Do You Need a Consultant?

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While there is a LOT of information available on the Internet—some of it really good, some of it really bad—it can be a lot to sift through.  When you are just starting out, you don't know what you don't know.  It can be overly daunting without a roadmap. It's often a good idea to have a guide—a consultant, a mentor, an instructor—to set you on the right path.

New to the Field

If you are brand new to a field—be it Internet marketing, comic book illustrator, computer programming—you need a place to start.  Without any prior knowledge of the field you need someone who has been around the block a time or two and made the mistakes and had some successes show you the ropes and the tools. Having a mentor will shorten the learning curve as you can cut out time looking for information or experimentation.  The mentor will show you skills and techniques that work. Think of it like walking into a room of 100 people.  You need to find and talk to only one specific person, wouldn't it be better and quicker if someone lead you right to her?

Refining Tools / Skillsets

Another reason to seek out a consultant or mentor is to hone in or evolve a skillset.  You may be familiar with WordPress, but do you really KNOW how it works? Often times when we experiment on our own we are able to develop a general working knowledge of the tool.  But in the hands of a master, the tool is capable of amazing things we've never dreamed of.  This is the reason people frequently attend workshops of varying levels or have common industry groups, so that they can continue to refine their craft.

As an example, refining your skill set could take you from repair work, to custom work.  A broader base of knowledge will allow you to handle more problems or issues, including that of creative or customs works.

Don't Stand So Close….

Sometimes, you are too close to the trees to see the forest. Your own perspective can be inhibiting your growth or progress as a business person. You have done certain things a certain way as long as you can remember, but suddenly, it's not working anymore. How do you carry forward?

Consultants offer a fresh perspective and are able to assess details that you might take for granted. What seems like a good idea within the “inner circle” of your business, might have no real world bearings at all.  It might look good on paper and completely fall apart if there is no support structure for it.  A consultant might understand that while you look towards the future of an idea instead of how the idea has to work.

The bottom line is, it's important to remain open to opportunities to educate and evolve.  in some instances this might be a school or educational opportunity.  In others, it might be an expert perspective with fresh eyes.

If you're just getting started, consider the opportunity of studying with IMTC.  Learn the tools and skill sets you need to set yourself apart from your competition and shorten your learning curve so that you don't flounder directionless in the open water.

Choosing a Niche Market Wisely

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Choosing a Niche Market

Choosing a Niche Market

Choosing a niche market can be rather challenging for new Internet marketers. One of the biggest and worst mistakes anyone can possibly make is picking a niche without data to support potential profitability, then spending weeks or months building up their websites content hoping the traffic will follow. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.

Before you put any eggs into your online marketing basket you need to make sure you have all your ducks in a row first; before proceeding with your website building phase. Here's a few things to keep in mind whenever selecting a niche market for your Internet marketing business.

Niche Potential Profitability

You should always choose a niche that has a large enough audience that are ready and willing to purchase products or services in that specific niche. Yet, you also want to make certain that the competition level isn't overly saturated, which makes it extremely difficult to make money. Having some competition in your niche is a good indicator of profitability, and by performing the proper keyword research can help you match those profitable keywords and phrases to highly sort after products or services.

Finding Niches of Interest

Although there's nothing wrong with finding profitable niches in markets that don't really interest you, you should consider markets that you enjoy, or have an extreme interest in. The reason for this is simple; people tend to have more longevity when doing something they really enjoy versus something they have little interest in. So to stay focused and motivated you should choose a niche that you absolutely enjoy.

You should try to come up with at least five things you really enjoy, and begin researching these niches. More than likely you will find one that's not only interesting to you, but profitable as well.

Niche Lifespan and Scalability

You should select a niche market that has an indefinite lifespan and the potential to grow. For instance, I would stay away from niches such as Halloween costumes simply because it's a seasonal niche. Once Halloween ends your paychecks disappears until next season!

Whenever searching for a niche market to dive into, make certain that it has the potential to grow on a long term basis. Many niches have the potential to sustain long term growth, and have related products and services to add to your niche market.

These are a just few key things to remember when choosing profitable niche markets. To learn more about choosing niche markets come on over to The Internet Marketing Training Center of Virgina, and don’t forget to download your FREE brochure.

Your Own Home Business: The Tools For Success

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When people decide to start their own home business, there's a lot more that goes into running it than most realize. You're bombarded with ads just about every hour touting how you can be successful online, from home. But they neglect to explain the details about what knowledge is needed, what software you'll need and how much time is involved. These companies don't want to scare you away with the finer points, they just want to sell you something that makes it look easy.

This isn't realistic. That's why people fail at making money online. They fall for the get rich quick / no experience necessary model and it rarely works if ever. Making money online is just like any business endeavor: it takes time, investment, patience and knowledge. It has its risks just like any other business. I know you wouldn't open up a clothing store in the mall without learning how to sell, studying retail management and investing in a consultant to help you. Yet, there are no ads flooding your inbox promising that you can have your own clothing store in “days” and making money by next week. Most people would never believe that. How is the Internet any different? Sure, building a website and getting traffic to it may be somewhat easier than filling a store with the latest fashions, but the ‘knowing how to sell' is very similar.

IMTC is one of the few educational entities on the web that tells it like it is. You'll get no ‘get rich quick' promises here, just the real knowledge and facts that arms you with the tools for success. We teach every aspect of running an online business: shopping carts, email campaigns, video promotions, website design, writing effective copy, customer service, product creation and delivery and more. You'll be a professional online business owner, not just another victim of scams. It's like a ‘virtual marketing degree' that is 100% online. You need not attend classes to get the education you seek, and it won't cost you the farm. IMTC is an investment in yourself and your future. From here, you can take your online business as far as you want it to go.

Online Video Marketing Campaigns For Business

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Many businesses are turning to online video to promote their products and services. A great example is the Stihl Corp. and their Timbersports Series. They started this series for outdoor promotions, especially for television. This series was a popular draw for the company for the last few years, but with the advent of online video and Youtube, the size of the audience tripled. Youtube has the ability to reach farther than traditional television programming, especially considering the costs. For all of this exposure to take place, an online video manager needs to take control and produce the campaign for the company.

Tasks for this include: proper uploading of video files, optimizing the keywords in the title and descriptions for search engines, building a subscriber list to the Youtube channel, sharing and promoting the videos to other sites such as Facebook and Twitter and more. Whether in-house or hired from a firm, Stihl needed someone with the skills to help with their video campaign. Online promotions can differ greatly from traditional media and it takes a special understanding of how search engines find the appropriate sources of information.

This is where IMTC comes in. As more and more businesses turn towards online video and the Internet to promote their products, people who have the skills to tackle these unique opportunities will become more in demand. How would working in this kind of industry enrich your life? It's not the same old career. You may already be working with video and the Internet and love it. For companies such as Stihl, it's serious business. The job market for skilled Internet marketers is going everyday. Find out how you can get on this exploding career field!

Where is Your Focal Point?

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Is Your Content Working For You?

Local is a big catch phrase recently.  Local grown food. Local search.  Support your community, buy local! The Internet is taking notice.  Most likely because we all live, play and shop locally. While it's incredibly easy to go online, purchase something and have it shipped, there are something you want to see and feel before you buy.  There are something you can't do online, like theater, sports, etc.  It's only logical that local search is going to be more important than regional or global.  (Except in the case of hard to find items or services, in which case, these are special cases and not the norm.)

There are 4 Billion local searches on Google per month and 61% of all local searches result in purchases (according to National Positions).  That's a lot of local activity.  Perhaps

This could be an amazing focal point of your site.  If you start to include LOCAL news and local events in in your articles on your site—in a relevant way of course—this could break you into your local market—or into OTHER local markets.

Are Your Keywords Focused?

Your articles should not include everything—including the kitchen sink.  Articles—and keywords—should be tightly focused on your subject matter. If in a 500 page article you mention “hamburger” once, it's probably not a keyword. Read your article back.  The the keywords and phrases should naturally “pop” out.

Your article should not wander all over the place.  It should have a couple key points and support of those points.  The key points should translate well to “keywords” or “key phrases”.  If you are using WordPress or something else with tagging capabilities, don't forget to use those as tags as well so you can link like articles together on your site.

Does your Site Do TOO Much?

If your site does too much, it can be hard to find any singular value in it, from the point-of-view of the search engine. It's possible that if you niche your products or services a little bit you will have a better response.  Amazon sells everything under the sun, but you don't have the resources or connections to do that.  Stick with what you can control, focus on and excel with.

Are you having trouble with your business?  Unable to generate traffic or sales?  Learn quickly how to get on the right path and focus on the important details to improve your internet marketing.

The Power of the Internet

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The Internet has grown quickly.  It's hard for most of us to imagine a world without the Internet.  Christmas shopping, raising money, staying in touch.

Communication

There may be 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, but there are thousands of ways to communicate on the Internet.  We have Email and forums, which are traditionally a slower to “chat” that allows you to sent short typed messages back and forth.  There are also audio “chats” through a variety of services as well as video chatting and conferencing. Games come built in with audio or text chats, you can leave comments on blogs/websites that encourage discussion. You can Tweet, you can “+1”, you can Post on Facebook, you can “share” across all sorts of platforms. There are so many ways to communicate and share information back and forth on the Internet.

Recreation

Video games and casual games have taken on in recent years on the Internet.  The Internet has fallen in love with social gaming as well, playing games with friends, against friends.  Several games give special in game awards for having your friends interact with you (or you with them). We spend time reading online—blogs, ebooks (and ereaders) and news have all taken their place on the Internet. We stay connect on Facebook, Google+ and an endless amount of other little “connection” sites and organizations.  We're meeting friends, we're meeting mates, we're staying in touch with family.

Shopping

Online retail has taken off as well.  Some people do all their Christmas shopping online.  Shipping no longer takes “4-6 weeks”—in some instances we can get things in 2-days without paying anything extra. You can sell your own “junk” on ebay.com or craigslist.com.  You can build your own website and sell things you make yourself!  You can buy things you would never be able to find in a local store.

Politics

The Internet can spread information incredibly fast. When SmartPhones became the majority of phones, people can receive information instantly.  Text messages to notifications of news they find interesting to important political actions.  People can organize and make their voices heard.  Nothing is more indicative of this than the recent SOPA/PIPA action. Congress shelved the vote on this bill indefinitely after action was organized on the Internet and thousands of people let's their representatives know they did not support these bills.

Another indication of how the Internet can mobilize and influence “politics” can be seen in Verizon's attempt to charge a fee for paying your bill online.  When this became news the Internet reacted and Verizon also decided against the fee.

Education

Online learning has become very popular.  It allows people to learn at their own pace while still getting benefits of having a teacher available for help and guidance. Many things that are available in a traditional setting, like lectures, textbooks and teacher feedback are still available.  It's really become an amazing opportunity in some instances that afford people a change to change their lives in ways they would not have been able to otherwise.

It's easy to see that the Internet has changed our daily lives. Why not let it continue to enrich your life by learning how to make it work for you?  Check out the Internet Marketing Training Center to see how you can harness the power of the Internet and start making money.

Email – Are you still in the 90s?

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Managing email is incredibly important for any business. When it comes to online businesses, you may have multiple email addresses for many uses. And, when it comes to email applications, you have many free and paid versions. But, not all applications are created equal. There are a few features that any email application should be able to provide you.

1) Access – Being able to access all of your email addresses in one place can speed up production exponentially. If you have an email application that can sync all of your email addresses into one easy to reach place, you will find the speed and ease of use make it difficult to ever go back to the ‘good old days' of checking a million email accounts.

2) Storage – Being able to store past emails that may or may not contain attachments is paramount to successful email management. If you have a mailbox that constantly gets full, requiring you to delete emails and shuffle around those you want to keep, it may be time to find another option.

3) Ease of use – Email applications that provide simple interfaces with easily accessible features will save you a lot of time and hassle with large and small tasks alike.

Changing email applications can seem daunting, but it's actually simpler than you think. You may just need to force yourself to change. But if you have any gripes about your current email, it's a necessary evil. If you still need incentive to change your email, take it from web guru Tom Antion:

If the big guys are doing it, so should you!

More secrets the big Internet marketing gurus are excited about. HERE!

Do It Yourself? Not Without Some Direction….

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When I started doing “web design” by in 1997, you had HTML.  It was fairly easy to learn. If you used any graphics, you were pushing the envelope.  There really was not very much to learn. Since my friend and I had started a web design company—Web Age Services, Inc.—I learned a little bit about HTML/Web Design and learned a bit about running a dedicated web server, web server, and DNS server/Nameserver. We had a few clients, learned a bit about business as well as the Internet, and quietly folded after a year and a half of losing money.  We were young, the Internet was young and no one wanted to do business with “kids”.  My point is, back then, you didn't have to learn very much.

Times have changed.  We're getting ready to move into HTML5—which is a far cry from early versions, heck we even get NATIVE video tags in this one—and it's starting to get tricky. You could feasibly build a website using just HTML, but it's so easy to do so much more with a little bit of guidance these days.  That's where IMTC comes in.  IMTC will let you know what you need to know, what you need to focus on and avoid all the fluff.  Cut to the chase.

A LOT goes into making a website these days.  I mentioned HTML5, but this is just the structure of a webpage.  This is saying, “this is a graphic.”, “this is a paragraph”.  To format and position elements, you should be using styles—Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. Styles interact with elements individually or in groups.  CSS starts to get a little confusing, but not nearly as confusing as a scripting language.  Javascript, PHP, ASP…. these are languages that start to do complex functions. In all likelihood, you won't be working directly with any scripting languages, but you should know how to interact with things that do.

Search Engine Optimization?  When I started, there were a handful of directories. Now, not only has the search game changed completely but there's a whole “science” behind it all. You want your site to be found if people are looking for your product or service. Let IMTC teach you.

IMTC covers basics to get your started, and then focuses on the aspects you will need that will help you create successful websites and bring traffic to those sites. Marketing has always been a challenge, and the Internet is no different. IMTC helps you define the tools to help conquer that challenge.

The Internet is always evolving.  In the past 15 years it's seen some enormous changes.  Don't get left behind and don't try to tackle this monster on your own.  There's lots of places to get lost.  Visit IMTC today and talk to an advisor to see if could take advantage of the Internet.

An Easy Way to Add Audio to Your Blog

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One method to Add Audio to Your Blog.

This method uses Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a dirt cheap place to store large files like audio and video.

Get a free player to put on your blog. The player connects to your amazon s3 account.

Connect the player to your Amazon account using your public key and secret key given to you by your amazon s3 account.

Copy the code for the player into your blog.

Amazon S3

We use Amazon S3 for our video storage needs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is used by many people to store files, any type of files they want; including web hosting, image/video hosting, and as back-up systems. This service offers a cheaper option to storing files compared to uploading them to your own server.

Here's the steps you need to take:

1. You open up a Free Amazon S3 account. You will need an Amazon account to use S3.

2. You set up your S3 account, including your Access Key

3. Download either Cloudberry Explorer or Firefox Organizer (or both programs) to organize your files.

4. Start uploading files. ATTENTION: Since we are using S3 for video storage, there is one more step we take. Depending on what you use Amazon S3 for, you may or may not need to do this step.

5. We use a program that takes our video file, uploads it to Amazon S3, adds a player to the video, and then gives us an embed code for us to use on our sites. We just embed the code onto a page and that's it, people can view our video.

There are a couple program options you can use if you want to do the same thing. Two of the most widely used programs are EZS3 and the other is Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player. EZS3 is a monthly, “in the cloud” service. They charge $20 a month. Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player is a downloadable application and costs a one time fee of $249.

We use Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player and are pleased with the results. It's very easy to use; three steps is all it takes to get the embed code. The nice thing about Amazon S3 is that the files you upload to the server are available to you anywhere in the world as long as you can connect to the internet.

This is a prime example of cloud computing*.

Another nice thing is that Amazon guarantees S3 to have a 99.9% uptime. Probably the nicest thing about Amazon S3 however, is the price. Amazon S3's pricing is based on a tiered system starting at .15 cents a Gigabyte(GB) per month for up to 50 Terabytes(TB) of storage.

If you have over 50 TB of storage, the price per GB gets lower. You can see the whole pricing structure here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

And the best part is you only pay for what you use, nothing more. Make sure you check out Amazon S3 and decide whether it'll work for you.

*Cloud Computing, or “in/on the cloud computing” is the term used to describe Internet-based computing. This is where software programs, services, and files are all available on servers on the Internet. As long as you have an Internet connection, you will be able to access and use these programs, services, and files anywhere in the world. Many experts believe Cloud Computing is the way of the future, thereby eliminating the need to install software on your machine and/or keep files on your hard drive.

Thinking of being a professional blogger?

If you build it, they will come…..to your website.

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“If you build it, they will come.”

Unfortunately, these words are SO far from the truth.  You cannot expect to put up a website these days and people will just magically show up.

One thing people may not realize is, a search engine goes through your website, cataloging valuable words, phrases and content. When someone searches for a term in Google, what is actually going on?  Well, the person is saying, “Hey Google, what do you know about XYZ?”

Google, of course, knows very little about xyz, but he's been to LOTS of websites.  Some of them, about XYZ.  In fact, Google has cataloged all the sites it knows of about XYZ and when you ask about it, it tells about the ones it found.  From the most valuable, to the least valuable. Google has it's own artbitrary way of determining value, but they are always striving to make sure it's fair and valuable.  For instance, let's say you wanted to do a site about boats.  Well, let's say you used only one word.  Boats.  Over and over again.  This does not make you the most valuable authority on boats. It makes you a spammer!  The content saturation of the page is such that there is nothing but boats.  That cannot be valuable to anyone.

So, you should start to realize that a small amount of content does not a website make.  You'll have to increase the amount of valuable information you have on the site.

Another thing to consider is to “narrow” your field.  If your topic is too broad, you will run the risk of direct competition with businesses have have more longevity, more resources and brand recognition already set up to work against you. Ingraining yourself to a smaller audience can actually allow you to capture a larger market share than if you had tried to cover a broader topic. I always like to use “running” as a very broad topic, and “barefoot” or “minimalist” running as the niche.

This is a “nice start” but isn't going to have internet traffic bursting down your door.  You have to get out and “drive traffic”. A website is a nice repository of information and a great sales counter and interface, but it is NOT the salesman in your workforce. You need to get your information out to where people are already talking about your topic.  Is your topic barefoot running? At a minimum you need to get into a discussion with runners.  All the better if you can find people already talking about BAREFOOT running.

Even if you get out there and let people know about your website, you still have to entice them to come.  Either you are directly giving away information in your discussion that incites people to see what else you have to say, or you offer something of value they want.  This is a tricky technique—essentially you are bribing people to come to your site. Make sure that it's an appropriate time and forum to offer someone something.  Just popping into a discussion and and saying, “Hey guys!  I'm giving away free marshmallow people at my site!  ‘Kay thanks BYE!” is NOT the right way to make friends. You need to develop relationships in the community, contribute to discussions and then let people know that you have a wealth of resources back at your site.  Typically, this is done either through a signature file in back-and-forth types of discussions, article or comment.

Don't neglect local connections!  They can prove easier to reach than a national audience.

Making money on the Internet is not extremely difficult, but it's not instant and there is some consistent effort involved.  Prevent mistakes by getting certified in Internet Marketing at IMTC.