Your comments were very welcome and I’m sending everyone who did comment their free copy of my shopping cart script. I’ve just finished tidying up a couple of little things on it and I’m waiting for the source code to be encoded (should be done today/tomorrow) then I’ll send it out to everyone.

I’ve got something pretty special planned for my next ‘real’ blog post. Well, I think it’s special and I hope you will too, so keep an eye out for that announcement on Tuesday 9th March. Genuine value of the freebie is well over $444 in the next 12 months – but I don’t want to give too much away today.

What I will say is that the freebies will go to the first action takers and I’m limiting it to the first 5 who follow the directions I’ll give next week – I can’t afford to let anymore than that have it for free!

No, it’s not a bonus to something else, it’s completely free.

To make it fair for people in different timezones (I hate it when a webinar starts at 3 a.m my time – don’t you?) I will also keep back another 2 freebies. Best 2 comments will also get the freebie. My decision as to which are best will be final!

So you have 2 ways to get your gift: comment fast, or make a great comment.

Shameless bribe? Yes, it is!

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2. Work Motivation
3. Mike Filsaime Just Told Me Off

PLR is one of the easiest ways to get good content for your websites and blogs because, essentially, you’re sharing the cost of having it written with other buyers.

I’ve had an American MD write 8 of the articles in the pack, although you can’t use his name for contractual reasons. These are solid, well written, informative articles that you can use on your blog or website, to create a report, in your autoresponder sequences – almost anywhere, in fact.

And at just $17 it’s a lot cheaper than having them written yourself. I know because I’ve just spent $262.22 on having them written!

If you’ve ever had a bad experience with PLR I’d urge you to look at www.sublime-products.com/articles/products/plr-cholesterol-articles/ because you will be pleasantly surprised at how well the articles are written.

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2. Does Duplicate Content Get You Banned?
3. PLR Cholesterol Articles

So I was intrigued today to get a promo email about something Mike Filsaime is doing with Butterfly Marketing 2.0. He’s actually giving away 5,000 copies of his home study course and the scripts – if you’re quick enough. I’ve registered on the notification list and I’ll be there when it’s launched to see if I can catch one of the free copies. I know the power of the script and as an internet marketing tool it’s powerful!

It’s not a completely unconditional offer though. You also have to pay about $30 for shipping – which seems perfectly reasonable as this is a physical product – and there is a continuity element for his newsletter, but it’s clear on his website and the video that there is a continuity aspect.

Personally I don’t mind the continuity element, if it’s clear and up front, as it is here. A while back there was a lot of heated debate back and forth when Mike did a forced continuity. The argument over whether it was a fair marketing model raged for a while, without ever being settled one way or the other. My own view is that the extremely clear continuity element on this offer is perfectly fair. After all, you can always unsubsribe later if you don’t like the newsletter.

The Butterfly Marketing script 2.0 has a lot of features in it. If you’d like your chance to get a copy let me point you to Mike’s pre-launch page. It’s a direct link – I’m not one of his affiliates I’m now using an affiliate link. I’ve just had an invite to JV with Mike Filsaime on this so I’ve spent a lot of time having a really good look at his offer.

I was happy to recommend it before, but now I know how much is in there it’s even better than I realized. BUT by 25th March you’ll probably have missed your chance. I’m offering a bonus to anyone who goes via that link and you’ll be able to read about that bonus on my next post.

But for the quick movers it will save you a chunk of change ($1,997) and then some. And it will give you a platform for managing your entire internet marketing empire.

Have a look here. And after you’ve confirmed your email address be sure to watch the video with Jordan Hall. It’s an inspiring story of a young guy who’s taken action and really done well.

There are some interesting lessons in that little video, if you pay careful attention. Mike Filsaime picked up on points that Jordan glossed over. I’d actually recommend you watch the video a 2 or 3 times, to get the most from it. Jordan Hall made about $40,000 in one week one week!!) using the power of Butterfly Marketing and he now makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The free launch of the 5,000 copies takes place March 24th, 2009. Chances are the copies will be snapped up pretty quickly, so if you’re interested at all then go sign up now. If you don’t, it could be an expensive mistake.

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1. Butterfly Marketing Campaign
2. Butterfly Marketing Meltdown
3. Butterfly Marketing Manuscript

It’s a relatively simple technique and in my first month I made a few hundred dollars. By increasing the number of sites I expected to make even more the following month. What happened turned out to be very different from what I expected.

I made virtually no sales. I’d calculated that I should have made many hundreds, possibly into the thousands. The amount of money I made was about $60.

Ok, these sites are set it and forget it sites. You don’t need to keep going back after they’re made, which is always an attractive proposition because passive income like that is easy to multiply over time. That’s where my first mistake came in. I did set them and forget them. I didn’t check them as I know now that I should have done.

Traffic has been going down – along with my search engine results positions – and since this was a new technique I was testing I was disappointed. Maybe the technique doesn’t work longer term? I should have known better and trusted my instincts.

What’s happened is that someone has hacked those sites. They diverted any search engine bot traffic to a page of links of their own choosing. That made my sites look like a real spammer’s paradise. It’s no wonder they’ve gone from first page of Google (I had position 3 for many of them!) to completely off the map. Here’s the thing though. When I checked the sites in a browser they looked fine. It was only the search engines who got the spammy page that had been put on my sites. Of course the search engines are the very ones I’m relying on for organic traffic, so going from #3 page 1 to invisibility was guaranteed to cost me money and lose me traffic.

It’s fixed now and I know what to check for. That’s one mistake I shan’t make again, but in the meantime it’s cost me the affiliate sales I should have made plus the cost of the domains that are now effectively trashed because they’re off the chart as far as Google are concerned.

I should have been getting about 50-60 unique visitors a day on each of those sites. I’ve been getting 1. Even with 1 visitor I made about $30 so far this month. Just by the law of averages if I’d have 50 times the visitor count there’s a fair chance I’d have made over $1,000 this month. It’s been an expensive lesson to learn, but I’ve learned it. I hope you can learn it without the need to suffer it.

Just because a site is said to be set it and forget it, that does not mean you should forget it! Check it regularly, look for foreign files that you didn’t upload. Changed your passwords regularly and don’t use the same one on all your sites (I never use the same passwords and my sites still got hacked – I have my own theory as to why, but let’s say I’ve cancelled that hosting plan).

If you find a decent niche and start making some money on it, keep an eye open for any changes. Even a sudden spike in traffic can be a problem because it might indicate someone is spamming – that can happen if you have an affiliate program on the site. I learned that lesson the hard way too, when I got shut down because someone decided to spam a great offer I was making…

Summary: keep an eye on your sites. They’re your lifeblood and their value can be destroyed by other people. Don’t let them put their hand in your pocket and rob your family of what you’ve worked for.

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I recently bought the exclusive rights to a music package from Ginny Culp.

Ginny is the audio queen: she creates music and sound effects and she creates a lot of great voice audio products, so I didn’t hesitate to ask her – with a touch of pleading – if I could buy the exclusive rights to one of her creation packages.

Fortunately for me she said yes.

Video and audio on the web are changing the way we do business. A lot of people find it much more convenient to listen to information rather than read it. If you couple that with a good video presentation it can be a real winner.

But imagine a bare voice coming to your from the speakers on your machine. I’m afraid these days it’s often not enough. We’re used to the spectacular production values of TV and DVD. That’s why I’ve bought most of what Ginny has produced and have acquired the exclusive rights to Orchestral Impact.

Music, good music, lifts any message and can create an emotional connection with your visitor.

If you get chance today pay attention to how music is used in films. Even when a character is talking there is often

an underlying musical theme playing. It sets an emotional tone. If you turn the sound down you’ll notice how flat and lifeless the whole thing usually seems. It’s not because you can’t hear the dialog, it’s the lack of music.

What would your own products sound like if you gave them a musical lift? Could you turn your ebook report into a spoken audio version, complete with a subtle musical background? Any idea how much that could add to the selling price of your report? Just think how many people like to listen to their daily news on an iPod, or in the car. The same could be true of your latest report.

Let’s be honest though, it probably wouldn’t be very interesting to hear someone just drone on for 30 minutes, would it? Without some kind of background track and audio punctuation it could just be a big snooze fest. Add some suitable audio and you can keep your audience alert, interested and informed.

And there’s no better way to get an audience to give you that wonderful word-of-mouth advertising than by giving them exactly what they want.

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2. 2CO Free Account
3. Free Adsense Sites

I thought I’d do a quick update of the results of my affiliate marketing business post from a couple of weeks ago.

Right now I’ve earned $189.76 USD in just over 5 weeks. I’ve only got 3 sites up and running and producing revenue at the moment, although I have a larger number of sites actually completed. Of the 3 sites only 1 of them has been running for the full 5 weeks. The other 2 are about 2 weeks old (actually just over 2 weeks).

So that’s not a clear indication of what each site will produce, but what it does tell me is that the technique works. Those sites are sitting there producing revenue and I haven’t touched them since creating them. The sites I do now I can usually do within 90 minutes so it’s really not much work at all.

If we took a simple view and said I had 30 sites similar to my existing ones, I’d expect to be seeing close to $2,000 dollars in that time period. Not too shabby- apart from this one thing:

I’ve learned more about how to do this and I’m better at it now than I was just a few weeks ago. I think I can get better results than I have with those first sites. I’ll have proof of that over the next month or so.

So keep an eye open for a more detailed analysis of the results later.

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2. Work ON your business, not IN it.
3. Marketing Lessons from Julia Roberts

When you’ve written a great article with a killer headline there are a few things left to do to get the most benefit.

Arguably the most important part of your article – or certainly the second most important part after the headline – is your signature, or resource box. You want to get people to your site. That’s kind of the whole point of your article, for most people.

To make sure your resource box gets read you have to make it interesting. Offering something extra that your reader wants is one way of doing that. It could be more information, a free report, an e-course. As long as it’s something that naturally follows on from your article it’s likely to make them curious.

So offer them something that makes them want to visit your site immediately.

Don’t make it hard work for them. I’d recommend you keep the resource box between 3 and 6 lines. And make them count. In general a lot of blurb about yourself is less interesting to your reader than it is to you. I don’t mean to be rude, but most people don’t care too much if you have a special interest in lace-making, they just care how they can solve their own problem! So give them what’s important to them.

Example?

Learn how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; visit…..

I don’t actually know how you can do that, but if I read an article that promised to tell me how to do it I’d certainly be interested. Which passenger wouldn’t? You could include a little bit of relevant bio if it’s done right, but don’t waste their time with unnecessary detail.

Another example?

Airline pilot of 25 years shows how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; read how at…..

That’s relevant bio information. Can I show an example that maybe isn’t so good?

John Noname is a respected author with over 20 years of experience. He writes on a variety of topics, including airline travel. Sign up to his newsletter at…

Sorry, but that doesn’t offer me enough to be bothered clicking through. What’s the benefit to me? I get to be on his newsletter? That’s his benefit, not mine.

My own early articles in the self-improvement field didn’t do very well on clickthrough, largely because my resource box was too much like the example shown! I know from personal experience that nobody really cares about my 20+ years’ experience in the self-help and self-improvement field.

As soon as I switched to telling people about the benefits they can receive, results changed. I don’t even mention my name now – nobody seems to care what I’m called. If my name were Tony Robbins then I might make a feature of it, but for most of us who aren’t that famous it probably doesn’t hurt to leave it out. Certainly, you don’t need to make it a big feature.

One other thing you can do, if you are submitting your article to several different sites, is to write a different resource box for each site. Knowing which type of resource box works for your particular niche is a good way of maximizing your returns, but you can only do that if you test different resource boxes. You might even want to have them point to a different landing page, so you get absolute figures.

Naturally, when you find out which type of resource box works best you use it more often. Your clickthrough rates could shoot through the roof if you test, test, test. Don’t forget that your keyword research will tell you the types of ‘anchor text’ you should be using in your resource box, so you should be able to come up with several different resource boxes if you do your research.

To access the password protected posts in this series and receive 3 free gifts sign up to my newsletter on the top right of the screen.

Related posts:

1. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 10
2. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 9
3. Tips for Article Marketing Success – Part 2

Well, Robert Plank has a blog that I enjoy reading and I often drop by, make a comment and think nothing of it.

A few days ago, 23rd July to be exact, I left a comment about Robert’s latest question. He’s wondering whether to ditch Clickbank since they’ve given him a hard time, apparently. There doesn’t seem to be much of a reason why they’ve done that and he’s, quite rightly, very annoyed about it.

He’s considering using PayDotCom and I made an opening remark about it before making some other suggestions.  Seems that Mike Filsaime didn’t like my comments and he told me off in a comment he posted on the same blog entry.

Now, everyone has the right to an opinion and the fact his is different to mine is no problem. But here’s the thing: if you’re a big marketer with thousands of new customers joining you every day, do you really need to be sarcastic to one of your customers if you don’t agree with him?

What do you think? How would you feel if I were sarcastic to you because I don’t agree with your point of view?

It’s an over-reaction on his part, it seems to me, because if I’m wrong in what I said he can simply point out the facts as he sees them. Which he did. But doesn’t it seem a bit overly defensive, or just plain rude and aggressive, to be personally sarcastic? That’s certainly how his comments came across to me.

Anyway, whether he was right in what he said, or he was rude with no good cause, it doesn’t touch the fact that I see complaints about Clickbank and PayDotCom. And right now I don’t see a huge difference between them. I certainly earn money from both of them so I have no intention of abandoning either one any time soon.

But I do wonder why any very successful marketer would need to go straight to sarcasm when they could, instead, do a wonderful job of putting their case just by being very professional.

I’ve asked Mike that in the original blog post. I’m looking forward to seeing his reply because I really love getting my commissions earned via PayDotCom every month – and I stick up for them when I see some of the complaints that people make!

Have any big time marketers attacked you personally? What about small-time marketers? I’d love to hear your comments.

EDIT: please read the comments to this post because I think I took Mike’s comments more to heart than I should have done. I suppose when a very big name appears to have a go it can be a bit disconcerting.

It also shows why you should think before you post anything. My reply to Mike Filsaime is permanently out there for all to see. In hindsight I don’t believe my reply was the best example of how I think and what I believe. As such I don’t believe it’s the best advert for me. Too late to do much about that reply now, beyond being brutally open here.

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How would you like some of the best copywriters around to help you out? I certainly would.

That’s why I was delighted to find this blog post over on John Ritskowitz’s blog today. It has a single great tip and even though it could potentially help my competition, I’m really pleased to share it here with you.

Take a look at his blog entry here.

Frankly, this is something that I had never thought of. It’s brilliant in its simplicity.

I’m not a salesman – I’m more of an educator, but my brother is a very good face to face salesman so I’m going to ask him to go through this exercise for me for a couple of my products to see what we come up with.

Sometimes you can pick up good ideas for nothing. When you do, I think it’s a good idea to jump on them and test them out as fast as you can. Why don’t you try the technique John talks about in his blog on your next salespage?

Oh, one other thing: his comments on that post are already shaping up to offer even more advice so I’d definitely recommend taking a look.

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If you work at home, as so many people do these days, whether it’s internet marketing, or answering telephone calls for a call center, it can be very difficult to maintain a positive attitude and stay motivated. Especially if you work alone.

Not everyone is totally suited to working completely alone and instant messenger systems are no substitute for real human contact.

So here are 7 tips that help you keep motivated. And if you keep motivated it should be easier to make more money in your home business.

1. Remember to allow yourself time for a little fun during the day. There’s an old saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Your job is not your life and you shouldn’t treat it as such. Don’t feel guilty about taking a little time for yourself – you deserve it.
2. Set SMART goals. You might have heard of SMART before. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. What you want to do is give yourself a little time pressure, but not too much. Allowing yourself forever to finish something means you’ll never finish it, but allowing an hour for something that will take 3 weeks will just stress you out.
3. Try to mix with positive people. The last thing you want is anyone negative around you. We all know people like that and we all know how we feel after spending time with them. Spend time wisely and choose your company even more wisely.
4. Do what you love. Really. It makes a big difference. I’ve been privileged in my life to do what I love since I started work, apart from just a couple of years. I can tell you when you hate your job it’s hard to stay motivated! You’re more likely to make more money if you keep at what you’re doing, so if you’re doing what you love you’re more likely to keep at it.
5. Look to make some kind of difference in the lives of those around you. One of my greatest joys, many years ago, was telling my wife that she no longer had to work because I was earning enough money for her to stay at home. Our son was born about 11 months later (there might be a connection there). It doesn’t have to be family, of course, you could always be nice to a stranger in the street, or help someone you meet online. Sometimes it can be just a kind word at the right time.
6. Do something every day to keep a pma – positive mental attitude. It might be listening to inspiring music, talking kindly to yourself, listening to positive self-talk, or just smelling the roses from time to time. Just do something.
7. Don’t forget to look after your body. If you’re ill you’re not going to feel motivated, or positive and that will impact on the whole of your life, not just your work. Take the time to get out into the fresh air, eat wholesome foods and play sometimes. And don’t overlook the physical benefits of laughter!

You’ll hit some obstacles from time to time. You know that. But it’s possible to keep going right over them, if you keep your motivation high.

I have a Windows PC software application that maintains motivation while you’re working, by displaying positive messages on screen – briefly – while you work. I use it and I find it’s much easier to keep working for longer. As a little incentive to any readers I’ll send you a free copy if you add your own tip for keeping motivated into the comments.

For Mac users, I’m sorry. It doesn’t work on Macs.

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For example, on your home page you could have the latest entries appearing – or some of the oldest if you wanted to breathe a bit of new life into posts that you wrote some time ago.

Of course if you install your blog directly into the root of your domain this doesn’t really apply to you because your posts will show up there anyway.

But if you have your blog elsewhere it’s a great way to freshen up your home page every time you make a new post. I’ve just added that to my own home page and it works a treat. I had to do a little reading up on it to find out how to do it and found this page quite helpful: corvidworks.com

I actually had to modify the example code a little because it didn’t work for me. I used <?php endif; ?>
rather than <?php endwhile; ?>

You can see the effect on my home page. I’ve set the display to show 3 excerpts with links to the full post. If you wanted you could put the full post, but it seems more sensible to me to give a taste of the post and then let the user decide whether to read more.

It’s not limited to the home page. You can display blog entries on any of the pages on your site, so if you focus on a particular topic you can point your visitors to other, pertinent information.

And last, but not least, there’s a definite SEO benefit to having regular fresh content on your home page. If you use the excerpt facility well and pull in a couple or three of your latest posts your page(s) will always look interesting

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If you don’t already know that link building is an important part of building traffic to your website, it’s time to start.

Because arguably nothing is more important. Yes, good content is definitely important, but the best content in the world is of no use if you get no visitors.

Blogs are a great way to get some traffic because right now Google just loves blogs. It’s true. They love blogs.

So all you need to do is make a blog and some posts, right?

Well, not all, no. You should still concentrate on link building. And one way you can do that is by making posts that refer to other blogs posts – that’s beneficial to your readers. But just as importantly you can get a valuable link back to your own blog, if trackbacks are enabled on the other blog.

However, finding blog  posts that are trackback friendly is time consuming. And that means you can only do so much of it. You’re limited in how much link building you can do by the fact it takes a lot of time and effort. What if you could do 5 times as much in the same time?

Do you think your results might be 5 times better? I do.

Have a look at this blog post – it’s about a new piece of software that’s going to be available pretty soon.

I have to say I’m waiting for the launch day because I’ll be waiting with credit card in hand ready to bag a copy. The video that shows the application in use is better than any sales page, in my opinion. To paraphrase the great line in “Jerry Maguire”, you had me at Hello!

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Seems a bit odd when you consider how many sites syndicate content these days, from the BBC and CNN to ma and pa sites, everyone’s getting their content out there as much as possible.

Ezine articles wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t hordes of webmasters all wanting to take the duplicate content and publish it!

So, will duplicate content really get you penalized? Who should we ask? There are any number of self-proclaimed experts hanging out a various webmaster and internet marketing forums. Just spend more than a day at any one of them and watch the same discussion take place many times.

We can’t ask them, so who do we ask?

How about Google?

Here’s what I read from Google

The most important things to know about duplicate content are:

• Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

If you’d like to read Google’s full post you can do so here.

So, does this mean it’s safe to just put up any old scraped content then? Well, no not really. You still need good content and their own advice makes it clear that unique content is always likely to do better than duplicate content, so it’s worth the effort to be unique. You just don’t have to spend sleepless nights that you’ll disappear from the search engine if you have some content that also exists elsewhere.

Of course, if your whole site is nothing but scraped content you might still have problems, but that’s a whole other post.

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2. PLR Content
3. Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 10