She sold her goods by driving door to door, visiting every gym she could find. She was doing okay. But the time and effort — not to mention gas — she was putting into it was crazy.

Her products were great, and the people who purchased them were always happy to buy from her again. But her only follow-up with them was by phone. She worked out of her tiny two-bedroom house. And because she couldn’t afford to have someone else handle order fulfillment, there were so many boxes piled up that you could hardly walk through the house without tripping over one.

I thought to myself … “If she had some way to reach her customers WITHOUT running all over town, she could seriously improve her sales.”

I offered to help her set up a website and bring her business to the Internet. And because she had limited funds, the main business-building strategy I recommended was to drive free traffic to her site using search engine optimization (SEO). (Actually, even if you have a big budget, free traffic is always best in my book.)

She finally agreed. And BAM! She is now selling about $10K per month on her website. She has even picked up a few wholesale accounts from big-name national gyms. And that doesn’t include the phone orders she is still taking.

Needless to say … she no longer drives anywhere to make sales. People find HER on the Web, quickly and easily.

If you have a brick-and-mortar business you want to take online — or if you want to start an Internet business from scratch — here’s how I helped my friend …

I developed a VERY simple shopping cart for her website, using www.OSCommerce.com  as her e-commerce platform. OsCommerce is free software that you can easily install to run your own online store. It is used on over 1 million websites, so it’s been tested thoroughly by many Web professionals. (Just perform a search for “Powered by OSCommerce” and you’ll see.)

Then I taught her how to enter in her products. And I taught her how to input product descriptions using targeted keywords for SEO. (I just taught her the basics.) And before long, her website began getting free SEO traffic. In fact, she started getting it quicker than even I expected.

— Highly Recommended —

This Could Be the Game-Changer You’re Looking For!

Say you could access 4.5 BILLION potential customers…

Get just .001 percent of them to buy, and you’re a multi-millionaire.

Internet expert Mike Koenigs has the secret to connecting with this huge pool of prospects. Once $350,000 in debt, he now heads up a multi-million-dollar company. He’s created over 300 websites and more than 40 products.

He knows the secret to getting access. Unprecedented access to three-quarters of the world’s population. Access that most marketers would sell their soul to have. Access that your business can immediately tap into.

Mike will tell all at ETR’s 2009 Bootcamp. But if you don’t want to wait… you can “meet up” with him during a special Pre-Bootcamp “Hot Seat” Session Wednesday, September 23. MaryEllen Tribby will be grilling Mike… and you have a chance to listen in.

Most marketers would pay dearly for this kind of insider information. But it won’t cost you a penny. Reserve your spot by signing up for our “Hot Seat” hotlist right now.

P.S. You’ll get access to two more of the country’s leading experts in building wealth. There’s no obligation and absolutely no charge. Reserve your spot now.

—

Let me show you what I mean. (I’ve got her permission to do this, of course.)

As you can see, she’s been getting a lot of free traffic from the search engines.

And 99.9 percent of her traffic is for the “targeted” keywords she’s used on her site:

Here are some of the tips I gave her to get that traffic:

1. Make sure the name you enter for each product on your site includes some of your keywords. If, for example, my friend enters a pair of low-cut workout pants, she might name them something like “Sexy Women’s Workout Pants.”

2. When you write a description for each product, insert keywords close to the beginning of the copy.

3. If a product comes in different colors, enter each one individually. This creates more website pages, because each product has its own page in the system. (And for SEO, the more pages a site has, the better.) The trick is to make sure you have different product names and descriptions. They can be close, but not using the exact verbiage.

Search engine optimization is the main technique I used to help my friend get free traffic — but not the only one. Another technique that worked really well for her was to build outside links to her website. In particular, I showed her how to find forums and blogs related to her niche. And I taught her how to post her opinions, ideas, and comments on those sites — and link her postings to her website.

Even if a site doesn’t “officially” allow you to include your link, you can usually find a way to sneak it in. For example, here’s a comment she posted on a website dedicated to health and fitness:

“I was working out one day and my fat thighs were tearing at the seam, so I thought it was time to buy new gear. I found a great place (www.bellamiasportswear.com), and they had some of the hottest outfits I’ve seen in a while.”

Not only did she get her link in, she did it as a third-party recommendation. And that kind of testimonial is probably the best advertising there is.

By the way, it’s important to post useful content on these websites. Don’t just “hit and run” with your site address. Join the conversation.

Throughout the learning process, my friend absorbed the tidbits of information I gave her. Even though she had known NOTHING about the Internet, she merely followed my simple instructions and kept plugging away.

Eventually, she felt ready to manage the website on her own. And she did great.

Now, she’s gearing up to open two websites in different (but related) markets: one for men’s workout wear and one for nutritional supplements.

And to think … before I stepped in, she had never realized how easy it is to make a fortune on the Web.

She had the right attitude. She was willing to learn a boatload of new skills. She pushed forward even though she was unsure. And she was well rewarded as a result.

You can do it too.

If you’re not interested in learning the technical skills, not a problem. There are many freelancers out there who can do just about anything you need for a very reasonable fee. (Because they work from home, they don’t mind charging less than you might expect.)

Bottom line: You really can’t afford to sit back and watch others make their fortunes simply because you don’t dare take that first step.

Like any other business, marketing your product or service online takes a little time to set up. But the financial and personal freedom you’ll enjoy makes it worth it.

The time is NOW folks!

P.S. There are many resources out there that can help you — and you should take full advantage of them, if you can. I know of one, for example, that is tailor-made for those who want to start their own online business. No previous experience necessary. Find out more about it here.

— Highly Recommended —

The “Obvious” Marketing Strategy… that Almost Every Start-Up Forgets - Your favorite restaurant almost certainly does it. So do McDonalds and Starbucks down the street. But I’ll bet your new online business is missing out on this. If so, you’re probably losing thousands every time you sell something. Read more to find out what “it” is…

—————————————————————————————————————————

More wealth, health, and wisdom from Masterson …

In 2006, Jeff Leach and Randy Crochet decided to open a business selling healthy pizzas.

Jeff, an archeologist, was an amateur expert in natural health. He knew how bad processed foods are and convinced Randy, a mortgage broker, that they could make a nice living selling a healthy pizza pie.

They spent 18 months and $750,000 researching and testing their product. Then, last year, they opened their first store in New Orleans. Their pizza had a crust made of 12 whole grains, low-fat mozzarella, and a tomato sauce with no additives.

Why they needed to spend $750,000 to come up with that recipe, I can’t say. Had they been reading Dr. Al Sears or Total Health Breakthroughs, they could have saved themselves a lot of money.

They called it the World’s Healthiest Pizza. And printed on the pizza box cover was a mini “dissertation” (written by Jeff) about how food is processed in the lower intestines. A local marketing guy, Robbie Vitrano, saw their product and convinced them to change the name to Naked Pizza, rewrite their box copy, and advertise on the Net.

Their pizza was tasty — really tasty, according to some local Internet ratings. And the new marketing pitch seemed to click. Their sales were growing and their reputation was spreading.

Then they took another step. They applied for funding from the Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan, and got the financial help they needed to franchise Naked Pizza nationwide.

Leach hopes to see 1,000 locations or more across the country. It could happen.

These guys wasted a lot of money “researching” their recipe. Still, even with the low-fat mozzarella, it isn’t all that healthy.

But what they did really well was find a new way to sell an extremely popular product. And they did so without raising the price or sacrificing quality. In fact, they improved it.

Everybody eats pizza. If you can give people what they want anyway — cheaply and with a significant advantage (in this case, less guilt) — you have a product that can catch on.

If you wish you had thought of the healthy pizza idea yourself, don’t sweat it.

If you think about it, you can probably come up with your own “spin-off” idea that should work just as well as pizza.

Just keep these points in mind:

• Retail is a very difficult business.
• But fast-food restaurants often beat the odds.
• Healthful foods are becoming more popular.
• Cheap is always better than expensive, especially today.
• A single-item restaurant is the easiest to manage.

Many years ago on SNL, Steve Martin did a bit about a new drug he was taking. “It’s fantastic!” he said. “Everybody should be taking it!” “What is it called?” someone asked him. “Pla-cee-bo,” was his reply.

In 2003, Merck introduced a new drug called MK-869. It was designed to have a feel-good effect by tinkering with the nervous system. Early trials were very positive. Company executives and investors were excited.

Then Phase II testing began. The drug was tested against a control group taking a placebo. Many test subjects taking MK-869 reported reductions in anxiety. But nearly the same number of people in the placebo group had the same positive response. Further testing confirmed that there was no difference between the experimental drug and a placebo. MK-869 was shelved.

The case of MK-869 is far from unique. In recent years, more drugs than ever before are being pulled from clinical trials because they can’t outperform placebos. Even billion-dollar moneymakers like Prozac are failing the test.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Drug developers are saying that it’s not that the meds are ineffective — it’s that the placebo effect is getting stronger. And because it is getting stronger, they believe they should be able to sell their drugs even though they can’t beat sugar pills.

They are spending millions of dollars trying to convince the FDA that their ridiculous theory is valid.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this:

1. Big Pharma is not interested in the effectiveness of its drugs. It’s interested in having the “right” to sell them.

2. Placebos do work. They don’t work all the time. But they often work at the same rate as expensive drugs. Why is this? Probably because they trigger the brain to activate the body’s own therapeutic mechanisms.

That is why it is so important to treat illness holistically — with a mind-body approach. And why, if you have a choice, it is always better to try natural remedies before taking drugs.

— Highly Recommended —

Luxury Vacations “on the House” – Okay, so you still have to pay for the flight… but you could stay at a beachfront mansion in Maui – that usually rents for $1,500+ a week… for $0. That’s right. Zero, zip, nada, FREE! Stay a week. A month. Or a year (or more). Ka-Ching Editor Matthew Adams can show you how…

Anita Funkhouser

Keyser, WV

Dear Anita,

Using third-party content DOES NOT hurt your rankings. The reason Web marketers make such an issue about duplicate content is that only the original creator of the content gets the full SEO (search engine optimization) value from it. In other words, if you use articles from Early to Rise, you won’t rank as well for the content as we at ETR would.

Let’s say you republish one of our articles about satellite sites. Since ETR published that article first, we would automatically get a higher Google ranking for the term “satellite sites” than your site would. However, even though the ETR website would get most of the credit, you’d still benefit in three major ways:

1. You would get some SEO benefit from it, which would result in traffic for your site.

2. You would be providing your visitors with useful content they would want to read. One thing search engines look for is how long a visitor stays on a site. And sites with a “stickier” following get better rankings. PERIOD.

3. If your visitors like the content, they will return to your site – which also helps with search engine ratings. (See #2.)

You can’t take everything you read about Internet marketing as the gospel truth. Most (so-called) “SEO experts” will tell you that having duplicate content is a bad thing. But it really isn’t. It just may not be as good as having your own unique content.

Take a look at drudgereport.com. This site has nothing but content from other websites, yet it is among the top 1,000 sites on the Net (traffic-wise), week in and week out.

Bottom line: To get the search engines to love your site, you want to update your site regularly with useful, relevant content – whether that content is your own or syndicated from other sites.

Having your own content is better, but syndicated and republished content helps too.

- Edwin Huertas

ETR Web Team Manager

[Ed. Note: ETR experts are standing by to answer your questions! Send us your top marketing, health, and business-building questions at AskETR@ETRFeedback.com.]

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A Web host is a company that provides server (computer) space for your website – for a “modest” monthly fee. Think of it as the landlord of the building where your website lives.

And you don’t want to take this service for granted. One of the things you need to consider when you are developing your marketing initiatives is the Web hosting provider for your company’s portal. Choosing the wrong one can give you a major headache.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean…

A company (let’s call them Widgets-R-Us) had recently laid off its Vice President of Marketing. Along with her went a few of the company’s Web marketing team members, including its main search engine specialist. Internet sales had been extremely slow, and it was a bad year for Widgets-R-Us. The downsizing move had been made to give the company a chance to regroup.

At the time, I was the Web Consultant for my local Chamber of Commerce – and at one of their networking events, I bumped into the CEO of Widgets-R-Us. After about an hour of listening to him carry on about his diminishing online sales, I agreed to see what I could do for him.

I quickly got to work, analyzing every Web promotion tactic they had been using and breaking it down to the point in time where sales began to drop. Usually, I can narrow a sales decrease down to a specific set of issues that can be dealt with. But in this case, I couldn’t find anything concrete that would indicate exactly where they went wrong.

In fact, their Web marketing team had done an excellent job. Their ideas were great and the design team was incredibly talented.

I was baffled. Their overall efforts were “on the money.” Their designs were flawless, and the marketing team had worked with the copy team to develop creative e-mail campaigns that had produced generous sales for a long time. But though they were using the same techniques that had always been effective for them, their online sales were slipping.

What was even stranger was that none of their other marketing channels were doing badly. On the contrary, those channels were benefiting from the extra work the teams were putting in on them because of the slowdown in online sales.

What could have caused the company’s online sales to drop? It wasn’t until I started asking about their Web hosting provider that I discovered the reason.

Turns out that, several months prior, they had brought in a new “tech” company to manage their networks and computers. The new tech company convinced them to switch their Web hosting to a “better” company (no doubt friends) – and, based on that recommendation, Widgets-R-Us made the change.

The new hosting company seemed to be fine. But when I took a second look, I noticed that the Widgets-R-Us open rates had started dropping at about the same time (give or take a week) as they switched companies. When I researched it further, I saw that their domain had been placed on some of the major spam blacklists – which, as you probably know, is really bad news for any online business.

The company’s search engine traffic, on the other hand, had deteriorated more gradually. It takes time for search engines to revisit and re-index a Website, so it can be a month or two before you would notice any big drops in search engine traffic. But after a few months of constantly declining traffic, the Widgets-R-Us domain was almost completely wiped out of Google’s index! A little bit longer and they may have been blacklisted altogether.

Needless to say… my client was in a panic.

After speaking with his (so-called) techs, I started to research the server’s IP (The IP is somewhat like your computer’s own personal Web “telephone number.”) And I was surprised to find that the same IP was being used by more than 300 other domains. This is common practice among many Web hosting providers, but for Widgets-R-Us, it was disastrous.

I later found out that there were lots of spammer domains on that server that were sending out daily e-mails. It looked like the Web hosting provider was oblivious to this (or maybe they just didn’t care). And when I studied the situation a little more, I started to see why the search engines were penalizing my client’s website: The Web hosting provider was home to some of the worst spammers on the Net – spammers that incorporated everything from SEO cloaking applications (used to trick search engines, but extremely frowned upon) to bulk e-mailers on their websites.

One of my first recommendations was for my client to GET RID OF THOSE IDIOT TECHS. I convinced them to move their hosting to a reputable Web hosting company and contacted Google to see about getting their website re-indexed.

I explained to Google what had occurred and how we had fixed the problem. And within a couple of months, the Widgets-R-Us website was once again getting great targeted search engine traffic.

So… now do you understand why having the right hosting provider is important to your online sales?

Here are five suggestions that will help you pick the right Web host:

1. Research the company’s background. How big are they and how long have they been around? Bigger companies that have been around longer have usually gone through all the networking issues, so chances are your site will be on a bigger, stronger network.

2. Look for a company with good Internet connectivity (lines connected to the Internet). Better Internet connectivity means your server will run faster – which means people will download your pages quicker. It’s kind of like the difference between a modem and high-speed Internet service.

You want an OC3 line or better. A business might have one T1 line connecting its entire office to the Internet with no problems, but when you’re working with Web servers the loads can be much higher and require bigger lines.

Here is a breakdown of some of the connectivity options your host might offer:

T1 – 1.544 megabits per second (24 DS0 lines) – Not bad for office Internet, but terrible for Web servers

T3 – 43.232 megabits per second (28 T1s) – Much better than a T1 and lower priced than OC3+ connections

OC3 – 155 megabits per second (84 T1s) – Very good

OC12 – 622 megabits per second (4 OC3s) – Awesome

OC48 – 2.5 gigabits per seconds (4 OC12s) – WOW!

OC192 – 9.6 gigabits per second (4 OC48s) – NASA?

3. Make sure they have generator backup. Any good Internet service provider will have HUGE generators to power the building in case of power outages. Your website needs to be running 24/7, and you don’t want to take chances with a hosting company that doesn’t supply (BIG and POWERFUL) backup generators to power your server in case of an emergency.

4. Make sure they offer you a control panel. A control panel is a user interface that allows you to manage different aspects of your hosting account – adding new e-mail accounts, viewing your traffic logs, installing additional software on your site, and more.

5. IMPORTANT!!! Make sure they offer 24/7 support in case of an emergency! Every good hosting company offers this feature.

After my experience with Widgets-R-Us, I learned to stick with the best of the best. Here are three of the top hosting companies on the Web:

www.bluehost.com

www.lunarpages.com

www.godaddy.com

But the one I prefer is Host Gator. Here’s why…

I personally use Host Gator (one of the Internet’s largest and most respected Web hosting providers) for my own domains. They have such a good reputation that ETR has chosen them as the official Web hosting company for our 5 Days in July conference. And I recommend Host Gator to all of our ETR readers, too.

They offer you an extremely secure hosting environment with an individual IP. (No one else will have it.) When you sign up for a hosting account – at $7.95 per month – you can add as many of your domains to the account as you like. In other words, you pay just $7.95 a month… even if you host 100 domains!

With Host Gator, you will never pay to host another website again. They will even give you unlimited space and bandwidth (so you can upload unlimited Web pages and graphics), as well as free 800 numbers, website software, and much more.

Click here to view Host Gator’s low-cost business hosting packages.

[Ed. Note: Don't let the technical aspects of Internet entrepreneurship - like website hosting - keep you from starting your own online business. Next month, Edwin Huertas and a team of Internet marketing and business-building experts will show an elite group of future Internet millionaires how to start their very own powerhouse businesses. You'll get step-by-step instructions on how to do everything from setting up a website to picking a hosting company to marketing your business online. The $500 Early Bird discount ends Monday at 5:00 p.m., so make sure you sign up today!]

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From: Kelly Brock

Date: Sun, May 17, 2009 at 10:15 PM

Subject: Google reported your site as suspicious with malware

To: AskETR@etrfeedback.com

Hi,

Google has reported your site has been loading with malware and suspicious activities, and has blocked users from accessing it. To be on the safe side, I am not opening the link to your website till all is clear. You might want to check and clarify. Attached is the browser screen. Hope this help.

Regards

Kelly

Our website was under attack.

I immediately started digging, and saw that certain pages of our site were trying to redirect our visitors to a Chinese site called gunbar.cn. That site then tried to pass along a virus to our visitors’ computers.

It seems that an extremely malicious Trojan/Virus had been released on the Web. ETR – along with WalMart.com and Variety.com, among others – was one of its latest victims. Colin Witucki, ETR’s Operations Manager, and I managed to eradicate the virus from ETR’s site. But this experience offers a good lesson for anyone with an Internet business.

If you take the proper precautions – like using reputable anti-virus and malware protection software – this is a one-in-a-million occurrence. And the possibility of contracting a virus is certainly not a reason to get scared away from doing business online.

But it CAN happen.

Here’s what I learned during our own battle – and how you can use it to prevent or thwart any attacks on your site…

This particular Trojan/Virus has a way of infecting a computer without being detected by anti-virus software, and it seems that one of the computers in our office had caught it. A computer can catch this electronic parasite simply by “visiting” an infected website.

It works by first infecting your computer, and then infecting your website using login criteria it steals from your FTP client. (FTP is a software used to upload and download pages from your Web server.) It then begins to upload infected Web pages to your server without you knowing it!

The URL for the virus was originally several variations of gumblar.cn. It had been out for a short time – and I was aware of it – but the version we contracted was fairly new.

This malicious code started slowly and kept spreading until many of the pages on our site were infected. Though I acted as soon as I knew we had a problem, I wasn’t able to catch it in time to prevent our website from being flagged by Google and other online authorities.

Because we were flagged by Google, when people visited our website they were greeted by an ugly red sign that read: “This site has been listed as an attack site.” From that warning page, the ETR site was accessible only by clicking on the “Ignore this warning” link (which, as you can imagine, NO ONE used).

Needless to say… our website was in serious trouble. We could have been blacklisted by Google and other search engines if the problem had not been taken care of quickly.

How WE Overcame This Malicious Attack

It wasn’t easy. It took a lot of work and about five re-submissions to Google’s review board, but we managed to fend of the attack and get our website back to normal.

• The first thing we did was change ALL the passwords on every site we hosted on the server. Once they were changed, the virus had no way to upload itself to the server.

• Colin and I then ran around to every computer in the office (more than 20) and installed virus protection software called Avast! Antivirus. This was the only software we could find that detected this Trojan/Virus.

• Once everyone’s computer was clean, I proceeded to clean out the files on the server. Since the virus had randomized the malicious code (it looked completely different on every page), I wasn’t able to remove it simply by using the software. I had to go in and remove the line of code file by file. There are more 3,000 files on our site, so you can imagine how beat I was after the first 300 or so.

That’s when I decided to try to write a small application that would do it automatically using PHP (a Web programming language). I ran my program on the server – and IT WORKED! It cleared all the malicious code on our pages. And when I submitted to Google’s review board this time (they allow a review request every eight hours or so), they finally removed the block they’d put on our site.

Thank goodness we were able to get out of this jam. Unfortunately, thousands of Websites get infected by viruses every day. That’s why we’re taking every precaution to ensure that it does not happen to us again (including some that – for security reasons – I can’t mention here).

Your first step in detecting and removing this nasty little bug (as well as just about every other worm, virus, or Trojan out there), is to install AVAST! Antivirus.

I can’t say enough about how much help this software was. It helped save our online business. Our office computers had Norton, McAfee, and AVG installed – and NONE of those programs caught this Trojan/Virus.

The little application I wrote was also a big help – so I thought I’d offer it to our readers and website visitors here.

PLEASE NOTE: Use this PHP script at your own risk! The application worked for me – but though it was intended to remove only the malicious code, it does remove lines of JavaScript code that contains similar structures. If you do not know how to use it (there are two lines of code you need to change to suit your needs), I recommend that you hire an expert webmaster to help you. If you do not know of any, post your comment on this article and I will recommend someone.

We dodged a bullet – but how will YOU fare if a virus attacks your business website?

As I said, it is unlikely that you will have a problem if you take the proper precautions. Here are the two most important things you can do:

1. Be vigilant.

This is key. I am constantly scanning ETR’s website to watch for viruses, and I check the site every day for irregularities. You should do the same. You – or your Web manager – should also keep up to date on the latest viruses and how they get access to websites. That way, you’ll be on top of them before they ever affect your site.

2. Take some easy initial steps to protect yourself.

• Make sure your FTP login information and passwords are secure. Write them down somewhere rather than saving them on your site. And give access to upload only to people who absolutely need it.

• Run a daily scan for malicious software (malware). I use malwarebytes.com. [

• Install privacy software that detects and removes spyware from your site. I use spybot.com.

While you shouldn't let the threat of a virus keep you from starting an online business, it is something you should be aware of. A few ounces of prevention - and an understanding of how to thwart an attack - can help keep your website, your visitors, and your business safe.

[Ed. Note: Starting an Internet business may sound daunting - especially when you think of all the "technical" aspects. But that's where ETR's experts come in. Edwin Huertas, MaryEllen Tribby, Charlie Byrne, and other Internet marketing specialists will show you, step by step, exactly how to set up an Internet business. After 5 days with them, you WILL have a fully functioning Internet business with the potential to pull in thousands of dollars every month. Get all the details here.]

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Alexis Siemon has written before about marketing your business via social networking websites like these. Usually, that means interacting with members of the network, answering questions, leaving comments, and branding yourself as an expert in your field.

And now, not only can social media networking help you build a relationship with potential customers – which is essential to getting them to trust you enough to buy your products – this marketing channel can (apparently) help you amp up your traffic by increasing the number of inbound links to your site.

Facebook and MySpace have given us a way to use social networking sites to market a business or product by setting up banner ads on the sites themselves. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you might think.

Let me tell you about my experience…

I’d been reading a lot about the new advertising possibilities at Facebook.com and MySpace.com, and I figured I should start testing ads on both to determine if they would be effective marketing channels for ETR. So I decided to open accounts on both of these social media platforms.

The first one I tried was Facebook – and I have to tell you… they’re going to be leaving BIG money on the table if this is how they plan to run their program.

I’ll explain.

The sign-up process for Facebook was simple. I managed to set up an account quickly, so my experience started out as a positive one.

Then the problems began…

I started to create an ad using their (somewhat user-friendly) system, and I found that it was similar to Google’s AdWords interface. So I thought, “Great. I will zip through all of my ads quickly and begin tracking the results.”

That wasn’t the case.

For openers, they ask you to make choices from a set of audience-targeting criteria, including such things as Location, Age, Sex, Education, and Relationship Interests. It made me feel like I was putting up a personals ad to look for a lover.

When I finally finished my ad and clicked Submit, I was told that it had to be approved… and I had to wait. (Awful compared to Google’s instant reviewing system.) After a few hours I received an e-mail from Facebook telling me the ad was declined, but with no explanation as to why. Instead, they told me to look at their guidelines, which outline so many different things that I had no idea what the problem(s) could have been.

I tried to clean up my ad (using EVERY rule they had in place) and resubmitted it. After a few hours I got the same e-mail telling me it was declined. Again, with no explanation – just pointing me to their stupid guidelines page.

I tried five more times and finally gave up. Maybe they didn’t like my landing page. Maybe the verbiage was wrong. Or maybe there was a misspelled word. Who knows?

So I decided to try my luck with MySpace.

I created an account for ETR and was pleasantly surprised by their interface. They give you much more control over how your ad looks and have an easy-to-use system that allows you to customize it down to the last detail.

I created and submitted my first ad. As with Facebook, I was told that the ad had to be approved. I understand the need for quality control, but considering how quickly you get feedback from other programs – like Google AdWords – the slow response is ridiculous.

I waited more than 24 hours but didn’t hear from them. I logged onto my account and there was my ad… still pending.

I can’t believe that posting ads to these websites takes so long. I want to give them money, but they don’t seem to want it.

I started writing this article when I started submitting my ads to Facebook and MySpace, and decided to wait until at least one of them was approved so I could share my results with you. But it’s been six days… and NONE of my ads have made it through.

At this point, I think I’ve done enough research to confidently say that Facebook and MySpace ads are just not worth it for us.

Listen, despite their massive popularity with users, these sites just aren’t making sales. According to an article in the MIT Technology Review, “The sites seem largely incapable of generating revenues commensurate with their popularity.”

In an interview for the MIT Technology Review, Anthony Acquisti of New York-based emerging media agency OMD says this about advertising on social media sites: “You don’t want to be there.”

Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo.com says, “Social networking is second only to chat rooms as the worst place to advertise.” He adds, “When you’re on Facebook, we know you’re looking to meet a girl or talk to your friends. It’s a terrible platform for advertising.”

Says Ryan Hupfer of HubPages, writing for TechCrunch.com about advertising with the social media giants, “The one thing that I do worry about is how much noise their users will take before the ads begin to get in the way of what they’re actually there for – communicating with their friends.”

These comments all add up to some serious problems with the existing advertising models on Facebook and MySpace.

For now, based on my experience and on what my research has turned up, I can’t imagine Facebook or MySpace becoming a competitor for ETR’s advertising dollars.

Here’s the way I see it…

1. Google offers a much quicker turnaround time for new ads. Your ads are reviewed quickly, and there’s no waiting hours (or days) for them to be approved and get posted.

2. Google is the leader in PPC advertising, and there’s a reason for that. Their advertising platform is extremely user-friendly.

3. Google’s conversion ratio (from the anecdotal evidence I can find) is MUCH higher than that of either of the two social media giants. This could be due to the fact that most of the (young) surfers on those portals are there for socializing and nothing else. They’re not looking for information or ads.

Of course, you never know how these sites will work for you until you TEST. So, yes, go ahead and test Facebook and MySpace. Still, in my opinion, they need to do some major overhauling if they plan to develop serious ad revenue. And you will never get the results that Google AdWords provides.

[Ed. Note: You should test out multiple marketing platforms - social media sites included. For 12 proven, effective marketing channels and how to use them, pick up a copy of the Amazon.com bestseller Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business.

You may want to get started right away with easy, user-friendly Google AdWords. You can get a step-by-step guide on just how to do it right here.]

Some might even say it looks “boring.”

But we say “Boring is better!”

Some of the more “exciting” features of our e-mails were preventing them from reaching our subscribers. (Maybe even you!) So we’ve made a few changes to ETR – to make sure you get it in your inbox every morning.

And by making your own e-mails more “boring,” you could see more subscribers receiving and opening them. Which, in the end, should result in more sales.

You see, the most important thing about an e-mail newsletter is not how “pretty” it looks or how “flashy” the design is. The most important thing is the content. The innovative ideas and useful techniques that made readers subscribe in the first place.

And if a newsletter’s subscribers can’t access that content because the graphics are too “high-tech,” there’s no point in sending it out at all.

Every time you send an e-mail to your subscribers, their e-mail service checks to make sure it meets their deliverability standards. E-mail policies for Internet service providers (ISPs) change more often than you can keep up with. But if you follow a few basic guidelines, you should be able to get your e-mails to nearly all of your subscribers all of the time.

I’ll outline some of the more important guidelines below, but I’d like to discuss the design of your newsletter first.

I’ve managed well over 100 e-mail marketing campaigns for various companies around the world – and it seems to me that most businesses are more interested in designing a snappy-looking e-mail than in making sure the e-mail actually gets read.

Think of it this way: Your readers didn’t subscribe to your newsletter because it’s pretty. And once they have been duly impressed by the design of your first e-mail, do you really think they care about the design of your second e-mail? NO! They simply want the content they know the e-mail can provide. The design has nothing to do with the information they want and need.

In my experience, newsletters that focus on content rather than design experience higher sales conversion rates than newsletters with heavy HTML and graphics.

The more HTML and graphics you add, the more you take away from the message you’re trying to relay. As a result, I’ve found that newsletters willing to go lighter on HTML and graphics have higher open rates.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “Why would this change my open rates?” I don’t have enough space to give you a complete answer to that question. But here – in brief – are a few of the main reasons (based on theories I’ve tested and know to be true):

1. Most SPAM protection software utilized by ISPs makes use of predetermined scoring mechanisms that look for e-mails that are bloated with HTML and graphics to determine if they are SPAM. SPAM Assassin, for instance, will penalize your e-mail if it has more than 30-40 percent HTML (vs. text).

2. Graphics do not always display correctly in e-mails. Plus, HTML standards are always changing. So the techniques you used to design your e-mails last year might not be as effective this year.

3. People do NOT prefer heavy HTML and graphics in their e-mails. E-mails that are graphics/HTML-heavy can take much longer to download.

4. Most e-mail software (and most e-mail services like Gmail and Yahoo) blocks images by default. This is a built-in security precaution. In order for the recipient to view the graphics, they have to click on a button or link to allow it. (And why would you want to make a customer click anything just so they can read your e-mail properly?)

5. Many of the companies I’ve helped in the past had the idea that, in order to make the most of their (virtual) real estate, they should leave no white space in their e-mails. But I’ve found that most people react much better to e-newsletters (and Web pages) that are “clean” looking, with plenty of white space.

Leaving the right amount of white space allows your viewer to read your e-mail more easily. (They can target the specific sections they’re interested in.) This gives them a better overall usability experience and makes it more likely that they’ll continue to open and read your e-mails.

ETR’s CEO and Publisher, MaryEllen Tribby, said, “I don’t care how “pretty” our readers think it is – I just want to make sure they get our valuable content everday.”

Keep her words – and my guidelines – in mind when you send out your own e-mails. Sure, graphics, colors, and HTML can make an e-newsletter look slick and professional, fancy and fun. But they can also trigger your subscribers’ spam filters and cause other problems with deliverability and readability that you just don’t need.

Keep it simple. You could increase your open rates – which could skyrocket your sales.

[Ed. Note: There are a lot of details that go into running a successful Internet business. Fortunately, they aren't impossible to master or hard to learn. But if you don't know where to start, let ETR's experts help you. At our 5 Days in July business-building seminar, we'll walk you through everything from setting up a website to picking products to writing persuasive sales copy, and more. Get the details here.]

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If you don’t have a product or product idea, you may become discouraged about the whole idea of starting an Internet business. But the truth is, you CAN make a bundle online… without having a single product of your own.

I’m talking about joining an affiliate program and linking their offers to your website.

At Early to Rise, we sell our own products. But we also sell products for others – through affiliate and joint-venture partnerships – and we have been very successful doing both.

Selling products through an affiliate program eliminates the need to stock and manage them. It is also a lot easier to sell someone else’s existing product than to create one yourself.

But before you join an affiliate program, you need to consider the following:

1. Will this product appeal to my website’s visitors?

When selecting an affiliate program, make sure the products they offer are in the same (or a similar) niche as your website.

This might seem obvious – but you’d be surprised by the number of websites that sell things that have nothing to do with their niche. For instance, I recently saw a website dedicated to “Health” that had banner ads posted on every page for products that ranged from movies and music to electronics. There was hardly anything health-related!

2. How much can I make selling this product?

Most affiliate programs offer a 2 percent to 10 percent commission for sales generated by affiliates.

But a program with high payouts (15+ percent) gives you a chance to make the most money with the smallest amount of traffic and the least amount of effort. So go with the higher paying programs and make more money. It’s that simple.

3. Who is offering the product?

As you know, there are plenty of scams on the Web, so you have to be careful when choosing an affiliate program. Make sure the company you are dealing with is an established business with a good reputation – one that offers its customers a money-back guarantee and pays its affiliates on time.

4. Does this product sell well – or am I wasting my time and effort promoting it?

There are so many affiliate programs out there these days that it can be difficult to choose the right one. Make sure the program you choose sells a product that has a good conversion rate. If you are not making sales with a program, it might be time to look at a different one.

At ETR, our products convert at an extremely high rate – and we offer some of the highest payouts in the industry. This helps us ensure that our affiliates make plenty of money, and that they remain happy, loyal partners.

5. What kind of tracking system does the program use?

Look into the tracking software the program uses, and understand how it works. Most good affiliate programs track sales for 30 to 60 days, some even longer.

6. What kind of reporting do they offer?

Make sure the affiliate program provides you with all the tools you might need to accurately track your sales as well as the traffic you send to them. A good affiliate program will give you full metric reports to help you fine-tune your marketing efforts.

7. What sort of marketing support do they provide?

A really good affiliate program will also give you plenty of marketing materials and/or training to help you make the most of your partnership.

ETR’s affiliate program, for instance, offers its affiliates all of the sales materials they might need (from top-producing banner ads to proven sales copy). Plus, we offer lots of useful resources and training, including tutorials and access to a library of marketing articles.

8. Does it cost anything to join?

Sometimes it pays to join an affiliate program to check out their system before actually putting up any ads.

Joining should cost you NOTHING! If a (so-called) affiliate program charges for membership… it’s NOT an affiliate program.

There are many scams that prey on unsuspecting people looking to earn more money online. But why would any reputable company charge YOU for selling THEIR products?

Don’t EVER pay to join an affiliate program. Period.

Do your research. Take your time. Make sure you know the answers to the above eight questions – and then choose a good affiliate program that fits your needs.

[Ed. Note: You can start making money - today! - by joining ETR's Affiliate Marketing Program. It's 100% free to join, and we offer an extremely competitive commission on every ETR product you sell. Get all the details right here.]

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As you know, SEO is all about getting your site listed in the search engines’ top results. The higher up in the results you rank, the better chance you have of capturing your prospective customer’s attention. Get them to click on your link, and you are on your way to making a sale.

So knowing how to get those coveted high rankings is critical to the success of your Internet business.

The way that search engines currently spider, rate, and index a website depend on various factors, including link popularity, content, site structure, and a mixture of other variables. All of these can be manipulated by most webmasters and SEO specialists.

But this could be changing very soon!

The word on the Net is that search engines are changing the way they spider and index websites to help them serve better results to their search audience. They are incorporating new ranking algorithms that will take into consideration input that is submitted by “real people” (as opposed to primarily software calculations).

Google (and others) will give higher priority to sites that Web surfers vote for. The way a Web surfer “votes” for a website will be completely transparent. It will not be something that can be easily manipulated by webmasters and SEO specialists.

If this happens, we will see an entirely different pattern emerge – and it will affect thousands of websites across the Net. Many that were once showing up in the top 10 results will no longer be there. New sites (rated using the latest algorithms) will take their place.

Google currently asks Web surfers (normally users that are logged into their Google account) to move their search results around, based on the surfer’s own idea of how important each one is. If they like a certain page in the search results, they can move it higher on the list so that anytime they search for the same keyword(s) they will be presented with their own personalized set of results.

Google claims that this data is not currently calculated in their existing algorithms, but I seriously doubt that. Search engines are constantly looking to improve their search results. By using actual feedback provided by their users, they can get a better understanding of what Web surfers consider relevant.

So that’s the main thing that I think will make a difference in the way results are ranked in the future: Web users will have more influence. In addition, I believe the search engines will be spidering online videos, article comments, and social media.

Having videos on your website helps your SEO now. (Webmasters love to link to good videos.) But if a search engine can actually read the contents of a video, you might have to give more serious consideration to the content of the videos on your site than you have in the past.

According to many SEO analysts, search engines will be looking at criteria like these when scoring your Web pages:

• How often have Web surfers moved (voted) your listing to the top of the results?

• What type of searches have those users performed in the past?

• How many times has your page been bookmarked (voted for) on a major social networking site (i.e., Digg.com, LinkedIn.com, and StumbleUpon.com)?

• How many other sites are talking about your site?

• Does your Web page have video? If so, how long do people watch it?

• How often do website visitors return to your page?

• How many comments does your page have on it? (More people posting comments on your page means more popularity, as far as search engines are concerned.)

What YOU Can Do About the “New” Ranking Rules

The new search engine ranking methods are sure to bring a lot of changes to the world of search engine optimization. But don’t worry. You won’t have to learn a bunch of new SEO tactics. One thing will always hold true: CONTENT IS KING.

Plain and simple, if you have good Web content, surfers will bookmark it, comment on it, and talk about it on other websites. Whether you are offering useful videos or informative articles, people appreciate high-quality content. And search engines will take notice. This will continue to boost your SEO efforts more than anything else.

With that said, keep in mind that no one knows for sure what the search engines are going to do. They guard their secrets like the CIA guards theirs. We can only make an educated guess as to what the future of SEO holds, and try to keep on top of the latest changes.

One more thing. Keep in mind that even a top ranking on Google won’t mean a thing for your business unless you can turn the resulting traffic into paying customers. Read Alexis Siemon’s article “What’s More Important Than Your Search Engine Ranking?” to find out exactly how to measure the efficacy of your search engine optimization efforts.

[Ed. Note: Running a successful online business takes more than just throwing up a website - but it doesn't have to be complicated or confusing. Get a step-by-step guide to search engine optimization, link building, and more as a member of ETR's Internet Money Club. Spaces are limited, so find out now if there are any spots left for the "Class" of 2009.]

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But though more and more online marketers are learning about SEO and how it can help deliver lots of quality traffic to their sites, the powerful little link is still a mystery to many. One question I frequently get is about “link juice.”

What is link juice? It is the key to your popularity with the search engines. The more you have, the higher you can rank in the search engines’ results.

To understand link juice, you first need to understand another SEO term: Link Popularity.

Link Popularity is a metric that most search engines use to gauge the “popularity” of a Web page based on how many other Web pages link to it. You could think of it this way: Each link to a Web page that a search engine finds on the Internet counts as a vote for the page it’s linking to. The more links that are pointing to one of your Web pages, the more “popular” a search engine will consider that page to be.

Search engines consider popular pages to be highly relevant. Since they are interested in presenting the most relevant search results to their users, they’ll give popular pages a high ranking. And this will improve your SEO, put your website in front of more search engine users, and ultimately result in more traffic and more potential sales.

But that doesn’t mean you should ask all your friends to link to your site. You don’t want a link from just anybody. You want links from sites with lots of link juice.

Link juice is a way to describe the “weight” a specific link might carry. A link with more weight is going to be more important to the search engines.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say you’re trying to get a job. Your potential employer is going to be more impressed by recommendations from your boss at your previous company than she will by recommendations from your mailman or your dentist. You could have 100 letters of recommendation from your college buddies, but one powerful letter from the CEO of a business you used to work for will do a lot more to convince her to hire you.

It’s the same with the search engines. Each Web page has a certain amount of clout – or link juice – that it can pass to another page. How much is not really something you can accurately measure, but you can get an idea of how good a link is (how much link juice it has) by looking at a few variables:

1. How many links are pointing to the page? If a page has hundreds or thousands of links pointing to it, chances are the links on that page have good link juice that can be passed on to outside pages (like your page).

Let’s say MortgageBroker.com has a ton of link juice. If you are in the mortgage brokerage business and get this site to link to you, it could pass on a lot of link juice. (It’s like getting a job recommendation from the top dog in your industry.)

2. How many outgoing links does that page have? Pages with too many outgoing links (20 or more) usually have less link juice than pages with 10 or fewer outgoing links. That’s because sites with too many links to outside sites aren’t as choosy.

Think about it this way: If a food critic rates every restaurant she visits as “5-star,” you might not believe she’s got a very discerning palate. But if she gives her top recommendation only to a few restaurants, you would be more inclined to try them out. After all, they are the only restaurants she likes out of thousands.

If a page has lots of links pointing to it and a small number of links pointing out, it’s probably a good page with plenty of link juice. A link on that site pointing to your site would be beneficial to you.

3. Is the page that links to you in a similar niche? It’s important to build up links to your site, but you must make sure those links come from sites that complement yours. In other words, don’t request links from sites that are about mortgages if your business is about sporting goods.

4. How much real content does the page have? Pages that have very little content and are mostly made up of outgoing links have less link juice to offer. The best links are usually from pages that have lots of “real” content and a small number of incoming links.

Once you’ve found a site that has a lot of link juice, request a link from it. You can learn more about how to get a site to link to your site by re-reading Alexis’s article on becoming a killer link builder.

Remember, the more link juice you can get, the higher you will rank with the search engines.

[Ed. Note: Running a successful online business takes more than just throwing up a website - but it doesn't have to be complicated or confusing. Get a step-by-step guide to link building, search engine optimization, and more as a member of ETR's Internet Money Club. Spaces are limited, so find out now if there are any spots left for the "Class" of 2009.

If you feel that your website is in the same category as ETR's, we may want to exchange links with you. Contact us via http://www.earlytorise.com/resources/ with your link exchange request. If your site qualifies as a good link partner, we would be happy to link to your page from our website in exchange for a link-back from your website.]

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These additional traffic-building sites aren’t as complex as your primary website. In fact, they are often very simple – targeting one specific aspect of your business.

Think of your primary website as a storefront on the Net. If you have multiple storefronts (i.e., satellite sites) – each with unique content – you’re likely to get more “eyeballs” in front of your products or services. And, as you know, the more eyeballs that read through your sales copy, the more sales you’ll make.

One reason that satellite sites help draw more traffic is that you can submit them to the search engines separately. This means that more of your pages will show up on the search results pages when Web users type in your keywords. Just think – if one of your satellite sites AND your primary website rank highly for the same keyword, you could dominate that search engine results page!

I’ve been setting up satellite sites for ETR’s website. Right now, we have eight of them. Each of these sites is averaging about 30-40 new visitors per day. As time goes on, this traffic will increase. My goal is to have 100+ new satellite sites finished by the end of next year.

Imagine if you had 100 satellite sites, each bringing in highly targeted traffic. Even if each site brought in only 20 or 30 visits per day, that would be an extra 60,000 to 80,000 visits per month!

Now before you start throwing up satellite websites, you need to know that there’s a methodology to setting up good ones. In fact, doing it the wrong way can hurt you more than help.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #1: Make sure each satellite site has unique content.

Search engines are smart. And they do not like sites that have identical content. They consider websites like these “cookie cutters.” If you have cookie-cutter satellite sites, the search engines may punish you by not giving those sites any priority. Even worse, you could be blacklisted and not show up in their results at all.

To avoid this, you have to make sure that each and every satellite site has unique, distinctive content.

At ETR, for instance, we sell a program that teaches people how to make money by importing goods from China. So I created one satellite that was optimized for “China importing secrets” – and I filled the site with content relating only to that aspect of the program.

When you do a Google search for “China importing secrets,” this satellite site will usually be within the top 10 positions. It is bringing in 20 to 30 new visits per day, and each visit comes in via a targeted keyword search performed on a major search engine.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #2: Make sure your site is “big” enough for the search engines to find it.

It’s easy to toss up a single-page satellite site – but don’t expect it to attract any traffic. Search engines (especially Google) love sites that have plenty of pages – and content – for them to index. How many pages will depend on your business – but sites with 100+ pages tend to do better than those with fewer pages.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of pages!” don’t worry. You will begin to see additional traffic with 10 or 20 pages (sometimes even less). And then, as you add more pages with new content, you will see more traffic.

To get that content, I like to hire freelance writers to create articles for me. I ask them to base those articles on information that has been posted by respected publications. For instance, if I need content relating to the medical industry, I might ask them to visit medical journals and government sites to find studies or news releases that they can comment on or summarize.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #3: Each site should have a unique IP address.

A website’s IP address is a numerical identification (like a telephone number) that allows people (and search engines) to connect to it. Most hosting companies provide shared hosting accounts that use the same IP for all satellite sites. This is bad for your traffic-attracting efforts, because the search engines will recognize those sites as being related to one another.

If the content on each site is completely different, you won’t get flagged – but it’s much better to have unique IP addresses for them. That tells the search engines that they are separate websites. Contact your hosting provider to find out how you can do this.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #4: Optimize each satellite site properly.

One of the best – and easiest – ways to optimize your satellite sites is to make each one focus on only one aspect of your business. Let’s say you have a primary website about pets. You could make a separate satellite site for each category of products that you offer: pet food, pet medication, grooming, training, etc. That way, each site stands a chance of getting more targeted traffic.

If you plan on putting up multiple satellite websites, follow the rules. Make sure that each one has its own individual IP address and at least 10 pages of unique content… for starters.

You can also link to your primary site from each satellite site for extra “link juice,” but that’s an entirely different subject. For now, just get at least one satellite site up and running using the guidelines above… and watch the traffic begin to flow in.

[Ed. Note: Attracting more traffic should be one of your top goals as an Internet marketer. For more secrets to doing this, plus step-by-step instructions for everything from setting up your website to writing sales copy and more, sign up for ETR's Internet Money Club. You could find yourself the proud owner of an Internet business that generates $100,000 to $25 million a year. Space is limited, so find out now if you can still enroll in the "Class" of 2009. Learn more here.]

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