If you’re interested in promoting a product or service online, you need all the free IM  tools you can get!  Today’s featured tool is HubPages.  Here’s what I like about this self-promotional and monetizing tool:

1. It’s like a free article site except that you don’t have to give anyone the right to re-publish it elsewhere.  While other article directory sites can give you great backlinks, they can get you the duplicate content wrist slap because other sites are promoting your content.
2. It has great SEO potential with the ability to put your RSS feeds, your links and tagged photos plus get you indexed in search engines for your targeted key phrases.
3. You can earn money through ad sharing from HubPages via Google Adsense and other publishers as well as put various affiliate links in the pages.
4. HubPages has a social aspect as well with the community that posts there which can help you get more exposure for your hub!

The more you have in your marketing arsenal, the better.  Tools like these can help you get noticed, get subscribers and make sales!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Internet marketing has some stiff competition and if you study your competition, you can get ahead. The great thing about online competition is that there are almost no secrets, really.

Sure, your competition might not be 100% transparent but there are a lot of things you can research and learn in order to improve your chances of increasing how much money you’re making on a constant basis. Here’s what you do:

Pick Your Top Three Competitors

Look at your targeted keywords and pick the top three competitors who seem to be getting the market you want. Study everything about them! Read all their website content, put Google Alerts out there about them and about your niche in general so you’ll learn about their businesses constantly (set a daily alert instead of on demand if you’re worried about inbox inundation), dissect their landing pages and sales letters to see what they’re doing and opt in to their mailing lists so you can see exactly what they’re up to!

Emulate But Don’t Copy

Emulating your mentors isn’t the same as copying them. You aren’t looking to plagiarize or rip off your competition; you’re gaining market intelligence and seeing what makes them so profitable.  Learning about the competition’s techniques and strategies will help you and if you gather information about more than one, you’ll be well on your way to evolving and learning on a constant basis!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Time management is an essential skill for entrepreneurs who find themselves being pulled in many directions at once. Besides using a task management timer as we recently suggested here at SeanSEO.com, there are other things you can do as well in order to increase your productivity. Problogger talks about how batch processing helps him and that’s something you can do with your various tasks to stay on target and reach your goals.

Here are a few time management tips:

• Emailing is something most people do throughout the day but instead of checking email every minute or two and giving it a chance to take you away from the task you’re working on, turn off your auto-notification sound or alert and check it hourly instead. When you’re in the middle of a task, don’t be tempted to check it in the middle.

• Sometimes it’s better to be invisible for a bit! Instant messaging and Skype are great but can be very disruptive. Turn them off or stay invisible other than in short periods of time per day so you aren’t constantly interrupted by those who want to chat you up.

Here’s a big one:

Use Social Networking as a Reward

If you use microblogging tools like Plurk and Twitter, only stop in periodically during the day. Save socializing (even if it’s productive socializing) for after you’ve completed a task to reward yourself. For instance, if you’ve submitted to article directories, go on Twitter and Plurk to buzz your articles after you’ve done them and take that time to spend a few minutes surfing the blogosphere or chatting with your friends.

Having a productive lifestyle does take discipline and you occasionally need to hide from online friends and force yourself to work before you can play.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

How are your time management skills? Are you someone who gets lost in cyberspace sometimes and needs help staying on task? Do you have the equivalent of Internet ADHD? A timer might be in order.  The internet is a vast playground that can detract you from work and as someone who wants to earn an income online, you need to stay on focus.

Beware of Productivity Traps!

If you’re apt to go off to read a blog post or update your MySpace, Facebook or Twitter status and suddenly realise time has slipped away and you’ve been playing in cyberspace for the last hour and a half instead of working, a timer can help you. Set up a little egg timer by your computer and allocate time for tasks.  Here are a few tasks you might choose to do it for:

• Social bookmarking
• Link Building
• Bum Marketing
• Blog comments
• Social networking
• Keyword research
• Chatting

As an entrepreneur you are your own boss and as such, sometimes you need to crack a whip and make yourself get back to work! Feel free to dig through our archives here at www.seanseo.com for a few more minutes before you do so, though

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

There is a lot of information available for free when it comes to making money on the Internet. There is a lot of basic information that you’ll find on blogs and websites and some experienced marketers will even give away a lot of information for free as well. There are also things available for a fee.

When are you ready to go from learning about earning for free to paying for secrets?  The answer is simple.  When you have a thirst for more and can’t find the information for free it might be time to find an internet marketing guru.  Once you’ve started earning some commissions or hit payout with Google Adsense, you might be ready to take your internet marketing career from that of a newbie to the path of becoming a guru.

Never stop reading the free stuff as you’ll find that new information and new angles continuously develop but there may come a time when you decide you’re ready to pay some money for information. Do yourself a favour and spend time researching before you take the plunge!

Reading Product Reviews

Product review sites are all over the Internet.  Some of them offer great information on what’s available. A good product review site will have purchased the products they review and offer valuable positive and negative information as well.

It’s a good guess to assume you’ll find affiliate links on these sites but that doesn’t mean the information isn’t valuable. Take time to look at a few reviews before you make your decision about buying an affiliate marketing e-book or a membership.The reviews should do more than tell you a product is great. They should provide insight about how to use it, what features and benefits it has as well as what type of results the reviewer got.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008