As a young boy I looked after him and his sisters – they lived with their mother at my family home and became part of our extended family.

Nobody was expecting anything, his general health was fine. It was all a bit of a shock – he was still a young man – and tragically it follow his mother’s death last year.

He was fine this morning and by the evening he was gone. Who knows how long we have on this planet?

I’ve been thinking for a while of taking a break from internet marketing.  I can’t provide the energy and focus it requires right now and I have the sense that I’m focusing on things that, ultimately, may not be all that important in the bigger scheme of things. It’s important to earn a living, for sure, but it’s important not to be consumed doing so.

The sudden death of my cousin suggests that maybe that’s true. I haven’t seem him or his 2 sisters for a while. I meant to do it when I came back to this country, but all my time seems to be spent in front of a monitor.  I’ve got my priorities wrong in so many ways.

I have a couple of projects that I’ll hand over to somebody to continue with – I’ll pay them to run them for me, but I won’t be investing all my personal time in them. I can’t. Other people can handle them better than I can anyway, even if I still had the drive to see to them personally.

My own health has suffered because I haven’t taken care of myself. It’s so easy to be swallowed up by this exciting game called internet marketing, but sometimes you just have to ask what it’s all for.

So, for those reasons and 100 others too personal to detail, I’m saying ‘see you around’.  I hope each and every one of you gets what you want out of IM and enriches your life and your family’s in the process. Just remember to stop and smell the roses along the way sometimes.

Good luck to you all,

Maybe we’ll meet again online sometime in the future.

Related posts:

1. About

Find out what they’re doing and beat them at their own game. All you need to do is spy on your competitors, learn about their keywords, see what they’re spending and discover the profitable ad campaigns – and all the keywords used in them!

Sounds great, right?

Well, maybe, maybe not, but there is one thing I find very interesting. In my Gmail account today Google themselves put an advert about a keyword spying service. Seems funny to me, when Google are so secretive about everything they do, that they’ll allow an advert to appear on their email service – an advert that promotes using other people’s activities so you can make more money.

Ah, wait. When you do that, Google make more money because you’ll be placing Adwords ads to copy successful campaigns. I wonder if that has something to do with this particular advert being prominently placed inside Gmail?

Click to see larger image

What do you think?

Personally, I don’t have too much trouble with learning from others – it’s what makes the world go round. Outright copying is not so good though. As you can see in the image, I’ve left the URL of the advertised site displayed (not an affiliate link). The service looks good enough. I have no problems with what they’re doing.

What really prompted me to write this post (apart from Google’s ironically placed ad) is a question I got from someone who wanted to know if a particular service would cause their site to fall foul of Google’s terms of service. Google can do what they like with their own websites, but they cannot tell you what to do with yours – there are no terms of service imposed on you just because they’d like you to think there are.

Unless you contract with them for something, they have no right to impose any terms. They don’t own the internet, despite what they’ve managed to make people think to the contrary.

Yes, they can de-index your site if they don’t like it. They can do what they want with their own websites and services. So it pays to be smart if you want good rankings in Google. You have to play the game to win. Google do – that’s why they’re showing an advert inside Gmail for a ‘spying’ service.

Yahoo even agree – here’s a quote on the ‘spy’ service website from one of their heads of SEO: “Best Tool By Far For Anyone.”

So I’d have to say that Google seem to be tacitly agreeing that doing what works…works.

Next time you’re worrying if everything you do meets Google’s ‘approval’, ask yourself this: does an ad that links you to a tool to copy other people’s keywords and ad campaigns really meet the approval of the webmasters whose site campaigns are going to be copied?

In other words, did Google meet the terms of service of those sites? No? How strange. For a company that unilaterally imposes terms of service on the entire internet, it’s not really what you’d expect – is it?

Oh, quick tip: want some top rankings in Google? Just pay them some money and they’ll push your results ahead of everyone else. Take a look at this picture to see what I mean:

Google take money to put adverts in a place where web searchers will see them. But if you do that (with paid links), you may find yourself in trouble. That’s the general understanding most webmasters have.

NOTE: I’m not bashing Google. They help to make a lot of people a lot of money. What I do find objectionable is the implicit assumption that it’s up to Google how we should all behave. It isn’t.

Please let me know what you think about it. Is Google two-faced?

Related posts:

1. Google neglecting your site? Add a blog.
2. Google Site Maps
3. Looking to make money from Adsense?

It looks like someone has sent out a ton of promo emails (can’t tell if they’ve spammed) and offered something for $1 that appears to tell you how to make some money. At least the promo title suggests that.

Now just because it’s $1 doesn’t mean the information is wrong. I haven’t seen it so I have no way of knowing.

What surprises me is the un-realistic expectations of the people who have paid their $1 and now haven’t a clue what they’re supposed to do, even after they’ve been given the information. The most common question seems to be:

Can you help me personally, to understand this?

Leaving aside that they’re asking the wrong helpdesk – it’s not a campaign I’m involved in – we still have a situation where people are expecting to pay a dollar and then receive individual personal attention to explain the material to them. Doesn’t seem very likely, does it, that any marketer could afford to do that for a large number of customers? Not unless there were some much more expensive purchase just waiting to be unleashed on you.

What’s most disturbing is that many beginners expect to have to put no work in. They seem to believe, or hope, that there is a magical way to make money without lifting a finger, or breaking a sweat.  And there is no end of people willing to tell you that idea works – for a price.  Easy money, push-button simple, no work involved, make $12,433.13 by this time tomorrow – yeah, right.

And don’t even get me started on the “only sharing this product to give back to the community” nonsense.

Here’s a truth that every would-be internet marketer should have permanently etched on their forehead: making money online takes planning, discipline and work.

I can hear the sound of bubbles being burst all over the place.  I’m sorry to be so blunt about this, but if you’re one of those people who are looking for the quick-fix easy solution to make some money, you’re statistically likely to be bled dry by tons of offers of easy money.  You’re statistically likely to keep buying stuff, half read it and then take no action.  And you’re statistically likely to make nothing.

There are plenty of good materials out there that can help you succeed online, but not one of them promises you the earth.  And none of them are totally effort free.  You have to do some work to earn some money – yes, it’s really that simple.  Now don’t misunderstand this next part.  It’s not complicated stuff you have to do; it’s fairly straightforward stuff.  But you have to keep doing it, at least until you can afford to pay and train someone else to do it for you.  That means that almost anyone, regardless of education and income level can get started and can make some money online, but only if they take the right action and keep on taking the right action.

What’s the good news?  The good news is that most people are so undisciplined that you probably have much less competition than you think,  You can distinguish yourself from maybe 99.99% of the population just by doing the steps you need to do, on a regular and consistent basis.  Remember the old fable about the tortoise and the hare?  Slow and steady won the race, in the end.

What makes you think internet marketing is that much different?

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1. Get on Talk Radio

Of course I get a lot of spam, as we all do, but I filter better than 90% of it before it hits my email client. I still end up with thousands of emails building up (sales records, receipts, passwords, that kind of thing).

I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and it’s great, but if you have a lot of accounts in it and lots of incoming email, it does slow down. Plus, who wants to keep thousands of emails in front of them all day long? You only need the ones you need and the rest should be filed somewhere neat and orderly.

It occurred to me that many of you might be in the same boat and looking for a nice, simple solution.

There’s a free program called MailStore Home, which addresses the issue of email bloat perfectly. I don’t really know why the creators of the application give the personal use version away for free, because I can’t imagine that many people would upgrade to the Server version for organizations. But I’m glad they do give it away and I find it a tremendously useful resource.

You can archive all your emails, even from several different sources, into MailStore Home, where it’s kept safe in a database for as long as you want. You can also burn archives to disc if they get too big. Best of all is the facility to search through the entire database (reasonably) quickly, searching for any keyword. You might remember that you got an email with Snagit licence codes, as I did when installing Snagit to capture some images for this post – but what if you can’t remember when you got it, or from whom? No problem.

One quick search later, using the keyword ‘snagit’ and MailStore Home had found the relevant emails for me. Previously I’ve made notes of licence numbers, printing off the original purchase email, but MailStore Home is much neater and easier.

You can see the application in the images here.

Main application panel

Search page

Results appear in the left column

Displaying the licence code

You can download a free copy over at Mailstore.com and you’ll find it works with most popular email clients, including Gmail, which is very handy. If you receive a lot of email and want to keep it safe, MailStore Home is a good utitility for doing just that.

Quick tip: create a couple of folders for emails from your favorite marketers. As you archive the emails you’ll have a great library of their campaigns. If you go back from time to time and study what they do and how they do it, you’ll see some regular patterns emerging. If you then study those patterns you’ll see what the marketers do that they don’t tell you about. A lot of marketers keep a few tricks up their sleeves, but in using them they leave a trail that you can follow. That trail is easier to see when you can look back through a particular folder of messages and see how each one leads to the next.

Archiving those folders means you can look back for inspiration at any time. You can even, if you want to, analyze marketing techniques used at different times of year. If big marketers are using a particular technique every summer for example, or at the start of the winter, there’s likely to be a very good reason for it.

All in all, MailStore Home is a handly little tool and available for free.

Related posts:

1. Hot Copy Product Review
2. Do Google obey TOS?
3. Marketing Scams

Both of them are ‘big’ products, with a (normally) high price tag. And for most people they are probably more than you need to get started. But they have both been offered for ‘free’ and I’ve downloaded my copies of both applications. Even if it’s going to be a little while before you’re ready to use them, since they were free you’d have done well to get a copy, ready for the future. Whether you should use them immediately is a different question.

The Butterfly Marketing launch suffered severe server problems (try saying that fast!). The Delavo launch was smoother, but kept getting delayed. Now I have both scripts, what have I done with them?

Well, with BFM I’ve done nothing yet. The whole launch issue thing put me off. It was so problematic it makes me wonder how the software will perform. My instinct is to let the other launch attendees do some site building and see how they get on. If they hit problems, someone will find a solution, which I can benefit from later.

Delavo, however, I’ve installed on a new domain and I’ve added my first product to it. It’s live right now and if you want to have a look – or better still, make a purchase – just visit sublimeproductsmarketing.com. There’s a great set of squeeze templates with audio for sale as the first product – price is pretty good too.

I have to say that the Delavo installation went pretty smoothly. I’ve installed a lot of scripts over the years so I have a lot of experience, but even so, I think it’s a pretty decent install. The power of the basic package is pretty good. It’s not ‘all singing and all dancing’, as I’ll cover later, but it’s a powerful tool for anyone who wants to centralize their marketing operations.

The one thing that some people are already complaining about is the fact that you need to buy a bunch of plugins to get the basic Delavo install up to the full power of Fantasos. A lot of the juicier facilities within Delavo come courtesy of plugins, so you might end up spending a bit of money to upgrade it. Currently that figure is just under $1,000 – if you act fast.

Not everyone will need all the plugins – I certainly don’t, for example. And the basic package is still very capable. It’s also going to be possible to buy individual plugins one at a time. So if I need a facility later, the $97, or whatever they’ll be charging, will be a relatively small price to pay.

In reviewing these packages I can see that they’ve both gone for the ‘do almost everything you can think of’ philosophy. There’s pretty much nothing, one way or another, you can’t do with them. But I’m reminded of what happens to a very large number of Swiss Army Knives: they get left in drawers to go rusty.

What I believe is important for most people, most of the time, is to find a tool that fits and get skilled in using it. Whether that tool is the 7 Dollar Secrets, DL Guard, BFM, or Delavo, it’s really all about what you do with it and not always about how powerful it is. And the simpler tools are often a good way to learn, before progressing to the meatier products.

None of this applies to you if you’re already an experienced marketer, using high end software solutions. But when it comes time to advise a beginner, it’s not always the best thing to recommend what we use ourselves. A beginner may just need something very different.

For me, therefore, I wouldn’t recommend any beginner to jump in with BFM or Delavo. They’d have to learn too much. When many beginners don’t even know what the clipboard is – or even what webhosting means – learning about scripts like those is just too much.

Related posts:

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

So, I did what I’d advised my subscribers to do and I went to the site when I got the early notification. Credit card in hand, I was ready to push whatever purchase button was on there.

Except I couldn’t.

The site broke down within a couple of minutes of opening. In fact it was so bad at one point that Mike Filsaime had to publicly ask his visitors to stop trying to place orders because his technicians couldn’t even login into the server to fix it.

Bit of a public mess. And as you might imagine a lot of people got angry that they had to wait, or that they might not get a copy.

About 6 hours later I got my copy so I’m now good to go. Great. But a lot of people are still feeling annoyed. Personally, I think they should be learning from the whole experience, both the good points and the bad points.

Let me break down what I saw as good and bad:

Good:

• Very effective use of affiliates to generate lots of interest
• Extremely high value offer
• Regular updates as to how it was going
• Prizes for the affiliates that meant even newbies had a shot at a prize
• Very clear disclosure that there would be a continuity element
• Honest admissions that their newsletter wasn’t so good before
• Highly persuasive case study testimonials

Bad:

• Not expecting a lot of people to be ordering at once. Come on! Over 45,000 people pre-registered for early access! Isn’t that a bit of a clue?
• Not adequately testing that their site would cope with high numbers of people ordering at once, as opposed to viewing at once.
• Using what appeared to be poor code, not optimized for transaction speed (at least according to someone even more techie than I am)
• Having no backup server/site/order button ready to go ‘just in case’

Not such a big list of things that went wrong, is it?

I suspect most of us are not going to have 45,000 people chomping at the bit for one of our product launches, but it shows what can go wrong. Now of the items I’ve listed as going wrong, all but the first one should have been solved by the technical guys on Mike’s team. The first one, though, is something any of us could contemplate.

It doesn’t require technical knowledge, just a bit of forethought. The second item on the list should have been done – testing of a web site is extremely important. In Mike’s case he’s got a full team of people who could have helped with that and he’s got programmers who could have created ‘stress’ tests to simulate a worst-case scenario.

At least they kept people informed as best they could on their Ustream video, although it was a little galling to see them sitting there at times, looking like they weren’t even breaking a sweat to get the thing fixed.

I suppose what it translates into for the average marketer is that anyone can get it wrong, but not everyone has the resources to put it right the way Mike has done. Offering to have extra copies of the product made for anyone who missed out costs hard cash.

And don’t expect too much sympathy from a large crowd if you’ve got it wrong. There were people on the Ustream chatrooms who were very aggressive.

For my own part I apologize profusely if you had wasted time waiting for this to work as a result of my recommendation. Sorry.

I hope you managed to get your copy. If not, there’s still a bit of time left since he’s effectively reset the clock and if you order today you should be able to get your copy at Butterfly Marketing.

Related posts:

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

I’ve received various emails from people promoting it. Indeed, I’m promoting it myself, although hopefully without pushing it in your face. I’ve also received emails from someone who is launching a product that’s ‘similar’ to BFM. It’s similar in the sense that it handles product sales, affiliates, memberships – the whole shooting match.

The other product looks good. I intend to get a copy, if I can. I like to collect these things as much to learn from them as to use them and there’s always the chance that one of them will turn out to be the ideal fit for what you want to do. It’s like trying on several jackets to see which fit best and which look good…

The point of this post is to mention a pre-emptive tactic used by the other marketer. He clearly knows he’s up against BFM and he also knows that the whole word and his dog has been emailed about it. So he’s referred to it obliquely and his advertising emails ask his subscribers whether they’d rather buy something that’s a couple of years old (Butterfly Marketing), or something brand new for 2009 (his product).

Quite a provocative question, isn’t it? Which would you rather have? Something old, tired and with a catch, or something brand new with no catch?

That’s a marketing technique that’s as old as the hills. Ask a loaded question that can only be answered one way and guess which answer you’ll get? Everyone is going to prefer something without the catch.

The power of the question is in putting forward two views as if they are given facts. They’re not facts, they’re marketing speak. It’s interesting especially because this marketer is leveraging all the buzz about Butterfly Marketing to plant a little seed of doubt in his readers’ minds. Here’s an alternative way to look at the same ‘facts’:

Would you rather put your entire business in a script that’s brand new and ‘untested’ in the real world, or would you rather use a solid, mature product used by a host of top marketers every day to run their multi-million dollar businesses?

If the question was asked that way, what would be the more likely answer? Hmm, might be different than the other question.

If you take away anything from this post, please take away this: when somebody asks you a question and they’re trying to sell you something, the question is frequently loaded. Not always, but enough to make it important to ask yourself why that particular question is being asked.

Related posts:

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

This campaign, however, is different and I say that as someone who had an online disagreement with Mike Filsaime in the past. He’s going to be giving away an updated copy of his Butterfly Marketing home study course, the updated manual and the 2.0 version of the software. The Butterfly Marketing scripts have been selling for a genuine $1,997 and he’s decided to give the latest version away. There are a couple of conditions, as you might imagine.

1. There are only 5,000 copies – sounds a lot, but there’ll be a lot of interest in this
2. You have to pay for shipping and handling ($30-$40, depends where you live)
3. You have to take out a subscription to his print newsletter
4. You have to be quick enough to get one of the 5,000 slots – there’s a way to do that

The Butterfly Marketing script is a powerful solution to running an internet marketing empire – or just a single site. It’s probably overkill for most people with a simple salespage site, but for anyone who wants to take their online marketing to another level it offers features to make you drool.

When it first came out I couldn’t afford it, so I used cheap solutions. That’s actually how I got started, using the scripts from the $7 Secrets – which cost $7. I still use them for some projects, together with other software such as DL Guard. I’ll admit it – I like collecting software and I like installing stuff. I’m a little bit of a geek when it comes to that.

But $1,997 was way out of my reach back then. Well, on 24th March at 1pm EST, it’s expected that many tens of thousands of people are going to queue to get chance to own a copy of the complete Butterfly Marketing package, genuinely worth $1,997. Mike reckons only 1 in 15 in that queue will get the chance.

I won’t be in that massive queue. I’m getting in ahead of everyone else 1 hour early.

I signed up for the pre-notification list, so I get a head start on the public. I don’t intend to miss out on this because it’s too good a deal to miss. As for the newsletter, although you have to sign up to get the software, you can cancel at any time so there’s no issue there.

There’s a way you can get in early too.

If you’ve come to this post as a result of one of my newsletter emails, you’ll know that I’m making an offer to anyone who signs up through my link and gets a copy of the software. You’ll also know that the offer takes away any technical know-how issues that might make you hesitate to get such a powerful software solution. I’m not repeating the offer here because, frankly, I couldn’t cope if thousands of people take me up on it.

For anyone who wants to learn more about how to get a $1,997 software and home study course for the cost of shipping, click here now.

P.S. When you visit that page and sign up for pre-notification you’ll get an hour head start on everyone else too. And after sign-up you’ll also get to see some case study videos of what other people have achieved with this software. My favorite story is of Jordan Hall, who is a young man – he’s practically a kid – who’s made a lot of money using this software. I urge you to watch his video after you sign up for pre-notification. There are lessons in there for everyone who pays attention.

P.P.S. You should watch this campaign just for the stunning lessons it gives in marketing a product and adding value upon value to make it almost irresistible. If you took the hidden lessons just from this one campaign and added some of them to your own marketing, you’d likely increase your results significantly. I speak as someone who’s had an online argument with Mike Filsaime in the past. This campaign is superbly well executed and I’ll be incorporating some of the lessons I’ve discovered in it, into my own campaigns in future.

Related posts:

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

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.

Related posts:

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

Russell Brunson turned 29 the other day and he’s having an “I’m getting old” giveaway. It’s very time limited – just a couple of days I think -and for some of you, by the time you read this you might have missed your chance to pick up some freebies. So there’s a time pressure here, but is it actually any good?

Well, I’ve had a look. There are 75 pages of products. What I would say is that many of the products have been submitted more than once — that is because some of the products have Master resell rights and giveaway rights and that means that several contributors have added them to the list. In itself, that is not a problem, but it does mean that it takes longer to look through the list to find anything that is worth having.

With giveaway events such as this it’s important to remember that not every item is worth having. I have looked at every single page of products and my personal opinion is that there are maybe 10 or 20 good products in there worth having. One rather disappointing experience was when I signed up for one of the products that was particularly interesting and found that the contributor did what appears to be a bait and switch on me, in other words they did not deliver the expected product, which was a very good product, but instead took me to a rather lame sales page instead. There was no indication that a purchase would be required to claim the free product and having examined the sales page very carefully my personal view of that contributor is that it was a deliberate move. I hope I’m wrong and that in fact it was simply incompetence on their part!

Everyone will have different needs and requirements so I won’t make specific recommendations on which products to look at, but there is one product which is particularly interesting and that is DiscMojo.

If you have any intention of selling physical products in the future, using the Kunaki service, DiscMojo will help you to do so very easily. As you may be aware physical product shipment is beginning to be a big success story and there are ways of automating the process in almost the same way as marketers have traditionally automated their digital download process. DiscMojo script interfaces with Kunaki and automates the transmission of an order to Kunaki for you. That means that as soon as payment has been successfully made or your product, the script will place the order for your customer with the fulfilment house and you don’t have to do anything! I already have this script and I paid real money for it when it first came out. Since it’s available now, for free, even if you’re not sure that you will be doing physical shipment it’s worth getting it now so that you’re ready for the future.

The giveaway was organised by Russell Brunson and you can visit his page here. As you might imagine there is an upsell immediately after you register — I simply ignored it because I wasn’t interested in that particular offering he made.

I think it’s worth having a look through the 75 pages, even though there is, in my personal opinion, a lot of junk in there. There are some PLR products that you can turn into your own product, with a little work, and there is the DiscMojo software which will let you build your own CD and DVD physical product business. If I were you I’d definitely pick that one up because the market is only likely to get bigger for physical products.

Here’s that link again: Russell Brunson’s Giveaway

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Now the title of this post is marketing scams, which is not what that email was. Actually, I’m not for one second suggesting that this particular marketer is perpetrating a scam. They’re not. They have genuine products for sale and a lot of people love their stuff. Many claim to have made a lot of money following their courses. Perhaps a better title would have been Annoying Marketing Emails – that’s how this email made me feel.

But I can’t help feeling that the tone of their emails is directed at the ‘less experienced’ beginner. Here’s an example of their subject line:

Frankly, I’m puzzled Amin…

And here’s part of a line in the email itself:

I’m writing because I’m concerned about you.

That, quite frankly, is so hard to believe. It’s a broadcast email, not a personal letter, so how much genuine concern can there be for me? Especially, as in this case, since there is something being sold on the back end of it. And the concern appears to be because I haven’t ‘registered’ to see if I’m ‘qualified’ to buy their product – so I must have something wrong with me! At least, that’s the implication in my opinion.

I still don’t see your application! Truth is, I find that puzzling.

Really? A marketer with tens of thousands of customers and huge amounts of testing doesn’t appear to have any idea why some people don’t buy from them? To me that’s unlikely, but of course I could be wrong. The person sending the email might have genuinely looked at my details in their database and sat worrying about me. That’s quite touching.

So what’s the point? Well, there are several. Telling people you care about them probably only works when it’s demonstrably true, or they’re very inexperienced, like beginners. Telling inexperienced people that you care about them because they’re making a mistake probably works quite well, given a decent mailing list.

And one of the oldest marketing principles in the world is what’s sometimes called FUD, which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. In other words try to scare your prospect that they’ll suffer if they don’t buy what you have to sell.

Does that really sound like a way to build a long-term relationship with somebody? Doesn’t to me. What do you think?

Do you get emails that are lacking in conviction? I get a ton of them. I hope my mailings never fall into that trap, but if they do please feel free to berate me here!

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1. Butterfly Marketing Manuscript
2. Marketing Waffle
3. Tips for Article Marketing Success – Part 2

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’ve had an experience recently that has made me re-define the whole question of excellent customer service.

A marketer whose products I normally buy sent out a mailer promoting a sale of a product I already bought from him. He also hinted that there was a great product available as an OTO at a stunning price. Naturally I was curious because he didn’t mention what the offer was. The only way to find out was to buy the front-end offer.

His products have always proved worth having. I think I have them all now, so I didn’t need the front-end product again, but it was worth it to me to find out what his OTO was. Turned out it really was a superb offer on a piece of software that can

automate most of your internet marketing, including integration with Kunaki, if you want to offer CD or DVD products.

Unfortunately for me, I had bought the very same product some months before. It’s an unlimited license so I don’t need a second copy. Frankly, for me, it was worth the $7 on the front-end product to find out what the OTO was. In fact I already own and use the OTO software to sell physical CDs that give me access to a whole different marketplace. It works like a dream and quite honestly I just forget it’s there.

Here’s where the re-definition of customer service comes in. I got an email from the marketer a while later. He asked me whether I wanted a refund since I already had a licence to the software. How’s that for good customer service? He pro-actively checked with me to see whether there I had made some mistake and offered to rectify it.

There are 2 things going on here that are important. The first is that his offers are genuine offers so I had no hesitation in buying to find out about that famous OTO. I knew it would be something great and I knew it would be a great price. On both counts I was right.

The second is that  in going the extra mile with me, by contacting me about a possible refund, he’s just virtually guaranteed I’ll continue to buy everything he puts out. I might as well give him the password to my PayPal account and tell him to just charge it whenever he launches a product!

There were several steps employed to gain my custom and – more importantly – my word of mouth advertising.

1. Offer good, solid products
2. Ask a fair price
3. Deliver what you say you will
4. Pique the customer’s interest
5. Make a limited offer genuinely limited. If it’s just a ploy, people see through it and don’t like it. Ever seen those phoney “buy before midnight” messages on those cheesy salespages?

Because he’s given me good value and good products I’m giving my friend something valuable in return – word-of-mouth recommendation. He has a limited time offer on a great Nickel Script, just $7. It’s like the $7 Secrets scripts with a boost and when you’ve bought that you get the chance to buy an incredibly powerful internet marketing script. I’ll tell you now that the offer price is just $20, way below market value.

If anyone buys from my link here I’ll offer free installation of the OTO software on 1 domain. Check out the deal from Frank Haywood now.

, customer service

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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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If you’re involved with online selling, of any kind, one of the things you have to consider is what actually makes your visitors buy.

It’s not always obvious and in many cases it’s not even logical.

An advert for a new car got me thinking about this yesterday. The car looks great and it’s got all the gadgets a gadget freak like me could want. I’m not even looking for a new car, by the way, but the advert still got my attention.

When I next change, I’d like that car.

That was my reaction through 85% of the advert. And then it happened: the deal breaker.

They showed the hi-tec looking dashboard with enough information panels to rival a fighter jet. But the backlighting on the panels was orange.

Orange.

If they offered me that car at half retail I’d still walk away. I couldn’t drive a car with that color information panel. Yeuch!

Sitting thinking about it afterward I thought it was strange that that color alone was enough to make me discount an otherwise excellent car.

Then I realized that there was a big lesson in there for me. The actual trigger that converts my visitors into customers might not be the product value, or the contents, or even proven benefits. It could be anything – even something as simple as the color of the background on my ecover.

I don’t propose to split test 128 different color combos to see which works best, but I do intend to be more aware of the point at which people make a decision not to buy. I know there is software out there that can track where on the page a visitor abandons the page so I’m going to look into using that on my own pages.

The point, of course, isn’t specifically that your ebook background color might lose you sales. It’s that the real trigger for – or against – your sales may not always be the most obvious, or logical factor. If you put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer you might be able to feel what really matters to them.

For someone looking for a weight loss product, for example, what they really want might be to feel invisible so that they ‘fit in’ and don’t stand out from the crowd. If your product focuses on how much people will notice them, they’re not that likely to buy from you. Someone looking to lose weight is doing so for complex reasons, usually.

Surveys are also a good way to find out why your visitors did buy – or didn’t. I know of lots of sites that present a survey if you don’t buy from them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a site that asks why you did buy from them. I’m thinking it would be useful to know exactly why, from people who’ve voted with their wallet.

So if you see a survey on my thank you pages in future, you’ll know exactly why I’m asking you. Won’t you?

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Do you have it?

I ask the question because I had a subscriber unsubscribe today. Most people wouldn’t bother to leave comments when they unsubscribe, but this particular person did and their comments were very interesting.

You see, if someone takes the time to comment when they unsubscribe you can learn something from them, even if it says more about them than it does about your product.

In this case the subscriber had downloaded a free product I offer. It’s a ready made website and you have to configure it with some of your own details, like URL and Adsense ID, before you upload it. That’s the minimum you have to do to get it ready. If you take the time to make a few additional tweaks it’s better for you.

So having had the freebie the subscriber got one of my autoresponder messages offering some software to be used for link cloaking. Handy if you’re going to promote affiliate offers. At that point he decided to unsubscribe and tell me why.

you guys send me a website that is complicated to set up. I think you can take your freebie and ,..

I assume the “and…” part refers to something rude, although that’s not the point. That was message 1.

Here’s message 2.

boring and time consuming, if you help set up and I start making bucks, don’t you think i’ll pay you more?

Interesting statement and question. Let’s examine it.

don’t you think i’ll pay you more?

Hey, it was free on both counts. If you paid anything it would automatically be more than that!

boring and time consuming

It’s called work. You find it boring? Well, nobody is forcing you to do it. Do you really think anyone actually enjoys configuring a site (77 seconds) and then uploading it (129 seconds)?  Geeks and tech heads might love doing it, but most of us don’t live to do tech stuff. It’s a necessary step to making money for most people – at least until you can afford to pay someone to do it for you.

if you help set up and I start making bucks

Now we’re getting to the real meat of the issue. If somebody else (me, in this case) is willing to do all the work for him, for free of course, he’ll be glad to see money start coming in. Well now who wouldn’t?

I mean come on, if there is anyone out there who wants to set up a bricks and mortar operation for me and let me have the profits I’ll gladly give you my name and email, no problem. It’s a no-brainer. Hey, if all you’re offering is a website and some tools to go with it so I can start to make some money I’ll take it – just as long as you do all the work.

Does real life ever work out that way? Does anyone really believe that somebody else is going to do all the work and hand all the profits over to them? Do you believe that?

Of all the tools and products I offer, paid and freebie, you have to do at least something with them. And right there is one of the seemingly most “hidden” secrets of success of all time. You have to take a little action. And keep on taking action.

There may be a complete system out there that requires you just to look at it once and it will start making money. But let’s be sensible about this. What are the odds of that happening, really? You know those gurus who claim that they work 2 hours a day and make a fortune? Well in some cases it’s true. But they don’t often tell you how much work their team is putting in, do they? That work’s usually got to be done by someone for success to come calling.

And here’s the funniest thing of all. In the time it takes to unsubscribe and leave a comment, then dig out the original subscription email and send a separate comment, my ex subscriber could have configured the website and probably had it uploaded too.

How much money will he make sending me those 2 comments? I’m pretty sure he’ll make nothing. How much money could he have made with the website if he’d put the same amount of effort into using it? I don’t know for certain because a lot depends on him thinking about what he’s doing, but I know that similar websites can make a couple of grand a year on autopilot. But only after you’ve put a little bit of work to get them going in the first place.

“boring and time consuming?”

Maybe, but likely to produce more income over the longer term than walking away and doing nothing but complain.

So it’s up to you: you can complain and quit, or you can quit complaining.

Which are you going to do?

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3. Work ON your business, not IN it.

See, here’s the kicker. Life does not give us what we deserve. Life gives us what we go claim. And claiming is a proactive process that we have to engage in every single day.

As the lion says in Wizard of Oz, “ain’t that the truth?”.

What you deserve and what you’re going to get are not linked. You already know that. That’s why you see people who clearly are not deserving, who enjoy all the good things life has to offer. Well, it’s available for you too, if you’re willing to step up to the plate and stake your claim.

Stephen is making the short report freely available so I’ve put the link here. You can download it here.

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It occurred to me that many people may not be aware that most good hosting accounts usually come with some kind of stats package. Used properly, it can give you all kinds of valuable information about how your site is doing, what you might do to improve it and what’s working well.

For anyone wanting to improve their site, or blog, that’s fantastic information.

I’ve created a very short video to show how to get to the stats package if you have CPanel. CPanel is available on so many different hosting packages that there’s a good chance you’ll have it on yours.

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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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Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. And it’s also something that everybody with a website wants more of. It is, in fact, something every website owner needs.

You can read my short series on traffic generation, starting tomorrow. For this series I’m going to offer some valuable information, but I’m not going to make it publicly accessible. It will only be accessible to anyone who is signed up to my list. I’ll send a password out tomorrow so you can access the posts.

There are dozens of ways to get more traffic to your website. Actually, there are probably hundreds, but one of the most popular ways is also free and that’s what I’m going to be concentrating on.

So why not make it publicly available? Well, I did think about that, but I want to offer something just to my existing subscribers. Of course, since the series doesn’t start until tomorrow there is time for new people to become subscribers too.  At the end of the series there may be a surprise or two, but I’m keeping that under wraps for now.

Please note that this free training series is not for experienced marketers already pulling down thousands of dollars a week – I won’t insult your intelligence. It’s really for beginners and people just finding their feet a little bit.

So sign up now – the signup box is just over on the right under my picture – and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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The reason is simple: You’re doing something wrong. Now, I don’t know what it is that you’re doing wrong. You’ll have to find that out for yourself. But I can safely say that you are doing at least one thing wrong.

This was brought home to me today by something totally unrelated to internet marketing. Let me explain.

I’ve been able to swim for about 40 years. I’m not a very good swimmer, but I can swim. Thanks largely to the internet lifestyle I now have a pool at my home and I have the time to use it whenever I want.  Trouble is I don’t really want to use it much because I’m not that good a swimmer.

But today we had guests over so we all took a splash. My brother asked me how to do the breast stroke. I gave him an answer.

“Wrong answer”, came the voice next to me – my wife.  Turns out that the way I swim the breast stroke is wrong, ineffecient and just plain hard work. After a very, very short explanation on the right way I tried it. Now I’ve never been told this before, even after 20 years of marriage and 40 years of swimming. And I never went looking for the answer, either.

Ok, so this isn’t life-changing, but my swimming speed went up about 70%, maybe more, and the ease of swimming definitely improved immediately. I was pretty astonished. For 40 years I’ve been doing it wrong and because I could swim I thought I was doing it right. I hadn’t considered that just being able to do something doesn’t mean you’ve found the best way to do it.

So here’s how it impacts on internet marketing. You learn a technique and you apply it. Does it still work today? Does it need a change? Are you doing it right?

These are questions you can only answer if you bother to ask them in the first place. And once you do ask them you have to commit to acting on the answers. You see nothing stands still. So whatever you’re doing, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, might be less than optimal. At the very least you should ask the question.

If you find that you’re already doing it the best way, keep doing it!

But, if you find there is room for improvement, will you make that improvement and reap the benefits?

Nobody learns something once in this industry and then never has to learn again. Change is a given and I’m afraid the effort of constant learning is the price you must expect to pay to keep up. That effort will reward you many times over.

What process do you take for granted in your internet marketing business?

Will you take a close look at it to see where you can improve?

Me? I’ve spent 4 hours in my pool today (try doing that with a J.O.B.) and I’ve now got sunburn – but that’s another story!

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They spend millions of dollars on promotion and publicity and almost everyone on the planet gets to see some of their output at some point.

As internet marketers, we would do well to study how they market new products, recycle old products (‘Anniversary Edition, Limited Edition…’) and make you feel like you’re part of their loop.

Individual stars appear to do it effortlessly and so many of us feel we know them, just from seeing them on the big screen a few times. Isn’t it true that you have a favorite actor, or actress? Aren’t there some actors you just don’t like – for whatever reason?

I ponder this point in an article I wrote a while back. You can view the entire article over at Ezinearticles if you want to find out the full details of the lesson I draw from the experience.

But here’s a small taster:

Now I happen to love Julia Roberts – she’s a great actress and I always enjoy her films. And let’s be honest, she’s very pretty. So when I saw what looked like her blonde twin I immediately felt that I would enjoy the film.

That’s not actually logical, because I’ve never seen this actress before, but my emotional response was exactly the same as if it had been Julia Roberts. I guess, if you want an explanation, that the part of my brain that recognizes faces kicked in and sent a message to my anticipation center that Julia Roberts was in the house – so to speak.

When the actress spoke she also sounded like Julia Roberts so that made the connection even more. In the end I had a very good time watching the film, it was thoroughly enjoyable and a good time was had by all the family.

At the end of the film I got to thinking how really good marketers use the same phenomenon to make more sales. Let me explain…

If you think of this in the context of all the big launches that have happened recently you’ll be able to see how they’ve used this phenomenon to reach into your pocket. The phenomenon is likely to increase over the next 12 months as savvy marketers pick up on the fact that it works. Smart marketers are already doing it, but new people are joining the ranks of the ‘friend of a friend’ every day.

This is your chance to use the power of relationship to improve how you interact with your visitors, subscribers and customers. When they see your name, what memories and associations do you want them to have? Because if you’re not controlling how they see you, who is?

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I’m about to launch a viral marketing campaign to test that particular question and, hopefully, to launch a couple of my newest products faster than just putting them out there and ‘hoping’.

As results come in I’ll report on the success of the campaign and let you know what I discover. I don’t want to mention the products here, but they’re in a niche that is fairly crowded so if viral marketing really does work it should provide me with some good results and fast.

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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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Actually, that’s their business. But if they’re shoving it in my face to sell me something, they make it my business.

Now I don’t care whether someone is making a million a year, or just a few thousand a month, or even less, as long as they’ve got something useful to show/tell/sell/teach. I’ve met quite a few people with brilliant ideas who made not a cent off them because they won’t take action. And what I’m looking for all the time are ideas.

Isn’t that true of you too? You’re looking for information, ideas. Something that will give you the next level of success, whatever that means for you right now.

So let me ask you a question?

If somebody is telling and showing you how his ‘methods’ make him a small fortune, would that make you feel more confident that his systems work? Sure it would. And a lovely little screenshot of a Paypal account does a lot to make a desperate buyer salivate at the prospect of earning similar amounts.

What if the screenshots were so small and badly resized that you could only just make out that their ‘big’ income was actually from several years ago? Would it make you wonder what they were hiding about results today? Are they still making big money? Are they making massive money and just don’t want you to know?

Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered updating their site with fresh information?

Seems odd, doesn’t it?

Surely, if their results were so good they’d get even better in time – wouldn’t they? And if they did get better what possible reason could they have for not showing the proof?

Remember, they offered the proof in the first place – they obviously thought it was necessary.

Showing old results doesn’t mean you’re not making money. Not by a long shot. But it does mean you’re not showing your potential customers the full picture and I think in that case it’s reasonable to wonder why.

And even if somebody shows you huge amounts of money going into their account, so what?

Bill Gates and Donald Trump can show you that and tell you what they do to make it happen. Think you can copy them?

My recommendation: don’t fall for income claims. They nearly always come with a disclaimer and they don’t represent what you can achieve. Concern yourself with the quality of the product and if that’s not apparent from the sales page then steer clear. Honestly, there’ll be another “must have” product along in a day or two – won’t there?

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We’re all so used to advertising of the most blatant and outrageous kind these days – just watch almost any infomercial – that I believe we think it’s normal.

So when some steaming pile of hype comes through your email inbox it can be hard to spot it. Sometimes.

But there’s one particular type of ‘advertising’ that is particularly offensive, in my eyes. It’s the type that promises the mythical average man or woman a chance to get a bargain collection of products that will help them make a living.

I’m not going to start mentioning names – there would be too many to mention anyway! But recently I’ve been receiving some emails that tell me how there’s a wonderful collection of ‘superb products’ at knock-down price from someone who’s struggling a little because they had to take a week or so off work to do some other stuff.

Funny really. Well, it would be if it weren’t for the fact that I keep getting emails from the marketer that explain how it’s possible to make money ‘even while you sleep’. Having multiple streams of income that are virtually on auto-pilot isn’t a pipe dream, it’s a reality for a lot of people. And I have no doubt the marketer is making good money online – so why cry the poor tale when you’re supposed to be showing people how to make money?

What I find just a little difficult to take is that this ‘sale’ is happening to rectify a horrible situation for the poor marketer. That week or so he couldn’t work really made a big hole in his income, it seems. Perhaps he should have set up a couple of extra new income streams beforehand…

Creative advertising will always be with us and I applaud it, where there’s a transparent level of honesty. But sometimes the hype that you get in the promotions is just ridiculous. And the more ridiculous the claim the less likely there is to be extreme value in the offer, in my opinion.

Here’s a tip for you to keep your hype radar on high alert: if it’s in an email promotion that has more than one person sending similar emails, it’s hype.

Organic referrals, the kind where friends genuinely recommend something for each other, are rarely neat, pre-packaged and identical.

Don’t miss a bargain, by all means, but make sure it is a bargain first. Don’t be too impressed with tales of woe. We all have them, don’t we?

And by the way, my car blew up this week so now’s your chance to get a bargain on a couple of superb products that I’ve never offered this cheaply before. Just send a money order to….

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Many website owners would almost kill to get a top 10 position on page 1 of Google. But Jon’s asked whether that’s actually good enough. His answers may surprise you.

It seems that most webmasters and internet marketers have the goal of getting their sites onto page one of Google. I admit that I, too, feel a sense of joy and satisfaction when my sites hit the top 10 for my keywords.

But is the top 10 good enough? Should you rest on your laurels once you’ve achieved page one ranking? Not according to the AOL search data that was compromised in 2006. Yes, that data is two years old, but I think it’s important to revisit those results and remind ourselves of what it revealed.

That compromised data gave us the following break-down of the percentage of clicks received by each of the top 11 search results:

“Wait,” you say, “those numbers barely add up to 50%!” That’s true. According to the AOL data, that’s because 46% of all queries resulted in no clicks — meaning that the user didn’t see what they were looking for and so tried something else or moved on.

There are a few points I want to make about this. First, this is data from AOL, and without being too unkind to AOL users, well, they’re not the savviest of searchers. That makes a difference. I would theorize that Google searchers would be a bit more prone to “dig” for the result they need, especially since in my own experience the figures aren’t quite so drastic as this data shows.

That said, though, this chart helps to demonstrate the vast difference between the #1 ranking for a set of keywords and all of the other rankings. Basically, the number one ranking gets the lion’s share of the traffic, and the other 9 of the top 10 just get the tricklings.

Number 11, the first result on page 2, gets virtually no traffic at all. I included it in the results to demonstrate how little effect a page 2 ranking has on your traffic.

This is one of the reasons I advocate trying to rank for a series of long-tail keywords, and not putting all of your efforts into one set of very popular keywords. Getting to #1 for a single set of competitive keywords requires an exponential amount more effort than ranking #1 for dozens of long-tail keywords. And, as demonstrated by this data, those dozens of “lesser” rankings will be far more valuable to the bottom line of your traffic than a #9 or #10 ranking for a competitive keyword.

Let me illustrate.

Let’s say that your niche has a set of competitive keywords that generates 10,000 searches a day. Sounds like a goldmine if you have a page one ranking right? Let’s see.

If you managed to get on page one, but only rank #9, based on the AOL data you would only get 150 of those visitors to your site (4,500 or so per month). However, if you manage to rank #1 for 10 keywords that each only receive 1,000 searches a day, you would get 226 visitors (6,780 or so per month). That’s 150% more traffic for the long-tail keywords. And I promise you, it’s dramatically easier to achieve (and maintain) 10 less competitive rankings than it is for one super-competitive one. In fact, in many cases you can achieve multiple #1 rankings for long-tail keywords with the same quantity of links needed just to get you on page one for the super-competitive keywords!

Just ask the happy 3WayLinks.net customer who recently posted at the users’ forum regarding their first $369 day in affiliate profits. Or another forum poster who reached his first $100+ AdSense day thanks to 3WayLinks’ ranking his sites for lesser-competition keywords.

So remember, when planning your keyword targets for your web site, don’t forget to target a variety of long-tail keywords. Even if you are planning on going after a competitive set of keywords, still keep the long-tail on your agenda, and give them at least as much of your time and resources. Do so and you’ll reap the rewards to be found in Google’s “low hanging fruit.”

Source: Search Engine Optimization

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If you want to know a little more, read the full article – the link is given below.

There is a specific system of steps to use to get on the radio—and effective methods to use to create interest and listener action when you’re on the air.

Step 1 – Listen to the radio, read newspapers, watch TV news, subscribe to news blog rss feeds, and setup a Google Alert that tracks your area of expertise. These actions will help you stay current with what’s in the news and how your message ..

Source: Interview

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See if this post can give you some insight into it.

I once made the mistake of hiring a company that specialized in handling technical support for online businesses. The single person assigned to my (smallish) account at the time was a member of MENSA. She was a true-blue certified genius with a technical background.

Who could ask for more, right? Wrong! The woman turned out to be completely unable to handle the support for my business, and after a couple of months of fighting and hoping for the best, I fired the firm.

From that point on I became a bit of a control freak about my business. I mistakenly assumed that if a certified genius with a technical degree was unable to handle my tech support, that I just needed to give up and do it all myself.

After about 18 months of that I was at the point where 80% of my time was used up handling support requests. My business stopped growing. I was chained down by support requests, stuck working in my business instead of on it.

Not long after that Mike Filsaime asked me to give him a call, which I did. We had a long conversation about outsourcing things like support requests.

Mike laid the bare truth on me in a way that only he can. “Jon,” he said, “you have two choices: you can burn yourself out doing everything yourself, or you can hire out and watch your business grow.”

“But Mike,” I protested, “nobody is going to be able to give my customers the kind of support I can! I created these products.”

“That may be true,” he replied, “but not even you can do what you do for an endless number of customers without killing yourself. At some point you simply will not be able to handle it.”

He was right, too. I was already at the point of wanting to chuck it all because I just couldn’t keep up with the support requests the way I wanted to — forget about growing my business!

So I did some hard thinking about what I was going to do. Mike told me that he managed to get a very happy customer of his to do support for one of his products in return for a percentage of the profits. That worked very well because the person was not just an employee, but was actually invested in doing a good job.

I decided to give that a try, and ended up hiring Amin Motin, a very active member at one of the support forums I ran. I had already made him a moderator at the forum because of his freely dispensing so much good advice and support to folks there. It seemed only natural to have him do support for my other products.

Amin is also invested in my business. His “salary” comes from a variety of web sites and services which turn a profit for both of us. And you know what? I was very wrong when I said that nobody could give my customers the same level of support that I was giving them. Amin is better than me, more patient and helpful with my customers, and I’ve read more praise directed at him than I have room to share here.

After bringing Amin on board I suddenly had a huge amount of time to devote both to personal and business pursuits. My net monthly income has increased 40% because of being free to work on other projects and toy with ideas I’d had in the back of my mind — and this increase has come despite Amin’s share of the profits and me working fewer hours than I did before (I devote a lot more time to my personal ministry work now).

You see, I had the wrong outlook on my business. I was so afraid to let go of a piece of my business that I had been burned on before that it was strangling its growth (and stressing myself out beyond belief). I also had the mistaken notion that I couldn’t afford to pay somebody to handle the support for me. What Mike helped me to see, and what indeed has proven to be true, is that I couldn’t afford not to have someone else doing support.

Now I outsource everything. My site design, graphics and logos, my support, my content creation. You name it. If it can be outsourced, I try a few folks out until I find the one who fits the bill and I stick with them.

Doing this has dramatically increased not only my bottom line, but also my peace of mind. My family and I travel on vacation, and I’m not stuck doing support tickets in the evening while we’re away. I don’t stress about how support is going to get handled, because Amin is so fantastic at it. I never worry about how my next web site or product is going to look, because the guys at GraphicsGenie.com do such a fantastic job on every product I put up.

You may really not be able to afford to hire out just yet, and that’s understandable. I was in that position at first also. But I promise you, I promise you, that as soon as you can make room in your budget to start hiring out the services that you do not absolutely have to handle yourself, you will find your business blossoming into something much greater than you could possibly make it by yourself.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Source: Internet Marketing

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