Move over Bellagio fountain, you just got pwned. The Dubai Fountain can shoot water 492 feet up in the air! Everything about it is off the scale big. It was built for $217 million by WET Design, which is the same company that created the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel. The Dubai Fountain’s 900 foot long water show uses 6,600 lights, 50 colored projectors, and hundreds of servos, all computer controlled and synchronized with music to offer a show that would make Las Vegas envious.

The Dubai Fountain is located next to the recently finished Burj Dubai, which happens to be the world tallest building. This just adds one more reason for me to take a trip to Dubai. Here’s a video of the fountain in action.

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Have you been watching as your stock portfolio tanks into oblivion? Is it at all possible to make money in this market when everyone seems to be losing value, laying off employees, downsizing operations, and declaring bankruptcy?

One of the biggest keys to financial success is finding a way to make a buck under even the worst of circumstances. One strategy that many people have tried is short selling and just like conventional stock trading, there are certainly techniques and tactics to maximizing your profits through shorting. Short Screen, which serves as the subject of today’s review, is designed to be a robust tool with short sellers in mind.

Sell High and Then Buy Low

Let me start out by saying that I am no stock market expert, but I am somewhat familiar with what short selling is all about. Under normal circumstances, you’d probably be on the lookout for stocks on the rise. You buy them while they’re still low and then you sell them when they’re high. That’s how you turn a profit.

Short selling still adheres to the “buy low, sell high” mentality, but it reverses the order of the steps. What you do is “sell” stocks (that you do not own) at today’s higher price with the promise that you’ll “buy” them at a future date, ideally at a lower price. Instead of looking for stock prices on the rise, you look for stock prices that are destined to plummet. You look for companies about to declare bankruptcy.

What is Short Screen?

Offering tools and ideas for short sellers, Short Screen is a website that will help you find the stocks that you should be shorting and the ones that you should be avoiding. The main information is based on the Altman Z-score model, which describes how “distressed” a stock is.

Short Screen offers three main areas: message boards, screener, and calculator.

The Free Message Boards for Everyone

The only real area of the site that is readily available to members and non-members alike is the message board. This is where your fellow stock traders can post their tips on which stocks could be on the rise and which are about to fall.

One of the more recent examples is the post for Domino’s Pizza. You can adjust the stock chart for a number of different time periods and premium members can rate the “tip” on a five-star scale. If the average rating drops below two stars (with an adequate number of total votes), the post gets removed from the site.

Screener: Who’s About to Go Under?

Possibly the most valuable tool on Short Screen is the Screener. Here, you can find the fifty most distress stocks based on the Altman Z-Score or Z”-Score. For maximum profitability, you can also adjust for the minimum share price.

In the screenshot above, Verisign looks like it could be in for a world of hurt. The computed score is -21.6585. This scoring model is said to be about 72% accurate in predicting bankruptcy up to two years in advance and about 80-90% accurate for a one-year timeframe.

By using the screener, you can determine some of the best candidate for your short selling endeavors. This sure beats trying to work out the score on your own for the thousands of different stocks available on the market.

Calculator: Researching Specific Stocks

While the screener can point you toward (at least) 50 candidates for your short sales, you may be interested in the Z-Score for a specific company. I used the Z-Score Calculator on Short Screen for Motorola (MOT) and got a score of 2.0348.

This is in the positive and it looks like the stock has been on a steady rise for the last few months. I guess the introduction of the Motorola DROID with Verizon is helping those guys out, so it’s probably not a good idea to short sell Motorola at this point.

Making Money from the Losers

You have many options when it comes to stock trading research tools and it seems that short selling utility can be a valued addition to the mix. The calculator is handy, but I think it’s the screener that could really help you turn an imminent loser into a winner for you.

A premium member’s account is $14 a month, but you can recoup these costs through your short selling profits and through the Short Screen affiliate program. This pays a 15% recurring referral commission and the people you refer get a 5% discount on the membership fee.

CLICK HERE TO BECOME A SHORT SCREEN PREMIUM MEMBER

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My buddy Aymen will be doing a sit down tomorrow with Internet superstar Shawn Casey and you’re invited to sit in. The chat start tomorrow at 5PM Vancouver time (8PM EST). Only 10,000 seats are available and will be given out on a first come, first served basis. You can try to grab a seat for the webcast here.

Aymen is the most successful Super Affiliate I have ever met and the cool thing is he now lives in Vancouver so I get to meet him quite often. For some reason, Vancouver has been attracting a lot of Super Affiliates lately. Must be the weather or something. Anyway, Shawn will be asking Aymen to reveal his 7 simple steps that anyone can use to generate more money online — and be paid in virtually any currency, from anywhere in the world.

You may think there is no way Aymen can fill 10,000 spaces for the webcast but I know he will because this is being promoted by all the big names in the affiliate marketing game. If you want to see what the hype is about, go reserve your seat now.

The Shawn Casey and Aymen Webcast

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This morning, the mailman dropped of a box with over 40 Broke DVDs in it. Needless to say, I’ve never been this broke before. Broke is a movie by Michael Covel on how America went broke and who’s to blame. It’s a really good movie and I enjoyed it a lot.

Michael Covel traveled 75,000 miles in the making of this film. He did face-to-face interviews with financial gurus; from Nobel Prize winners to professional poker players to fund managers. From big Wall Street names to real estate agents to ordinary citizens, Covel asks the critical questions: how did we get here and what can we do about it?

Broke: The New American Dream also cracks down on the media influence upon money decisions. It nullifies media hype and Jim Cramer propaganda. It takes a hard look at the state lotteries and draws remarkable parallels to the Social Security system. Most importantly, this film is about hope. We don’t have to behave like sheep and we don’t have to go ‘broke.’ Active and mindful audiences will discover that there is a way out.

Who Want To Be Broke?

While I’m sure no one wants to be broke, I bet many readers will want a copy of Broke. Well, you’re in luck because I’m got to give all these copies away. The first five copies are going to the readers who beat me in that Halloween Slot game. The next batch will go to everyone who shows up to this week’s Dot Com Pho. It may not be as nice a gift as Apple giving us new Macbook Pros, but it’s better than nothing!

If you want a copy of Broke but can’t make Dot Com Pho, then simply reply to this blog post. I’ll draw a few winners this Friday and announce them at Dot Com Pho. Good luck!

Broke – The New American Dream

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Are you getting tired of receiving a thousand DM spam on Twitter everyday? Are you following so many people that your iPhone Twitter app no longer works because it can’t download all the updates? Do you feel like starting over with a clean slate? Well now you can with my newest Twitter service, UnfollowAll.com.

Enter your Twitter information into Unfollow All, hit the start unfollowing button and it will nuke everyone you’re following on twitter. Once your following count hits zero, you can start a fresh list by following only the people you want to follow. Be absolutely sure you want to do this because once you hit the button, there’s no going back!

Unlike some other Twitter unfollow services, Unfollow All is completely free to use and I have no intention of every charging for it. The service is a good way to find out just how much influence you really have on Twitter. Many big Twitter accounts with a lot of followers got that way because they mass follow everyone with the hope of getting followed back. Unfollowing your entire list will mean only those that are truly interested in you will continue to follow you. The rest will unfollow you because you unfollow them.

If you only wish to unfollow people who are not following you, then you can use Twitter Follower.

Unfollow All – Sometimes, You Just Want To Start Over

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is bringing in new rules that will have a drastic effect on Internet marketers and bloggers. According to the new rules, if you blog for money or received any free stuff that is associated with a blog post, you have to disclosed it. Failure to do so could mean fines of up to $11,000 per violation.

The easiest way to comply with the new FTC rules is to have a disclosure policy page that clearly outlines your relationship with readers and advertisers. The FTP only has power in the US. However, I have a feeling that these rules will eventually spread to the Canadian version of the FTC (whatever that is). To prepare myself, I’ve created the following disclosure policy and added it under my About page. If you’re reading my blog, you should assume the following:

• I make money from every post I put on this blog. If I’m not making money from every blog post, then it was an oversight on my part and it will be corrected soon.
• Every link on this blog is a paid link. If it is not a paid link, then it was an oversight on my part and it will become a paid link soon.
• Every product I write about on this blog, I get for free. If I didn’t get it for free, then there was a miss-communication with the company that sent it and I will be billing them for the cost so the product becomes free.
• I make money from every tweet I send out on Twitter. If I didn’t make money on the tweet, then it was an oversight on my part and it will be corrected soon.
• If you email me, all of the information in your email is mine to do with as I please, such as exploit for financial profit, use as blackmail, or quote on my blog.
• The T-shirts you see me wear at trade shows. I get paid to wear them. If I didn’t get paid to wear them, then it means I ran out of paid shirts and had to wear a free one. In which case, I will go to the company that gave me the free shirt and ask them to sponsor it.
• If something on the Net is making a lot of money, you can bet I will be in on it. If I’m not in on it, then it was an oversight on my part and it will be corrected soon.
• Just because I get paid to blog, tweet, wear T-shirts, etc. does NOT mean I will give you or your company a positive review, blog post or endorsement. As a matter of fact, chances are pretty high that I might slam you.

Hopefully, the above statement clears up any misunderstanding you may have about my blog posts or Twitter tweets. If you have any questions, you can contact me at my contact page. Just remember what I said about emails.

This disclosure policy was sponsored by Market Leverage and Clickbooth. Yes, I make money on my disclosure statement as well!

Feel free to use this as a template for creating your own disclosure policy.

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I get many emails everyday. Most are pretty tame and boring. However, once in a while, a real gem will land in my inbox. I’m calling this Email from Dan Waggoner the Email of the week but I think it has a good shot at being the email of the year.

Hi John,

I am writing you to ask for a favor. I just wrote my first eBook titled “A Peasant’s Guide To Internet Marketing” 10 Powerful Steps for the New Business Website Owner.

I was wondering if you would be willing to read it and maybe write a short endorsement if you like it. I want to put a few very strong endorsements on the sales page to help sell the book.

I don’t have a huge following yet like you and some of the other guys as I am a relatively new Internet Marketer, however I believe the book to be of solid quality.

It may not help your audience because they might be a little advanced for it but I would be more than happy to pay you as an affiliate as well if you like it. It’s going to sell for $19.95US.

The book is 34 full length pages long in PDF format. If you get some time, let me know if you are interested and I will send you a copy. I would be very grateful and would owe you big time.

Sincerely,

Dan Waggoner

So, let me get this straight. You’re new to Internet Marketing but you wrote an eBook on how to do Internet Marketing? What’s more, you want to sell a 34 page (no doubt double space with 24pt font) PDF for $20? Good luck with that!

If you truly understood Internet marketing, you wouldn’t have worded your email the way you did. And you would have included the eBook in your email instead of asking me to email you back for a copy. I recommend you stick to writing about things you actually have knowledge of instead of trying to be something you’re not.

I would love to hear how you would reply to Dan. Please do so in the comments.

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Kim Roach, affiliate marketer and blogger at Buzz Blogger has released a new eBook call 24 Untapped Traffic Sources and has ordered this sponsored post to help generate some buzz for it. As you might guest, the eBook is about 24 ways to get tons of traffic to your site. On the Net, traffic equals money. The more traffic you have, the more money you can make. 24 Untapped Traffic Sources will help you get more traffic.

The cool thing about 24 Untapped Traffic Sources is nearly all the methods for getting the traffic are free. The eBook is free as well. That’s right, Kim is giving the eBook away for free instead of charging for it. Free is always a good price!

24 Untapped Traffic Sources is only 22 page long and shouldn’t take you more than half an hour to read. The nice thing about Kim’s book is most of the 24 untapped sources are not the average stuff you already know, like submit your content to search engines or Digg. There were many traffic sources that I haven’t even thought of, like hiring Mechanical Turks to vote up your YouTube videos or creating a perpetual WSO.

In addition to the 24 traffic sources, Kim’s eBook offers a wealth of additional resources. For example, the book contains a complete list of popular sites where you can submit your tutorials for extra exposure, traffic and backlinks. There are also links to traffic articles written by other bloggers.

No matter what skill level you are on the Internet, you’re sure to come away with a few fresh ideas from 24 Untapped Traffic Sources. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hire some Mechanical Turks.

Download 24 Untapped Traffic Sources

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The new LeapFish search allows users to do the two things they do most often when online: search and share. The new search platform combines the ability to search and share real-time and traditional content in any media format in a single interface across a range of different sites (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc).

The new LeapFish search experience offers consumers a real-time search engine, an advanced customizable personal homepage, more multi-media results from the entire Web and the ability to share any piece of content found online.

LeapFish Search Engine Features :

• Real-Time Search Engine : A fresh multi-media real-time search engine capturing results from all containers of real-time content (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Twitpic, Flickr).
• Searching and Sharing : Easy and convenient sharing features empower users to merge traditional content into the social and real-time Web as they search and find content anywhere online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Digg).
• Variety of the Web : Delivering rich multi-media content from the deep and wide new Web via integration of leading authorities in website aggregation, videos, images, news, blogs, tweets and much more on every search query (e.g., YouTube, CNN, Twitter).
• Personal Internet Dashboard : Technically advanced customizable personal homepage allowing consumers to build their own dashboard to the Internet by adding multiple news feeds, blogs, applications, tools and more (e.g., Facebook Application, Twitter Application, Mashable Feed)

Leapfish search results are aggregated from Google, Yahoo and Bing. I like how you can view results from all three search engines with just the push of a button. Makes it very easy to compare results. The real-time search is very cool. At the moment, it looks like it’s pulling all its results from Twitter, which makes sense since Twitter is as real time as you can get.

One thing I’ve noticed while using Leapfish. There’s A LOT of information about me on the living web. For example, Leapfish found that I am for sale for only 99 cents at Amazon. I had completely forgotten about that.

To try the new search experience for yourself, visit www.leapfish.com.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Marketing Your FTM Site

As an Internet Marketer, there is one simple truth that I am sure you already know – no matter how expertly written your copy is, how attractive your graphics are and how incredibly valuable your content is, none of this matters if you aren’t putting it in front of the right eyeballs.

This section, then, seeks to address this very issue. By the time you are done reading it, you will know all there is it to know about driving targeted traffic to your site and getting your first few subscribers.

And, better still, we are going to break with tradition here and start our examination of traffic methods by discussing a method that most beginner marketers are loathe to use – Pay Per Click.

PPC Marketing

Most marketers are terrified of investing into PPC, and for a good reason. When you’re selling an e-book at $47, your profit margins aren’t just slim – they’re dependent entirely upon the quality of your copy. If it doesn’t convert at least at 1%, you will usually find yourself losing money with PPC – especially when operating in highly competitive markets, where cost per click can easily exceed $1.

In this chapter, I am going to show you the trick that experienced marketers use to make a profit with PPC, even with insanely high costs per click.

In competitive markets, profits are made not on front-end sales, but on the back-end. For instance, let’s say you’re selling a $47 e-book in the weight loss market. Assuming 1% conversion rate and $0.50 Cost per Click, you will be spending $50 to bring a 100 visitors to your site, and only generate $47 in revenue.

On the surface, it looks like a losing proposition, right? Not quite. You see, while you might be losing money on the initial sale, you can still make a healthy profit by selling additional products to your customers, whether in the form of OTOs or list promotions.

For example, according to the math above, each customer costs you $50. If you sell them an e-book for $47, an OTO for $37, an affiliate product for $27 and a collection of weight loss videos for $57, you’re actually making an impressive $168 from a customer that only cost you $50 to acquire. That’s a healthy $118 profit right there!

$168 is your customer’s lifetime value – and this is exactly what makes membership sites so special. As we discussed earlier in this series, the lifetime value of a membership site subscriber can be almost $500 over the 12 month period – and that’s not including any of the additional monetization techniques that I will share with you later in this series!

You can literally spend hundreds to acquire each customer and still make a profit!

This is exactly what makes membership sites so easy to promote via PPC. Since the value of each customer is so high, you can invest as much into PPC as you need and still make a healthy profit.

Fundamentals of PPC Marketing

Entire books can be written – and, indeed, have been written – on the subject of PPC marketing and how to get the most clicks at the lowest price (I strongly encourage you to check out Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google Adwords – it is by far the single best e-book you will ever read on the subject).

With that said, there are some simple techniques you can use to make your PPC campaigns profitable. First of all, bid on low-competition long-tail keywords whenever possible. Not only are they usually less expensive, but they also bring paying customers more often.

For example, someone who types “basket weaving underwater” into Google might simply be looking for general information on the subject. In comparison, someone running a search on “how to learn how to weave a basket underwater” is clearly looking for a step-by-step guide to doing just that, and is therefore more likely to pay money for this knowledge.

Secondly, always remember the concept of Quality Score and how it can impact your campaign. Quality Score is one of the main factors that determine how much you have to pay per click; the higher your QS is (on a scale of 1 to 10), the lower your CPC will be.

Therefore, to maximize your profits, you need to maximize your QS – as doing so will often enable you to get better ad positions at lower prices.

The exact formula used in calculating the QS is kept secret – but it is known that it factors in variables such as the content of your landing page and the quality of your ad.

The first factor – that of the landing page – is essentially a check to see whether the page that the reader will visit upon clicking on your advertisement is relevant to the keyword they searched for.

For example, if they’re looking for information on basket weaving and your site is full of content on pet care, your Quality Score will suffer.

In addition, Google will also penalize you if your landing page is too short. This is why sales letters can sometimes be cheaper to advertise than squeeze pages – the latter are short by definition, and Google doesn’t like that, not one bit.

However, if you do want to use a squeeze page to warm up your traffic somewhat before redirecting them to your sales letter, here’s one trick you can use – place all the essential information above the fold (for example, the headline, the benefits and the opt-in form) and fill up the rest of the site with testimonials.

Although most people won’t read them, you will still give Google spider bots enough “meat” to avoid being penalized for having an overly short page.

The quality of your ad is, in turn, based on two major factors – clickthrough rate and relevancy. Clickthrough rate is the percentage of Google users that click on your ad when the search results come up; relevancy is the extent to which the wording of your ad is relevant to the keyword they entered.

In general, a clickthrough rate of above 1% is the bare minimum you should be aiming for; anything less than that, and you will find yourself penalized by Google. To maximize both the CTR and relevancy of an ad, try to make sure that the text of the advertisement contains the keyword – or the key phrase – that the user searched for.

Here’s another neat little trick you can use to boost your CTR – write unique ads for every single group of keywords you bid on. For example, let’s say you’re bidding on two keywords – “how to weave a basket” and “underwater basket weaving”. Instead of simply having one ad that reads “Basket Weaving Course”, create two unique ones, each relevant to its respective keyword.

For example, one ad would read “How to Weave a Basket” while other would state “Underwater Basket Weaving”.

This will boost your CTR immensely – not only does it make the ad look relevant, but Google will also bold the part of your ad that is identical to the keyword the user searched for, making it easier for your advertisements to stand out.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the most effective – and also the least expensive – form of marketing your site. Better still, you don’t need to be a professional writer or master wordsmith to craft winning articles that will drive thousands of targeted visitors to your site.

As you probably know, EzineArticles is the definitive article directory out there. Although they’re pretty strict in terms of what content they accept, you really can’t beat the traffic that your submissions will generate.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to get the most out of EZA – search engine optimization and sheer quantity. The former means submitting articles optimized to appear on the first page of Google results for a specific keyword; the latter simply means dominating the entire directory listing with hundreds of article submissions.

SEO Articles

Depending on how competitive your niche is, optimizing articles for search engine placement can be difficult. For markets such as weight loss, it is not uncommon to discover that all lucrative long-tail keywords have already been taken.

If, however, you decide to go down this route, then remember that your keyword should not appear more than 3-4 times in your article body. Anything more than that, and you risk having your submission declined automatically for keyword stuffing.

Additionally, make sure that you also place the keyword somewhere in your article title. Very often, this means having to get a bit creative. For instance, let’s say you’re optimizing your article for the “lose weight for the summer” keyword. Some examples of title optimization can include:

• “How to Lose Weight for the Summer in 7 Quick Steps”
• “Lose Weight for the Summer in Just One Month”
• “How to Lose Weight for the Summer Vacation”
• “Beach Body Secrets – How to Lose Weight for the Summer”

As you can see, the trick is to be as creative as possible with your title and keep looking for ways to seamlessly integrate your keyword into it without disrupting the flow of the sentence.

For this reason, some keywords are easier to write around than others – which is why SEO can get pretty difficult in competitive markets, where every single good long-tail word has been taken and the remaining ones either get absolutely no traffic or cannot be easily integrated into the article.

By the way – if you want to do keyword research, whether for your articles or PPC campaigns, I strongly encourage you to use Google’s free keyword tool.

It used to be the case that Google didn’t display exact search volumes for each term, making this tool all but useless; but ever since Overture shut down, the Big G has changed its tune and turned it into a relatively useful tool.

One caveat, however – take everything you find through that tool with a grain of salt. Google’s results are notoriously inaccurate – especially insofar as cost-per-click estimates are concerned. However, they’re still good at getting a relative picture of how much some keywords get searched in relation to others.

Sheer Volume

This technique is pretty straightforward – instead of relying on SEO, you simply dominate your relevant article category by submitting more articles to it than anyone else. With 150 articles listed, this is exactly how I came to dominate an extremely competitive category on EZA – and I’m getting about 50-60 unique visitors from it every day. Assuming 1% conversion rate, that’s an easy sale every two days!

If you decide to follow this strategy, then remember that the key to making it work is consistency. Submitting one or two articles every day is much more effective than submitting all of them in a lump, because each article will get featured on the front page on each day of the week.

Also, here’s a little trick that a lot of people don’t know about – if you’re a Platinum author and your articles get approved in around two days, try submitting 4-5 articles on a Thursday. You might get lucky and one of these articles will get approved on Friday night, meaning that it will stay on the front page the whole weekend.

One of my articles once got around 2,000 views in this manner, netting me approximately 500 visitors in just two days.

Which, by the way, brings us nicely to the topic of optimizing your CTR and getting the most of your articles.

Boosting Your CTR

There are three little-known tricks that I have personally used to massively boost clickthrough rates on my EZA articles.

Firstly, write customized biography boxes for each article, and make them as long as possible. The idea is to trick the reader into thinking that the biography box is actually part of the article. In doing so, you will avoid situations where the reader stops because they know they’ve reached the end and that what follows is little more than promotion by the author.

Secondly, seamlessly integrate your biography box into the content of your article. For example, let’s say you’re writing a piece on how to win your ex back. Instead of ending the article with a few summarizing sentences and inserting a completely irrelevant biography box, write the latter in a manner that complements your article.

For instance, start the biography box with a paragraph on how winning your ex back can be made easier by taking certain steps, and only use the next paragraph for your link plug.

This seamless integration eliminates the disconnect between the body and the biography, and ensures that the viewer keeps reading well into your biography box, as opposed to leaving the article after the closing body paragraph.

Lastly, always phrase your biography box to highlight the benefit that the reader will get out of clicking on your link. Truth be told, no one cares if you’re an expert in this and a PhD in that – it’s boring, it’s unoriginal but, most importantly, it offers absolutely no value to the reader.

Instead, you can phrase your biography box in the following manner:

“How would you like to lose 5 kilos in seven days and never again feel embarrassed of slipping into that bikini? Click here to read the truth about weight loss from an expert fitness coach.”

The first sentence immediately explains the benefit to the reader – if they follow your link, they will lose weight and finally get that summer body they’ve always dreamt of. The key is to appeal to the reader’s emotions, not reason –every woman feels mortified of bikinis if her body isn’t 100% perfect.

The second sentence contains a simple call to action (“click here”) and establishes your credibility by saying a few words about your background – just enough for your readers to take you seriously.

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing has become rather difficulty lately as more and more forums started prohibiting commercial or otherwise self-serving signature links.

In most cases, only IM-related forums still allow those; all other communities either ban you for doing that, or ask you to pay an advertiser’s fee.

So what do you do if your FTM site isn’t IM-related and you can’t market it simply by adding a signature to your forum posts?

First of all, make sure that the forum you choose to post on is worth your time. The Internet is full of abandoned communities that have been overrun by spambots. Here are three sites that I routinely use to find forums in my own niche markets:

• http://www.BoardReader.com
• http://www.Big-Boards.com
• http://www.BoardTracker.com

Once you’ve shortlisted around 6-8 forums that you feel are worth posting on, spend some time researching how their members interact. Once you’ve gotten a feel for it, start building your reputation as an expert by responding to questions, appeals for help and general requests for feedback.

Luckily for you, if there’s one thing you will always find in abundance on any forum, it’s hundreds of people complaining, asking questions and looking for support and guidance.

All you have to do is track these questions down and start answering them, seemingly without asking for anything in return. Don’t post links to your site, don’t offer to refer them to a site that offers more information – just be a valuable member of the community trying to help out fellow forum members in need.

Building your expert reputation is the key to forum marketing. Since signature links are no longer an option, your next best chance is to become a genuine expert in this topic, so that people start coming to you for guidance and support. And before too long, you can start discretely recommending your site to them in PMs (of course, only when someone asks you for help first). Since forums are tightly-knit communities, if your site offers genuinely value to subscribers, word will spread, as forum members start recommending your site to each other.

Video Marketing

Video-sharing sites offer you a free, easy way to drive traffic to your FTM offering – although, of course, you can make it expensive if you so choose by hiring professional video producers and actors.

In its simplest form, a marketing video consists either of you talking into your webcam and providing a solution to some kind of problem or, alternatively, a recording of a simple PowerPoint presentation with voiceovers for additional effect.

Although, for the purposes of this chapter, we shall concentrate solely on YouTube, keep in mind that it is not the only video-sharing site out there (although it is, by far, the most popular one). However, since most such sites generally feature similar user interfaces and functionality, you can use the technique I am about to show you with just about any video-sharing site out there.

Despite what you may think, search engine optimization and video marketing are two sides of the same coin. You will get the most traffic to your YouTube video (and, by extension, to your site) if it appears at the top of Google results for specific long-tail keywords (which isn’t all that difficult to achieve, since Google often awards high SERPs to YouTube videos).

This means that you really need to do your keyword research before producing and uploading a video. In many respects, YouTube is a mini-Google in and of itself – it’s got millions of competing content, and SEO is one way to make sure that your video stands out from the crowd.

Once you know what topic – or long-tail keyword – you want to aim for, it’s time to get the actual video produced. As suggested earlier, it needn’t be anything complicated – very often, simply recording yourself talking into a webcam will do the trick. Remember, though, that no one likes blatant sales pitches – so, in a 5-minute video, keep the first four minutes advertising-free and concentrate on providing genuinely valuable information to the user.

By the way – I strongly encourage you to stick to the 4-5 minute limit instead of producing a 2-hour documentary. Remember, the attention spans of online audiences are notoriously short – and, unlike e-books, videos haven’t got a table of contents to cherry-pick what you do and do not want to watch. As a result, uploading an overly long video will simply cause frustrated users to fast-forward through content looking for information that’s actually relevant to them, resulting in your own advertising message being diluted in the process.

If you really find yourself with more material than you can comfortably talk about in a 5-minute video, break it up into several parts instead or, better still, release several such videos, each optimized around a specific keyword. Not only will you still provide valuable information to your viewers, but you will also capture more long-tail keywords!

When working with a video site, always remember to create a channel first. You want to make it as easy for current viewers as possible to see what other content you have to offer. More importantly, you can add a link to your site on your channel page, thus helping bring even more traffic from each video you upload.

Before we conclude this lesson, let me give you one final tip that will save you tons of time and lots of frustration.

DON’T FOLLOW EVERYTHING I HAVE SHARED ABOVE.

Yes, that’s true. If you try to follow every trick that I have shared above, you WILL fail. Instead, great marketers stick to just one or two techniques and repeat them until they start seeing the conversions. And once they start seeing the conversions, they do them more often.

So pick any one or two techniques and then just stick to them until you have tested them thoroughly and optimized them fully. Only then, move to the next one. You will thank me later J

What’s coming up next week?

Top Internet Marketing Technique That Brings A Flood of Customers EVERY TIME You Use It – Guaranteed! Next week we will look into the top internet marketing technique that almost every guru uses and that can bring tons of free customers every time you use it. Stay tuned.

If you have missed the previous lessons of this coaching series, don’t worry. You can start from lesson 1 and study at your own pace. Simply visit http://www.MemberSip.com and enroll for the free coaching. You will receive many more tips and tricks that I share with the subscribed readers only.

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