The Secret to 6-Figure Online Income

Have you heard of the latest search engine to be unveiled?  Cuil. Cuil? Yes the new search engine can be found out at http://cuil.com . Cuil pronounced “kool” claims to be the search engine with the highest number of indexed pages, and displays their results in columns as you’ll find in a newspaper. They also display images along with your search results, as is done currently by ask.com

Interesting. The company was founded by a couple of former Google staffers and some other technical ‘eggheads’. Apparently Google is unmoved saying that they always welcome competition in the Search arena. We’ll see.. . You can find more information about this latest Search Engine offering at http://cuil.com/info/faq  or even proceed to search with a different approach at http://cuil.com .

As an Internet Marketer, I welcome the addition. We don’t want to live our lives and do our business under the monopoly of powerful Google. Maybe Cuil will finally give Google a run for their money, and succeed where the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft have failed miserably!

As you may be aware, website traffic comes in different forms and flavours. You can generate traffic from many sources: Pay Per Click [(Google Adwords, Yahoo Search (Panama, anyone?), Microsoft Adcenter etc.].

You may decide, however ,that Pay Per Click Advertising is too expensive for you and you decide to go the route of Traffic Exchanges. Traffic Exchanges are largely free, and examples include: “I Love Hits“, “WebbizInsider”, etc. But from my own experience with traffic exchanges, they are hardly effective because the purpose of those browsing your websites (ads) is to accumulate credits so that their own websites will be displayed to others. Typically, it is advisable to rotate only your lead generation pages on Traffic Exchanges, you are typically wasting your time if you attempt to sell anything directly on traffic exchanges. You stand a greater chance of success if you just generate the lead and then offer a one time offer (OTO) after the lead has subscribed. If you really want to achieve maximum success with Traffic exchanges, you should opt for a paid option. This is the case in which you pay (say) $20/month and your webpage is rotated continually throughout the month. This, I believe is a better investment of your time,instead of mindlessly browsing through webpages, you can spend that time more effectively on your business.

Another form of ‘free’ advertising is placing your ads on Classified sites. The most popular free classified site that we all know is Craigslist, and it has [phenomenal success using its business model. People have gotten excellent results using Craigslist, and this has brought up a number of competitors like AdlandPro, Ablewise, etc. These ones also offer free classified ads, but in addition, give you the opportunity to make your adds more prominent by paying a premium ranging from $1 and upwards. On other sites apart from Craigslist, I have had more success when I opt for the Premium ads, than when I stick to just free classifieds. The reason is simply that the premium ads stand out from the thousands of free ads.

How can we forget the ultimate form of free advertisement; Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A  1st page placement in google (especially positions 1-5) is worth its price in Gold, and you cannot buy it (at least not directly!) with money.  Many experts have argued, however, that SEO is not really ‘free’. You pay for it in the time you devote to it.  They say that you can actually ‘buy’ a Google 1st page placement by hiring an SEO expert to optimize your site for the search engines. The debate rages on……..

I came across this interesting bit of news this morning. A medical doctor has left his lucrative 6-figure medical practice to devote all his time and efforts to running his very popular blog: Macrumors.com. How interesting?

Dr Kim started blogging about Apple Inc’s Secrets while still a Computer Science major in the university, and the site has grown to become the 2nd most popular blog on the Internet, defeating such popular blogs as the Huffingtonpost.com etc. Don’t forget that this blog is a technology blog and it has managed to eclipse political and other news websites. How and why did this happen? The main reason is that the Internet is like “thirsty elephant”, it’s always seeking fresh “waters” in the form of fresh content. Since Dr Kim’s Macrumors.com blog regularly supplies this fresh content, it has become one of the most visited webpages (not just blogs!) in the world. Very interesting.

Dr Kim’s MacRumors thrived on the secrecy of Apple, and over the years has been able to amass an impressive following. With that huge following, Dr Kim has been able to monetize the traffic through advertising income to such an extent that the income generated from a single blog was enough to enable Dr Kim to effectively ‘retire’ from his medical practice to run Macworlds.com on a full-time basis.

Well, well..   Iam looking forward to that day when I can generate even 1% of that income through my blogging efforts. I hope that day comes pretty soon!.

You can get further details of this interesting and encourging news (to us budding internet marketers) here : Dr Kim’s story.

The one thing which is absolutely critical, if you
want to make money on the internet, is that you must
be able to generate traffic.

After all, you can have the greatest product in the
world, but if nobody knows about it you aren’t going
to makeany sales.

There is a saying that goes, “nothing moves without a
sale.” When it comes to the Internet a sale does not
occur, if you do not have website traffic.

There are three types of traffic:

- Free traffic
- Performance traffic
- Paid traffic.

Free traffic is generated from sites like MySpace,
YouTube and from Blogs. By free, I mean you don’t
have to pay money for the traffic.

Performance traffic is traffic that you do not pay to
get, but you pay if something happens. Like having
affiliates selling for you. Let’s say you are giving
(paying) your affiliate 50% of the sale. You only pay
your affiliates when they generate sales. That is paid
based on the performance of the traffic that was
driven toward the website.

Paid traffic. Finally there is paid traffic. Probably the
most popular paid traffic program is Google
AdWords. This is a simple program where you have
Google display your ads in their search engine results
as well as on other related websites. When people
click on your ads to go to your site, you pay a certain
amount they you have agreed to in advance.

To really succeed continuously on the Internet, you need to utilize
all three types of traffic described above. There is not one
perfect way or one hallowed path for generating traffic.

It’s more of having multiple methods of generating traffic that are
efficient and effective. Methods that work together as a system
to give you the expected results.

Your traffic generation strategy should consist of as
many efficient and effective ways as you can
properly manage to ensure you get the maximum
traffic directed to your website so that you get the
greatest profits possible from the same traffic generation efforts.

One of the most valuable things that you can do to
receive long-term income is to capture the contact
information of those people who have shown an
interest in whatever product or service you are
offering.

You see, one of the mistakes individuals make and which
really hurts their ability to make money is when you have an
offer that directs the prospect immediately to the
offer page. Let’s say you are selling an ebook, and
perhaps you’ll use pay per click advertising or maybe
something else, and you send the prospect directly to
the website offering the ebook.

That’s a mistake, as if they do not buy, then
guess what — you’ll lose the opportunity to plant
and build a good relationship with them to buy it later
on from you. That’s a big deficit!

This is why lead generation is so important. You
must generate leads therefore that you can contact people
many times. After all, even the best websites merely
have a 3% toward 5% conversion rate — and that is the
really high end; it has been reported that most sites have an abandonment
rate of 95% to 98%.

If you are not getting people’s information such that
you have numerous opportunities to impact them with
your message, to get them interested, and to compel
them to believe from you — your profits will never be
what you hope for.

So you need to start making plans now for how you
are going to get people to give you their information.
This is very important. What you need to do is
create valuable information which is going to assist your prospects
in getting something done, and then you can offer
them the content absolutely free in exchange,
minimally, for their name and email address.

This is clearly one the most powerful things you can
do when you advertise.

So start planning today at how you are going to
get your prospects’ names and email addresses, at a
minimum. Do this effectively and you’ll be able to
generate income steadily ad infinitum!