There are so many business models you can pursue as an Internet Marketer. You may be planning to branch out in a new direction or you might still be plotting out your strategy for your very first foray into building an online business.

You can build a membership site, create thousands of pages of content to fuel an AdSense campaign, be a mentor to others in your niche, act as a service provider who tackles tasks others would rather pay to have done – or develop your own info products that provide you with a residual income for many years.

Info product development means many things to many people. An info product is a product that shares information with others – but the format in which it teaches can vary. Some marketers use an eBook, while others prefer making people pay for podcast or video productions.

Any or all of the methods can help you generate a great income online, if the info product is created and marketed in a way that makes consumers rave about your abilities as a teacher.

Info product development will still be very viable in the year 2010. Many newcomers to Internet Marketing mistakenly believe that because there are so many free blogs, websites and article directories chock full of information, there’s no way consumers would pay to gain information shared in a digital download.

That’s not true now, nor will it be in the year 2010! Consumers have always been willing to pay for convenience. Take the free social networking site Squidoo. Not only had Seth Godin, the creator of the site and bestselling author, produced a guide of his own about Squidoo, but there were an endless number of lenses and threads in the forum that taught new lensmasters how to use the site.

Yet every day consumers are paying money for a Squidoo guide that compiles it all in one place – usually written by someone who has achieved great results. Some people are left scratching their heads wondering why they would pay if it’s free elsewhere? Because they don’t want to sit and hunt and peck for hours trying to find step-by-step instructions on how to use the site for a specific purpose (to make money).

First do the background research to see what kind of searches are being conducted for your niche topic. Then determine what media format would best convey your instructions to your audience. You might even find that a healthy combination of audio, video and written text is what makes your hungry audience crave your info products.

In 2009, chances are you made quite a few mistakes that you wish you could take back. Don’t beat yourself up too hard – just learn from what went wrong and vow to make things different for the coming year.

Let’s go over some common problems Internet Marketers face – see if you’ve made any of these mistakes and then read how to solve it for 2010:

·    Tried black hat tactics – You may have invested in a guide that taught you how to sneak around the rules and make a lot of money, fast. Problem is, you got banned along the way – and all of your hard work went down the drain.
In 2010, stay above the board with everything that you do. Why try building a business on quick sand? That’s not the smart entrepreneur’s way of achieving financial security for the long haul!
·    Ignored trends and opportunities – Did you even try to do any market research? Or did you only do it once in January and then never check back to see how the market was trending in March, June or November? You have the stay on top of these things and although it’s a tedious process, it’s something you must do if you want your business in good health.
In 2010, make it a part of your monthly routine to conduct new keyword research for your niche. See if anything has changed in how they’re searching. See what competitors you have now or if there are some additional, new affiliate opportunities you can jump on.
·    Trusted too easily – Did you sign up for a marketer’s list and buy everything he advised you to buy, only to be sorely disappointed with the money you wasted? In 2010, don’t be afraid to click that unsubscribe button if you don’t feel you’re getting any value for your investment of time and money. And from now on, vet each purchase with thorough research into non-biased reviews of both the product and the marketer selling it to you.
·    Bought things you couldn’t afford – Who hasn’t been there, done that? It sounds like you can get your money back in 24 hours, so you forego paying a bill to buy a how to guide and then regret it later. Promise yourself that in 2010, you’ll save up an allowance for your Internet Marketing education – and not dip into essential finances that could cost your family its utilities or even its home.
·    Failed to map out a blueprint for your business – No more jumping from this task to the next without any forethought. In 2010, you’re going to have a plan, Stan! Know what’s coming up for January, February, March and so on – and stick to it, allowing for a little bit of flexibility that’s a perk of being a work at homer.
·    Procrastinated too much – Is procrastinate your middle name? Are you caught up in playing online games or checking in with Facebook friends too much? Commit to your career in 2010. Pretend you have a boss and you have to answer to that person at the end of every day with a list of your accomplishments. Force yourself to work first and play later.

In 2010, you can set aside all of your previous Internet Marketing mistakes and treat your business like a freshly planted garden that you’ve just weeded to make room for new growth.

Hashim Kamal

Technorati Tags: 2010 Predictions

If you’re one of those marketers who keep saying, “I know, I know – I haven’t built a list yet,” then shame on you. I’m going to make sure you understand the importance of having an autoresponder system in place for the 2010 marketing year.

There are too many marketers who are lazy about list building. Then they have the nerve to complain that they’re not making much money – only a few hit or miss sales even though they’ve had ample traffic.

Most of the time, it takes a few communications with a consumer to convert them into a buyer. You can’t expect to continually come up on their search radar and be the one out of millions they choose until you happen to snag them as a customer.

With new FTC regulations, you won’t be able to convert as easily since hyped up testimonials and sales copy will be against the rules, so an autoresponder will help you convert people using less risky verbiage, allowing you to educate and inform your prospects over time.

You want to have opportunities everywhere that capture names and email addresses where you can reach out to your target audience on a regular basis until you do build enough trust and loyalty or inject enough curiosity in them to click the order button.

The good news it doesn’t have to cost you a penny to build a list. There are free list builders if you simply don’t have the money to invest in the paid versions. It’s also easy to set up as far as technical prowess goes – it’s as simple as clicking choices for your form, and then cutting and pasting code into your HTML.

You don’t even have to be a professional writer to get a viable email autoresponder system up and running. There are tons of private label rights packages that are made for autoresponder campaigns.

You just buy them (usually less than $1 per page), put your introduction in your autoresponder, paste the PLR you bought, and give it your own signature. You can also alter them if you want to provide your own unique slant.

In 2010, if you’re a copywriter, you might want to consider launching a service to provide autoresponder campaigns for marketers who don’t possess that particular skill. It can be lucrative when you’re selling something that makes it convenient for others.

You want to make sure that your autoresponders comply with recent FTC regulations. That means if you’re endorsing a product, if you’re promoting someone else’s product (or your own), you need to be honest and learn the FTC rules before you play with testimonials.

Have you heard the one about the guru who said he was retiring? Yes, it’s starting to sound like a joke to many marketers who learn from those who have paved the way for our success.

It seems like it’s the trending thing to do – send out an email that says you’re leaving Internet Marketing, followed by an email that gives a last chance to buy sale, ending with a “let me clarify” email.

Why is this happening? For some, who follow in the footsteps of their competitors, it’s just a case of mimicking others to be part of the same crowd. For the rest, it’s an opportunity to make a large sum of sales right before switching gears into something else.

Growth of your business means you’ll frequently be reassessing your opportunities and pursing things that make you more money, with less effort. Some marketers have speculated that these retiring gurus are just burned out, or have made enough money already.

Make no mistake about it – they don’t believe they can ever make enough money. That’s why they run these last ditch sales and make widespread announcements that they’re going to now be doing something else.

It’s the start of a new phase of branding for them. Some of the gurus are moving away from instructional teaching because the expectations have risen by consumers and they now have to work harder to keep refund rates low and meet the needs of those who purchase their products.

When you have more marketers entering this niche to teach, it cuts away at their income – and more people expect freebies and hand holding than they did five years ago. So if a marketer finds a way to outsource the development of technical tools that help marketers, like a keyword research tool they can sell, it makes sense to cash in on something like that where they retain their reputation as a leader in the IM niche, but not as much is required of them to succeed.

If a favorite guru of yours has announced that he or she is retiring, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s highly unlikely that their leave of absence will be as final as you might believe from the wording of the last email they sent out.

It’s also highly probable that the next trend you’ll see in 2010 is the “I’m coming out of retirement just for this one quick guide because it’s something you must see” trend. And you can laugh when it happens because you’ll have known it was coming all along.

By the way, my good friend John Dalevera is retiring and here's his one in the life time offer, the Turbo Farewell.  Be sure to check this out!

If you might be interested to join the Affiliate Program,  CLICK HERE.

Hashim Kamal

Aren’t you glad that the social networking sites are making it more difficult for marketers t use stealth tactics to market to (and spam) its members?  Even if it’s fruitful for you, it never makes you feel good to deceive customers and annoy the masses.

In 2009, Facebook really took off, replacing MySpace as the marketer’s adult web 2.0 playground of choice. There were some drawbacks, though. You had people complaining that their friends were only talking about business opportunities – and some complaining that they didn’t care to know the personal aspects of their friends lives because they were there to conduct business.

Many marketers decided to clean their friends’ list and open fan pages instead – reserving their official Facebook profile for close friends and family only. Facebook has a lot to ensure their income continues to soar with this influx of non-college students.

Their estimated revenue for the year 2010 is over $710 million. They’ve grown to over 350 million members and that number will continue to soar. While it’s traditionally been a closed site, Facebook is now working to connect its own member content across the World Wide Wide, enabling members to share on their own websites or blogs via Facebook connect.

Facebook will continue to lead the social networking scene when it comes to globalization. It started with a nifty translator that enables you to participate on the site in more than 70 different languages.

One thing is for sure. Facebook’s going to have to find a way to help its members avoid spam. Right now, anyone can send you a message without even having you confirm them as a friend.

That means you’ll get all sorts of spam content – from the long lost relative with the same last name who wants you to pay her $14,000 so she can transfer $1.4 million into your account to the cutesy women who want to chat with you, big boy!

Users of Facebook will be hyper-sensitive to any changes the site makes in regards to the privacy of their content, after 2009’s fiasco of announcing they officially owned your content and then going back on that statement to put out all of the fires that started.

Advertising is rampant on the site, so more marketers will be looking for ways to pay to play there. Right now you can run an AdWords-like campaign on Facebook, targeting individuals by age, location and more. Then you create an ad, choose PPC or pay per impression and track your conversions. Competition for 2010 may heat up, so learn to tweak your campaigns early on.



Technorati Tags: 2010 Predictions

Twitter rose from the lowly ranks of new microblogging social networking sites swiftly. Some say an entire Presidential campaign was won partially off the viral nature of this site – but regardless of whether or not you believe that, there’s no denying it can be a very powerful method of reaching a large audience.

The problem to date has been to determine just how to single out the right people to communicate with. With the implementation of robots to add friends or auto-follow people, you never knew if those who reciprocated your follow were even interested in your products or services that you market online.

In 2009, Internet marketers learned how to get traffic to their domains, blog, Squidoo lenses and forums simply by devising a potent Tweet and sending it out to the web-o-sphere.

They learned how to personalize their Twitter profile page, including product images, tag lines, and hyperlinks to important sites. Some lucky users were grandfathered with the ability to have an animated avatar (which catches many eyes) before Twitter nixed it to the masses.

Just before the end of the year, the site created a Beta test version of list options, that supposedly wasn’t available to everyone using the site. With lists, you’re able to take the people who you’re following and categorize them, allowing you to read the Tweets of one particular group at a time rather than wade through hundreds or thousands of Tweets that might just be a courtesy follow instead of a true interest.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, is going to help marketers out by allowing you to open a business account for the year 2010. It will be a paid version of the site, but you’ll get perks such as analytic tools to help you focus your message more precisely.

You can’t blame Twitter. It must be horrible to have developed such a powerful social networking site that’s become a household name and still not be profitable. That’s the primary goal of Twitter in 2010 – to make acquisitions of developments that help them make revenue for the site. As marketers, we’ll be paying the bill for things we use, but hopefully well be reaping the rewards and our ROI (return on investment) will make it well worth it.

Another 2010 forecast is that your Tweets will soon be indexed in real time on both Google and Bing. As any marketer can tell you, this is wonderful for those who are marketing trend products and services and want to defeat their competition using effective keyword-laced Tweets that result in decent conversions.

Hashim Kamal

Follow me on Twitter!

Technorati Tags: 2010 Predictions, 2010 Trend, Twitter

“This niche seems so saturated – I might as well not even try to go into that one.” This is a common complaint that’s uttered by newer Internet Marketers who come into this business wet behind the ears and intimidated by their existing competition.

There’s a saying that you should adopt when you decide whether or not to get into a niche – “Everything that can be done has been done before.” Business is all about reinvention.

It’s about putting your own stamp on a product or topic and making people understand that yours is better than the rest. If it didn’t work this way, then we’d all be resigned to accepting only one hamburger brand, one brand of jeans, one movie with the same theme.

Think of how many Internet Marketing guides you’ve read to date. There are a wide variety of styles in teaching this business. Some will give a methodical, step-by-step technical accounting of AdWords, while others will deliver a more theory-based approach based on gut instinct and trend forecasting.

In the dating niche for men – there are those who teach you the traditional, seemingly common knowledge strategies and some who tell you to throw caution to the wind, forget everything you’ve ever known and use some tactic that would seem to get you slapped rather than score with a woman.

There will be plenty of room for you as an Internet Marketer in 2010. It doesn’t matter what niche you want to enter. There’s a spot with your name reserved on it, and here’s why:

If you want to succeed, then you should be going into this business truly believing that you can do it better than any of your competitors. That you can provide something no one else can – whether it’s secret knowledge of a trick used to make more money (or pick up women) or it’s in the way you teach – that helps people learn better from you than others.

Don’t go into Internet Marketing with a mindset that you’ll throw darts against the wall and hope something sticks. There’s room for you in this industry – but only if you’re willing to do the research and map out a plan of attack before you haphazardly jump in and waste time, money and patience on something you don’t really grasp.

There may not be an Internet Marketing degree you can earn at a college near you, but there is a wealth of information that can prepare you to succeed as an online marketer in any niche market you want to tap. All you have to do is generate enough interest, determination and motivation to get you from point A to point Z.

Hashim Kamal

A Blog of An Obsessed Internet Marketer

Internet Marketing Blog

Technorati Tags: 2010 Predictions, Trend 2010