Mitch Hedberg was an odd comedian. Why? He lacked everything that a good comedian needs. He had absolutely no stage confidence whatsoever. One of the first things they teach you as a stand up comic is to look your audience in the eye. He couldn’t do that. He was so self conscious of himself that he could never look his audience in the eye.

You could see by watching him that he was a nervous wreck. He stumbled over his words, would end sentences on the dumbest notes, and was so drugged up that is was amazing that he was able to do anything at all. He couldn’t stand still for one second. The guy was a total basket case.

But guess what?

He was absolutely hilarious. I was laughing so hard I cried. He was one of the funniest comics I had ever seen.

Logic tells us that with all the things he did wrong, he should NOT have been funny at all. They should have booed him off the stage. But they didn’t. Why? They didn’t because he made them laugh. And that is all that matters in the final analysis.

You’re probably asking me right now, “Steve, what’s this got to do with Internet marketing? I mean I know you’re trying to get enough info for 100 volumes but isn’t this carrying things a little too far?”

Maybe, but it also has EVERYTHING to do with Internet marketing and I will explain why.

Many of us who enter the world of Internet marketing feel that we have to be perfect in everything we do. We think we have to learn SEO and website design and how to write sales copy and how to write articles and on and on.

Let me ask you a question. Do you think that every single Internet marketer out there who is successful knows how to do everything? Trust me, there are Internet marketers out there who don’t even know how to spell SEO let alone do it. Writing articles? Some marketers can just about write a thank you note. What separates these people from the ones who can’t do these things and let it stop them is that the successful people find somebody else to do these things for them. In other words, they outsource. Outsourcing is going to be a subject of future articles, so don’t worry, we’ll get to just how to get the most out of outsourcing.

The point is, just because you are not perfect at something, doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful at it. By finding out what your strengths are and focusing on them and then taking your weaknesses and giving those tasks to others to do, you can be just as successful as any marketer online.

Targeted Traffic

Clever internet marketers have long used a variety of ways to herd targeted traffic to their web pages, such as: pay-per-click campaigns, email marketing, search engine optimization, and ezine advertising.

However, there is a simple, effective method that many marketers have missed — submitting brief, 400+ word articles, so that they appear all over the internet.

Linking Readers Back To Your Website

The time and effort you spend on these mini-articles is a shrewd investment. Here are a few of the ways widespread publication of your articles pays off:

Every article you submit contains a link back to your website. Every link helps your website gain link popularity, one of the factors in your search engine ranking.

If your article’s content matches the content of the web page you’ve linked it to, the search engines will regard this as a relevant link. Relevant links to your website are valued even higher by the search engines.

And ultimately, the higher your site is ranked, the more traffic you will get.

People Want Information

It helps to keep in mind that people who use the search engines are looking for information. If they happen upon one of your articles and find it interesting and useful, they will be likely to click on the link to your website to continue their research.

The more places your articles appears, the more people will find and read them, and the more traffic that will be funneled to your website.

What Makes An Effective Article?

How do you create one of these articles? Simple. Your article should be around 400-800 words long and contain just enough information to:

(a) offer the reader some useful facts,
(b) motivate the reader to click on the link to your website for more information, and
(c) attract the attention of an ezine editor who may republish your article.

A good article might contain 1 or 2 tips extracted from an information product you are selling on your website. You could also use paraphrased information from a web page you want the reader to visit. Also effective is a review of a product you would like the reader to purchase. The review would contain a link pointing to your affiliate page through a link tracker, or to a page on your own website where you offer more details.

Get A Ghostwriter

No time or inclination to write your own articles? Pay a ghostwriter to write them for you. Simply visit websites like Elance where you can post a description of the articles you want written, and writers will contact you.

When your article is done, you’ll want to submit it to as many places as possible, including:

Article Directories. They will run a quick content check, then publish your article. Once posted to one of these directories, it will likely be republished all over the internet. Many publishers are routinely on the lookout for quality articles. You simply allow them the rights to re-use your article and in exchange they leave intact the link back to your website contained in the bio at the bottom of your article. You just gained another link without lifting a finger.

Ezine Editors. You’ll get lots of well-targeted traffic by submitting your articles to popular ezines that are related to your niche website. Ezines are always in need of new, good quality content. Once your article is published in an ezine, you will get lots of publicity in return. Getting your articles in ezines read by hundreds, or even thousands of people is an excellent way to quickly increase traffic to your website.

Your Own Article Directory. Many ezine publishers and webmasters don’t realize that article directories even exist. Once they read one of your articles from a directory, they will visit your website, which could prominently display a link to your own article directory. The link should make clear the fact that your content is free for use in any website or ezine. “Free Content For Your Ezine” should appear in a link that is prominent on your directory website.

Keep in mind: this is a huge win-win-win process for all involved.

Authors get free publicity and links back to their website(s)
Publishers get free information for their website(s)
Readers get free quality information for their research and buying needs.

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.

If you want to generate more leads and naturally more sales, you need to start in small scale. The truth is that it can be easy to get high traffic in faster than you think, but the trick here is to maintain the high traffic rather than letting it slip away as the time goes by. So, instead of short-term traffic, we must aim for the long term traffic as well.

Imagine that on the day you submitted an article to EzineArticles.com, you might get a few traffic from there but if you can keep them interested to your site, they are sure to be back to get more information. Or else, the traffic will drop back to where you have began and your effort and time will be wasted.

Press release is powerful enough to send more traffic to your site but then again, only during the time you submit your press release that you will get more traffic and after that the leads will fade away. If you are using social media such as MySpace and YouTube, you might get more traffic if you have a large community of friends but it takes a long time for people to know more about your business.

So, you see, it can take years to achieve success in generating more leads and more sales to your site. Now, the smart network marketers will find as many ways as possible to leverage their efforts while waiting to use the others as a stepping stone.

An example would be when someone wants to create a YouTube video and post it on YouTube so that people can view it. It will takes a long time to get enough people to watch the video and generate the traffic that you want. Instead, you should not just post the video on YouTube and leave it. You should submit the video link to sites such as Digg.com or Delicious.com so that more people know about the video and view the video so that more traffic will be coming to your way.

If possible, try and stir up ‘controversy’ for your Youtube video. What happens when you do this is that people will start discussing about your video, this will create curiosity among other new viewers and everyone will to find out about your video. They will click on your link and visit your site.

Since you have gone a long way, you might as well continue to post the video on other social media site such as MySpace and Facebook. This will allow more people to watch the video and learn more about your business and increase the chances of getting more sales.

Do you know that YouTube records the number of view for each videos posted on the site. This will roughly lets you know how many people have viewed your video so why not target the ‘view count’ to get a higher ranking in YouTube. The more views you have, the more popular you will be. It will be featured as related videos when someone is watching a similar video as yours. This way, they might click on it and redirects to your video and you gain one more view and one more potential customer.

For those who find your video interesting will embed the video in their blogs and blog about it so you get free backlinks from their blogs. Your video will soon be ranked as relevant material in search engine as many people have blogs and link back to your video. It is simply as easy as ABC and all starts with one simple video.

However, you need to make sure to do this continuously in order to make sure you achieve success in your business and earn more profits. At the same time, you want it to be long term as well right? With consistency and persistency, you can make it.

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 internet business means you’ll frequently be reassessing your opportunities and pursuing 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.

There are those who would think that the mentor wouldn’t need to be told what to do. Believe it or not, just because somebody has a lot of knowledge about something doesn’t mean that they are capable of being a mentor to another person. Mentoring is really a form of teaching and believe it or not, not every person is cut out to be a teacher. Therefore, it is important that both sides know what will be expected of them, otherwise, the relationship has the potential to become a real disaster.

For the mentor, it is important that he or she understand the skill level of the person they are mentoring. The reason that this is important is because there are certain things, terms, concepts and what-have-you that may be second nature to you but is totally foreign to the person you are mentoring. Not everybody knows what an autoresponder is. So don’t take anything for granted. Get as good an idea as you can of the skill level of the person you are mentoring.

After you have assessed the skill level of your student, the next thing to do is to work up a lesson plan, actually several. You’ll start with wherever you need to start. If they have no basic knowledge, then that’s at the beginning. If they have a basic knowledge of Internet marketing terms and know what an autoresponder is and what SEO means, then you can get into the meat of the instruction a little quicker.

To make a set of lesson plans, find out where the student wants to start. Get his or her interests. If they don’t have a clue, then take the bull by the horns and decide on a starting point. Granted, there are many ways to make money online, so pick one to start with that’s simple for the student to follow so that they don’t get discouraged quickly. If you start them off with something complicated, like trying to create a Butterfly Marketing site and campaign, they will be hopelessly lost.

Make sure the lessons follow a logical sequence. If your student emails you with question, no matter how stupid you may think they are, answer the question as professionally as possible.

Keep track of your student’s progress. If you see that they are progressing nicely, then stick with them. If however, you see that they are not holding out their end of the bargain, and you’ve politely pointed out that they are not doing the work that is expected of them, then you need to cut ties. Some people simply either can’t be trained or don’t have the ability to market online.

For the person being mentored, their role is the simple one. Do everything that your mentor tells you to do. If he gives you an assignment, make sure it’s done on time. He is putting in his time to help you. So if you are not going to carry your weight, don’t expect him to spend any further time with you.

Mentoring can be a very rewarding experience for both parties, but it is also a two way street. Unless both parties hold up their ends, the mentoring process will not bring the desired results.

So why don’t we start with that one because it is one of my favorites. So many people ask this question. Just from reading these articles that I have put together, you can see that there are a number of ways to make a living online. So asking the question “How can I make money online?” only leaves the person trying to answer frustrated and annoyed.

A better question would be, “I am interested in music, how can I use my interest to make money with it online?” Now granted, there are still quite a number of answers to this question, but at least by asking this particular question, you have narrowed down the number of answers that you are going to get.

Here’s another question that drives me up the wall. “How can I get more traffic to my site?”

Again, there are many ways to get traffic on the Internet. Instead of asking an open ended question like that, how about giving a little more detail telling us what you’ve done so far? Maybe ask something like “Are traffic exchanges any good for getting traffic to my site?” This gives us a little less to work with and will give you better answers. Now, obviously you will have to do a little research just to figure out that using traffic exchanges is one way of getting traffic. Jumping into a forum or sending somebody an email with the question, “How can I get more traffic to my site?” is only going to get responses like “Well, what have you done so far?” You’d be surprised how many people write back, “Well. I haven’t started doing anything yet. I was just wondering what to do.” In other words, they want to be spoon fed and don’t want to do any preliminary work.

I am not saying these things with the intention of scolding anyone. I am only trying to point out that if you ask wide open ended questions that either will get you no concrete answers or won’t get any answers at all because they are so vague, you’re not going to get the help that you’re looking for. But, if you ask pinpoint questions that people can narrow in on, you have a much better chance of getting a response that will be easy for the person you’re asking to answer and provide you with the information that you need to make an informed decision based on that answer.

So, here is my golden rule of thumb. After you ask your question, ask it to yourself and see if it’s a question that you could see having a very specific answer. If it doesn’t, then it’s probably a very bad question to ask.

There are two things you have to consider for your 2010 headlines. The first is the legal ramifications of your headlines (which could be costly) and the second is the consumer effectiveness of them when it comes to converting traffic into sales. Now for a minute I want you to clear your head of the Internet Marketing niche.

I know you’re used to “make a million dollars in 24 hours while you sleep” tag lines, but that’s not going to sit well with the FTC committees who investigate fraud complaints. Chances are, you won’t have to worry about those anymore.

Let’s think about other niche markets. You still have to consider FTC regulations for your headlines. You can’t claim a product will help you lose 20 pounds in two weeks unless it’s a typical result for everyone who buys your product.

In any niche, you want to be careful that you don’t make outrageous claims in your headlines that aren’t going to hold true for most of the people buying your product or using your service.

Now let’s look at consumer-friendly headlines. I think between you and I, most people know the difference between too good to be true promises and realistic ones. But even in the Internet Marketing niche, there are tons of people (you might even be guilty of this yourself), of hoping too much and trusting in a headline when you know better.

For 2010, try to practice conveying benefits to your intended audience without being outrageous. You may have to tone down your claims from losing an exact number of pounds to simply losing weight or staving off hunger or getting healthier.

When it comes to the promotion of tangible items, headlines that will work in 2010 will be a year, according to marketing experts, that focuses on energy efficiency and loyalty to items being made in the USA.

Continue practicing AIDA in your headline creations – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – and in the entire sales copy that you produce. But don’t violate FTC regulations and try to steer your consumer to above-the-board products and services that won’t result in deep disappointment.

There are a lot of tasks you have to learn in this industry and it can get overwhelming trying to decide which to focus on and which to ignore. You need to know how to conduct niche and keyword research, how to set up an email marketing campaign, how to cash in on social networking.

Video marketing is just one more important component of your online strategy. It’s powerful. But to date, only top marketers who had the money for tools and the technical savvy to master them had been riding this wave of success.

In 2010, every marketer will be searching for video marketing methods that help them dominate in their niche. Because of increased demand, developers have been working on tools that help the average consumer.

Video marketing will help you brand your company in a positive and professional (not to mention cutting edge) slant. It helps you highlight the benefits of your products and services. It increases the stickiness of your site, which is how long your visitors stay on your domain. And it also help you connect to your audience for sales conversions and instructional tutorials.

Some marketers have yet to invest in their copy of Camtasia. Editing video was deemed too hard. But there are free tools like Camtasia Studio that can help you get started and get comfortable before immersing yourself into more complex recordings.

You can even invest in simple point and click technology where you aim, click the button to record and stop, and upload it online via your USB port. You can do this with a Flip Video Camera.

In 2010, there will be more tools dedicated to helping marketers use video marketing as an SEO support system. Video advertising will be one of the increasingly used media formats in the social networking world, too.

Not only will your target audience be seeing a video played automatically on sites like Facebook, but there will be mobile video advertising, too. It’s not too late, but you want to educate yourself ASAP about this form of marketing so you won’t be behind the times when it comes to capturing the attention of your consumer base.

For example, if you were to write an eBook about the grieving process when a loved one dies, you could get away with writing an eBook that pretty much didn’t change from year to year (unless there was some new mind-blowing process someone came out with). Dog training is another similar niche – dogs aren’t changing, so training them pretty much remains consistent over the years.

But if you are in a niche about fashion, Internet marketing, finances, or technology, then you’d better stay abreast of several things – consumer needs, wants and demands and marketplace developments that create selling opportunities for you.

Let’s take finances as an example first. Consumers are going through a disastrous economical crunch right now. They need, want and demand money savers. Your info product could teach a wide variety of things.

When gas prices hit the roof, a ton of eBooks about saving on gas were flooded into the marketplace, but what else happened? Technology developers created tools to help convert water into gas and stretch the gas out. Those who were early on this trend made a lot of money with it.

In 2010, consumers will continue to need cost cutting advice. We’re not out of the recession yet. They’ll also need advice on how to find or keep a job, since unemployment is very high going into the New Year. Work at home topics will be highly sought after for those who want to save on daycare and commuting costs, or those who weren’t able to find a job the traditional way.

Mobile networks will become even more popular in 2010. Cell phones, social networking from your mobile gadget – all are on the horizon of becoming mainstream, where grandma has a Motorola Droid and she’s Tweeting at her grandchildren’s recital. Even your gadgets will have gadgets developed for them. Cell phones are going to have boosters – if you only get 1 bar in a certain area, you can use a gadget that boosts you by 3 more bars.

In the gaming niche, video games will almost make handheld clunky controllers a thing of the past – developers are coming out with games that are controlled more by the movements of your own body.

You’ll need to determine if your own niche has trending possibilities and create a forecast based on some market research that you conduct with keywords and a little investigative spying on what manufacturers or experts are predicting.