conversions, in turn, making your marketing leads automatically have better conversion rates.

3) You should set Monthly Lead Generation Goals across the Boards: FALSE

A common misconception in lead generation is that every month is measured in the same manner. In fact, it’s thought that every week and every day are measured the same way too. Unfortunately, that is just plain wrong. For instance, shorter months like February lead to less business days which means—yup, you got it—less sales. In order to remedy this situation, generate more leads in January to stockpile your sales team with enough leads to sift through, finding the qualified ones they want to work. Because you’ll also be cut short by February, generating excess leads before a short work week or month will even out in the end. Not every month, day or week is created equal. Know this and own it.

If you’re looking to generate local leads, one of the easiest things to do is use the templates, guides and resources provided in the Local Lead Plan.