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One of the big debates when you start your home internet business is whether you should learn how to do SEO for your site yourself or hire a professional. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. In this article I would like to compare both situations.

If you are just starting out there probably is a very big chance that you do not have that much money to invest. Usually a professional company will charge in the region of at least $2000 a month. If you do not have this money to spend then your budget will force you to do this yourself. However, if you are starting with a fairly large budget and you have a very good idea with a lot of your own products to sell then this may be a good idea. Just make sure that you choose a reputable company. It will save you a lot of time if you do not have to do this yourself.

One of the big advantages of learning this is that you can build as many websites as you like without having to pay extra for additional optimization charges. Basically, you can build your own virtual real estate online. Look for profitable niche markets and then create your web site yourself. You can use a combination of affiliate links, Google Adsense advertising or create your own products.

However, one of the disadvantages is that you need to keep pace of the developments in the industry. What works today may not work in the future. This will require a massive investment of your time and interest. You can follow white hat strategies which will ensure your long term success like building a quality web site that people will want to link to. However, if you hit a problem like say for example you have a dynamic web site using a scripting language and all of the sudden your site gets dropped from the search engines you will be alone and struggle to get your rankings back if you do not know what to do.

I have briefly looked at the two paths that you can follow, however your decision will most likely be made by how much time and capital that you have to invest in your business.

Are you really interested in driving massive traffic to your website?

Here’s the answer:

Secrets Of Article Marketing - Download your free ebook now.

Mark Abrahams is a full time internet marketer who has helped others to earn a living online.

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Virtually every business owner in the world makes this mistake. They consider their advertising a business expense, after all, it goes in the expense column on their profit and loss statement. Understand this, advertising is an investment in your business, and like any investment you need to know what return you are getting, how else can you decide if it is a good investment or not.

Most business owners advertise when their sales are down, or they just run the same add every week, giving no thought to whether it is helping their bottom line or not, before you place your next set of adds consider the example below.

My friend Alex and his wife Judy own a fish and chip shop. They were having financial trouble so I asked if I could help, and this is what happened. Alex was advertising in two local papers, the adds cost him $400 per week, so I asked him to start testing how effective the adds were. For one week Alex asked every single customer, where they heard about his store.

At the end of the week he found that only 25 people had responded to the newspaper adds. Each of these new customers, had an acquisition cost of $16. ($400 / 25 New Customers)

Then we counted up the amount of all the sales Alex had made in that week, and divided it by the total number of transactions. It worked out that on average, people were spending $8.50 each time they visited his shop.

So Alex was paying $16 for each new customer and they were only spending $8.50, he was making a loss of $7.50 on every new customer that he was getting.

Note: To be able to consider your marketing successful, your acquisition cost has to be lower than the average amount a new customer will spend with you.

To help rectify the problem Alex was having, we decided to change his headline, and his offer. I asked Alex how much he sold a scoop of chips for, he said $1.50, and how much does it cost you, only $0.50c he said.

Alex had a product that every person who was buying fish and chips would want, and it had a very low hard dollar cost. So I told Alex, great, were going to start giving them away.

Give them away, are you nuts, I will have hundreds of people flocking to my shop. Great, I replied, thats what you are in business for isnt it.

The next week, instead of his usual add, Cromwell Corner Fish & Chips, we used a coupon design that said, Free Scoop of Chips. The result was amazing, at the end of the week we had a total of 332 coupons.

His adds still cost him $400, and he also had to pay for 332 scoops of chips at $0.50c each, a total of $166. His advertising for the week now cost him a total of $566 but each of his new customers only cost him $1.70, and they spent on average $7.00 ($1.50 less because of the free chips). Alex now knows when he spends $566 on advertising he gets $2324 back. What do you think Alex does every time he comes across a spare $566.

Understanding Hard Dollar and Soft Dollar Costs

Hard Dollar is the physical cost to your business, eg each scoop of chips that Alex cooks takes 50c out of his pocket.

Soft Dollar, is the perceived amount, or the amount you sell a product for, eg, each scoop of chips has a perceived value of $1.50

When you are developing your headlines or trying to come up with an offer to excite your clients, try and find things with a high Soft Dollar value and a low Hard Dollar Cost. A really good example is giving away a free consultation, because often the hard dollar cost is nothing. If you dont do consultations, start, even if only for advertising purposes.

Think what response a hair dresser would get if her add said, Free Bottle of XYZ Shampoo and Conditioner worth $25 when you get your hair cut and colored at Sallies Hair dressing salon.

Two things are likely to happen, firstly, she will attract new customers because she has a great offer, secondly, it encourages current and new customers to get a color as well as a cut which increases the average sale amount. The really key thing here is the Hard Dollar cost, Sally should be getting the Shampoo and Conditioner from XYZ for free or at a heavily discounted price because of the free advertising she is doing for them, and because it might switch people from other brands to their brand.

If you don’t have a product with a low Hard Dollar Cost, negotiate with your suppliers, think of the benefits for them, not just the benefits for you.

Sally knows that she can only cut 10 peoples hair per day, and if the offer is only valid for one week, then she knows how many free bottles she needs to negotiate. If she cant get all the free bottles that she needs, she could change the offer so its only valid on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because they are her slow days and she always has heaps of free appointments, this means she needs a lot less free bottles of shampoo and conditioner.

Steven Dunedin
Walk Off With Your Competitors Money

Steven is 27 years old and is self retired after being involved in business since he was 17 years old. Steven is currently developing the info-sets available for purchase from http://www.walkoffwithyourcompetitorsmoney.com

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As Google Adwords and Google Adsense becomes more mainstream, the rate of fraud from self-clicking (commonly called Google-bation), and click-draining (clicking on competitors ads), will increase exponentially.

The problem is that the electronic antichrist has an obvious conflict of interest in eliminating fraud. Like most web site owners running Google Adsense, you probably are tempted to just “test” ads to make sure all the html you have embedded on your site is working.

In some markets these little “tests” can reward the web site owner over $20 per click. Drugs, bank loans and obesity cures pay pretty well I’m told.

And if you only test one click per day, that’s $140 per week. You and Google share the booty and if the pain is spread across multiple Adwords advertisers. Who is to know? What are the chances of being caught?

The super-paranoid defrauders who do their research will probably discover the joys of anonymous proxy servers. With these little beauties you can click on your ads all day long. An iPod by lunchtime, a new Xbox 360 by dinner - the money and the buzz of ripping off the electronic antichrist becomes addictive.

And for the truly entrepreneurial why not hire some click-workers in a low-wage country?

Some enterprising click-workers roam from Internet cafe to Internet cafe in large third world cities with lists of web sites in their hands. They may use up to 15 different cafes per day in an effort to show the Google database different IP addresses.

Their full time job is to click on Adsense ads on specific web sites. They get 10 - 20 cents per click - substantial and pretty easy money for them. The Adsense publisher and Google get much more, and the poor old Adwords advertiser foots the bill.

And on the flip-side if you want to drain away your competitors advertising budget the technology is just click away.

It’s 8:30. You’ve just arrived at work. You unlock your PC and open your browser - Firefox of course.

Taking your first slurp of coffee you go to Google and search on a keyword phrase for your industry. At top and right of page you see your competitor’s ads.

You put your coffee down.

Click, click, click, click (center-button tab browsing is the best thing since the web browser). There goes $120 of your competitors advertising budget. Google is $120 richer.

You do this every day … $28,800 per year of your competitor’s advertising budget blown on your coffees.

The phone rings. It’s that boring client from Sydney. While you listen to her tales of woe on the phone you search on a term that may be related to her business.

Bingo! There they are. Click, refresh, click, refresh. That call just cost her $30.

You see the Google business model doesn’t take into account human nature. Some people are greedy, rude, arrogant and nasty. Correction, a lot of people are greedy, rude, arrogant and nasty, especially if cash is involved.

Google has got away with it for so long (2-3 years), because the same sort of people ain’t that tech-savvy. There were a few exceptions of course, but they were lost in the white noise.

Not now. As Google Adwords and Adsense becomes mainstream the rates of Google-bation and click-draining will increase.

This year watch out for the growth pay-per-action and pay-per-sale. The affiliate marketers have it right.

John Hacking is Product Manager for Search Tempo, a Brisbane based search engine optimization and marketing firm that specializes in helping small businesses get found on the Internet.

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Small business marketing is not like taking a family vacation.

Did anybody take a family vacation this summer? Do you have children of your own, or do you remember what it was like when you were a kid taking a trip somewhere?

I can still remember the family vacations as a youngster growing up. Our famous treks across America in the family station wagon or the rented RV, when the station wagon became impractical. Now with my own family we’ve taken some similar but generally smaller scale trips.

It seems like one of the most asked questions from a child - “Are we there yet?” Or the other favorite is, “How much longer?” Even families that fly to their vacation destination I’m sure can relate.

What does this have to do with marketing?

I think sometimes (maybe many times) service business owners can become like that child in regards to their marketing. Are we there yet? How much longer?

You work on a web site, or a brochure, or go to networking events and send out letters. Then you wonder when you’re going to start getting results. When does the fun start? You know, the fun — when prospects start calling and others refer and send business your way.

And much like the family vacation, continual asking of are we there yet or how much longer often leads to unplanned stops or detours. You stop to work on other things because there is so much to do and it’s sometimes hard to see how this marketing is going to work.

Marketing shouldn’t start and stop.

Most people say they understand, even if their actions say differently, that marketing is an ongoing activity. Marketing isn’t like a vacation where you have a final destination and then you stop traveling because you’re there.

Unfortunately, many small businesses get frustrated or burned out when they work on their marketing. They want to know, “how long this is going to take”. Are we there yet?

And far too many times, they abandon their marketing “campaign” because it wasn’t getting them results and taking them where they wanted to go. But even worse than that, many times the “are we there yet” mentality didn’t even let them finish planning or put the idea into action.

Eventually they start planning, or maybe just take off on, another marketing trip. Once again, they start wondering how much longer it will be. Are we there yet?

Marketing needs to be an ongoing, lifelong kind of journey for your business. It takes regular and consistent effort to keep your pipeline full of good, high-quality leads and to keep moving your prospects forward until they become paying clients. That means continuously marketing even when you have clients you’re busy working with.

Keep Moving On.

The question “are we there yet?” needs to become “how do we keep going?” Yes, you do need to monitor results so you can assess how well things are working to get you where you want to go. When your measurements show you that something is working, keep doing it. In fact, do more of it.

But you can also keep striving to reach new heights as well. How can you continuously improve even the things that are working to get even better, more consistent results?

If you continue to ask the question, “Are we there yet?” you might just stall out on your journey. You see, eventually you’ll discover some marketing strategies that will start to attract attention and generate the response you’ve been hoping for. It might seem like in fact, “you are there” and so you put the marketing on cruise control.

How to keep moving forward.

When you find yourself asking this most asked question, consider any or all of the following ideas to keep you continuously moving forward.

Study up on marketing. There is no shortage of resources out there. You need to find them and begin consuming them. There are lots of books available on the subject. Look for the ones that offer proven, hands-on strategies and tactics. Remember, one or two good ideas now and then could make a significant difference to your business.

Form or join a “think tank” or mastermind group. Find a group of people who care just as much about your success as you do, just as you’ll care about their success. This is not a group of friends who will simply stroke your ego. Look for an honest group who will ask the tough questions and demand accountability from each other while supporting each others’ efforts.

Attend talks and workshops. If you go and participate fully, you’ll often get just as much from the other participants as you will from the session itself.

Get hands-on assistance. Working with a coach or marketing consultant who can help you focus, set goals, prioritize, create action plans and help hold you accountable could be an invaluable experience for your business.

Support from outside resources like this can help you shift from a mindset of “are we there yet” to a mindset of “how can we keep going.” They’ll help you continue to see possibilities beyond where things currently stand in your business.

(c) - Kevin Dervin, KPD Marketing

About the Author:

Kevin Dervin is focused on helping small businesses that are ready to grow, but struggle with how to consistently attract more clients. Visit http://www.proven-small-business-marketing-solutions.com for more great marketing information you can put to use in growing your business today.

Find Kevin’s Kansas City based KPD Marketing practice at http://www.ABCDgrowth.com and subscribe to his free ezine called ABCD Grow.

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