I would like to start this post by apologizing for not posting in more than a month.  Now, that I've got that out the way I would like to say to anyone that is trying to get into the Internet Marketing niche, "You are destined for failure".  Below, you will find my opinions as to why you are destined to fail:

1. 93.7 million competitors which means the niche is saturated
2. The people on the top have the niche locked you can't beat them
3. All the products that you purchase that tell you how to get ahead don't give you all the information that you need
4. etc...

Help me add to this list!

I guess that is a loaded question.  Your business can be failing for many reasons:

• Did you start a business doing something that you have a passion for
• Are you constantly researching and trying to make improvements to your business
• Are you marketing effectively (not all marketing is effective marketing)
• Do you have an online presence
• Does your website look professional
• Are you concentrating all your efforts on affiliate marketing (you shouldn't be)
• Do you have your own product
• etc...

Answer these questions and you will get closer to an answer to your question.

Optimizing a website for search engines requires a lot of consistent effort. Many internet marketers expect immediate success in ranking high on search engines, and they soon realize that this is not possible.

The other day while browsing the internet I happened across a website offering a guaranteed business loan.  Though a little apprehensive at first I filled out the form and received a call a couple days later.  The lady on the other end of the phone explained that I had been approved for a loan in the amount of $5,000.  She also went on to explain the reason why the loan amount was so low (my credit score).  I didn't even recall giving them my social but because I needed the money I kept listening.

Shortly, after my conversation I received a fax with a contract requesting that I fill it out and fax it in with my loan downpayment of $787.50.  The contract was well formatted and written by a lawyer from what I could tell.

Upon, finishing the fax I was told that I would need to wire my money and I would get the information for the wire transfer after I got to the transfer spot.  When I got to the wire transfer place I called back and was told where to wire my money CANADA!  The money was wired and I never received one penny of the money that I was supposed to.

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion. 

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories. 

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.  

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps. 

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one: 

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifsearch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1 

Or if you want professional help try the following sites: 

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission 

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html 

Don’t use the automatic submission services. Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies: 

Search Engines

Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista

Google, HotBot 

Excite/Webcrawler

Directories

AOL Search Inktomi

Lycos Open Directory

MSN, Yahoo!

LookSmart Snap 

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories: 

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm 

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm    

Why should I exchange links with other companies?  Exchanging links helps increase your search engine rankings especially if you are exchanging with a company that already has a high rank.  Your search engine rankings should be of great importance to you if you wish to drive traffic to your site(s).  There are other ways to drive traffic to your site but one of the best is having other high ranking sites linking to yours.

How do I start exchanging links or getting back links to my site?  There are a number of ways to exchange links or get back links to your site:

• You can write articles
• Blog
• Contact other site owners
• Pay to place your link/ad
• Join a banner exchange
• etc...

Regardless, of the method you choose if you wish to be successful you must choose.  Getting natural traffic from your site through the search engines is by far the best traffic you can get and exchanging links aids in getting this natural traffic.

If you want to be successful at affiliate marketing these are the minimum requirements.

Use Your Own Website

This is by far the most important requirement to your being successful at affiliate marketing.  However, it is not good enough to have a website you need to have a professional looking website.

Offer Incentives

You must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting.

Link Popularity

Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking and you will be able to make it big at affiliate marketing.

The promise of earning profits without really doing much of anything has enticed a lot of people towards affiliate marketing.  But does affiliate marketing really work this way?

As an affiliate, all that is required of you is to simply place the merchant's ad on your website.  Then after that, you virtually do nothing but wait for anyone to click on the merchant's ad and later collect your profits.  Easy, right?  Well, not quite.  Many affiliates earn almost nothing from their affiliate programs simply because they do nothing.  Remember that affiliate marketing is but another form of marketing, and you'll definitely need to market your merchant's product for you to earn money.

Successful affiliates in any affiliate program simply don't sit there and wait for money to come.  Why?  Because there is no money in simply sitting and waiting.  If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing and if you want to continually grow your affiliate checks, you've got to do something.  Think of ways on how to promote your merchant's business and products better.  Think of ways on how to induce other people to click on the link or ad provided to you by your merchant.  Think of ways on how to make your affiliate sales increase!

Promoting an online business in most cases involves sending emails to a list of people.  Bulk email can be detrimental to your business if handled incorrectly.  Once a single email from your company is labeled as SPAM, it may cause your entire company’s email addresses to be blocked by the email service providers such as AOL, YAHOO and MSN. Moreover, your site can be blocked, too, by the search engines, and worst, it may be kicked off your hosting service provider.

Getting rid of SPAM emails and sites is what most ISPs, hosts and search engines want. These people that they consider spammers cause annoyance to their customers and a huge waste of their bandwidth. That is why they do take action once they get a sufficient number of complaining customers.

Given this information, it is best to think twice before sending email advertisements to several people. You may be able to buy email addresses from companies claiming that people opted-in to receive your messages and promise a huge conversion rate. But better think again. These companies may just be fooling you to make money.

Thus, it might be best to think of other ways to send advertisements or promote your products. It can still be possible with the concept of bulk email marketing. The only difference is, instead of sending the email advertisements to unknown people, send it to your existing customer base.

I was browsing the internet today and ran across this new site that is in pre-release now called Bubonik.  They are claiming their site is converting at 50%.  The premise behind the site is free advertising, and who among us couldn't use some free advertising.  Check it out and tell me what you think.

http://notionsinc.com/ntirBubonik