While the video goes back to his earlier projects and how that led up to Snappa, I think the biggest takeaway of the presentation is about how to apply content marketing for your SaaS business.Watching this and taking a look at some other SaaS entrepreneurs I know, I think there are probably two main styles of content marketing.

1 – Persona Approach

2 – Tactical Approach

PERSONA APPROACH

Of course either way can produce great results. Or you could probably combine them both and do a hybrid. The main core is still about creating good content that is worth sharing and worth talking about. Something helpful and insightful. But the two approaches have slightly different methods to them.

With Persona Approach, the first thing that comes to mind is Inkdrop by solo developer, Takuya Matsuyama. And then also other personalities like Nathan Barry of ConvertKit, Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad, Jon Yongfook of BannerBear and more.These individuals share some of the most detailed aspects of their business and also challenges. Sahil once shared his story of Gumroad from a VC-backed company and now becoming an indie. Takuya shared detailed expenses and earnings, and also programming challenges, and sometimes code live. Jon Yongfook made a public announcement of his goal to build a $100k ARR company within a year, which he successfully did. Nathan Barry blogged and shared the progress of building a side project to earning $5000 MRR in 6 months, which he failed but that project still led to what we now know as ConvertKit.

I am sure you know what I mean by Persona right now. These individuals, whether directly or indirectly promote themselves while sharing their content. They open up to their audience, which not many of us are prepared to do.

Apart from building their products and companies, they are also building their personal brand. They have become a celebrity to their users and probably more, in the industry. And that persona has attracted leads, converted customers, and maybe also a following, whether they are a customer or not. If you don’t know about these individuals, I urge you to check them out, learn about them, and see how they are building and promoting their indie software business.

TACTICAL APPROACH

Then there is that Tactical Approach to content marketing. Watching the presentation by Christopher, you will begin to understand how this works. When promoting Snappa, Christopher researched about the type of content to create for Snappa. He looked at his customers. He uses SEO tools like Ahref to do keyword research. And then he discovered the type of content that he needed to create.Two examples that I can say here are…

ONE: When he discovered that many people were looking for information about Twitter cover size, Facebook cover size, Youtube thumbnail size, he then went on to create blog posts detailing the information about the correct cover image dimensions for YouTube thumbnail, Facebook page cover, Twitter cover and other online graphic image requirements. He even has blog posts about ad sizes for Instagram Story, Facebook Ads and more.

TWO: He also started to understand that his customers who come to Snappa are not looking for a graphic tool, but rather a Facebook page cover maker, or a Youtube thumbnail maker, and so on. With that, he created site pages linking from the homepage to specific uses for Snappa.

And this approach has helped him break from a stagnant growth position and into the $100k MRR.

The tactical approach is also something that any SaaS company can apply because it doesn’t need a persona or a spokesperson. But if you are an indie developer, you may want to consider the Persona approach, or maybe combining the two.

So generally, content marketing is important for a SaaS or any software business for that matter. But you can’t just do it blindly, dancing on TikTok trying to attract a younger user base.

Create something worth sharing.Yes, creating content takes time and planning, but one time ago, I heard this being said — YOU CAN’T GO WRONG WITH CONTENT MARKETING.

With a good content marketing, the content compounds, in traffic, in authority, in influence and more. Content marketing will definitely pay off in the long term.

So, do you have a content marketing strategy in place yet?Here’s the presentation by Christopher Gimmer at MicroConf 2019.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlDGw6RglNA

Print-on-demand means that your book will only be printed when there is a sale.

OK, maybe you were thinking about Kindle and ebook is the first thing that comes to mind. But you can also offer your book as paperback to be sold on Amazon.com.

The Kindle Direct Publishing allows authors and self publishers to upload their manuscript to be sold as paperback and / or ebook.

So I tried this recently. But I am not going for ebooks. I am only doing the paperback. The reason for this is because I am publishing public domain books and I was told by seasoned by publishers that Amazon is more strict on public domain content submissions for ebooks. This is probably because there are already a lot of them in their marketplace.

But it is still OK for paperbacks. But you have to have your unique feature to it. In most cases, this is a new book cover for the public domain book.

So here are my books on Amazon. I published a series of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes story books.

If working full-time and running your side hustle does not stress you out, and if your side hustle can provide you a comfortable life, you have the option to resign from work or not. Even better when your side hustle can run with little monitoring and attention from you. Of course that is something achievable with the power of Internet and technology where a lot of the work can be automated and outsourced.

Another option is where you build your side hustle to be sold in the near future. It is more valuable when you have built it to a point where it requires very little attention from you. A website that generates $1000 net can easily be sold for $20,000 to $30,000. That way you can profit faster up front and perhaps work on a new side hustle project.

Anyway, if you are starting out and considering a side hustle, I urge you to consider these Side Hustle courses available on Udemy. I believe these course will get you on the right track to begin your Side Hustle journey.

All the best…

Side Hustle Business Startup

By Joeel and Natalie Rivera

If you’re looking to eventually quit your job and replace it with a profitable and sustainable side hustle or startup, then check out this course. You’ll learn how to have the right mindset to start a side hustle, discover how to market yourself and scale your business so you can finally become your own boss!

Side Hustle Money Management

By James Burchill

Having your own side hustle means having your own business. This means being in charge of all financial transactions – maintaining your accounts, tracking expenses, logging time, etc. In this course, you’ll learn how to manage your money the right way. If you don’t want the tax man running after you, then you need this course right now.

Digital Flipping as a Side Hustle

Making a few extra dollars every month sounds like a dream, right? And there are so many different side hustles you can choose from! Well, if you haven’t heard of digital flipping, you can check out this course. With digital flipping, you don’t need a lot of money, time or experience to start. It’s one of the easiest side hustles for beginners!

Side Hustle: Develop the skills you need to succeed

Starting and succeeding at a side hustle is easier said than done. In fact, the sad truth is that many people fail and give up after a week or two. If you want to succeed in this business, then you need to develop the right mindset and the right skills. This course aims to do just that. So, if you need some guidance, then sign up for this course!

DotCom Secrets is a book by Russell Brunson that you get for free but pay for the shipping. Having it shipped all the way to Malaysia, of course, costs more than what people in USA would pay. But I am OK with that.

For delivery within USA, it costs $7.95 USD and everywhere else around the world, you would have to pay $14.95 USD.

Honestly, I knew about this book years ago when the ad appeared in my Facebook Newsfeed. And later, a colleague in the office got it and always had it on his desk.

My first impression, “It’s a book about squeeze pages… OK…”

And with that, I went on my merry way. I didn’t think much about it then. OK, I admit it. I was ignorant. I also was into my work as a CTO to a startup in Malaysia during that time that I didn’t even consider taking the time to read it. That was my lose.

A couple of years later, I heard about a software company that grew into its $100-million sales mark within just three years. And what’s more amazing is that this company did it without any venture capital funding.

I am really into those kind of stories. I like the story of Nathan Barry who built ConvertKit, also without venture capital funding. I like the story of Brandon Pearce who developed MusicTeacherHelper.com, which was featured in Tim Ferriss’ book, the 4-Hour Work Week. I like the book $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. And I frequent the IndieHacker.com forum and interviews.

I am all for the indie software businessmen and women…

So when I heard about a software company that did $100-million sales in just three days, without VC funding — I have to know more.

And it is ClickFunnels.com.

I know that ClickFunnels.com is by Russell Brunsons. To my normal definition previously, it is a landing page builder software. Much like its competitors like LeadPages.net and Instapage.com. But Russell Brunson would never call it a landing page — it’s a funnel!

Now, this company did $100-million in sales, beating its other competitors to the mark. And his other competitors are all backed with 8 and 9-figure US dollars from venture capital investors.

ClickFunnels? Just with whatever Russell had at hand. Not 7-figure, let alone 8-figure investment. So how does it do it? That is what I went out to figure out.

In the last couple of months, I have immersed myself into Russell Brunson’s content so much that sometimes he even appeared in my dreams at night (ohohoho). I have not only read DotCom Secrets book, I have undergone the One Funnel Away Challenge, a 30-day live coaching program. I have tried my hands on ClickFunnels. I have watched so much YouTube video by Russell and his team. I have read his other books and more.

So how does he do it? Russell would say, “Funnels”

Russell believes that funnels is the only way to sell online.

A funnel, unlike a traditional website, is focused on getting the sale. There is no menus to click, there is no navigation to browse through, there is no search function, there is no list of articles to read.

A funnel is focused on getting you to do one thing. It will direct you from one page to another until it gets the sale from you.

So how does funnels made Russell Brunson over $100-million in sales?

While I kind of get the idea from his videos on YouTube about funnels, the DotCom Secrets book made it clearer.

When you really look at how Russell Brunson promotes ClickFunnels, he rarely promotes ClickFunnels itself. Very seldom he would create a campaign to market ClickFunnels.

What you see he does is this — he educate people about how to use funnels to promote their business. By business, Russell means online business, offline business, e-commerce business, affiliate marketing, networking marketing, coaching, consulting, freelancing, brick-and-mortar business and many more. A funnel is for all of that.

So Russell went on to create funnels to promote ClickFunnels.

What are his other funnels? Well, you see him promote DotCom Secrets. Which is a funnel that giveaway a book for free, plus shipping. Of course he has upsells, order bumps and one-time offers along the way. So even though he is giving the book away, he still makes money with DotCom Secrets.

But that money is not for profit. Whenever somebody gets the book, he becomes introduced to ClickFunnels. Russell Brunson is actually finding customers for ClickFunnels using other funnels. When he makes money with the DotCom Secrets funnel, he can dump it all back into getting more traffic.

If you have something like that, how much money can you put into traffic back again? If you have a machine where $1 makes you $2, then would you put that $2 back into the machine to make $4?

For as long as the funnel is making money, right? He can do it all day, all year long. And continously “funneling” customers to ClickFunnels with DotCom Secrets. ClickFunnels is where he makes his actual profit.

Now imagine if Russell has more of those funnels, which all are cashflow positive, and all indoctrine their customers into becoming ClickFunnels customers.

Some of other funnels that Russell has are:

• DotCom Secrets book
• Expert Secrets book
• Affiliate Bootcamp
• Funnel Scripts copywriting software
• 30-Days Summit book
• One Funnel Away Challenge

You see, while his competitors spend $60 (negative) to get a new free trial user, for Russell, even before they become a customer at ClickFunnels, through DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and all of his other funnels, he already netted $30 (positive).

Imagine all that funnels, never ending, qualified buyer generator, self-sufficient at making money and funding traffic costs itself, all funneling new customers to ClickFunnels…

Imagine that… and that is before his speaking engagements, live events, consulting gigs and more.

That really explains the $100-million sales as a software business.

And it opens up a whole new world for me when it comes to promoting a software business online, especially SaaS. When you really look at what Russell does, and then look at his competitors, your thought would be, “They don’t stand a chance…”

While others have $XX-million in their bank to spend on traffic and marketing, Russell has endless of cash from his funnels. Remember, his funnels are forever generating new money to pay for more traffic, and also converting those traffic into customers, and later being funneled back into ClickFunnels. It’s an endless cycle!

OK, right! Back to DotCom Secrets Book…

You know when I said, I thought DotCom Secrets is just a book about building squeeze pages, I wasn’t kidding. So I was in for a big surprise when I started reading DotCom Secrets.

My initial thought after the first few chapters, “These are some sophisticated stuffs…!”

I have had some serious thoughts and questions when it comes to online marketing. For example, you know that you can make more sales when you promote offers to people who already know and trust you. But in this internet age, and you want to convert sales quickly, how do you generate traffic and establish instant rapport with them. Well that is just one of the questions that I got the answer from through DotCom Secrets.

Reading this book, it will convince you that if you are not using funnels in your business, you are really missing out on a lot. Russell has planned and laid out the content for DotCom Secrets so well where he started with the core foundation to building a funnel.

Through DotCom Secrets, Russell shares 13 secrets to help any business grow using the Internet and sales funnels. These secrets are grouped into 3 sections. And then there are two sections that covers about the type of funnels that you can use, and the last section is solely about ClickFunnels.com.

Through out the book, all the ideas, secrets and concepts are well illustrated with stories, examples and also Russell’s doodles. All these help in making you understand the concept that is being explained to you. I find myself have multiple “ah-ha” moments, and also the long “Oooo…” moments when you start get something.

Let’s skim through the chapters quickly.

• Section One – Ladders & Funnels
  • Secret #1 : The Secret Formula
  • Secret #2 : The Value Ladder
  • Secret #3 : From a Ladder to a Funnel
  • Secret #4 : How to Find Your Dream Customer
  • Secret #5 : The Three Types of Traffic
• Section Two – Your Communication / Follow-up Funnel
  • Secret #6 : The Attractive Character
  • Secret #7 : The Soap Opera Sequence
  • Secret #8 : The Daily Seinfield Sequence
• Section Three – Funnelology Leading Your Customers to the Sale (Over and Over Again)
  • Secret #9 : Funnel Hacking
  • Secret #10 : Seven Phases of a Funnel
  • Secret #11 : The 23 Building Blocks of a Funnel
  • Secret #12 : Frontend vs. Backend Funnels
  • Secret #13 : The Best Bait
• Section Four – Funnels & Scripts
  • Frontend Funnels
    • Funnel #1 : Two-Step, Free-Plus-Shipping
    • Funnel #2 : Self-Liquidating Offer
    • Funnel #3 : Continuity
  • Funnels for Middle of the Value Ladder
    • Funnel #4 : The Perfect Webinar
    • Funnel #5 : Invisible Funnel Webinar
    • Funnel #6 : Product Launch
  • Backend Funnel
    • Funnel #7 : High-Ticket, Three-Step Application
• Section Five – ClickFunnels
  • Conclusion: Ignite Your Funnel

This would not be a review if I tell you everything about the ebook. So I am going to share some of the valuable lessons I have got from DotCom Secrets.

The Question That Haunted Me For Years — Answered in DotCom Secrets

A few years ago, I was able to generate $276 in affiliate commission in just a week, without any list, paying for ads, utilizing any high trafficked website or seeking favors from anybody. How did I do that? I just posted a few updates on my Facebook feed.

The sales happened because I have people on my friend list that know and trusted my recommendation. So this method is really scalable. When I think about scaling, I started to ask questions about how can I build instant rapport and trust with a stranger online, so that he or she will immediately take my advice and suggestion, ie, buy a certain product through an affiliate offer?

I never got an answer for that — until now. Until I read DotCom Secrets.

Have you ever read a blog post and suddenly you feel so drawn into the blogger him/herself. After that one blog post you read, you have the urge read the About page. And after that other blog posts. And later you find yourself subscribing to his/her newsletter.

What was it that made this person so attractive?

Russell has the answer for that in Secret #6 : The Attractive Character.

So it is not just about the funnel. A lot of foundation stuffs need to be done before you get into the funnel building. Building your Attractive Character to engage and relate with your audience is key to a better performing funnel.

And you thought you can just “tell your story” and it will be enough. No…! there are ways to crafting and telling your story to make it more engaging. Russell even went on to share some scripts, personality and many more little details when it comes to building your Attractive Character.

Secret #7 : The Soap Opera Sequence continues on with the Attractive Character on how you should introduce yourself. The Soap Opera Sequence is a list of five emails that you should have in your autoresponder that every new subscriber should go through. There are tips and tricks to getting readers engaged to, making them eagerly anticipating your next email.

Reading through what is explained and the psychology behind every email amazes me. Boy, have I been doing it all wrong.

Another Ah-ha Moment — Traffic…

First of all, Russell simplifies traffic in Secret #5 : Three Types of Traffic. There is only three type of traffic:

• Traffic you control
• Traffic you don’t control
• Traffic you own

Traffic you control the traffic that you can work on like paying for them, or working with affiliates and joint-venture partners. Traffic you don’t control are like Facebook shares and tweets on Twitter. Or when something goes viral.

But the general idea is convert all these traffic into traffic that you control, which is people who are on your mailing list. With people in your mailing list, you can create content and promotion and drive them to any website that you want.

But later in Secret #12 : Frontend vs. Backend Funnels, Russell categorize traffic into three other different types. These types determine the work and treatment required for each of them. These three types are based on how aware they are to your product or services, or what Russell calls Product Awareness Continuum.

There are five level of Product Awareness Continum :

1. Unaware
2. Problem Aware
3. Solution Aware
4. Product Aware
5. Most Aware

Any consumer in the market move from level 1 to level 5 when they acquire a product or services. But to further simplify this, Russell categorize this into three different type of traffic.

1. Cold Traffic
2. Warm Traffic
3. Hot Traffic

Each of these types of traffic requires different treatment and approaches. It all depends on how you acquire your traffic. For example, if you are targeting people who have never heard of you before, those are Cold Traffic. If you are being promoted by somebody else that has authority in the market, then that could be considered as Warm Traffic. And Hot Traffic is those who know, like and trust you, or even better, have bought from you in the past.

Based on these types of traffic, in Secret #11 : The 23 Building Blocks of a Funnel, Russell has outlined 23 different types of funnel blocks (or tactics) to deal with them. For example, for Cold Traffic, you need to pre-frame their minds into being aware about their situations and problems. When the prospects are pre-framed, you get less resistance when you introduce your product.

If you are going to promote a product for joint pains, you can create a blog article or maybe a quiz with questions like, “Is it difficult for you to get up after sitting down in a chair?”

While the quiz helps you to identify and recommend better products, you are also actually pre-framing their minds into being aware that they have a problem that they need to solve.

Apart from that, towards the end of the book, Russell outlined seven different funnels and how you should use them. And it is also packed with scripts and copywriting templates to get you started.

The Verdict

I am learning so much from this book. And it was my mistake a few years ago ignoring this and thinking that I already know everything about squeeze pages. In this review, I can only share with you some of golden nuggets I have picked up from the book. But I have learned a lot more.

So my verdict is — if you want to get into online marketing for whatever business you are in, get it! It’s free. You just pay for shipping.

You will be glad that you did.

And for further learning experience, I highly recommend the One Funnel Away Challenge that is happening every other month or so.

Well, I guess that’s it! Let’s go make some money!

1) First and foremost, a tracking software. This is most crucial if you pay for traffic. This is not your normal link tracking, but one that is specific for affiliate marketing. You can track traffic and conversion with it, and later analyze best performing metrics.

Example, you can start to see when people are buying, what device they are using, where they are from, what keywords are converting, which banner ads contributed to the sale, and many, many more. And based on that, you can further optimize your campaign. You can also do split tests among ads, landing pages, offers and see which performs best. What I use currently is Bemob.com. It is awesome.

2) A way to build and host landing pages. Depending on what you use, sometimes landing page builders come with hosting options. And you want your site to be ultra fast for best user experience. Some build their landing pages with WordPress and optimize for speed. Some convert the WordPress site into a static site and host on Amazon S3 or Google Firebase. Some use tools like ClickFunnels.com which hosts your site all together.

There are many types of landing pages that you build for affiliate marketing. But the main idea is to help preframe your traffic into the state of mind of needing or buying your recommended product or solution. And landing page can be an article page, or blog post page, a survey, an optin form. ClickFunnels does help a lot in creating many of those types of landing pages.

3) A way to generate traffic. Depending on the type of affiliate marketer you are, you generate traffic in different ways. Generally to see results quickly, you pay for traffic and optimize it so that your affiliate commission is more than your traffic costs (plus other expenses). Hence the need for a tracking software. I have used Google Ads (used to be Adword), Microsoft Ads (used to be Bing Ads) and Propeller Ads (for push and native ad traffic).

An affiliate marketer that focuses on SEO will need a different set of tools. He or she would probably be into inbound link outreach software tools, ranking position monitoring, domain and website analysis tools and more.

An affiliate marketer who is into info-marketing and personal branding would probably create his or her product first and find other affiliates to promote his product. So he would need an affiliate platform to manage the affiliates or probably go with ClickBank or HasOffer, etc.

4) VPN software. A VPN software will be able to mask your IP address with a different one in a different location. So to the web servers you are browsing you can appear like a visitor from Sweden even if you are from Japan.

This is useful when you run an ad campaign targeting only Sweden and you want to see if you ad is actually running. Or maybe you want to check out the landing page for an offer that only allows Swedish. Sometimes you want to see competing ads that appears in specific countries.

I use Ivacy right now. It is available for just $40/year and has over 1000 servers in 100+ locations. And you can use it concurrently with up to five devices. I think that is good enough for me.

5) Email marketing software. This depends on the type of affiliate you are. If you are really hard-on with the media buying type and you don’t want to get into email marketing, you don’t have to. But email marketing can really be a great tool to engage, preframe and connect with your prospects and convert more sales.

An email marketing software would allow you to build a page that asks for name and email address, have visitors fill it up, and then the software will automatically sends out your pre-written emails at certain time schedule that you have set. A simple example, you can create a free 7-day email course on how to grow orchids. It can all be automated with an email marketing software. And that is just one feature. There is a ton more.

For email marketing, I use GetResponse. It is really easy to get started with, backed with a great, solid company with great customer support.

6) Lastly, you need an offer to promote. Common networks and platforms are ClickBank, MaxBounty, CJ.com, LinkShare, ShareASale and many others.

There you have it… Now let’s go make some money.

Sometimes I see people throw around the term “Super Affiliate”, and tell others they should do this, do that but these three schools I am about to tell you about were never discussed.

I don’t see other people talk about this. When you want to learn affiliate marketing, they just tell you affiliate marketing but not tell you about these three distinct approach of schools of affiliate marketing.

Knowing about these three schools of Affiliate Marketing will make you aware about the different strategies, tools, goals, and work that are required to make affiliate marketing work.

No wonder newbies are doing tactic A one day, then jump to method B, and the next day proceeding with strategy C — which they all conflict each other.

But let’s start from the very beginning.

If you know affiliate marketing, you can jump ahead to the 3 Schools of Affiliate Marketing. But if you are new to affiliate marketing, let me give you a quick introduction.

Affiliate marketing is one of the many ways to make money online. How affiliate marketing works is where you promote other people’s product by sending traffic to their website using a unique link. Every affiliate will get their own unique link, but they all arrive at the same merchant’s website.

With the unique affiliate link, the merchant, with an affiliate program system in place, will be able to track who sends the visitor to their site. And if that visitor buys something, you as the referring affiliate will earn a commission.

Sounds cool, right?

And there’s more. What makes affiliate marketing so appealing? Well it is because of the fact that:

• You don’t have to create or source your own product
• You don’t have to pack, ship nor deliver the product
• You don’t have to provide support to the customer
• It all can be done online, without having to leave your home, or any where in the world, as long as you have access to the Internet

But it’s not that simple…

Just about anything else, any discipline or skills you are trying to develop, it takes a lot of hardwork and time to get it right. There are many ways to promote an affiliate program. And the successful affiliates normally focuses on a certain type of method.

Just so you understand the many ways of promoting an affiliate program, I am going to group them into three distinct school of thoughts. The three schools are:

1. Niche / Authority Builders
2. Info-Marketers / Influencer
3. Media Buyers

Side Note: There are also hybrids of the three schools. These are not like set rules that you have to follow. Some affiliate marketers apply strategies from multiple schools. And also, while the skills and software I list for each schools are mostly core for each of them, they are also great tools for the other schools. My goal here is help you see they main core concept of approaching affiliate marketing so that you can pick one that you are most comfortable with and hack it till it works.

School 1 : Niche / Authority Site Builders

This is where you build a website. The goal is to build a website that attracts really targeted traffic, and later monetize from it.

Let’s take a simple example. Perhaps you have really good knowledge about pet grooming. You own a chihuahua yourself. So you built a website about that and you promote it hard that it really becomes the go-to website when it comes to pet grooming. Of course your website only attract people who wants to know more about pet grooming themselves. Your site would not attract people who wants to learn about personal finances. In fact you do not want that. When the interests of your visitors matches the content of your website, you now have a niche site with targeted traffic.

And because you are an affiliate, you would also write reviews and also recommend products from other websites. You recommend products from Amazon.com, with your affiliate link, of course. And with every sale, you earn a commission.

Apart from Amazon, you can also recommend products on PetCo.com, PetFlow.com, or Pet Warehouse that runs their affiliate program through ShareASale.com.

But generally, as an Authority Site Builder these are the skills that you may need

• Website development
• Content creation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Link building, and perhaps even outreach link building

Website Development

This is where you need to actually build your website. People used to build websites by actually coding every single line. You would need to learn HTML, CSS and maybe Javascript.

But all that is in the past. Technology has evolved where building a website is no longer a painstaking task. You still need to learn a few things but now there are tools like WordPress. With WordPress you can start to build your website with simple point-and-click, drag-and-drop methods. It may cost you a few bucks if you want to make things easier and faster, like for example getting the Elementor plugin which makes building a WordPress site 10-times faster, easier and makes your site looks amazing in record time.

What is required together with Website Development skills is some knowledge about domain names and web hosting. Fortunately there is really great, affordable course on Udemy for this. This course will teach you how to setup your first WordPress site and how to take it online with your own domain name (dot-com address) and web hosting.

Check out the course on Udemy

Content Creation

Content creation can be in the form of text or video. But let’s talk about text for now. What you want is to be able to create articles after articles on a consistent basis, and also inline with the theme of your website. Also, there is a certain strategy to picking what to write about, which will help in your affiliate conversion and also later, SEO efforts. Some goes deep to analyze which keywords can convert better and which are easier to rank for in search engines.

Of course, then there is the part where you actually write it. You have to make it interesting, valuable, keep readers engage, and on and on. Sometimes you come into a “block”, not knowing what to write and how to express yourself in words. Well, every writer comes across that. Give yourself time and then try again. But alternatively, you can hire a writer to help you with your content creation, which of course costs money. I guess it depends on where you are with your affiliate marketing to be able to consider that. If you are making good income, perhaps it is time to scale, hire writers and pamper yourself with more “me time”. But if you are starting out, maybe you want to do this yourself and see if it works first.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Now the traffic strategy – SEO. With SEO, you work to get your website and web pages rank high in search engines like Google for the relevant keywords. If you can achieve that, you will have targeted traffic coming to your website with huge interest in the topic that you are discussing. And after that, you will be able to promote relevant products to your traffic.

You may also combine your effort with email marketing where you get your traffic to sign up to your newsletter. This would allow you to further send information and perhaps promotions to your visitors that are now in your mailing list.

In summary, the common skills required here is web building and SEO. Of course something more is about doing research about a specific topic and keywords and choosing the right topic and products to focus on.

Link Building & Outreach (when you really get serious)

After all that work, now comes the part where you seek to find other website owners to link to your website. Some will leave this to happen naturally and hope that others will just link and share your content all over the Internet. But some Authority Site Builders I know take the proactive approach and seek out who should link to them. This is what we call the Outreach Program.

Sometimes a link building and outreach program starts from the keyword research itself. Authority Site Builders start analyzing the content are already ranked in search engines, find out who are their competitors, find out who are linking to those websites, and then figure out how to out-rank those listing.

Competitor analysis is normally done with expensive tools like AHREF.com or MOZ.com. These tools can give you really great insights over your competitors and see why they are ranked in the position that they are.

For the outreach program, you can checkout tools like Ninja Outreach and BuzzStream. These tools can help you find out the contact details of other websites linking to another, help you craft emails and keep track of responses. You can do this manually, but with a tool like Ninja Outreach or BuzzStream, tedious and painstaking task like writing and sending emails to hundreds of prospective link partners become easier and requires less time to complete.

Who are the Authority Figures

• Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income
• Matt Digity – Affiliate Lab
• Gael Breton, Mark Webster – Authority Hacker
• Lynn Terry – ClickNewz
• Ian Pribly – Free Internet Marketing Project

Pros & Cons

School 2 : Info-Marketers / Influencer

School 2, the Info-Marketers is a complex being. They study marketing the most (I believe). How you become an info-marketer is not very straight foward because there are many ways of going about it. But generally, the tools and skills that you would be using would be:

• Email marketing software
• Info-product creation (video course, ebooks, coaching, etc)
• Crafting offers
• Landing pages and sales funnels

Email Marketing Software

People who I call info-marketers will always preach, “The Money Is In The List”. An autoresponder or email marketing software is the number one arsenal for info-marketers.

Some common email marketing software companies out there are like GetResponse, Aweber, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign. I use GetResponse. They are great and comes with a bunch of features that meet all your marketing needs. With a good email marketing software, you can pre-write a series of emails and schedule them to go out on certain time after a prospect joins your mailing list. Now, why would somebody would want to join your mail list? That is an interesting point.

Info-Product Creation

Though I call them info-marketers because when building a mailing list, what is important is creating an info-product, whether you sell it or give it away. Because that is how to you start to build a mailing list. With a product, you can ethically “bribe” visitors into giving you their email address. For example, you want to build a list around the weight loss industry. So you write an ebook with the title, “How I Lost 28lbs in 3 Months Naturally”. Then you create a little website, also known as a landing page that asks people to enter their email address in a little form if they want this ebook.

Crafting Offers

Another skill that is also common among Info-Marketers is about crafting an offer. Of course, this comes handing when you are also capable of creating your own info-product, which you can add-on as bonuses to your initial product.

I believe a huge part of it is about understanding the customer. Info-marketers work hard to understand the customer, what they need, what they want, what they crave about and then start to craft a unique offer that is irresistable to the customer.

Landing Pages & Sales Funnel Tool

A Sales Funnel tool is where everything comes together. It is about presenting the offer on the Internet. Generally it helps you build a series on web page (that we now call landing pages) and help your prospect go through them.

InstaPage.com, LeadPages.net and ClickFunnels.com are some of the common providers for landing pages and sales funnel software. I use ClickFunnels.com.

So where is the affiliate marketing?

Good question! Remember when I said that info-marketing is slightly complex because there are so many ways to go about doing it? Well, let me try to give you some example.

Example Strategy 1: You build a landing page asking for visitors to enter their name and email address, where they will get an ebook sharing the secrets to weight loss. That ebook contains recommendations to diet pills that you are promoting, which you link using your affiliate link.

Example Strategy 2: You found a great weight loss coach, Mr. Slim, that has an online membership site, where people can pay a subscription to. Since you already have an email newsletter with people in the (read Example Strategy 1), you can now broadcast a recommendation to all of your email subscribers to try out Mr. Slim’s online program. And of course, you get a commission when one of your email subscribers join the program.

Example Strategy 3: You found a great software, PersonalTrainer+ that can help personal trainers keep track of their clients. You create a video on how to use the software, but with an angle — How To Earn More As A Personal Trainer.

Now you create a funnel

• Page 1 – Opt-In, you ask for their name and email address
• Page 2 – Software Video, you demonstrate the video

On Page 2, at the end of the video, you recommend the PersonalTrainer+ along together with your own personal bonuses such as PersonalTrainer+ Setup Guide eBook, PersonalTrainer+ Shortcut Guide, etc.

Also, you have a series of emails lined up for your prospects where they will get tips, tricks and other information about being a personal trainer, and of course those that reminds and recommends PersonalTrainer+.

Example Strategy 4: You create your own product, perhaps, Ultimate Personal Trainer Success Guide. And you create a sales funnel optimized to selling the product. And later, you go on to approach and recruit other product creators to become your affiliate to promote your product. You can also do webinars and get affiliates to promote the webinar, where at the end of the webinar, you pitch your product.

With your new list of customers, you can later promote other affiliate offers by sending out email newsletters.

So you see, there are just so many ways you can do affiliate marketing as an infomarketer. But of course, you would need an email marketing software, sales funnel software, copywriting skills and info-product creation skills.

There also other variations to this. Some go on to also become an Influencer by starting a YouTube channel, speaking in front of the camera and putting themselves out there. And of course, they would promote people to get on their email marketing list, where again, traded with some valuable ebook, video course, or any other info-product.

What About Traffic?

A common strategy I see in this school of thought is where you become a product creator yourself and recruit other product creators to become your affiliates. But you can also consider paying for traffic through Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Google Ads and others. However, the traffic that you pay is mainly to get people to enter their name and email address first, before your other marketing tactics come into action through your sales funnel and landing pages.

Who are the Authority Figures

• Andre Chaperon – Autoresponse Madness
• Russell Brunson – ClickFunnel.com
• Nick James – Nick-James.com
• Peng Joon – PengJoon.com
• Liz Tomey – Liz Tomey’s Products

Pro & Cons

School 3 : Media Buyer

I think Media Buyers are the most secretive bunch among affiliate marketers. You don’t know much about them if you don’t go out to really seek them out. I think primarily they don’t go out and sell affiliate marketing courses.

Also, it is probably a personality thing, by choice, Media Buyers don’t really put themselves out there to the world. But I believe Media Buyers are the type of affiliate marketers that are really killing it in the affiliate marketing world, mostly because of how it easy it is to scale the business once you get the hang of it. Especially if you have the fund to do it.

So what is this Media Buyer type? This is easy to explain, though not really easy to do.

Basically, Media Buyers buy traffic and send them to affiliate offers. As simple as that. OK, at times they may use their own landing pages just to get the visitors engaged and set the visitors into the right frame of mind to buy.

Most if not all Media Buyers that I know are not concerned over building a list for email marketing. They don’t want any of that. And also, while most info-marketers, in the end are building somewhat of a persona or a personal brand, Media Buyers are also not very fond of putting themselves out there.

What they are concerned about is where to buy traffic, which affiliate offers are most suitable for them, and can they make a campaign with a positive return? What I mean by positive return is where the affiliate commission that they get is more than the costs of the traffic.

So yes, it requires money to go with the Media Buyer affiliate school. But with this, it is the fastest way to start seeing affiliate commissions. The challenge is about whether or not your profitable.

And because of that, the search for a profitable campaign, Media Buyers are very analytical where they track and test everything from the

• traffic source (Bing, Google, Facebook, Native Ads, Push notification, etc)
• demographics targeting in their traffic source (age, location, gender, interests, etc),
• the advertisement (copywriting, creatives),
• the landing pages (quiz-style, advertorial, copywriting),
• the offers (which brands, which merchant, which affiliate network), and many more.

The challenge is find the best combination that generates the best return.

Landing Pages

When it comes to landing pages, they don’t use landing pages to capture email addresses. It is just as a quick tool to frame the mind of the visitors into buying the product, or take action on the offer page. So they may use tools like ClickFunnels to build landing pages, but instead of an opt-in page, they would build a page with a quiz, or perhaps something that looks like a news site but contain content that promotes a specific product. That is what we call advertorial.

Depending on a product, they may think about the angle which is the primary message on the landing page. Take for example, a hair growth product can be positioned can be targeted for male or female. That will determine the type of images and messages you have on your landing pages. A product in the Keto Diet fad can be positioned for weight loss, for the beach body, for detox. So it goes on. Which means a lot of thought really goes into building the landing page.

Tracking & Testing Tool

This tracking tool that Media Buyers use is not like a normal Google Analytics tool. They can give you detailed information about specific traffic source and whether or not it converts at the merchant.

For example, the media buyer will be able to know exactly which Ad contributed to the conversion. Which landing page made the sale. And also perhaps where did the customer come from. If she was from a specific town, or state, maybe others from that location would be interested in them too.

Media buyers would split test ads, copywriting, landing pages and more. When they have 5 ads, 2 landing pages, and maybe also split the campaign into 5 different age groups and then gender, there are basically 100 different combination. If you don’t actually track every detail, you won’t be able to tell which actually contributed to the conversion.

Some tracking tools available in the market that Media Buyers use are like Voluum, RedTracker, Bemob, ClickMagic.

Offers / Affiliate Programs

Media Buyers go for all types of offers. But sometimes foreign to the other two types of affiliate marketers, Media Buyers also promotes CPA offers, or cost-per-action. This is where the affiliate earns not commission, but payment for the action that the visitors make.

For example, Game Studio XYZ just launched a new game. They want to offer money to people who can send other people to download and install the game app. So they go to MaxBounty and make an offer available to the affiliates. Let’s just say that an affiliate can make $2 for every installation. The affiliate would need to do research on who would probably install this, create that campaign and send the visitor to where the app can be downloaded and installed.

There are many affiliate networks that offers CPA Offers like MaxBounty, PeerFly, and more. Perhaps some affiliate marketers in this arena are more fond of them rather than the normal per sale offers like ClickBank, CJ.com and the rest.

Who are the Authority Figures

• Charles Ngo
• Ralfs Smilšarājs
• Colin Dijs
• Kody Karppinen
• Brad Osborne – The Nomad Brad

Pros & Cons

This is a GetResponse review but you already know the verdict — I love GetResponse!

What you don’t know is my “why”.

If you are shopping around for an autoresponder or an email marketing software, you can stop because I believe GetResponse is it. And you can take my word for it because I checked quite a number of solutions before settling on GetResponse.

I have been using GetResponse for a while and I would like to share my experience and what I think of GetResponse.

Let me tell you what was my priorities when I was looking for an autoresponder. And later I will explain how GetResponse support my priorities with its features.

My first priority was price. I am cheapskate!

I always look for the cheapest option.

But OK… GetResponse is not the cheapest. But let’s go through what GetResponse offers with their tools. Here’s the thing with GetResponse’s pricing. When you look at GetResponse’s pricing, you are not presented with one product and several price levels, but instead with multiple products and multiple price levels:

Let me explain what I mean…

The four products and their prices are (monthly contract) :

Checkout full pricing details at GetResponse

Which package you should get depends on where you are right now with your marketing. Let’s go through what you get in these packages.

Email Package — Best for Bloggers

Let say that you are starting out as a simple blogger who wants to connect with your readers with email marketing — I would say that the Email package is excellent for that. I always tell people not to spend big when you are starting out, however you need to do it right.

So $15 per month is a small investment that won’t burn your pocket, and would allow you build a contact list of 1000 email addresses.

With the Email package, you can start to build a list, add an opt-in widgets on your blog’s sidebar and create one landing page. You can also use the workflow and design some automation around your email marketing.

For example, you want add certain labels or tags to your subscribers that clicked on a certain link on your email. The next time you send out an email broadcast to your list, you can target these individuals specifically. This is what we call segmentation. And the Email package allows you to do this.

If you have a blog about survival skills in the wilderness, you can also plan and write a 10-part email series as an email course.

When your subscriber subscribes to your 10-part email course, they will get an email a day for the next 10 days. Not only you are giving valuable content, but you are also starting to build relationship with your visitors on autopilot. You easily do this with the Marketing Automation.

And the pricing option allows you to start small and grow whenever you are ready. If you am ready to upgrade to Pro, you can go for that, which is $49 per month. That would unlock tons of other features. But if you are getting more subscribers but not quite ready to upgrade to Pro yet, you can just upgrade to the next price level within the Email package for an additional $10 per month, amounting to $25 per month.

GetResponse gets you started quickly.

Something that I like about GetResponse is how neatly the interface is designed, which helps you get started easily and quickly. Without much learning curve, you can integrate your email marketing with your blog within a day.

Once you are logged in to your Dashboard, GetResponse get you started up really quickly. On the top, you see seven icons to the different core modules in GetResponse. They are

• Contacts,
• Email Marketing,
• Automation,
• Landing Pages,
• Webinars,
• Form & Surveys
• and CRM.

To get started, you need create a Contact list. And then you can write your first autoresponder email that welcomes your new subscribers. This can be done in the Email Marketing. If you want to create an email series to be sent with specific time period intervals, you can do that with Automation. You can create your emails with the Automation Messages, and later use them and design your automation workflow.

Of course GetResponse has a really cool email newsletter designer, where you can get started with cool template designs. There are a ton to choose from. And later, for images, GetResponse via iStockphoto provides 1000 free stock photos to get you started.

Now that you have your Contact list, and your email series all set up, you can use Forms & Surveys to design a form where your visitors can enter their details to subscribe to your newsletter.

Here’s where GetResponse is cool. GetResponse Form Builder tool can help you build a simple widget for your sidebar or even cool interactive forms that appears and shakes, appear on scroll, appear on exit, appear on button click, and many, many more. Maybe you know about WordPress plugins that help you do this. But if you are using GetResponse, you don’t need to use those plugins. Also, everything is drag and drop. You don’t need to do any codings.

Alright, with any email marketing software provider, the process of setting up your email marketing campaign is going to take some time. You need to plan and write your email messages that will be sent out. And later use them with your email marketing software. But GetResponse helps to make things easier with all these tools I mentioned previously. And you also know that your visitors will have an amazing experience, and will be greeted with well-crafted email messages.

What are the major differences between the Email and Pro?

Landing page split-testing, more powerful automation, webinar, and CRM.

With the Pro, which starts at $49 per month, it allows you to have access to a bigger range of features. For example, while you can only build one landing page with the Email package, the Pro unlocks unlimited amount of land pages, with split testing capabilities. With this, not only you can build more landing pages, you can also have variations of the same landing page and test them against one another to see which performs better.

Before we get into split testing, let me explain what a Landing Page is. A landing page is a one-page microsite with a single objective. In this case, the objective is to get visitors to enter the name and email address so that they subscribe to your Contact list. Maybe you have seen some of these promoting dating sites, TV cable packages, insurance, and many more.

With the previous example of a Jungle Survival blog, perhaps you want to promote your new info-product, The Complete Jungle Survival Guide, that you sell for $49.

To frame your prospects into buying your product, you create a free 5-day email course, “5 Must Know Tips On How To Survive in the Jungle”. You can create a specific landing page to get people to subscribe to this email course. And of course, in each of your email, you sell them on the benefits of why they should get your complete package.

GetResponse allows you to create good-looking, highly converting (meaning they convert visitors to subscribers) landing pages and host them for you. There is no need to mess around with FTP, image software, HTML or codes. And also, it is all drag-and-drop and easy to use. You can put up a stunning landing pages in merely minutes.

Now let’s talk about split-testing…

Split-testing – Why would you want to do this?

Let say you build two landing pages, A and B. A has a headline that says, “Hello Survival Freaks”. B has a headline that says, “Hello Wilderness Friends”. With split testing, we can test them out with a small amount of traffic to see which is better at converting visitors into subscribers. Once we have a winner, we go wild and unlock our traffic floodgates.

If you have a budget of $1000 to spend on traffic, you can spend $100 for split testing, and the other $900 for your real traffic efforts. Let say each landing page A and B receives 1000 visitors during split testing. Landing page A converts 100 visitors into subscribers, while landing page B converts 50 visitors into subscribers. Now you know that landing page A is the one to go with. We can end our split testing and use the other $900 traffic budget to direct all traffic to landing page A.

So that is how you use the split-testing in the Landing Page. The split testing is only available to Pro users and above. So if you want this, you better get the Pro package.

Now let’s talk about the Marketing Automation in the Pro package.

GetResponse is best for E-Commerce and Membership Sites

In the Email package, you already have this. But you are limited by the triggers on how you can track your subscribers. A clear and simple example would be in e-commerce. If you sell from your website, especially with an e-commerce site like those built on WooCommerce or Shopify, with the Marketing Automation in the Pro package, you can track if the shopping cart has been abandoned, or the visitor did not complete the transaction and then you can start to send personalized messages to invite them back to complete the transaction.

And if you have any kind membership site, you can even track their movements around your membership site and notify GetResponse to trigger certain email campaign when they visited specific web page on your website. Perhaps a user just completed an online training, you can send them a message that says “Congratulations!”. Yes, you can do that with GetResponse.

You can also track if a purchase occurred and then you can send a personalized messages on how to use the products that they just bought.

Those are just some example on how powerful GetResponse Marketing Automation is. I believe, perhaps you can imagine more use case on how you can implement this for your website.

If you are using GetReponse right now, or will be getting GetResponse soon, we can talk more about how to implement this. Get in touch with me.

I think this is a powerful feature in Marketing Automation. You already have this in the Email package, but the Pro package unlocks more triggers that you can use. The three extra triggers in the Pro are Purchase, Abandoned Cart and Visit URL.

What else do you get in Pro package?

Webinar & CRM

You may or may not agree with me, but if you are not doing webinars, especially if you are running an online business, you are missing out on something big.

Webinar is a low-cost, high-impact solution to reaching out to hundreds of individuals and deliver your message. A webinar is where you can really connect with your customers, run training, do Q&A sessions, do a sales pitch and many more.

While in most cases, a webinar platform is sold as a separate solution, you get a webinar platform ready in GetResponse and integrated with your email marketing software. It is easy to plan and trigger email messages before and after your webinar.

You can remind them that the webinar is about to start before the webinar. And you can also track who attended the webinar and send them a thank you message after the webinar. Furthermore, you can probably remind them about your offer that is ending in 24 hours.

You may not be needing it now, but you know that it’s there when you need it.

And the same goes for CRM, a system that you can use to track leads and at which sales process they are at in your funnel. This is ideal for your sales people in the real world, or even for your telesales team. You can design move them around from one process to another and triggers appropriate messages when you do that. For example, you just did an sales presentation with a prospect, moving them to the next process can automatically trigger and thank you message.

OK, let’s talk about other things that GetResponse can do for you. Dynamic Content.

One little hidden feature in GetResponse that I find very powerful is the Dynamic Content. Before I get really technical on how it is done, let me explain what you can do with Dynamic Content.

Let say you tell your blog visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. And the first email, where you welcome them, you also list your 5 latest blog posts for them to checkout. While you can have the list written manually in the email message your design, with Dynamic Content, you can also have your email message be updated automatically.

Imagine this… a new subscriber yesterday will get a list of your latest blog posts. And then a new subscriber today will get a slightly different list today, because you just published a new blog post a few hours ago. This can be done even without having to login and update anything on GetResponse. This is achieved with Dynamic Content, where you can set up your email message to fetch some of its content from external URL, for example, your blog.

What is Dynamic Content? Dynamic Content is the simple syntax or message composing language that GetResponse developed for their customers. Using specific syntax, you can customize the messages that go out to your subscribers based on the information that you collected from your subscribers, certain dates and times, external data like the weather, and many more.

The Dynamic Content is very powerful and can be used in many ways.

Let’s look at another example. Say you created a custom field and asked what type of pet your subscribers own. You provided the options of:

• Dog
• Cat
• Others
• None

Based on these options, you can craft an email that says:

If it is a dog, your email says
“Buy a bone for your dog.”

If it is a cat, your email says
“Buy a toy mouse for your cat.”

If it is others, your email says
“Buy some food for your pet.”

If it is none, your email says
“Why don’t you get a pet?”

Personalization is something that help you connect with your subscribers on a deeper level. And with Dynamic Content, you take personalization on a whole new level.

What else can you do with GetResponse?

Honestly, a lot! This review is over 3000 words and I am only covering the surface. Perhaps I can briefly list other things that you can do with GetResponse.

• Easy to import contacts from other sources
• Time Travel feature where your emails can be delivered depending on your recipient’s timezone
• Perfect Timing where you can have GetResponse intelligently deliver your emails based on when your subscribers will most likely to open them
• Advanced Segmentation where you can create a campaign and have it sent only to people that qualifies certain criterias, ie, location, recent actions (like just joined your webinar), etc
• Create online surveys
• Advanced Analytics where you can see how your campaign is performing
• Email previews for top email clients, ie, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, web, desktop and mobile
• Over 200 integration options with systems and apps like Salesforce, Shopify, Zapier, Github, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Slack, Facebook, LiveChat, Freshbooks, and more.
• Notify your subscribers via email of new blog posts automatically with RSS-to-Email
• Developer API unlocks a ton more stuffs that you can do with GetResponse
• Mobile App for iOS and Android to always be informed about your campaign
• And many more.

What else do you look for in an email marketing software?

Reliable company and strong customer support

Everything is well and good. But what else do you look for in an email marketing software? GetResponse has the features to support the small guys and newbies, up to the enterprise level companies.

You can get started with Email package, and later on grow up to the Pro and Max with webinar, CRM if needed to. Furthermore, with APIs that allows developers to extend the capabilities of GetResponse into their own application and services, GetResponse is definitely flexible to cater any kind of needs. Dynamic Content and other integration is really powerful to create personal, intelligent emails for your subscribers and make you look good at the same time.

Feature-wise, GetResponse is a clear winner… but…

What else is there to worry about? Well, let me tell you…

Since everything else looks good, I look at the company, GetResponse itself. To me, I want to be assured that I am in good hands. If something does not go well, having to switch from one provider to another is a pain. I want to have some peace of mind knowing that GetResponse is still going to be here tomorrow and years to come. And also I want to know that if I ever need help, GetResponse has a good customer support to back it up.

So here’s what I found out. GetResponse has been around since 1997 and has offices around the globe. That shows how reliable a company is. With over 350,000 customers, I can rest assured knowing that GetResponse will have my back whether my Contact list size is 10, or even 1,000,000.

And as for support goes, their 300 employees is ready to provide 24/7 live chat support from within the web application itself. I said this not only because I read about their support, but I’ve tried them too. They are always quick to respond to the chat if you encounter any issue with their system, no matter where you are on the globe. And while chatting, their support also knows where you are on the system so they can better help you with some technical issues you may be facing with.

My recent chat with the support, they are quick to suggest to me which is the better option for me to create a 10-day email course for my blog. I was confused to either use the Automation or the Autoresponder, because you can use either. But they quickly recommended that it is better to use the Automation which is easier and offers more flexibility for future updates. This shows how responsive and friendly their customer support personnels are, and also knowledgeable about their product.

I believe that a company that stops R&D is as good as dead. And if you check out their blog, a part from tips and tricks for better interaction with your subscribers, you also see that they are always rolling out new features and tools. At the time of this writing, you can check their website where they list 133 people in their tech team, actively maintaining the system and building new exciting features to be rolled out.

It is good to know that GetResponse invests heavily and is always active in developing new features and tools to support your online marketing.

So there you go. That is my review of GetResponse. And I say that you can’t go wrong with GetResponse.

If you need a summary, well here it is.

• Good for bloggers – yes!
• Good for e-commerce – yes!
• Good for online marketers – yes!
• Good for marketing agencies – yes!
• Good for enterprise and big companies – yes!

Click here to start you 30-day trial at GetResponses

credit card is not required for free trial sign up

p.s. ~ Be sure you also subscribe to the Emailer Guy Newsletter to get tips and tricks on GetResponse.

p.p.s. ~ In case you were wondering, I had a looked at these other solutions before settling with GetResponse. Aweber, MailChimp, ConstantContact, iContact, CampaignMonitor, ActiveCampaign, VerticalResponse, ConvertKit, Drip, SendLoop, FlutterMail, MailiGen, Moosend, Benchmark Email, MailerLite, SendInBlue, ElasticEmail, MailJet, Clever Reach, Zoho Campaign, MyEmma, MadMimi.

p.p.p.s. ~ I have to give credit to some options, ie ActiveCampaign and Aweber. They are really good. If you feel GetResponse is not for you, checkout ActiveCampaign and Aweber. But GetResponse is best for my needs.

Looking at the prices offered by Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr and even Amazon Lightsail, maybe you are tempted to move your websites over to those cloud hosting providers. Just one catch — you need to know server administration skills to be able to do that, or what people call nowadays as DevOp.

What if it is easier for people like you and I?

What if there is a service that offers a web panel to your servers in Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr and other cloud hosting providers, much like how CPanel functions for your shared hosting account?

But why move at all?

There are many benefits of moving over to cloud hosting as opposed to normal shared hosting.

You do know that with a shared hosting, your website is lumped together with other shared hosting account in the same server machine, right? It is normal that there are 200 to 400 websites per server all sharing the same RAM and CPU resources.

With cloud servers or VPS, you can get full control over your server. Resources like RAM and CPU usage is set dedicated to your use only. You can also sleep well at night knowing that you don’t have a shared-hosting neighbour that resides in the same server as yours.

Has anything like these happened to you? Or perhaps, have you heard any of your friends had problems with these? Of course you have…

• your email is not being delivered because your IP address was blacklisted, just because your shared hosting neighbour decided to spam people
• suddenly your website cannot be accessed because your shared hosting neighbour experienced a spike of new traffic, or maybe a DDOS attack
• your website was blocked by Google and Chrome browser as it was marked malicious. It turns your website was infected by malware, where the malware traveled from one shared hosting account to another inside that same server

Well, fortunately there is RunCloud.

If you are are only familiar with the CPanel, but have been wanting to move over to cloud hosting? Then perhaps it is time you try out RunCloud.

How Does RunCloud Work?

RunCloud is a SaaS-based web panel for your servers. From RunCloud, once you have your servers connected, you can start monitoring them. Actually, the works on deploying a new server also becomes a lot easier. If you have never deployed a server before, then let me tell you, it can take from 2 hours to 2 full days, depending on how experienced you are.

But with RunCloud, everything is done is 20 minutes.

To get started, just sign up for an account at RunCloud. It is really easy and you don’t need a credit card. They have a free account, but for your first 15 days, you get to try all the Pro features.

https://runcloud.io

Next, you need to get a server from any cloud hosting provider that you like. I recommend Linode. When asked for a the operating system, make sure you choose Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. On Linode, you create a linode (server) first. And then you have to install an image (operating system). That is when you choose Ubuntu 16.04 or RunCloud would not work.

In my next blog post, I will show you a complete tutorial on how to get started with RunCloud. In the meantime, why don’t you check it out.

This is the CSS that I applied my Design Editor.

.meat-skirt-left { float: none; width: 90%; border: none; border-bottom: 1px dashed #ccc; }
.meat-skirt-left p { text-align: justify; }

And this is how my product page looks like at Payhip.com.

https://payhip.com/b/FUKJ

If you can’t find the Design Editor, click on the Account menu on the top right.

Have a great day.

I will be building an authority site and monetize it with affiliate marketing.

Well, the terms change… virtual real estate, niche sites, portal, blogs, authority site. But the initial goal is the same. To develop a website that provides quality content and value for the visitors.

I can’t tell you what the site just yet. But I can tell you that I am going with the review website model. To be more specific, this is going to be a website where I review a specific type of software.

When it comes to traffic, the main idea is to go with SEO. I will be creating a lot of long and useful epic content. And after that, the plan continues with some outreach to promote the content. If you are new the whole outreach plan, what it means is that you will be reaching out to other website owners and bloggers for either 1) a link back to to you with a reason that is beneficial to them or 2) for an opportunity to publish an article on their website as a guest blogger.

I am considering sharing and boosting the article on social media too, especially on Facebook. I hope this will get me fans and likes, and also traffic for initial tests.

Email marketing is definitely in the picture as well. But it will not be like the type where you have a specific landing page to capture email. I will be using the website’s content pages with widgets like top bar, pop-ups or something like that.

I am seeing that this is going to cost me some money. So I will be reporting to you my spending and my earnings.

The goal is to be generating $10,000 in commissions by December 2018.

Let see how it goes.