Internet Marketing with Mike Gillis

This free strategy to building an opt-in list has been around for awhile now and has allowed some people to create massive lists and profits along the way.

There are new jv giveaway sites being added all the time and you can easily setup your own giveaway site using a software called Giveaway Manager 2 which is one of the most popular software products for setup a giveaway site.

You can be a contributor of these giveaway sites for free and you can giveaway any product that you have rights to, a product that you can brand or even better a product that you own. It’s important to make sure the product isn’t crap, add something of value (something that you would consider selling)

Here are some recent JV Giveaways that are running or will be starting shortly (this is a good time to sign up and add your gift)

• School Days Giveaway
• Impact Action Giveaway
• JV Quarterly
• Free Ebook Giveaway
• The Newbie Giveaway
• Learn The Internet
• September Gifts Giveaway

And even if for some odd reason you aren’t interested in building your list and send more traffic to your sites, you can sign up as a member and download the free gifts that interest you.

Here is a short video showing how to use Yahoo Answers for niche research, to increase traffic to your site and increase your authority.

Having a Google account allows you access to many free (and some paid) services that get greatly improve your business as well as make things easier for you. In order to setup a Google account and get access to all of Google’s applications and services, you need to sign up for a Gmail account (which is free)
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup

Once you have signed up for a gmail account, login and goto the Google home page, at the top right click on “My Acccount”. On your account page it will show you any Google products you have already setup which usually includes: gmail, talk, web history. Below that is a short list of some products to try out and a link at the bottom for “More”. Click the “more” link to get a full list of Google’s products that you can get setup.

Some of the big or most useful products that I have personally used and have also heard lots of positive results from include:

• Google Alerts – Get updates on a specific keyword or phrase for a specific time frame
• Blogger – Google’s blog platform
• Google Calendar – Schedule dates and quickly add events
• Google Docs – Free web-based word processor and spreadsheet
• Google Groups – Easy way to find other people that are interested and discussing in the same topic
• Google Picasa - Software that makes it easy to view, organize, edit and share photos on your PC
• Google Reader – Constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content.
• Google Notebook – Browse, clip, and organize info from the web in one spot be easily accessible
• Google Sites – Easily create web pages and share info on a free website or group wiki.
• Google Video & YouTube – Watch or upload videos and share across the web

Plus many more, you can also check out Google Labs for more products their working on or have been released from beta. Some other more popular products from Google are Google Adsense and Google Adwords.

Take a look around and see how you can take advantage of Google’s products in order to improve your business.

Many people use sites such as tinyurl.com or other url shortening sites when they are promoting affiliate products or recommended programs or services. (I have been guilty of this too) But you can increase your web presence using your own domain name and even get it ranked in the search engines.

Have you ever received an email with a link such as:
http://mikegillis.com/recommends
http://mikegillis.com/recommended
http://mikegillis.com/likes

I’m sure by now you have seen many other marketers doing this as well.

I have recently found some of my recommended links getting ranked in the top 10 of Google using this strategy. I’m going to briefly go over how I go about doing this.

First of all, I’m going to assume you already have your own domain name. Now you will want to create a folder called recommends, recommended, likes, or whatever you prefer. For each product or service that you recommend you will include in a sub folder.

Example: http://mikegillis.com/recommends/InternetMarketingTools (this is one of my older sites) Make sure to keep your folder name in all lower case letters and no spaces. The capitals in the example above is using anchor text in order to make each word separate and easier to read.

You can name the sub folder whatever you want, think about the keywords for the product your recommending and try to optimize for it. Inside of that folder you want to include an index.htm file, this file will be temporary until we create our cloaked link.

I use the Link Cloaker by GLH Software, all you need to do is: enter in the title of the page, I usually use the same title that’s on the main page for that product. Then insert your affiliate link and name the file something related to the product so you can find it easily. After filling out those 3 boxes, download it to your computer.

Next you will need to use cpanel or a ftp program to upload the file to your server where your created the index.htm file, delete the temporary index.htm file and rename your cloaked link to index.htm, now you should be able to go to the sub folder and see the product page with your affiliate link embedded in the page.

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/product

You have the option to include a blank html page in your recommends folder or leave it blank so if someone wants to check out all your recommended files, they can. This is how I prefer to do it, as it may end up making me more commissions.

See here for more recommendations