TheAnand

A question posed to me by one of my chat mates. To answer that question, you need to know the chat we had before the question.

He: Hi Anand
Me: Hi
He: So, what do you do?
Me: I am into Internet Marketing
He: So, you are a liar?

Reminded me of the popular book by Seth Godin and a similarly popular proverb in my home state. In this age where the people have been empowered with search engines, decision engines and more engines than I can think of, do marketers and salesmen have any role to play?

My startup was recently approached by another small business with a very energetic man on top. They wanted to know how they manage their brand online as a company. We decided to go with the Personal Branding route as their CEO was a known personality with the number of conferences he had been to and the number of online relationships he had with his friends and collegues from his previous work experience.

Here are a few tips I provided him to get started with his own personal branding online.

I was recently talking to Arun of MillionClues about a goof up I saw on TV sometime back where a reporter was talking about a resourceful Cosmetics site. We wandered to a topic on why people just buy and squat on domain names.

What is Domain Parking?

Our good friend, Mr. Wikipedia defines Domain Parking as a practice to register good domain names and not using them as a website. There are two types of domain name parking. One like my own Shymz, which has been registered with a plan for future development and is unmonetized. The other is one which is monetized with text links and looks very much like a normal website with a bunch of links and almost nil content.

I am a big fan of testing ad units, primarily because it lets me find the best placements for a website. I think everyone looking forward to put in adunits to make money online in their sites should do it once the sites reaches 500+ visitors a day.

You should have seen this Google adsense heatmap by Google, which according to them should give you the right clicks on your site. But not every site has the same placements and the same audience, so testing and tweaking are the only ways you can increase your adsense revenue.

Today you are going to read about one of my top secret tools - The Google Insights and how I use it to find new niches to dominate. Google being one of the biggest search players, it is important to follow up and use every Google Keyword tool to research your niche. I have been using Google Insights for about 6-12 months now and it is definitely a great way to micro-target keywords and their trends. Also, recently I started using them to get ideas for new niches to target as I am getting out of niches to dominate!

I ask myself this question every once in a while. I remember overhearing in deep sleep in some audiobook  - “Any that requires you to work from morning to evening is not a business, but it is a job.” I am a great fan of this phrase. It is common sense yet when you think about it, it is dangerously powerful.

I am not exactly suggesting that you outsource all your work and sit back home munching chips and drowning cola, but if you have a part of business which is  essential to the business, but not worth your effort, OUTSOURCE. I remember a tweet by Mani Karthik where he said something on the lines which meant Anyone can outsource to anyone, thats the beauty of the internet.

Accountability is key in affiliate marketing. If you have started off and not done it yet, you are being stupid.

In Affiliate Marketing, it is easy to get excited to see conversions going up and money coming into your affiliate marketing account. But once you get serious about affiliate marketing, it can get pretty deceptive on your actual profits.

I used go insanely happy whenever I saw a conversion of $0.90 on email submits on my account, not any more. There is so much more involved to a successful affiliate marketer than conversions and money made. Money spent is a important factor too.