E-business Ideas

How To Set Up Wordpress Locally On Your Windows -MAC PC

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:51:00 +0000

Here's my tip of the week. It will save you hours!

There are loads of Wordpress themes and plugins available. But some are good, others less so.

Up to now, you've probably uploaded these toys onto your server. But this takes time, and can mess up a perfectly good site in a couple of clicks.

Solution? Set up Wordpress on your local PC or MAC and test themes, plugins and make test posts on there before deploying on your main site.

And it's really easy.

1. Visit: http://bitnami.org/stack/wordpress
2. Download the appropriate Wordpress stack package.
3. Install on your machine by running the file and following the simple prompts
4. Job done!

5. If you'd like to have an unlimited number of different sites locally, set up the multi-site option
6. Visit: http://wiki.bitnami.org/Applications/BitNami_Wordpress_Stack#Multisite_Support and follow the simple instructions
7. Voila! As many Wordpress sites on your local machine as you want

Windows Themes and Plugins go here:

C:\Program Files\BitNami WordPress Stack\apps\wordpress\htdocs\wp-content

Now go forth and add / test and plugins, themes etc locally on your PC!

A comprehensive list of keyword research tools

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:18:00 +0000

A list with all available keyword or market research tools would be useful. I hope you like my list. I will add any new links you post here to keep them organized.

Traffic:

http://www.alexa.com
http://www.compete.com/
http://www.quantcast.com/
http://www.hitwise.com/

Keyword services:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://www.wordtracker.com/
http://www.wordstream.com
http://wordze.com/
http://www.wordpot.com/
http://www.nichebot.com/
http://www.keywordcountry.com/
http://www.themezoom.com/

Free keyword tools:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/
http://www.wordpot.com/KeywordTool.aspx

Search suggestions:

Google
Youtube
Yahoo
Bing
Ask

Google tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
http://www.google.com/sktool/
http://www.google.com/insights/search
http://www.google.com/trends

Competitor research:

http://spyfu.com/
http://www.keywordspy.com/
http://www.adgooroo.com/
http://www.semrush.com/
http://www.keycompete.com/
http://www.ispionage.com/
http://www.keywordcompetitor.com/

Software
http://www.keywordelite.com/
http://www.micronichefinder.com/index.html
http://ppckeywordtoolz.com/
http://www.marketsamurai.com/
http://www.seoelite.com/

Online
http://www.majesticseo.com/
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Get Indexed Super Fast!

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:39:00 +0000

Submit your site url to Digg. Don't worry about how many other Diggs you get. The title and description should be interesting (for as high a CTR as possible, later on) and keyword rich too (for ranking purposes).

Then take your Digg url:

example: digg.com/Ferrari/Best_Auto_Suspension_for_Rich_Lovers

Get over to http://www.kping.com

Submit your url.

Go to http://www.pingomatic.com

Add your keywords to the title, and add what you want to rank for, too.

Thats it!

Take it further:

Get a couple of Digg accounts, behind a few proxies. Don't bother digging your own urls. Try and give your Digg accounts names which are relevant to your vertical (car-lover, super-car-lover etc).

Make sure you only Digg 2 urls per account. So if you have 10 urls you want to get indexed, only digg urls 1 + 2 with digg account 1, then with digg account 2 digg url 3 + 4 etc.

Add each account to your other accounts, as friends, and still behind a proxy.

Go to Digg and see your friends activity. You'll see the list of diggs that your 'friend' has submitted. You can get the RSS feed for this friends account (orange button near the top):

digg.com/urers/yourfriend/friends.rss

Get this for each friends account.

Submit at http://www.pingomatic.com

Each one with a different title you want to rank for.

Add each at:

My MSN
My Yahoo
My Google
BlogoWogo

Use a RSS submitting program if you can get one, and paste the RSS feed urls and submit to directories.

Voila!

Now I'm not saying this will definitely get you ranked at the TOP of each search engine, but sometimes you need to get indexed super fast (sales of a new site/blog whatever). So use this for that stuff and you should be golden.

From there, add more backlinks to push yourself up the SERPS.

Online document storage

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:44:00 +0000

Dropbox. Has iPhone app. Keeps copy of all revisions. Web accessible. Uses Amazon S3. Win/Mac/linux. Can only use 1 folder as a "dropbox" which isn't that big of an issue.

For a more well-rounded solution, jungledisk is great. I use it to back up my personal and business files. I love how I can have a network drive that I can treat like a hard drive. Uses S3, can sync and backup any folder, include/exclude with filtering rules, web accessible, keeps copies of revisions, Win/Mac/linux and portable, iPhone accessible with an app called Air Sharing Pro

Some Alternatives

Groove 2007

As part of Office 2007, I have Groove 2007. Haven't really used it much myself...but it's main purpose is to be able to work with groups in different locations and sync files across different networks and computers securely.

according to this wikipedia post

it looks like Microsoft is renaming Groove 2007 (Hosted version) to Sharepoint Workspace 2010

Open Source Group Collaboration
If you're looking to do group collaboration Sharepoint is used by many large corporations. I've also looked at some open source alternatives like ....

http://www.projectpier.org/
http://www.opengoo.org/index.html

these two grew out of forks of Active Collab while it was still open source; before Active Collab went closed source and started charging for installs.

Easy and Painless VPN
You can try out LogMeIn's Hamachi

I had tested and tried this out a couple of years ago right before and after they [Hamachi] had gotten acquired by LogMeIn. And found it to be straight forward and painless to setup.

Ubuntu One - Dropbox Like Clone
if you're using Ubuntu, in the latest release 9.10 they added access to cloud sharing via their ubuntu one system.

https://one.ubuntu.com/

it's supposed to use Amazon S3 like dropbox, and is a little cheaper as well (2GB for FREE, 50GB for $10). But the drawback is that it currently only runs on Ubuntu. Dropbox is cross platform with windows, linux, mac and has versioning.

Modelling – Sweet mother of fudge it’s powerful

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:15:00 +0000

I’m not talking about the kind of modelling that lets you take advantage of naïve hotties on your casting couch, unfortunately. The kind of modelling I’m talking about is business modelling. And what it lacks in hotties on your casting couch, it makes up for in ridiculous amounts of money it pulls from your businesses (for those of you reading who actually HAVE businesses).

Here are the premises that I’m assuming – If these don’t fit your business, this article won’t be useful to you:

1. You have a business
2. Your business is built on repeat business
3. You maintain a database of customers (or clients, or patients, or whatever) and their financial history with your company
4. You want to make more money

Okay. If those don’t fit, move to the next article, because this one will bore you.

There are lots of really simple ways to model, and depending on the data you have available, you can also get into some really esoteric & wacky statistical analysis to show you links between customer behaviour & increased money.

Like most things in life, the simple methods are the ones that have the greatest leverage (IE doing them will make you a LOT of money), while the complex ones give very marginal gains. Or, to put it another way, you only need to worry about the highly complex modelling once you’ve maxed out the very simple models that we’ll be talking about (and very few people have done that). So let’s look at a few simple models.

The first model you want to create is the Lifetime Value of a Client model – It’s the one we’ve all heard about a billion times, but rarely implemented. Again, this is a useless exercise if you don’t have a running concern, but if you’ve got a nice backlog of data, then pull it out and figure out how many visits an average client comes in for, and how much they spend. (Later, you can do separate analysis to determine if people who come in less frequently spend more, or if there’s any indication that there’s a ‘per visit maximum’ people will spend, etc. But for now, just figure out how often they come in, and how much they spend).

Now comes the fun part. You want to dive in DEEP to these numbers. Don’t just accept them at face value. After all, it’s great knowing that when somebody comes in they’ll have an average of 38 visits. But you know that averages are dangerous… So start asking better questions. What is the average visit number if somebody comes in a 2nd time? A 5th time? A 10th time?

What do the visit & spending profiles of people look like based on their age when they start doing business with you? You might find out that somebody who’s over 40 will be 3X as valuable to you as somebody who’s under 25 – that’d be nice to know for when you’re crafting marketing & referral campaigns.

Now, exactly how you get these ever so useful numbers will depend on the format of your database, of course. What I’ve found is that for non-tech geeks like myself, it’s often easiest just to pull all the relevant data you want to look at into a single excel page, and then manipulate from there. Of course, however you want to actually get the data is up to you, but I’m going to give a super low-tech example to walk through.

So for the above numbers, just pull the client ID, birthday, date of first purchase, number of purchases, and total dollar value purchased into a spreadsheet page. You can add in a column at the end called “Age”, then just subtract their birthday from date of first purchase, and you’ll get their age when they first came in.

So, assuming that you put all of these into columns A-F, number of purchases is in column D.

You can get the lifetime purchase average by using the formula =average(D2: -D1000000)
(remove the space between D$2: and -D$1000000)

A quick note – Excel 2007 is about a billion times better for this type of thing, since it gives you 1,000,000+ rows and 16k columns (as opposed to 65k rows and 256 columns)

Okay. That gives you the average lifetime value. What if we want to find out what the average value is if they’re not just one hit wonders (IE if they come in for a 2nd visit)?

=AVERAGEIF(D$2: -D$1000000,">1")
(remove the space between D$2: and -D$1000000)

You can replace the “>1” with any number to see what the effect is at different visit trigger points. Somebody who comes in for 5 visits will likely have SIGNIFICANTLY more visits than the total average (it’s the success bias, of course). What this will show you is how important certain visit milestones are in your business, so that you can start putting things into place to entice people to come in to at least those milestones.

To find the age ranges, you can use this formula:

=AVERAGEIFS(D$2: -D$1000000,F$2:F$1000000,">20",F$2:F$1000000,"<30")
(remove the space between D$2: and -D$1000000)

That’ll tell you the average visits of people between 20-30 years old. Change the 20 & 30 to see whatever range you like – that’ll give you an idea of what age group is most profitable to your business.

The upside of using formulas like that is that they’re simple, they’re fast, and they’re extremely easy to modify to get more and more detailed information.

Consider another type of model – We’ll call it the “Retention Model.” Here, what you do is slightly more complex, but extremely rewarding. In this case, what you do is go through your full visit history database, and find out what the visit pattern is for every customer you have. This is a variation of the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) that’s so highly touted in the book Drilling Down (which is DEFINITELY among my top 5 products here as far as value added).

The goal of this is simple – you want to learn what the “acceptable” latency between visits is for your customers, so that when customers go beyond that, you can flag them & contact them to bring them back.

You can make this more detailed, and do it on a visit-by-visit basis, if there’s a big difference between the usage of your product/service/store at the beginning of the relationship and as the relationship matures.

The main point is simple – you want to figure out where to set up ‘alarm systems’ in your business to let you know when people have been gone too long, so that you can get in touch with them. This is among the most powerful things you can do in your business to reduce the attrition rate, which as we all know, is ever so important.

Ways To Get Indexed Very Quickly

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:36:00 +0000

This is all about how to get your website or webpage indexed as quickly as possible. If the method gives you a backlink, that's cool too but it's not required. If you have a trick in your sleeve, please share it. I'll start.

Propeller method:
- Submit a story in Propeller and use popular tags like "news", "google", "barack obama" or better yet, find a hot hot news story and see what tag it uses
- For some reason search engines love love love Propeller. My current record is getting indexed in 11 minutes.
- Your story will be changing pages constantly so backlink value isn't that good.

Warning about using Digg to get indexed:
- I don't know if it's just me but it seems that submitting your story to Digg and getting 0 diggs does more bad than good for you.
- For some reason my pages don't get indexed unless they receive diggs. If somebody has opposite experiences (recent ones), please contribute.

Press releases:
- Use free press release service and publish a press release.
- I haven't used this for ages because Propeller works so test yourself.
- This works because Google has their own news aggregator that loves to scrape all press releases
- If your press release gets picked up and not just spidered, you'll get good backlinks too.

About Tag & Ping, Blog & Ping, Commenting, etc.
- Only for link building in my opinion.
- It just looks way too spammy if you start with pinging or commenting.

A load of Social Networking sites

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:47:00 +0000

200+ social bookmarking services plus places like Digg etc..

Top 100 Web 2.0 properties - choose the more popular ones

Are We In Control Of Our Decisions?

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:58:00 +0000

Watch this video:

If you are not familiar with Dan Ariely's work, you ought to get a kick out of it. Excellent implications for devious marketers everywhere.

LiveZilla freeware Live Chat ROCKS!

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:27:00 +0000

Wow, is all I can say:

Livezilla

Installed about one hour ago and highlights are as follows:

Freeware!
Customer Live Chat (free of course)
Multi-Server support (MS & Linux, only needs PHP...SQL not required)
Allows for complete tracking of each website visitor (i.e. you can coBrowse and watch each page that is browsed to LIVE!)
Push a chat request window to the user LIVE!
URL Redirect Push (push a URL to the user live to redirect them to a different page)
File Push - Send the user a file to their desktop
Allows for full branding...insert you colors and logo
multi user and multi domain
did I say it was FREE!

Damn after spending all day researching about 20-25 different pay per month hosted options...this one is free and ROCKS!

Firefox Speed Up Tip

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:16:00 +0000

The speed of loading up firefox was bugging me today. So I went and had a look at some methods to speed it up.

Came across the following tip on this page

'secret', I thought I would post it here

A tip how to make Firefox run faster. in the address bar type about:config.
Navigate to the following keys

set network.http.pipeling to true
set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
set network.http.pipeling.maxrequests to at least 30
AND add an integer called nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it to 0

This will significantly speed up firefox on a broadband connection

I have installed the tweaks and then spent the next four hours scientifically analyzing the performance increase. See the specifications of the test bed used and the performance numbers below:

Test Bed

I used an Intel Core i7-920 CPU for testing purposes, boosting its clock speed to 3.8 GHz in order to circumvent any potential CPU bottlenecks.

CPU Intel Core i7-920 Overclocked to 3.8GHz
Motherboard ASUS Rampage II Extreme X58
Video Card ATI Radeon HD 4770
Video Drivers 9.4, 9.4 Beta for 4770
Hard Drive Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
RAM 6 x 1GB DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1
PSU PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W

After performing extensive testing with browser, FTP, multi-tabbed, multi-access, multi-threading, multi-everything. I have come to the conclusion that there is a significant performance increase that averages as follows:

Performance:

www.cnn.com - .0051 second DLT (Decrease in Load Time)
www.tomshardware.com - .0066 second DLT

Yes, these tweaks are DEFINITELY WORTH LOADING...so get to it.

Why Use osCommerce?

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sun, 31 May 2009 20:55:00 +0000

I use osCommerce, and here's why:

osCommerce is free and it's open source being one of the most popular shoppingcart solution on the net. it's the most flexible i've seen and the list of features and contributions are the size of a thick text book, meaning you can do it all with it.

The amount of support you can get is unlimited. oscommerce forums are active. almost every experienced web designer has heard of it and can do anything with it. you aren't at the mercy of one provider, anyone can make changes for you, fix issues, and get you going.

The designs and templates are also endless. You aren't at the mercy of one template shop. you can get a custom design done for dirt cheap and there are millions of templates available for easy installation. The cart itself is also user friendly.

When it comes to payment integration, it can't get easier. You can add google checkout, paypal, authorize.net, or any other payment processor. payments go through smoothly and it seems easier then anything else out there.

It can handle unlimited products, you can add tens of thousands of products seemlessly. it takes about three minutes or less to get a product in there with full details, specs, pictures, the whole enchilada. seriously, anybody can do it.

Everything is managed through one admin panel, literally everything. No need to go to ten different sites to get organized. Everything is in one easy spot which again is very user friendly. There are lots of SEO contributions, which make your site easy to find in the search engines. They are easy to install and fix up your site automatically.

Hopefully this helps all of you who are still in a search for a shopping cart solution. take my word for it, go with oscommerce.

Traffic to your blog from CNN

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sun, 31 May 2009 20:45:00 +0000

Found this:

I discovered quite by accident that you can get a lot of quick traffic from CNN, especially if it's a "hot trend" type of thing.

If you have a blog, write about a topic that's really hot -- like the April Fool's virus. Cite some authoritative stuff from CNN and give them a link. They give you a trackback in the "what blogs are saying" section under the article.

I got over 190 visitors from CNN in just one day. More continue to come in.

I'm taking a look at other news media and will put together a list that gives trackbacks. Some of my blogs were getting traffic from news sites and I just wasn't paying attention. By capitalizing on what's hot and linking to current articles, I think this could be a huge boost to any blog. It sure was more effective than Digg, that's for sure.

I can confirm this.

Also Politico.com allows you, to post your blog links in comments.

A few British news outlets lets you post it as a live HTML link with keywords.

GoDaddy auctions for today (5/31/2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sun, 31 May 2009 20:33:00 +0000

thoroughbredblog.com PR4
informaticositz.com PR4
glendalegreeters.com PR4
aglessmarketing.com PR4
re-make.net PR4
marblesound.com PR4
miamicondoflipping.com PR4
coloradobusinesscouncil.com PR4
osogolozo.info PR4
eosrealm.net PR6
bmecentral.net PR6
mercosur-info.com PR6

Twitter Success Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:56:00 +0000

I want to share everything I've been doing to create a successful Twitter account. My hope is that I can help you out. :)

Background (before I knew what I was doing):

I recently started a new website with a partner. I had created a Twitter account having known about Twitter for a while, but never really used it.

I went around following all the top dogs in my niche and the people they're following. I would post about different things I was doing and throw a link on when I created a new article or something of that nature.

My response? Nothing!!!

I thought to myself, "Twitter sucks... what a stupid website. What is the big deal about Twitter?"

I write this here because this seems to be most people's experience. They get on there, put their product, their website or themselves up there, only to be totally ignored! And as a result, frustrated and unenthusiastic about Twitter.

The strategy I figured out (that DOES work well):

Twitter is about conversations - Yeah, yeah, you may have heard that before. Let me translate it to something meaningful: Twitter is about MUTUAL INTERESTS. When people are making that split second decision on whether or not they follow you, they look at the following things.

- the number of people following you (we'll get to inflating this later)
- the value of the content in your posts ("tweets")
- the regularity at which you converse with your followers

Let's talk about that last thing - how often you talk with your followers. See, if people see that you DON'T talk to the people that follow you, they will not want to follow you either. Again, Twitter is about MUTUAL INTERESTS, so if they believe that you won't acknowledge them as a follower, they're not going to bother following you (and by extension, your interests).

Talking to followers involves writing @ and then your message. That user can then see your @ reply to them in his/her @ list. It makes them feel warm and fuzzy because you are publicly acknowledging them, which means you are implicitly endorsing them to your followers.

Twitter is about contributing value to your followers - OK, how can you do this (and how have I done this effectively)... People value posts about:

a. Breaking news (and links to the news)
b. QUOTES (I post about 5 quotes relevant to my niche everyday and my followers go bananas!!)
c. Something funny.
d. A great, relevant link within your niche which is not self-promotion.

When you tweet things that are of value to your followers, they will often "retweet" you. This means that they will write "RT @ ... your message ..." to spread the message you sent to all their followers. YOU WANT THIS. It's a great way to get new followers and it also shows users that you are a good, legitimate person to follow who gives value.

To make yourself more "retweet" worthy, write posts about the 4 things I mentioned above regularly and choose a SHORT twitter name (if possible). Also, because twitter messages are limited to 140 characters per message, leave about 12 - 20 characters unused in your original message to leave room for them to credit you on the retweet.

With that said, give back by retweeting the posts that you find valuable. It's the ultimate compliment to give on Twitter.

People will judge you on your number of followers... get a bunch! - It's true, people treat people differently depending on the number of followers they have.

When I had 300 followers, people didn't really care all that much about what I was saying. But after I broke 2000 followers, tons of people started coming out of the woodwork, kissing my butt and trying to get on MY radar screen!

The difference goes back to mutual interests again. People know that if you have over 2000 followers, you have a good sphere of influence. Therefore, they are going to try and get you to like them so that maybe you will say something good about them to your following, which helps them out.

Good luck and hope it helps.

Googles next Major PR update is 3/31/09, are you ready?

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:31:00 +0000

I don't think PR update will cause as much a stir as it would a couple years back. Two reasons:

1. I highly believe Google's ranking PR is heavily dynamic, so an update may mean the toolbar value will change, but the SERPs should largely stay the same for the non-naughty sites out there.

2. Any last minute hastiness isn't going to secure anything, except Red Flags. Rather stay natural - should be my advice. If you want to pass trust by linking to high authority sites, that different. Don't make this PR Update a big issue than it already is.

Another laid back attitude towads this PR update is :

It doesn't affect SERP changes as it used to be. For link sellers it maybe a bad thing, but last year when my toolbar pr dropped from 5 - "Two" - my serps weren't affected at all. Sure some of my sites gained massive serp boost, which means some of the top pages lost their position, I'd still recommend everyone sticking to their linking schedule. If theres new competition in the Block, have a Fight Plan.

Best of Luck everyone retaining their SERPs or Boost.

Tips to download Flash Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:24:00 +0000

You can get a Firefox addon called,

Live HTTP Headers

1. Install the addon
2. Restart Firefox to activate the addon
3. Open the addon
4. Visit the webpage that contains the video

All the headers will load in the addon. There might be a lot of information to sort through but when you load the particular page with the video, all of the header information is loaded top-to-bottom in the addon. So starting from the bottom of the Live HTTP Headers window, scroll upward looking at each URL. You will possibly see URLs pointing to GIF, JPG, javascript, PHP files etc but you will also see the direct path to the *.FLV file. You can right click this path, copy and then paste it into a new tab to begin downloading.

Also, another solution is to download the Maxthon web browser, which has an option to save files/elements directly off a web page simply by hovering your mouse over the target image, video, etc then clicking the " + " sign that appears. You can do a save-as and that's it or you can use the file sniffer to get the direct path of the *.FLV video or even *.SWF for that matter.

Some *.SWF videos get a bit trickier, but *.FLVs are very easy to download. These methods might seem complicated but they are really not. A lot of the addons for Firefox should work in downloading *.FLV videos, but they don't work (as I have found) for *.SWF videos. More people will eventually move to *.SWF videos because its easier to secure the video preventing less downloads of content they don't want shared. It's not impossible, just a bit more difficult for some people.

Tips To Get Indexed Fast On Google

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:46:00 +0000

1. Put your site up

2. Create 10 different Social bookmarking profiles

3. Create blogger blog make a couple of post with links back to your site then ping and social bookmark the posts.

4. Create Squidoo lens with a couple of links back to your site and social bookmark the lens.

5. Create Hub page with a couple of links back to your site and social bookmark the Hub page.

6. Create a Wordpress blog on wordpress,com make a couple of post with links back to your site ping and social bookmark the posts.

I usually get indexed doing this within 24 to 48 hours.

If not then Rinse and Repeat

Note: if you have Fantastico in your c-panel make a wordpress blog as a subdirectory of your site and do the same as above.

Preferably the links going back to your site should have the keywords you want to rank for them.

Good CPA/Affiliate Marketing Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:11:00 +0000

Thought this might be a useful resource here. These are good blogs for CPA, Affiliate Marketing, SEO, etc. Some are better than others and some are updated more than others but there's a ton of info to be had and a lot of it blows any launched ebook out of the water. Some of these folks do some serious volume.

There are tons of others. If you have one you think rocks that isn't listed here, please post. Hopefully you'll find a gem or three.

CPA - Affiliate

cdfnetworks.com

cashtactics.net - this has one of the best instructional case studies that's out there. Look for the videos top right.

convert2media.com/blog/

jonathanvolk.com

nickycakes.com

thinklikeansob.com

aojon.com

zacjohnson.com

justindupre.com

neilsweb.com - good facebook tips

uberaffiliate.com

clickconsultants.com

ppcdiscussions.com

oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog - Smaxor's blog

fbaff.com - facebook stuff, not updated frequently

ppchero.com

earnersblog.com

SEO

bluehatseo.com - awesome blog

lornefade.com

General Internet Marketing Site

winningtheweb.com - also have a blog rating system that lists a lot of other blogs/resources.

winningtheweb.com/im-top-blogs

Optimal Seo Tips And Tricks

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:18:00 +0000

For anyone who wants to rank well in a certain niche, given a moderate competition ( Adwords avg CPC is not too high example like the good ol' Mesithelioma, quoted results between 500,000), these are the surefire methods which will rank them high in search engines ( Usually in Google first, followed by Yahoo and Live) :

Have optimal site structure, with relevant: follow, no indexes : in archival and other duplicate content possibilities. Silo structures help you to rank for long tails easily (while waiting for the more competitive rankings), keywords in the title, variations as header etc. all been discussed.

O.P.O.S - Clever deeplinking, example NOT using anchor texts as a outbound link if you want to rank that particular page for that anchor text. On Page Optimization is very essential, I'm talking about Alts, relevant variations in keywords, careful management of link juice flow throughout the site, etc.

Content : Put original content, lots of them. Consistent pace is very essential. Most of the times consistency will make the difference. Putting 100 articles up a weekend don't work anymore. Adding original, well written content consistently will make the spiders love your site. example: for many QDF ( Query deserves Freshness) queries, the site will slowly start to rank.

LinkBuilding : Try to get at least 3-4 links from the top 20 sites ranking. Its easier than you think. There are lots of ways - call them directly, be a chick, hire a chick, give a reward, guest blog, - and of nothing helps - start a false controversial flame war accuse them something stupid, once you get mentioned in their site/blog - apologize and everyone will forget. Even John Reese publicly apologized for his Tweeter comments with mashable.

A. Try to build links gradually. Age of site is very important. Experience says if the site is 8 months - 2 years old, aggressive link buildings are often blind eyed by the search engines. However, should try getting 300-500 links in 2 months, do-followed, good targetted anchor texts, pointing to your sites. Relevant niche forum signatures works both as relevant links and a source of initial traffic. Provide value in the forum posts rather than spamming them. Of course article marketing, blog comments etc helps, but make sure you first use original content in your own sites before syndicating.

Fail Safe is a completely different topic, maybe ill share it sometime later for what to do when someone is stuck in the rankings.

B. Consistency is the key. 99.9% in house self starter SEOs fail because they get frustrated after month 1 or 2. Five to six months time of gradual efforts to the site must bring it to the front pages of the organic searches. there is a big BUT though..

...search engines brings you targeted traffic - means more or less the conversion centric buyers will be aware of the niche. Monetizing them is an art, which I lack. Traffic alone is BS if you cant convert them. Marketing is 100 times harder than SEO - although both are Arts of its kind - I firmly believe one should know how to sell himself in order to be successful.

Internet Marketing Handbook

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:20:00 +0000

Now this is a great collection of links!

The Internet Marketing Handbook

Categories:

Link Building
Keyword Research
Content Creation
On-Page Optimization
Crawling and Indexing Issues
Social Media Marketing

Very good resource. Check it out!

Consulting - Tips For The Greenhorn

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:45:00 +0000

I received this email from a good friend:

What advice would you give a "greenhorn" about the 80/20 of consulting? What, in your experience, delivers the most results/satisfaction to your clients with the least amount of effort from your part? What should I focus on, as a beginner?

My response:

You know, 'consulting' is such a loose term, often misunderstood, sometimes misrepresented. At the heart of it any good 'consultant' provides three things:

1. Knowledge
2. Understanding
3. Advice

Let's take a look:

Knowledge - this is usually the starting point for consulting work. Your claim (as the consultant) is that you know as much (or more) than your client about how to market and promote his/her business. And although it's important that you do know about the subject, it's rarely the most important factor in success. Knowledge can only come from two places - LEARNING and EXPERIENCE. If you are not constantly learning and improving your knowledge you are doomed, Equally if you do not regularly use the knowledge you have gained you will quickly become out of date. In the traditional marketing world written material can lag by several years behind current thinking. Even internet marketing courses can become out of date in a matter of months. So putting ideas into practice to confirm that they do, indeed, do what the author suggests, is crucial.

Understanding - this is the key to gaining client confidence and respect. The ability to appraise and understand what your client is trying to achieve and to 'see' the potential strategies and tactics to achieve those goals, is what will cement the relationship and put you in control.
And where does this ability come from? Well, that would be KNOWLEDGE!

Advice - this is the bit you actually get paid for! There's a long standing joke about consultants that they charge a great deal of money to tell you what you already know. In some instances this is true. I have been in a situation where I've worked with a client for several weeks, simply to confirm that his original plan was the right one. However, as a general rule client's want to hear original, innovative ideas. They come to a consultant because they want to develop something 'new'. However, the key to being a trully successful consultant is not delivering what they want to hear, but delivering what you BELIEVE is in their best interests. Giving the best possible advice can only come from the UNDERSTANDING of their business goals and their market.

To answer the question asked, I can only offer my own personal experiences, and hope that one or more of these points will be useful you:

Work with businesses you are passionate about. Getting excited about the industry you are trying to help will be a huge benefit in your consulting work. If you are passionate about sport then you probably read a lot of sports news and reports. You probably watch a lot of sport on TV. Consequently you'll have lots of KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING. So when you meet with a sports centre manager or a sportswear store owner or a tennis coach, you have the key ingredients PLUS the enthusiasm to convince them to work with you. You'll also ENJOY finding out about their business and helping them make marketing projects successful.

Be systematic. Develop and follow a plan that works from first contact right through to working with each client. For example; establish an appraisal process that you undertake with all new clients; use a USP development process to evaluate potential strategies, or create a checklist of activities and actions that you can follow as you develop the initial proposal and then create campaigns for your client. Noone can give you an off-the-shelf plan - you need to develop your own. Something that works the way you work and fits with your target industry.

Teach and then coach. One of the realisations that constantly astonishes me is that VERY FEW people in business really understand what marketing is all about. I have met and worked with some incredibly successful people, all over the world. And yet many hadn't the faintest idea of the differences between 'direct response' and 'brand awareness' campaigning. They had minimal understanding of response mechanisms and how to maximise them. They couldn't even quote a USP for their business other than the usual lame remarks like 'we do it better' or 'we put our customers first'. And yet some of these people were running companies turning over $millions! Just about everyone in business has somethng to learn, and if you teach people, they will respect and admire you. And then they will LISTEN to your ideas. One successful and lucrative tactic with new clients is to suggest that they attend a seminar before you start work on their business needs. A one or two day seminar run by you which covers the basics of marketing will create rapport, bring the customer up to speed, and give you the chance to demonstrate your KNOWLEDGE. And you can charge them for attending!

Be ruthless. It is very easy to 'give in' to clients who suggest that 'their approach' may be better than your ideas. Or they don't like the sound of that piece of copy you just wrote. Or they're not keen on the magazine you have proposed for advertising because they never got on with the editor. Compromising your proposals and pandering to the client will mostly lead to failure. And when the campaign fails - it's inevitably YOUR fault. Even when the campaign is successful, it'll will be his changes that made it so. You lose either way! Be faithful to your beliefs and honest with your client. Back up your proposals with reasoning and evidence and if the client doesn't like it be ruthless about convincing him or her that the reason you are their consultant is to provide solid advice based on knowledge and understanding. As a last resort suggest a 'split test' in which the company tries both approaches and measures the results. If you're as good as you claim you'll demonstrate your ability with positive results. And although I would never go as far as telling a client I think he's a complete tosser, I HAVE told a client that I think he clearly has strong views about how to proceed and I'm willing to step aside. I'd rather walk away from a project I don't believe in than get paid to watch it crash and burn.

Document everything! I really can't stress this enough. Take minutes at every meeting. Send a 'contact report' the following day. Measure everything about each project - costs, responses, results, sales. Report back in detail the outcome of every project. Where results do not go to plan, you can provide reasons and further advice based on facts. Where things go well you can 'rinse and repeat' the exercise or learn from it to create even better result next time. And when things go REALLY WELL, you can justify that increase in your charges based on the massive increase in turnover and profits that YOU created for that client!

Useful Negotiation Strategies and Tactics

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:29:00 +0000

Negotiation Tactics - Part II

There are a variety of methods to use when negotiating. In the first article, it was advocated to enter a negotiation from a position of power (strategy) - this means that they want your services just as much as you want their business.

The tactic is the mighty pause - name your price and sit still, count sheep, do mental math - anything to keep quiet (besides fidgeting).

Don't touch your face, smile, wince or or adjust your glasses. Studies have shown that your credibility and thus your believability rapidly declines when you touch your face, smile, wince or adjust your glasses, play with your hair in a negotiation.

The second strategy deals with the fact that the other party in the negotiation process wants everything they can - the proverbial 'get blood from stone.'

The tactic to keep them off balance is to just say, 'No.'

For example - an employee wants a raise. You reply, 'No.' Nothing else is said. Let them talk first (and you don't offer an explanation). If they ask, "Well why not,' - just answer 'No.' They'll look at you funny and won't know how to proceed. If you attempt to explain why, you're sunk. Just walk away.

Should the employee come back and ask again, say 'No.' - DO NOT offer any explanation(s).

To reverse this: (let's say it's you asking for a raise).

You: Hey boss, take a look at this. I've made a list of what I've accomplished for the past 8 months.'

Boss: (After reading it through).. You've done a lot.. So what do you want?

You: Well, I want another weeks vacation plus a 8.5% increase retro-active 8 months ago.

Boss: Well I'll have to think about that.

You: Thanks Boss (and walk away).

You have an 80% chance that you'll get what you asked for because you gave the boss proof (so the boss doesn't have to think - boss + thinking = not good for you).

The third strategy is focuses on the power of silence (the shut-up) factor.

The tactic to overcome this (in a boss) is to ask pre-answered questions (and you answer them).

For example: You ask for a raise - boss is silent.

You: (after slience from boss). Let's take for a moment, that these accomplishments weren't carried through. What do you imagine would have happened (and list the reasons) calmly and without emotion.

Boss: Well, anyone could have done that!

You: Most certainly - however, the fact is I performed these tasks. Did I mention that the company saved X as a result of this action? And as a result of this benefit - this is what I want - list whatever it is you want and then YOU be silent. Let the 'boss' do all the talking from here. DO NOT attempt to answer any of the questions the boss has - they aren't meant for you - they're the boss' verbalization of their mental process. They'll come to a conclusion all on their own - in your favor.

Negotiation tactics take some time to work on especially if you're afraid of carrying them through or afraid for your job. If your position is ever threatened by dismissal for just asking for a raise - then, I don't think that company is worth your time - do you?

Take what works and discard the rest.

$150 in free facebook ads

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:24:00 +0000

Totals $150, they can all be activated. You need to register a credit card with them. Make sure you limit your campaigns and watch them closely - facebook has been known to let campaigns run over their daily limit and charge for it.

$50 Free Facebook Coupon Code : T5V6-1JKV-TNH9-2MRH
$50 Free Facebook Coupon Code : 2JXY-WTFK-72Y0-VJ6Y
$50 Free Facebook Coupon Code : R1X5-0NH7-5FXW-5YEC

Also get a $100 Facebook ad coupon when you sign up for the Visa Business Network App

Coupon will arrive via email.

To change your daily spending limit. Ads Manager -> Edit. Set it to $50 or whatever you want your daily limit to be.

Enjoy

Affiliate Marketing Jargon

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:43:00 +0000

My guide for all noobs that want to grasp certain terms relating to affiliate marketing:

Landing Pages - it's basically a sales page
Squeeze Page - in short this is a optin-page (you get their email for your list)
WSO - Warrior Special offer from the warriorforum.com
SEO - Search Engine Optimization, optimizing your site for the search engines
PPC - Payperclick (usually referred with google's adwords), a type of advertising medium
CPA - Cost per action

For future reference...

See the Glossary

My Affiliate Dictionary

Other Affiliate Dictionary

Google is your friend

InterShipper - Your Shipping Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Peintros) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:53:00 +0000

I am finishing up the setup of my X-Cart shopping cart and was already dreading having to setup new UPS, FedEx online accounts in order to use the built in shipping calculators. When I noticed a new feature, integrated 'InterShipper'.

Looks interesting, they claim they can reduce cart abandonment by up to 35%.

It really looks simple to use, seems to handle shipping, tracking and cost auto-calculation from all four delivery services (USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL).