But, before I get more into it, I should mention that no part of this post should be considered legal advice and that you should consult your own legal counsel before taking any action.

Anyways, starting December 1, 2009 website owners who promote or endorse products as an affiliate can no longer do so without stating, in a clearly visible location, that they will be compensated financially should the visitor decide to buy the product after reading their endorsement.

Product sellers will also have to use extreme caution when using customer testimonials on their sales pages. For example, a testimonial like “I lost 27lbs in 10 days with the XYZ diet” or “My Uncle’s Grandma made $935 in just 48 hours using the ABC’s system” because even if the testimonial is 100% truthful and a grandmother did make $935 (and you have proof to back it up) the marketer must emphasize what the ‘average user’ can expect.

Therefore after the $935 claim, the product seller must state “Results not typical. The average user will never follow this system and the 5% who do, can expect to earn $1.43.”

Of course it is extremely difficult, meaning almost impossible to know what results the average user can expect - it is a fact that many people will buy a product and forget all about it a few hours later, and start using it as a coaster left to gather dust and spilled coffee.

Many other buyers will download, read, but fail to take action, therefore a product seller will never truly be able to demonstrate ‘typical’ results… leaving it safer not to use testimonials at all - if you are to comply with the new FTC Internet Marketing rulings. (If you cannot back up your testimonials with documented proof that the alleged success story did indeed use your product, don’t even think about using them).

This leaves many marketers with quite a dilemma - after all, some sales pages are little more than a long list of customer testimonials - and really, real world proof is one of the best ways to get people to buy.

What About Non-US Marketers?

I’ve always felt that US based marketers have had a tiny advantage over those of us who live in other countries… and now thanks to the FTC, it’s time to take that back.

All kidding aside, given that the FTC is a US Government body and cannot make laws for those residing outside the United States, everyone else can go on using testimonials till their heart’s content. I know I’ll keep using them and won’t be making any changes - except that maybe, I’ll throw in a few extra just to rub it in a little

Though, on the other hand, if you have affiliates, US based customers, web hosting, or shopping cart services that are based in the US, it might be wiser to consider complying with the new regulations, since theoretically, a website hosted by a US hosting company etc. could still be shut down.

To be completely safe and avoid your operation being targeted by the FTC a product owner would have to reside in a non US country, not sell to US residents, and have a merchant account or shopping cart based in his own country.

But really, I’m not going to worry too much about it. As long as your testimonials and proof and 100% legit and you have actual proof to back that up, I’m gonna keep it business as usual.

So How Can We, As Marketers Find a Way Around This?

There are a number of ways we can demonstrate our products to be of good value without claims from our friends or past customers that they made $XXX dollars or experienced XXX results in a remarkably short time.

Here are a few options we can use in the space where those testimonial boxes used to reside and keep away from the unwanted attentions of the FTC.

• A ‘character based’ testimonial is one way of filling up those testimonial boxes. I have received emails from clients thanking me for my follow-up support - they may have had trouble downloading the product or understanding a certain aspect of the system, and later kindly send an email thanking me for the fast support they received to solve their particular problem.

This will give you credibility as a vendor, and build confidence in your buyer, but I don’t recommend using too many of these - one or two would suffice as visitors will likely find it boring to read again and again how fantastic the vendor is- and therefore click away from the sales page.

Another idea that can work just as well as testimonials, is to use quotes, research or scientific studies to back up what you’re saying. If there’s a scientific study that proves that skinnier people live longer, more enjoyable lives, use that. Or if there’s a quote about the recession and how it’s worse than ever before, use that when selling your ‘how to make money’ product.

Here’s a few other ideas:

• Run cheap trial offers giving the user a taste of what he will get when he buys the full version. This is a good method of boosting sales - your sales copy does not have to be so long or involved when you are only asking the buyer to part with a few dollars for a trial period.

• Be absolutely sure your customer support is top notch. The standard way the FTC would monitor webmasters is through consumer complaints for deceptive advertising. If you respond to client’s queries quickly and ensure you resolve any issues they may have they are far less likely to make a formal complaint.

• Make your offer absolutely totally irresistible - when you are selling a first class item for a realistic price your sales letter can concentrate on the huge benefits the reader will receive when using your product, without you having to depend so heavily on testimonials to sell your amazing creation!

• If you are an affiliate endorsing products on your site or blog, be transparent. Simply state that although you do have a vested interest in endorsing the product, there are tens of thousands of similar companies also paying commissions but you chose to endorse that particular company because in your opinion, they sell the superior product. More importantly, buy and try the product.

Some bloggers and webmasters already use the following approach:

“If you like my site, please buy through my affiliate link.” and “If you don’t, here’s the direct link.”

Many have described excellent results using this method and people dig honesty.

And the Bottom Line?

The bottom line is “Don’t Worry!”

A quick scan through the ClickBank marketplace reveals many of the best selling products do not, and have never used customer testimonials.

Of the current 20 best selling products, at least 5 of them do not have any customer testimonials and concentrate on the benefits of the product itself, rather than what other customers are saying about it.

The ‘Fatloss 4 Idiots’ program which has consistently been at the top of the diet category since it’s launch does not have one customer testimonial on the page, and it is rumored the product has made well over $20 million for it’s owners in 2008 alone!

Transparency is never a bad thing, and the new policy could even improve sales in the long term as people feel less likely they are about to be scammed when buying online.

No matter how you look at it, it’s not the end of IM, but a slightly new beginning and I’ll for one be looking forward to the new marketing practices and techniques that will come out because of it.

One of the big advantages of this technique is that there is little competition – unlike competing for top spot in Google, it’s much easier to achieve top spot on YouTube.

Here’s how it works:

When someone watches a video on YouTube, when it’s over, often they’ll watch a similar related video.

So what you need to do to take advantage of this is to latch on to a new, but very popular ‘viral’ video in your niche market as a related video. By being one of the top responses or related videos to a really popular video that’s getting tons of views and is going viral, you’ll basically feed off their traffic to generate your own which in turn means website visitors.

There are some videos on YouTube with over 30,000,000 (that’s 30 million) views. Just think - if 5% of those people clicked over to your video and then 2% of those clicked through to your website, you’d get 30,000 new visitors to your website, which when monetized properly can mean hardcore profits.

I know most popular videos don’t get that many views, but even if they only manage 3 or 5 million and you hitch on for a ride at the right time, you could still end up with several thousand new visitors.

So, to take advantage of this technique, all you need to do is go to YouTube and find a video in your niche that’s new and on it’s way to becoming popular and getting a lot of views. Since you want a popular, but new video, go to the advanced search options and sort the results by ‘View Count’ and under ‘Uploaded’ choose ‘Today’ or ‘This Week’ and look for a video that’s gotten thousands or 10’s of thousands of views that you can tag along with.

Under the video, you see ‘Video Responses’ – click on that, then the ‘Post a Video Response’ link. Then create a video as a response to the popular one you found, and post it as a video response to feed off its traffic.

This way if / when that popular video you posted a response to goes viral, your video is going to show up as a ‘Video Response’ to that one and often as a ‘Related Video’ as well (if you copy the other videos’ tags and make them similar to your own).

So, when someone finishes watching that video, there’s a good chance they’ll click on yours as a response or related video and watch it next, which can make your video popular and drive a lot of traffic to your website.

While the quality of the video you post does matter and should be good, it doesn’t have to look like a fancy studio production and it doesn’t have to be very long either. As long as you have good content and provide either useful information or entertainment, that’s what really matters. Think along the lines of article marketing content. Make a video that gives them interesting, useful information in your niche in an entertaining style… or even a video that’s pure entertainment.

If you’re stuck on ideas, check out some other popular videos in your niche (or even a different one) and see what people are doing and what seems to be popular.

Hardly anyone uses this technique (I’ve seen videos with over 10 million views and no video responses), yet it can be insanely effective. Though… it can be a little hit or miss - but even if you miss, you’re still way ahead of the game.

If you happen to tag along with a video that ends up getting a million views or more, you can still get thousands of visitors to your website. If the video only ends up with 50 or 100 thousands views, you still can squeeze a few hundred visitors out of it and if you’re good at creating a video, that’s not bad for an hour or two’s work.

Just remember to put in a link to your website with your video and in your profile!

You can download it here: www.InternetMarketingGoneWild.com

If you want a little more info, here’s the teaser video:

Eddie wanted desperately to have sex with this really cute, really hot girl in his office…

But she was dating someone else.

One day Eddie got so frustrated that he went to her and said, ‘I’ll give you $100 if you let me have sex with you…

The girl looked at him, and then said, ‘NO!’

Eddie said, ‘I’ll be real fast. I’ll throw the money on the floor, you bend down and I’ll finish by the time you’ve picked it up. ‘

She thought for a moment and said that she would consult with her boyfriend…So she called him and explained the situation.

Her boyfriend says, ‘Ask him for $200, and pick up the money really fast. He won’t even be able to get his pants down.’

She agreed and accepts the proposal.

Over half an hour goes by and the boyfriend is still waiting for his girlfriend’s call.

Finally, after 45 minutes the boyfriend calls and asks, ‘What happened…?’

Still breathing hard, she managed to reply, ‘The bastard had all dimes!’

Lesson: Always consider all potential outcomes of a business proposition before agreeing to it, or you may get screwed.

Where are you now… and where do you want to be? What do you want to achieve in the next year? What are your goals for 2009?

Write them down somewhere specific where you’ll see them everyday. I know it might sound silly, but it works because it gets you thinking about how you’re going to achieve them and what it’s going to take to make it work.

Besides, goal setting is something that’s used by top performers all over the place. Top athletes create them. Million dollar CEO’s create them. And soccer moms create them too because they work and help to get more done and ultimately make you more successful.

Here’s the 3 steps to setting goals:

1. Define your goals.
2. Set mini subgoals.
3. Create an action plan on how you’re going to achieve them.

Always set performance type goals that are measurable and realistic to achieve. Don’t make them too easy, but you also don’t want them to be nearly impossible to achieve.

If you’re new to goal setting, you can use the SMART mnemonic to get help get you started. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Because internet marketing is still a relatively new technology that’s constantly changing, I don’t like to plan too long term. In this business, you can’t. But you can set goals for what you want to accomplish in the next month. In the next 3 months, 6 months or even 12 months.

You might want to quit your job.

You might want to create your own product.

You might want to earn some extra income for a vacation.

You might want to become a recognized expert in your niche.

You might want to form a mastermind group.

You might want to find a JV partner for a new project

What do you want to do in 2009?

Here are a few of my goals for the New Year:

• To do $100,000 or more in online sales in February.
• To outsource more, work smarter and be able to take an extra day off each week by the end of the year.
• To add a minimum of an extra 25,000 opt-in subscribers to my list this year.
• To rewrite and republish my Street Smart Internet Marketing book as a hardcover (textbook style).
• To set up my business in such a way that I can spend 75% of my time working on the things that I enjoy doing most.

Goals are important, but what’s more important is how you’re going to achieve them. What’s it going to take to make them happen? What do you need to do to achieve them? Write that down as well and then work on setting it in motion.

Goal setting just doesn’t need to be limited to your business life, but can be done for your personal life as well. Maybe you want to pay off your mortgage or get married to a special someone or spend more time with your kids. How are you going to make that happen this year?

If you’re not a believer yet, goal setting and achieving is also an incredible motivational tool and in this business when many people are working from home, often by themselves, it’ll help keep you motivated, focused and on track. People who are laser focused and stay on track are often much more successful than those that aren’t.

So what are your goals for 2009?

Feel free to share some of them below… maybe you’ll inspire someone else and help to change their life.

Savvy business people used to make a fortune buying and selling stocks, then buying and selling real estate (flipping). Now website flipping of virtual real estate is quickly becoming one of the new things that will make many smart people very wealthy. Here’s an overview of website flipping and you can become a flipper.

The concept is pretty simple: Website flipping involves creating websites that make money with then selling them for a large profit (6-12 months worth of income). Websites of all kinds and in all niches can be flipped, the results of course vary from site to site and will also depend on the uniqueness of the site and if there’s any custom programming, graphics or other things.

As in all types of flipping the main idea is to get in, improve it, and get out as quickly as possible.

There are two ways to obtain a website to flip. Either buy an existing site and then imprve the design, content, SEO and ultimately traffic and income. Or start from scratch and buy a domain, then set to work on all the items I just mentioned. Doing all these things will up the PageRank, improve the site’s traffic, income and its appeal to a buyer.

To decide what kind of site you want to create to flip a bit of research is in order. It’s important to find a site that will be marketable. The easiest way to decide what to make is to see what people are buying. Check out sites like Sitepoint.com where websites are sold and see what types are popular.

Some keyword research will also help you narrow down the latest popular niches. As always, look for keywords with lots of searches but low competition. Looking at the ads in Google search results vs. organic results can be a great indicator of popularity and competition.

If you can get the keywords you choose into the domain name that you buy you’re well on your way. Also, make sure the domain you get for your flip is a .com as it will have a much higher selling value than any of the other options.

Another thing you might want to consider, is if you can create an authority site in a popular niche, it can often sell for several years worth or monthly income.

Once you have your domain set up on a hosting account, you want to get to work making it a great as you can, as quickly and easily as you can. This includes putting up a nice site design, adding content and monetizing it as best you can.

There are tons of free website templates floating around so in the beginning you won’t need to pay for this, but once you start earning an income and before you flip it, you’ll want something custom.

Then you want to let the world know about it. The quicker you can get it indexed in Google and linked to on the net, the quicker you can sell it for good money. It’s also a good idea to drive traffic to the page, be it by free or paid methods.

Before you sell your site, make sure you’re getting a price that is worth the effort and investment you put into creating the site. This includes all your costs (domain name, hosting, any parts that you outsourced such as article writing, driving traffic to the page, etc) and your time.

A good way to decide if a site is worth selling at the price you’ve been offered is to deduct all your costs, then divide the amount left by the amount of hours you put into it. If this hourly wage is too low, you’re not getting enough for the site to make it worthwhile. At this point you might want to try improving the site, or just scrapping it al together.

Once you’ve got some content on a nice looking site (i.e. clean Web 2.0 style.) and it’s getting traffic and making money, you can put it up for sale. There are plenty of sites where you can list it for sale. A good one is SitePoint.com as I mentioned earlier where it will cost less than $20. You can also go to eBay, or even approach private parties who might be interested.

Here are a few flipping tips:

Website flipping is really not all that hard to get started in and with a little practice, it can make you a lot of money. Happy flipping!

(Now would also be a good time to sign up for the RSS feed)

Anyways, I recently ran a promo where I gave my Traffic Tips Report for free as a list building promotion.

It’s been over for a couple of weeks, but I’ve still been getting a lot of questions about it. So I’ve decided to write this post, not only to show you how it went, but to show you how you or anyone else could run a similar promo with similar success.

I’ve written a lot of other blog entries, articles and emails on the importance of building your list over the last couple of years, but never really set out on a monumental effort to build my own.

I’d done the normal ad swaps, opt-in pages, article marketing, free giveaways and so on, but nothing big like this. So here’s what I did:

To save time, I took a report which I had previously written and sold for $7 and decided to give it away for free.

Instead of lining up a ton of partners to help me promote it, or spending a lot of time and money on marketing, I decided to try and make it go viral.

Viral marketing can be hit and miss, so I needed a sure fire way to make sure it was successful, so I decided to pay people $1 for everyone they referred who signed up.

I’d seen several big name marketers like Mike Filsaime or Russell Brunson who had done similar things in the past and it seemed to have worked well for them and sounded like a good way to go.

The goal was get a dozen or so marketing friends and business partners to help me by promoting it to their lists, then have it continue under its own power.

So, everyone that signed up to download the report also had the opportunity to sign up as an affiliate and promote the report to earn $1 per referral. Then everyone they signed up under them could do the same thing and so on, thus making the marketing / report viral.

The benefits for affiliates to promote the report was twofold- they could promote a useful resource to their lists or website visitors that was free and earn a commission for doing so. Their subscribers would be happy with the valuable traffic generation information and they’d earn cash for their efforts making it a win / win situation and a no-brainer for most people to promote.

Affiliates also like the fact that they can make money by giving away something and not selling anything which was a huge plus.

The reason I wanted to have affiliates promote something instead of doing it myself was pretty simple. An army of affiliates can cover a lot more ground than I can and they can each use their expertises in their specific marketing techniques to promote the report.

I had affiliates doing everything from emailing their lists, to posting to their websites and blogs, to submitting articles and press releases to posting ads on forums, Craiglist, eBay and so on. There were even a few people that setup PPC campaigns or ads on traffic networks.

In fact, so many people promoted it, that near the end of the two week campaign, there were over 17,000 hits on Google for the report:

After people signed up, they were presented with three one time offers. Some people gave me a little grief over this, but they were there for a couple of reasons.

1. Not everyone could afford the more expensive offers, so I had a cheaper alternative available to them.
2. When I tested everything, having three one time offers generated the highest profits by a long shot.

I had debated having one time offers at all, but got to thinking if things went insanely well and 25k or more people signed up, it would be kind of foolish to be out $25k in affiliate commissions and have not earned anything on the back end, so one time offers it was. They were just your standard OTO’s, nothing really special about them except that they were a killer deal.

Anyways, after signing up, going though the one time offers and confirming their email address, people were brought to a download page that also encouraged them the promote the report. A little over 1 in 5 people who downloaded the report signed up as an affiliate.

Autoresponder / Affiliate Software

To do this yourself you’ll want a complete shopping cart system and a good affiliate program that will track leads (signups) as well as make it easy for people to signup as an affiliate and access the promo material such as 1StartCart.com.

As far as promo material, I provided banners, articles, reviews, text links and emails that people could use to promote the report. That way there was something for everyone and it made it really quick and easy for anyone to post an article or review (with their affiliate link) on their blog or setup a broadcast email for their list etc.

How Well Did It Go - Some Stats

I’m not going to bore you with all the details, so I’ll just give it to you straight up:

In the 2 weeks the promo ran, I had just over 10,000 people signup for the free report - about 2,000 of those signed up to be an affiliate and about 450 of the affiliates referred more than 5 unique people.

The average conversion rate ended up being 51%. It started out at about 57%, then slowly dropped as the promo went on, likely because the quality of traffic was dropping.

The highest affiliate had a conversion rate of 88% and the lowest active affiliate had a conversion rate of 1% - so the quality of traffic definitely had a large impact on the signups generated.

Testing

Before I sign off, one thing I should mention is the importance of testing. Before running something like this, you need to test your opt-in page like crazy. Test the headlines, the graphics, the opt-in form, the bullets, the testimonials, the colors- test everything you can in the time you have.

It’s pretty easy to double or triple your conversion rate by testing a few key things and that cam mean the difference between 2,000 signups or 10,000 signups.

By the way, if you want to see the final tested opt-in page I used, it’s at www.LemonadeHere.com.

I tested everything with PPC, mostly because it was easy to do, cost effective and offered a good random sample of visitors.

I also did a little testing with one of those traffic generation pay per click sites which had such a low conversion rate, it was really just a waste of time and money.

Besides getting a lot of opt-ins, I wanted to try and earn back the $1 commission I was paying to affiliates from the one time offers, so I tested them with PPC as well until they were providing a good ROI.

I also did some live testing of the OTO’s simply because you need a certain number of sales to get decently accurate results and that can take a lot of time and money and go on forever with PPC.

In the end, everything worked out pretty well, I added an extra 10k people to my list, met a lot of new people and as luck would have it, earned back $1 and change per signup.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them as a comment and I’ll get back to you.

For the full case study and more detail on how you can run your own viral promo, please see: www.UnstoppableListBuilding.com to see how you can build a lit of 10,000+ in under 30 days.

I just took my Traffic Tips Report from www.TrafficTipsReport.com and put it up for free at: www.LemonadeHere.com

If you have a website, blog, Squidoo lens, Hub page or ever plan on putting one up, make sue you grab a copy before I pull it off the market at the end of the month.

Here’s the link: www.LemonadeHere.com

There’s also a special bonus in there that will allow you to start profiting from it almost instantly!

By the way, I’m working on a complete redesign of this blog / website which I hope to have ready soon- that’s why it hasn’t been updated in a while

Whether you want to put up a large e-commerce web site, or a small business site, it’s important that you do your research. There are many different types of web hosting review sites, many that claim to give the best, most thorough or objective reviews available online for the many different hosting services that are available online.

You may find that some of these hosting review web sites are quite large and have hundreds or thousands of reviews of web hosting businesses. Often websites like this usually have a large staff complete with customer service and support who regularly update the web site with new reviews and links. It’s important for these review web sites to maintain their image by keeping everything fresh and current without doing anything to tarnish the web site’s image.

There are also other review web sites you may come across which are a bit smaller. These don’t usually have a staff of customer service agents and support; instead they have one person controlling the updating of all the reviews for web hosting companies. Many of the articles you will find on the web site will be written by other writers who were outsourced, which may mean that they’re not .

It’s important to note that the larger websites have the budget to sign up for many different types of hosting accounts and can offer a more well researched opinion on the web hosts they review whereas smaller sites have less of a budget to devote to research, trial and error.

Most of the review websites you’ll come across are in it strictly to make money. Although it is acceptable to display advertisements and affiliate links on a review web site, some may be a little biased towards their advertisers or the hosting companies offering the largest affiliate commission.

You can protect yourself by either avoiding these types of sites or doing thorough research. If you see that are many positive reviews for one of the advertised web hosting companies, then you may not be able to trust the web site, so don’t base your decisions solely on them. The most important thing to do is browse around.

In the end, make sure that you research diligently and you should find the answers you seek in the countless available reviews of web hosting companies.

Guest post by www.webhostingbreak.com

All of those questions have been answered over and over in many articles on many websites, so what I’m going to address in this article is when enough is enough and you need to make the move from a shared hosting plan to a dedicated one.

Anyone who’s just starting out in internet marketing can easily get by with a shared web hosting plan, where your website is hosted by a third party on their server along with hundreds of thousands of other websites. Shared hosting plans are cheap, they’re extremely easy to use / manage and they’re more than adequate for 99% of websites.

Eventually though, your sites will either start to receive a high level of traffic, you’ll have multiple websites, have a strong need for security, or wish to run your own customized software and applications that will make a dedicated web hosting plan much more economical.

Here are few quick questions to ask yourself to determine if you require a shared or dedicated web server:

1. Does your website get more than 10,000 page views a day?

2. Do you have 10 or more websites that require hosting?

3. Do you need to install any special software on your server?

4. Do you require a unique IP address?

If you answered YES to 2 or more of the above questions, chances are you need a dedicated server. If you answered NO, you’ll probably do just fine with a shared server for now.

It goes without saying that dedicated servers are more expensive than shared servers, but depending on your specific requirements, they may actually be cheaper than multiple shared hosting accounts.

Guest post by www.webhostingsearch.com