iGoogle is a free way to customise the Google home page to your own liking. Just sign in and you can add news and weather relevant to your location or even horoscopes and YouTube videos.

Google is currently rolling out an upgrade to iGoogle which may save you time in your internet marketing efforts. It is not available in all locations yet so if you can’t see the updates just hold on, they should be in your area soon.

One of the main updates is a ‘canvas’ view for a range of Google gadgets. This includes features like Gmail, Google reader and a host of news and financial information gadgets which can now be viewed in a gallery style format all from one page.

The update also features the inclusion of a left side navigation menu. You can select the gadgets you use to add to the menu and save yourself time looking around for the one you want.

Apparently early users have had some minor problems with the iGoogle updates which seems to be the standard with new software features these days. Give it another month or so and Google will no doubt have ironed out any bugs and glitches.

This free Adwords keyword wrapping tool from Mike’s Marketing Tools is a real time saver. I manage a number of Adwords pay-per-click client accounts and I use this tool on a regular basis.

As you may know, there are 3 main keyword matching options which you can use for your Adwords keywords – broad, phrase and exact. It depends on the individual characteristics of a campaign, but I often start out by using all 3 matching options for each keyword to test how they perform.

Manually adding “ “ for phrase match and [ ] for exact match can take a long time if you have a large keyword list. With this tool you just paste in your list and it automatically gives you a list with broad, phrase and exact matching options.

The tool can also help you clean up a keyword list by removing duplicates, changing text to lower case, removing bid prices and taking out URLs.

Thanks for this tool Mike, you have saved me hours of tedious typing!

If you are trying to earn money online, it is a good bet that at some point you have written articles either to promote your site or to publish as content on your site.

If you have, you will know that it is a very time consuming process. Instant Article Wizard is a great program which could save you many hours of effort.

Original, interesting articles are a very good way to add content to your sites and bring in search engine traffic. You can then monetise this traffic with contextual advertising, like Adsense, or by promoting affiliate products.

Promoting your web site by writing articles and submitting them to online article directories is an effective way of getting good quality back links to your site.

Instant Article Wizard can help you create high quality articles on almost any subject in only a few minutes. You just enter a list of relevant keywords and it will provide you with sub-topics to choose from. It will then research these topics and give you a range of options for an introduction, topics to include and a concluding paragraph.

The article wizard will then put these elements together for you so you can export them into your favourite word processor. Leaving you with a good quality article ready to publish on your site. You can even use it to write articles when you have little or no knowledge of the subject matter.

This program is currently available at a very low price making it great value for money considering the endless number of articles you could produce. Visit the Instant Article Wizard site now and start using the software to create articles today!

Keyword Elite is another great piece of software from Brad Callen, it makes finding profitable keyword phrases much easier than any free keyword tool I have used.

Keyword Elite has many different features which make it an invaluable piece of software for anyone who wants to make money online.

There are 5 projects which make up Keyword Elite:

Project 1 - Analyze Pay Per Click Listings

This project allows you to find relevant Pay Per Click (PPC) keywords with good levels of traffic which few competitors are using. Less competitors means a low cost per click, making it easier for you to turn a healthy profit.

Project 2 - Create A Keyword List

You can quickly and easily build large keyword lists including a wide range of keyword phrases that are linked to your market. Once you have created your list there are a number of different sorting options which make it very simple to find exactly what you need.

Project 3 - Select A Keyword List

Once you have built your keyword list you can use it within Keyword Elite to build groups for your Adwords campaign or to build content pages for Adsense sites.

Project 4 - Analyze Keyword Competition

This one is very useful for anyone who wants to get free search traffic to their site. It allows you to analyse the top competitors for any keyword to see how difficult it would be for your site to out rank them in the search engine results. This project is great for finding areas in your market where there is little competition, you can draw in lots of search engine traffic this way.

Project 5 - Spy on Adwords Competition

A must for any PPC marketer. Using this project you can spy on competitors in your market, work out which keywords are making them money and then enter the market with a list of profitable keywords. If you have ever set up a new Adwords campaign and tested keywords you will realise that this could save you a fortune.

The software comes with free lifetime upgrades included in the price so you will be able to use Keyword Elite for years to come without having to pay extra.

Not only does Keyword Elite have 5 projects which are each good enough to be an individual piece of software, it also comes with some outstanding bonuses. These include a Fool-Proof Keyword Elite Success Blueprint, Access to the Keyword Elite Member’s Only Forum and a Comprehensive Training Facility.

This package is such great value that I highly recommend Keyword Elite to anyone who wants to earn money online, grab your copy today!

It has recently emerged from an insider, that the voting process on social media sites may not be as democratic as we thought. The man in question is a well established social media poster and his Digg posts carry a lot of weight. He admitted to taking payments from a number of companies in order to write and promote posts in an attempt to get them on the front page of Digg.

I am not sure where I stand on this one. I know you can pay an SEO company to carry out a social media campaign for your website, but this is just a type of public relations exercise and everyone who wants to can use social bookmarking sites to promote their own site. Manipulating the social media sites in order to get more exposure is maybe pushing this a little too far.

People read the top stories on Digg and the other sites because they think hundreds of other people have voted for them and found them interesting. If too much of this type of underhand activity occurs, visitors will start to see that the top posts are not that interesting and stop visiting the site.

Digg may try and prevent this type of activity in future. Perhaps they should start a paid advertising section like some of the other social media sites have.

SEO Elite Features

Let me run you through how I use Project 1 in SEO Elite. I find the keyword I want to optimise a site for and search for it in Google. I then note the top 3 commercial websites and run back link reports for each in SEO Elite.

Once the report is finished it will show you the number of links a site has, the exact URL of each link, the PageRank (PR) of the link page, the anchor text of the link page and it tells you if the link is a nofollow. You can sort this information by column, I usually sort them by PR so the most valuable links are at the top. It is also useful to sort the SEO Elite results by anchor text, you can then see how many links contain the exact text you are optimising for.

This gives me a blueprint of how those 3 sites are ranking at the top of Google and a plan of action to get my site to the top. I work through the link reports on each site to see if I can get links to my site from these locations.

Unfortunately you will not be able to get every link. Some will be paid links or adverts and others will be on authority sites in articles or news stories. If you work through all 3 though you should be able to get some really powerful links pointing to your site.

Another way to use SEO Elite is to analyse the back link profile for the site you are working on. Your site may have lots of links but how many of them use the exact anchor text for the keyword you are optimising. Sort the report by anchor text to find out, you may find it is not as many as you expected.

You can also check the distribution of inbound links with regard to IP addresses. Google does not like it when a large number of your links come from the same IP address, it looks as if you are trying to game the system. This can often be a problem if you have run of site links on a site with many pages. If you find that too many of your links come from the same IP address (more than 10% could be a problem), you either need to remove some of those links or get enough links from other sources to dilute the concentration.

There are 7 other projects in SEO Elite including verifying existing link partners, finding authority websites in your niche, article submitter software and other site analysis tools. For more details on these other projects check out the SEO Elite product details.

In my opinion this is the best value SEO software available to buy at present. Visit the SEO Elite site today to download your copy and start dominating your competition.

Google Chrome Features

It has one box for searches and entering URLs, it suggests searches and web site addresses as you type in letters. This is quite a neat idea and may be a real time saver. People may start using this feature too much though, so if your search terms are not in the suggest box you could see a drop in traffic from Chrome users.

It has a page where it displays thumbnails of your most visited sites which you can use instead of relying on traditional bookmarks. It also has a feature where you can add bookmarks instantly to the tool bar to save time.

Internet Explorer is by far the market leader with Firefox currently in second place. Personally I use IE most of the time, I find it to be the fastest and clearest browser. I do use Firefox  for certain SEO activities though, the myriad of plugins make it a useful option.

Is Chrome going to become the web browser of choice? Well this version of Chrome is a Beta which means there are probably still a few bugs to iron out, so I expect it will be some time before it is used by many surfers.

However they have a good spot to advertise it, there is currently a download below the search box on the Google home page. If people take to this new way of viewing the web it could come to dominate the web browser market in the future.

You can write a Knol, which is basically an information article, on almost any subject. You can also add links in the text pointing to external websites, including your own. This means that when people read the Knol they may visit your site to find out more on the subject.

It looks like these links, as with most other social content sites, are not going to do much to boost search engine rankings. However, the Knol itself can rank well in Google which can mean lots of referral traffic for a high search keyword phrase.

After some spot checking of a few Knols it seems that (surprisingly) Google likes Knols! Around 25% of the main keyword phrases from the Knols we checked had a top 10 ranking for that phrase on Google.

It is too early to say for sure but this could be THE social content site to use if you want to get high rankings on Google (and who doesn’t). Why not try sharing your own knowledge by writing a Knol based on the topic of your blog or website. You could be rewarded with a healthy stream of referral traffic.

The idea with this online marketing method is that you build up a list of emails from people interested in a certain topic. Once you have the email list you send out regular newsletters, product reviews, tips or other useful information. In these emails you endorse a product and use your affiliate link, every time someone on your list buys from one of your emails you make a commission on the sale.

This is one of the most consistently successful online marketing methods. I put off trying this method for ages as it seemed to complicated to set up. Once you get started though it is not too difficult, you just need to use the best strategy and the correct tools.

Building Your List

The best way to build a list is to offer something of value to people in exchange for their email addresses. Giving away a free guide or piece of software relevant to the topic of your site is probably the best option but a newsletter can work too. If you include this offer above the fold on your website or blog with a clear call to action you will see the best results.

You can use pay-per-click adverts or other forms of advertising to send visitors to your sign up page. This can speed up the process significantly but be careful, you should not spend too much here until you start to make sales and generate income.

Marketing To Your List

The only viable way to manage and market to your list is by using an auto responder. This software will automatically send out emails to those who sign up to your list. You can program them to send out multiple emails, perhaps once a week, with different information and product recommendations.

There are some free auto responders available but I use Aweber and would strongly recommend that you do the same. Your list is potentially very valuable, you do not want to lose out on sales. The cost of the service is relatively low, currently $19 per month for the first 500 subscribers. This includes access to many other marketing tools as well as the very reliable auto responder.

Treat Your List With Care

It is important to treat the people on your list with care, they can easily unsubscribe. If you send out well-written emails with useful content, your subscribers may start looking forward to receiving them. These people could stay on your list for years and buy numerous products thorough your affiliate links.

If you send out weak emails with little or no value you will lose subscribers and miss out on sales. It is just that simple. A good option is to sign up to your own email list, this way you will read each mail as your subscribers do. If you read any emails that you think are too sales focussed or uninteresting you should either re-write them or delete them from your auto responder series.

There is no strict rule as to how often you can email your list, really it depends on how good your emails are. If you have some great information you could send them out every day, but no more than twice a week is probably safer, at least to begin with.

At the beginning of your auto responder series you may want to send out a few mails with no products or affiliate links, just top information. This is a good way of building up trust with your subscribers.

The aim of this section is to highlight the online marketing methods that can actually work and the best way to use each one in order to make a profit.

Contextual Advertising (AdSense)

Contextual advertising is a way of showing adverts online which relate to the context of the page they display on. The idea behind this is that if someone is reading a page about used cars they are much more likely to click on a car advert than on one about say, health insurance. With contextual advertising you get paid per click, so the more relevant the adverts are to the content the higher the click through rate (CTR) and more money goes in your pocket.

The largest contextual advertising network is Google’s AdSense program and you have probably clicked on many AdSense ads without even realising. You can submit your site to Google and if it is accepted they will give you the necessary code to add to your pages to start earning money. Google will accept most sites that have useful and original content.

With AdSense there are many different advert sizes and formats which you can customise to your liking but the best feature is the accuracy. If you have a well optimised page the adverts displayed are usually very close to the theme of the page.

In fact, this is a useful way to test the on-page optimisation of a page. Place AdSense adverts on the page, give it a few hours to settle in and check the adverts displayed. If they are relevant to the content on the page, you know you have a reasonably well optimised page for ranking in the search engines. If the adverts do not match, you need to work on the theme of the page, visit my On-Page Optimisation page for tips on how to optimise a page.

In order to maximise the CTR of the adverts, it is usually best to make the colour scheme blend in with the rest of your site. Also, the best location for AdSense ads is in the main body of the page above the fold. You can still put them in footers or side columns but the CTR will be significantly lower.

As you get paid per click, if you have little or no traffic coming to your site you will not make any real money. The amount you get paid depends on the topic of the advert. Some higher end topics like insurance will pay you over $1 per click, the average seems to be between $0.30 and $0.50 per click but some low end keywords like tattooing will pay just one or to cents per click. CTR’s also vary depending on the format and position of the adverts on a page, 3 – 4 % is probably a good target here if your adverts are placed in with the content.

From these numbers you can see that an average personal website using AdSense with under 100 visitors per day is not going to make you wealthy. You could bring in a few dollars a day though and cover your hosting costs. However, if you have a large site with lots of traffic you can make decent money, especially if it is based on one of the higher paying topics.

A few words of caution before you go and put AdSense adverts all over your website. Consider the type of website you have. If you have an e commerce site you could get paid a few cents to send a visitor away from your site when you would have made a lot more from selling one of your own products.

I worked with a client once who had an online jewellery store and he was using AdSense as a secondary income source. He didn’t realise that the adverts on his site were sending his customers away to buy jewellery from his competitors. We removed the adverts from his site and the following month his revenue increased by 12%, a lot more than his earnings from AdSense!

If you use AdSense be very careful to stick to the terms and conditions laid out by Google. Pay close attention to the number of adverts allowed per page and avoid clicking on your own adverts. This is the quickest way to get banned from using AdSense, don’t panic if it happens once or twice while you are working on your site but never click your ads intentionally. Google can ban you if they are even slightly suspicious of the activity on your account and they can also keep any funds you have built up between payment dates, so be careful.

If you do get banned there are other alternatives to AdSense. The best one I have used is Kontera’s in text advertising. The CTR’s and price per click are nearly as good as AdSense and it is fairly straight forward to add to a website.