Internet Marketing Tools and Tips by Steve Atwal

It seems that the iPhone has become an integral part of my daily life: checking email, texting, making calls. But, I find it has a lot of other useful purposes, specifically for Bloggers and Internet Marketers. Below is a list of my favorite FREE ones:

• TwitterFon: a great free Twitter client for the iPhone. And yes, after only a few months, I now have close to 1000 followers. If you are not using Twitter then you should be.
• WordPress: an iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Facebook: according to their stats, millions of people are using this iPhone app. It works great, but don’t expect it to do everything that the Website does.
• bamAnalytics: this gives you a quick and easy way to view your basic Google Analytics stats for your Websites. If you are not using Google analytics then you should be - it’s free.
• Wikipanion: this app is great for research. Bookmarking is easy, along with in-text search and image saving straight to the iPhone library are also some of the useful features.

If you have an iPhone, or an iPod Touch, then you should get all of these apps. They will help you with using social media, posting to your blogs, and keeping track of how your campaigns are doing.

This is a good list of low cost (apart from Yahoo) PAID directories where you need to submit your Website or Blog if you want to be found by more people online. If you know of other good directories, post a comment here and I will add them to the list.

http://dir.yahoo.com
http://www.bluefind.com
http://www.01webdirectory.com
http://sbd.bcentral.com
http://sbd.bcentral.com
http://www.sunsteam.com
http://www.goguides.org
http://www.biz-directory.org
http://www.allestra.com
http://www.directoryhere.com
http://www.botw.org
http://www.indexunlimited.com
http://www.123world.com
http://www.arielis.com
http://www.incrawler.com
http://www.uncoverthenet.com
http://www.webatlas.org
http://www.cannylink.com
http://www.rlrouse.com
http://www.thisisouryear.com
http://www.allwebdirectory.com
http://www.1st-spot.net
http://www.linkopedia.com
http://www.thisisouryear.com
http://www.aroundtheweb.com
http://www.searchturtle.com
http://www.informationoutpost.com
http://www.ajdee.com
http://www.skaffe.com
http://www.web-beacon.com
http://www.joeant.com
http://www.gimpsy.com
http://www.wowdirectory.com
http://www.allthebizz.com (Free)
http://www.allthewebsites.org (Free)
http://www.businessplexus.com (Free)
http://www.direct-o-ry.com (Free)
http://www.dmoz.org (Free)
http://www.elib.org (Free)
http://www.goguides.org (Free)
http://www.hedir.com (Free)
http://www.jayde.com (Free)
http://www.joeant.com (Free)
http://www.landoflinks.com (Free)
http://www.netzoning.com (Free)
http://www.seekon.com (Free)
http://www.sevenseek.com (Free)
http://www.sezza.com (Free)
http://www.skaffe.com (Free)
http://www.spheri.com (Free)
http://www.smallerbizz.com (Free)
http://www.stormer.net (Free)
http://www.tygo.com/dir Free
http://www.webworldindex.com

Here are some other lists:

http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/submit-url-free-directory.shtml
http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

Check Out These Other Related Articles
10 Quick Ways to Get High on Alexa
Build Your Social Empire with Twitter

First, what is Alexa? What is the Alexa rank? Why should you care? Good questions. Simply put:

• Alexa is a Website ranking site owned by Amazon.com
• Alexa is one measure of how popular your Website is.
• your Website is given a rank, or position, relative to all the other Websites that are visited by people using the Alexa toolbar for Firefox (my favorite) and the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer.
• every time someone, who has the Alexa toolbar installed, visits your Website your Website gets a Brownie point. In this case, we can call it an Alexa point, I guess. Alexa also tracks how many pages that person viewed on your Website. Alexa then produces your average weekly rank and three month rank, and average pages viewed by visitors to your Website, etc. The rank basically tells you how far away your Website is from the coveted #1 spot now occupied by Yahoo.com or Google.ca (they seem to switch places daily). So, if your rank is 26,000,001 then you are 26 million positions away from the #1 spot. You want to be in the top 100,000. That is where you get the glory, and Alexa actually starts showing more traffic details about your Website at that point. There is even a report of the top 100,000 sites. You might get an offer from someone to buy your Website or advertisers might pay you more for better exposure to their ads on your website. Lots of benefits if you get into the top 100,000.
• most Alexa toolbar users are techies, i.e. people who know how to install add-ons to Firefox, Internet Explorer, and want such information as that provided by Alexa. For this reason, many argue that the Alexa rank is biased and not representative of the true popularity of your Website. Nevertheless, it is one such measure and it is used by a lot of people. So, get over it!
• some affiliate companies like ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews use the Alexa rank to determine your payout.

So, how do you get high on Alexa? To impress everyone, and start making some good affiliate income with partners like ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews you need to increase your Alexa rank. So, how do you do it? Here are some good, and some sneaky (blackhat?) ways to do it.
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You may not be aware of this nice little tool to help manage your Adwords campaign for your Website and products. This free software from Google has some nifty features in version 7.0.0. Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, is the following release notes for this version and includes such brand spanking new features as:

First page bid estimates: AdWords Editor now uses first page bid estimates for your keywords. Minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used.

Keyword Quality Score: The Keywords tab displays the Quality Score for your keywords.

Keyword Opportunities locale: Tailor your keyword suggestions to a particular language and location by changing your Keyword Opportunities locale.

Campaign targeting in the data view: You can view your targeting settings in the new ‘Language’ and ‘Location’ columns on the Campaigns tab. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser.

Send feedback to Google: You can help improve AdWords Editor by enabling usage tracking in your AdWords Editor settings (Tools menu > Settings).

Other updates

• The ‘Volume’ column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool now shows absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.
• The Keyword Opportunities tool isn’t available for draft accounts.

Full details at http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

By the way, if you use Adsense then you can now use YouTube videos too. Take a look at the one below.

If you want to make money online, your first goal will be to find a niche market that will be profitable and return the most money for your efforts. To be most effective, you need to target a specific niche, and attract the right users and audience for your Website. For example, if your interest is weddings, that is too broad a topic. Instead, pick a more focused niche such as: wedding toasts, wedding speeches, wedding dresses, etc.

Does your niche idea have a lot of competition? How do you tell? Just go to Google, and do a search on your keywords, e.g. wedding dresses. Are there a lot of ads on the right side of the Google search results? If so, then you have a lot of competition, so make sure you use the right keywords to attract people to your Website. If there are only a few ads when you search for your niche idea then you will probably make more money as this niche may not have been exploited yet.

Next, see if there are affiliate products available to sell for this niche market. You can do this by visiting the ClickBank marketplace and performing a search using your niche market keywords. Those will be the products you will likely want to sell on your niche market Website. You want to make sure there are enough products to sell or you will not be able to monetize your Website as well.

Do the search engines send enough traffic for this niche market? Head on over to the Overture keywords tool and find out. There should be at least 15,000 searches for this niche market.

So, here is my list of the 20 ways to find a profitable niche market.
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