There are two kinds of marketing (at least as far as most of us are concerned): Active and Passive.

Active marketing would include eZine advertising, opt-in marketing, PR, offline advertising, banner ads and the like. Basically, active marketing brings you visitors for as long as you “push” it.

Passive marketing would include any form of marketing that continues to provide traffic once it is “set up” without any real action on your part.

The best form of “passive” marketing is getting listed well on search engines. In fact, you want to be one of the top five listing for your best keywords.

Why is this so great? Think about it: Someone who is looking for your product or service sits down at their computer, types in the best keywords for your product and then *BOOM* up pops your site! What could be better than that?

BUT THERE ARE SOME COMMON MYTHS ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES…

MYTH ONE…There are HUNDREDS of Search Engines.

The truth is that 90+% of searches are performed on just a handful of engines–and most of those on the top 5.

MYTH TWO…All You Need to do is SUBMIT

While you must submit your site, just submitting will not guarantee you the top position you need.

MYTH THREE…META TAGS are the key

At one time, this was true. Then things got complicated. The people running the search engines realized that web sites were stuffing unrelated keywords into their meta tags to get more traffic. So, they all came up with various ways to look not only at the META tags, but also the actual content of the page.

MYTH FOUR…Yahoo is a search engine

Yahoo is a DIRECTORY. Yahoo’s listings (except as I will let you know below) are set based on a real person looking at your site and deciding where it should be listed.

MYTH FIVE…It is a WASTE OF TIME to Position on Search Engines

Search engines are a great way to get targeted traffic to your site. Those who choose wisely will find it a great revenue source for years to come.

OK, so how are YOU going to get GOOD POSITION for your site on search engines? Here are some keys…

1. Pick the right product

Use this tool:
http://all-in-one-business.com/wt.html

To check out the competition and traffic for keywords on any product you want to promote. Once you get your results, you can easily tell whether or not you have a shot at a good listing and traffic for that site. If the traffic is very low or the competition is very high, you are probably better off to focus your marketing on more “active” means.

2. Build Optimized “Doorway” pages

Your MAIN PAGE, as much as possible, needs to be targeted to your most highly targeted and high traffic keywords. In addition to that you need to put up a number of pages that act as “doorways” to your main page–pages that will score well with a particular search engine that will “lead” people to your main sales page.

These doorway pages might be informative articles, product reviews, whatever, but they are designed to get people to your site.

3. Submit According to the Rules

Each search engine has different methods for submission. This is an important step, and you need to make sure that you follow their guidelines–you don’t want to put all the time and effort into optimizing pages just to have them automatically ignored because you failed to follow the rules.

Many search engines are now charging a fee to have your site “evaluated for listing”. Understand, this doesn’t mean they WILL list your site, it just means they will look at it.

Here is what you need to know: If you know that you will get a good listing and traffic from keywords on that search engine, go ahead and pay the fee. Even Yahoo’s $200 fee is small if it brings you 50,000 targeted visitors in a year.

AND SPEAKING OF YAHOO!: Yahoo recently made a change that you may not have heard of–they are showing Google listings right along with their directory listings. The only difference is the Yahoo listings have a little “Y” next to them. How does this help you? If you can rank well with Google (for free) you AUTOMATICALLY will rank well with Yahoo.

4. Check On Your Listings and Positions Often

You need to monitor your listings. High traffic keywords are very competitive and there will be people wanting to “replace” you in the cyber version of “King of the Hill”.

If you have the right product, you can create a flood of FREE visitors with a good search engine strategy. Take the time to do it right, and you could make thousands of dollars each month.

Kevin Bidwell is owner of
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293

Kevin just finished a complete report on building a passive
income. Grab your copy here:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293&e=/pi