Crap Customer Service

We’ll get the rant out of the way first. A couple of weeks ago I saw a writer offering his services on the Warrior forum. Cheap, only $5 per article, I know …. It looked to be a new service from a guy in the UK so I was an ass and assumed that he was trying to start up and offering his articles at a discount (as often happens on the WF), then once he had built up a customer base of satisfied customers put the price up. I can dig that, and if the articles are quality and working for me and the customer service is good I would happily go along with price increases.

Anyway I put a trial order in for 6 articles, not many but I order more when I know that the service is ok. 4 of those articles were to go on and then be reused to promote an electronic cigarette site. This is what I specified when I made the order:

‘To comply with the current UK law ecigs cannot be referred to as stop smoking aids, so it’s best to concentrate on what they are and the positives.’

Three of the articles that came back were totally about stopping smoking and ecigs being quit smoking aids. The fourth was about after stopping smoking and using an ecig rather than start again, with a fair bit of editing I managed to make that article comply with the UK and US laws – I hope!

Two of the articles were also invented stories from imaginary people who used ecigs to quit. I objected to using fakery to promote a product and I’ve got a darned good idea that’s illegal too. In this day and age with the Internet being policed more it isn’t worth risking your sites and business by telling lies or not complying with the laws in the country that you live in and the countries that you are targeting. I did actually use ecigs to help me stop smoking nearly 3 years ago but I am not allowed to try and sell them as a quit smoking aid.

Anyway I asked for 3 of the articles to be rewritten and explained why. I heard nothing for 3 days and then got the revised articles emailed to me with no apology for initially ignoring my instructions. I checked the articles and although different they were still about using ecigs for stopping smoking grrr. Again I asked for a rewrite and the articles came back the next day and they were what I asked for, but again no apology.

However, 2 of them were so poorly written and factually incorrect that it wasn’t even worth wasting time editing them. I couldn’t be bothered asking for further rewrites, the writer clearly wasn’t up to the task, nor did he understand the topic.

Two days later I saw the service provider – it was obvious from the articles that it was an English guy outsourcing to Asian writers – complaining in a thread on the forum about not getting many customers at his price point. This is what I would have posted if I wasn’t so nice

‘C…. the reason that you don’t have many customers is because your customer service stinks!

• You don’t ensure that the articles written by your outsource workers follow the instructions given by your customers.
•  Unbelievable that you did not reply to a customer complaint for 3 days, yet you were looking for more customers and answering questions about your ad on the forum.
• If you valued your customers you would apologise when mistakes are made and make sure that it doesn’t happen again as it did with me.
• The articles needed a lot of editing and 2 were unusable even after the third attempt. They were not worth any more than your $5 price point so stop whining.

Ok I got what I paid for in the end, but I could have gone straight to any number of Asian writers and got the same or a better standard for less aggro. I expected more of a UK service proveder, but maybe that was wrong of me. Suffice it to say that I’m not using that service again and ordered my next batch of outsourced articles at much higher rate and from a better writer, whose customer service  is far superior.

What Is Good Customer Service?

In my book good customer service is always being prompt. You should follow customer’s instructions, over deliver rather than under deliver. Apologise for mistakes or any lateness, your customer will be a lot more forgiving – and communicate. Good customer service = happy, repeat customers and recommendations from your customers = less or even no more advertising because you have a great customer base who want to throw lots of work and money at you.

Wow Free Articles

Also on the WF I saw a WSO offering free PLR articles, all new and several niches. I sometimes rewrite PLR for content so I thought I’d take advantage of the offer. I got 10 packs of 5 articles in different niches and most were suitable for my sites. The quality was good, better than the $5 articles that’s for sure. As always I checked to see how many had used them so far and came up with zilch. I checked again and again and found that they were absolutely unique.

In this day and age of Google wanting quality and uniqueness I was gobsmacked to find that I had got 50 good quality  articles free and nobody else had used them. Of course I took advantage of those articles, they were indexed on my sites first so no matter what my sites had the unique content first and that’s what’s important as far as Google is concerned.

What surprised me was that of all of those forum members who downloaded the articles not one of them took action and it’s the same story 2 weeks later. This early bird got the big fat worm.

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What Is Linxbot For?

Blog commenting, or should I say searching for high ranking blog pages to leave comments on.

Why Do That?

To help my sites rank well in the search engines. Backlinks count towards that and the higher the relevancy and Page Rank the better. I leave a comment that gets approved I get a backlink.

Isn’t Blog Commenting Spam?

Yes and no. Like many of you I get cheesed off with the huge amounts of crappy comment spam left on my blogs, but whenever somebody leaves an intelligent, relevant comment I’m pleased enough to visit their site and give it a Facebook like or tweet once I’ve approved it.

When I comment on blogs I read the post that I’m commenting on and think about what I’m going to say. If I can’t think of a decent quality comment that will add value I click away without leaving a comment.

Why Use Software?

I can find plenty of blogs to leave comments on by using a bit of code in the search engines, but when I check the blogs out I find that the cruddy spammers have got there before me. There is also the Page rank aspect. Many blogs have high ranking home pages, but the posts can be low or zero ranking and the link juice from those isn’t so great. What Linxbot finds is actual pages that have a high PR and the backlinks from thos are more valuable.

How Does Linxbot Work?

It’s really simple. You enter your keyword, select the tld from a drop down box. You can choose from .com, .edu, .gov, .co.uk, .com.au, .de, .nl and .ca then click on search. The software uses Google to search the Internet and find high PR pages. When it’s finished you click on ‘export to file’ and you can save the list wherever you want on your computer and open it up in notepad when you need to use it.

Is The List Of High PR Pages Any Good?

Yes it is, but not all of them. Some of the pages have closed comments, some have so much spam that I don’t want to go there. However, at least half of the pages are usable and there are far less spammed to death pages in a Linxbot search than when you just use the search engines.

Does The Software Get Results?

Yes it does. When I first bought it I kept a record of the high PR pages that I’d left comments on. I checked through them last week and found that every single one of my comments had been approved. That is because Linxbot quickly helped me to find good spam free pages and because I didn’t leave crap comments.

One result that I’m very pleased with is getting first place in the UK Google rankings for one of my niche blogs. For over 3 years it floated between 2nd and 8th for several keywords and I never thought I’d top that. I got comments accepted on 2 high PR .edu pages and within a few weeks another 13 .edu blogs linked to mine and suddenly it was ranking 1st for the 2 main keywords.

Any Downside?

Yes. I’ve run Linxbot whilst writing this and have now got a massive lists of high PR blog pages to check out for one of my new sites, no rest for the wicked!!

If you want to buy or watch the video showing you how it works just click on Linxbot – that is my affiliate link but if you don’t want to click on it type Linxbot into the search engines.

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In the morning I found a support email from George at Marketing Online Workshop asking if I had any problems because he’d noticed that I hadn’t downloaded yet. That was the beginning of some outstanding support.

Later on I downloaded it and tried to set it up on one of my sites, got an error message saying that the ioncube loader wasn’t up to date. I decided to try it on a site hosted with a different host and got the same error message. I contacted support and got Evan who advised me to ask my hosts for an upgrade. Evan spent a lot of time with me on Skype during the next couple of days. Initially because one of the hosts didn’t do the upgrade properly, we also found out that both hosting accounts needed upgrading to php 5.3 to be able to upgrade the ioncube loader.

Once the upgrades were done I was able to activate Mow Pop. I let Evan know that it was ok and he still came on Skype with me to make sure. Because of the php upgrade I had a big problem on one of my sites and Evan very kindly sorted it out for me.

Did I make another midnight buying mistake?

It isn’t difficult to use, but I did make a pretty basic mistake with the images – Evan to the rescue again. Even with that mistake I still got my first pop up designed pretty quickly using the inbuilt html editor and you can see it at Game Skill

I was able to do exactly what I envisaged and in a short time. I like there being a built in test page where you can see what your pop up looks like at different stages. Because of the plugin’s flexibility and stats it will be easy to split test different ideas.

One week on.

I’m really struggling to get any work done this week. I blame it on Mow Pop, it’s fun to use and it’s addictive. I’m getting conversion rates of between 1.3% and 6.9% with different pop ups and I’ve still got an awful lot of ideas and features to try.

This isn’t just a pop up. Apart from normal pop up and exit pop functions you can also slide in from left, right, top and bottom – that was my suggestion and the feature was very quickly added.You can see that working on my air swimmers article.

You can choose the size that you want, use the built in images and backgrounds or upload your own. You can add text, links, buttons, forms, videos – just about blooming anything.

I almost suggested sounds, but that could turn out to be darned annoying when you are browsing. You can build a different pop up for every page and post on your blog if you want. Or you can have a different pop up for each category and there are stats for every one that you create in your dashboard. I’m sure that there are features that I’ve forgotten to mention, and Evan tells me that he has some more ideas that he may add.

So far I’ve just used Mow Pop for making ads, but the potential uses are just about endless. Autoresponder forms, snippets of information, jokes, quotes, quizes and polls, simple recommendations, offering paid advertising space on your blog – heck one paying ad could pay for this plugin and more.

This was an excellent midnight buy, for the product and the fantastic customer service I’m loving Mow Pop

To watch a video about this impressive plugin just click on Mow Pop – yes that is an affiliate link, but I think that you all know me well enough by now to recognise that I only promote things that work for me.

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I gave membership sites a go myself a few years ago using the Memberspeed software, but my ideas weren’t strong enough, the software was time consuming and hard to use and to be honest I got bored with maintaining it. I’m a flibberty jibbet, I need variety.

That doesn’t stop me from admiring other people’s membership sites and wondering ‘what if’.

Marketer Rob Cornish mentioned that he was going to open a new membership site a few weeks ago at http://www.gainhighergroundmembership.com and this week when I found out that it had launched I took a good look around and this is what I saw:

First of all I noticed that the membership site had been built using the same clean, attractive blue and white design as Rob’s Internet marketing blog. In my opinion that was a good move because Rob’s regular visitors to his blog will feel familiar with and at home on the membership site straight away.

On the home page you are tempted to join with the promise of lots of information and advice, certainly enough to learn how to start and build a successful Online business. Just some of the various modules are titled Kick Start Profits, The Content Factory, Profitable Niches, Audio Content and Real Traffic etc.

To gain access to all of this useful material you can pay £4 for 7 days membership and then £21.62 monthly.  That’s GB pounds at an exchange rate of £3.33 to $5. I’m guessing that if you are in the US you would see a dollar price and lower because you won’t have to pay VAT like us Brits.

Once I entered the members area I could see that already Rob has quite a lot of information to offer and to a large extent in video format. I like training videos and often feel that learning is easier because I can’t skim read videos.Because the step by step training comes in a series of videos you can learn at your own pace and rerun the videos if you need to recap at any time.

There is also a forum where you can ask for help or be helped by other members. Forums to me are a very important part of online marketing, not only can you get help and advice you can market your own business and shmooze and make business contacts.

I like what I see and over time as more information is added and the site and forum gets busier this could be a really impressive membership site. Check it out at Gain Higher Ground Membership

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Is Search Engine Optimization Overrated?

Absolutely not. A site or page that isn’t optimised will not get much if any traffic from the search engines and if it’s any sort of business site will never make it’s earning potential. I’ll admit right now that I don’t know everything about this topic, or I don’t think that I do. It’s surprising just how much on page optimisation that I do naturally and without thinking about it.

Take for instance my title, right at the start I’ve used two different keywords in the title. I’ve also used both terms in the first paragraph and I’ve used heading 3 for the sub title. Take note that I’ve used the US spelling for optimization even though I’m a Brit. Unfortunately the yanks have taken over the English language and I’m more likely to be criticized for my spelling by US citizens who forget where their national language originated than my more tolerant countryfellows. If a site is targeted to the UK I use proper English, if like this site it’s not targeted to a specific area then US English is best because there are more who use that.

Some marketers advocate peppering each page with their keywords so many times that the information they are offering becomes almost unreadable. It isn’t necessary and it can be foolhardy if the search engines think that you are keyword spamming. I like to keep my main keywords down to less than 2% of an article’s content and use alternative related terms where I need to. That makes my content flow naturally and it’s readable.

Higher quality content and readability has become more important recently. Google has decided ‘hey hang on, we’re sick of all of the keyword spammy content and spinned gobbledegook’ – many sites have been de-indexed or have lost their rankings so common sense says that you provide good content that is optimised and will keep visitors on your site longer because it’s good, readable information.

I will use my keywords in the final paragraph, some say that it’s better to bold those but that I forego because it looks better to visitors if you don’t bold keywords. I try to keyword link to at least one other page on my online business site as I’ve done there. WordPress makes it easy and you can get free plugins like ‘Yet Another Related Post’ to help.

That’s all good for posts or pages but what about when you set your site or blog up?

Normally I try to get a keyword rich domain which is good for SEO, but I didn’t have a cat in hells chance of getting this blog ranked high in the search engines for terms like ‘online business’ or ‘make money online’ anytime soon without masses more work than I’ve got time for so I decided to brand myself and have my proper name as the domain. I’ve got some good competition with an artist and a writer but I’m still ranked 1st, 4th, 8th and 10th in Google UK for various things besides this blog.

If your niche is for instance vacuum cleaners then you should use your research to find keywords with a good amount of searches and low competition and use the best for your domain, i.e. top vacuum cleaners – topvacuumcleaners.com, then use the same keywords as your site title and they should also be in your site description and meta keywords. If you are using WordPress they should go in your general settings.

Ok your best keyphrase might not be as strong as you might want it to be, but competition is fierce, or like me you have used something that you want to brand. You can help counteract that by having well optimized content and also by what you name your categories. Research again, but for a vacuum cleaner site good categories would be ‘canister vacuum cleaners’, ‘upright vacuum cleaners’, ‘hepa filter vacuum cleaners’ and ‘handheld vacuum cleaners’. On this blog I’ve gone for the normal online business terms.

If you own a WordPress blog you can set your permalinks up to either just use the post name (/%postname%/) or use that and the category (/category%/%postname%/) – without the brackets of course.

patriciajones.org/seo-is-search-engine-optimization-overrated

would become

patriciajones.org/traffic-building/seo-is-search-engine-optimization-overrated

I’m sure that the second example is probably better SEO, but I had a phase of hating longer than necessary website addresses and just used post name on this blog, but I already admitted that I’m not perfect.

Another thing that you can do is check your site statistics to find out what keywords are being used to find your site. I use various WordPress plugins to check the stats in my dashboard, Awstats in my c panel, Google Analytics and Alexa. I might find that yes my visitors are finding me by using the keywords that I researched, or there might be additional keyphrases that I hadn’t thought of and might find worth using when I research them. Today, for instance there are search strings for ‘article directory scripts‘ and ‘new information products’. If the same phrases pop up frequently I might be able to capitalise upon them.

 I hope that this post about search engine optimization has helped. If you have any questions, or anything to add to this discussion about SEO please leace a comment. Also please take advantage of my new free ebook.

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A domain is a website adress like patriciajones.org or even google.com. It’s what distinguishes your website from others just as your home address does from your next door neighbour’s, but you get to choose it. Your domain can reflect what your website or blog is about, be a vanity domain as mine is, be the name of your company, or a brand that you are building like Google or Yahoo.

Choosing Your Domain

If you are niche marketing then it is better for search engine optimisation if your domain reflects what your website is about, for instance like my Yorkshire pudding recipe blog.  A large amount of the search terms used to find the blog are ‘Yorkshire pudding recipe’ or ‘Yorkshire pudding’.

By picking the domain yorkshirepuddingrecipe.co.uk and using ‘Yorkshire pudding recipe’ in the title I helped make it easier for the blog to be found in the search engines. I could have done the same by using a different domain and adding ‘Yorkshire pudding recipe’ as a category or an article but it wouldn’t have been so easy to get the site ranking for those particular search terms.

Trademarked Domains

A trademark is a company or product name that has been trademarked, for instance Sony or Xbox. I would never use a domain with a trademark in it because there is a good chance that I would be found out by the company that owns the trademark and not only could I lose the domain, the work that I’ve put into it and any income that I made from it I could also be sued for the costs of a court case.

You will get some smart Alecs telling you that it won’t ever happen, but it does. You will also get some people telling you that it’s ok as long as you are an affiliate of that company and selling their products – it isn’t ok unless you get permission from the company or individual. If for instance you used best-dyson.com you could be taking part of Dyson’s traffic and potentially their top level sales, of course they won’t like it. However, there is nothing to stop you from using a domain like vacuumcleaners.com and making Dyson a category, or different models of Dyson’s as posts.

Sometimes you will find a trademarked domain that also has a common use. For instance Amazon which is a place, a river, a rainforest or a description of an amazing lady (that started me wondering if Amazon came from the word amazing – anybody know?), Amazon is also the name of the largest ecommerce site. If you intend to promote Amazon products with Amazon in your domain you could at the least lose your affiliate account. If for instance you wanted to build a site about amazing women or the place then that’s different.

Is .com The Best TLD To Use?

Years ago when the Internet was much smaller it was more important to get a .com as a top level domain. That was because most people would find your website by typing the domain into their browser and .com is the most common TLD that most people would remember and type in. As the Internet grew and search engines were added the TLD became less important because more people find your website through different search terms or by clicking on links on other websites.

There are still some who say that a .com is a must but it is very difficult to get a decent .com nowadays because of the vast amount already taken. If you want to target one area of the world then most places have their own top level domains now. I have quite a lot of .co.uk domains which I use for UK targeted sites. Apart from it being a trusted TLD, the search engines pick up on it and send you mainly UK traffic.

If you want worldwide traffic then you are better off sticking to .com, .org, .net or .info TLDs. Some Internet marketers are a bit snobbish about .info because there have been a lot of really cheap offers about for them and spammers and scammers tend to go for the cheap. But, I’ve got several .info domains and they do well. I’m targeting people in the real world who when they see mydomain.info think that I’m offering information so I don’t care what IM snobs think.

Can I Get A Free Domain?

It is possible to get free domains when you get a hosting account, but unless you transfer it to a cheaper registrar the price is often higher to renew the next year.

That is the normal TLDs, recently there was thousands of free .co.cc sub domains given out with free hosting and Google de-indexed all of them because there were a lot of spammy sites. A Google de-index is genereally a serious losss of traffic. You can get free sub domains on sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, WordPress and Blogger but I would still buy a top level domain for business pages and redirect.

Where Do I buy Domains?

If you do a search you will find plenty of domain registrars with different offers at any given time, but before you choose do another search for reviews – those on forums are generally the most honest because often marketers will call overviews of companies or products that they haven’t used reviews to gain affiliate commission.

The main 2 registrars that I use are 123.reg.co.uk and Namecheap.com. I’ve used 123.reg.co.uk ever since they started out in 2000 and find their interface easier to understand than some other registrars that I’ve used. I also like the Namecheap.com set up and have had some bargains there during the last 3 years. Whenever I’m looking for a new domain I check both before buying because depending upon the TLD one is always cheaper than the other.

Domain Renewal

Usually you buy a domain for a period of 1 or 2 years. When your domain is due for renewal you will start getting reminders by email from the company that you bought from. If you ever get letters sor emails saying that your domain is due for renewal bin them unless you are absolutely certain that they are from the company that you bought with. These letters or emails are very probably scams and if you don’t lose your domain through them you could end up paying many times more than the price with your regular company for renewal. It’s always a good idea to keep reords of your purchases and who you bought from.

If you have any questions or anything to add please leave a comment.

P.S. My affiliate links where I will earn commission for domain name sales are 123.reg.co.uk and namecheap.com Feel free to type the names into the browser so that I don’t get commission.

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Although I’m not new to self publishing my own products it feels like it’s the first time because my other products were created for the offline information publishing market in the late 90s and early 2000s. One of them at least I may dig out and repurpose for the Internet, that’s if I ever find the time.

I actually have 2 more products well on the way, but they didn’t seem right for the purpose of my first product and that is to help build my list. I wanted to write something that would help newcomers to online marketing think about and see that there are plenty of options and help them to avoid losing their money to scams or pipedreams.

The title ’7 Virtual Ways To Make Money Online’ came about because that was the best way to describe the report. I also did a search and found that nobody else was using that title so at least that makes it more individual.

I wrote the report using the free open office writer. I don’t know why but I installed that on my laptop even though I have Microsoft Word on my main computer. It’s really easy to convert to a PDF format using open office, just a few seconds and it’s sorted.

I made the ebook cover online at http://www.myecovermaker.com I tried the free version first but wasn’t happy with the result so I paid $3.95 for one download to access to more covers to make the cover in this post. Unfortunately resizing it for this post cut the top off so it doesn’t look so good if I add it to the post.

I built the squeeze page using xSitePro because I wanted to try something simple and because it’s easy to block the search engines from the download page. I’m not totally happy with the wording or design, but as with the report I will probably do some tweaking later. Sometimes if you go back with a fresh eye you see all sorts that you missed earlier. All I have to do now is get traffic to the page and see how well it converts.

The hardest part was the writing, ideas flowed but I have a rather painful medical condition caused by using my laptop on my lap and the laptop stand that I bought, although the lowest is still too high for me to sit comfortably and write for prolonged times. I should go back to using my desktop but I like the laptop better.

Anyway if you would like a free copy of 7 Virtual Ways To Make Money Online you need to click on the link. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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Creating Information Products That Are Different

My mentoring got held up too. I didn’t need to but I decided to create my own product to use as part of the whole thing. I had 2 products partly done and worked more on them but they just didn’t seem right for the purpose. So I started writing a whole new product that I’m much happier with.

My new product is an internet marketing guide for beginners that gives very basic advice that anybody should be able to understand. Hopefully it will be finished next week and be available free for subscribers to my list to give away to their subscribers.

I was thinking about it today and realised that it’s 10 years since I had my own product. That was in the offline world of information publishing. They did well because they were different from anything else available at the time and I wonder if that’s why I’ve been stalling with producing my own Internet products.

There are so many free and low cost information products available that it’s difficult to come up with new ideas unless you are a software creator. I’ve also had an overload from information products that I’ve checked out recently. For instance I bought a guide showing how to build sites that get traffic post Panda. I was whissed off when I read it. There was nothing new and the example sites were not faring as well as the niche blogs that I’ve put up post Panda.

I bought another guide that showed an ingenious way to get traffic, but that was one off traffic and in my opinion you give too much back to make it worth a few one off sales if like me you promote Amazon products. The idea was clever though and I appreciated reading about it and learning something new.

So we go back to my first IM product and although it’s unlikely to be very different it will be in it’s own way. I can guarantee no BS and no recommendations to anything costly that doesn’t work. I know that I have an ability to be able to explain things in a way that most can understand. That comes from really struggling when I first got a computer and first started to design websites. I could never understand the techy talk in the help files and had to figure a lot of things out for myself.

Anyway I’m off to the seaside now with my grandkids. If you want a free copy of my new ebook just sign up to my list. I absolutely promise that it will be realeased within the next week and you will be the first to get it.

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Trawl through Internet Marketing Forums and you will often see that or a similar subject line for a thread. An open invitation to be ripped off, for cynical replies or condescending behaviour on the part of some individuals, very rarely justified.

Often those who are looking for a mentor or tutor have no money and mention no skills that they can barter and of course the question that leaps to mind is ‘Why should anybody offer to spend their valuable time mentoring you a total stranger with nothing in return?’ But, not everybody is nice when they ask that question.

Sometimes you see the offer of ‘mentor me and you can have half of my earnings for 6 months’. Still not really feasible because nobody can guarantee earnings for others. The person being mentored may be lazy or not follow instructions to the letter, effectively reducing prospective earnings and under valuing the time of the mentor.

Today I saw a similar thread that was offering to pay an unspecified figure, but the poster stated earlier in the post that they didn’t have the time or patience to dig through the hordes of free information on the Internet.

What rang alarm bells for me was the lack of time or patience. Ok the guy might be willing to pay, but would he have the time or patience to follow things through? Building any sort of business needs patience besides knowledge and especially Internet Marketing. I wouldn’t want to spend my time mentoring anybody who openly admits that they don’t have the time or patience to do things for themselves. It would be frustrating and I would worry that my reputation would suffer because of somebody elses lack of patience rather than my tutoring skills.

What Would Work?

In my opinion, if you have no money but for instance some writing skills then bartering may work. Offer to write so many articles a week, or offer to work for the mentor for so many hours a week in exchange for their time.

Whether you have the money to pay or not you should state that you are willing to work hard and be patient and also mention any skills. You might get lucky and be spotted by an experienced marketer who is just starting to mentor others and is looking for case studies and will either do it free or low cost to gain good feedback.

If you do get an offer from a mentor make sure that you check them out for experience and reputation before spending any money.

Why Do You Need A Mentor?

Not everybody needs a mentor, in fact I think that many of us don’t because there is so much freely available information. However, for some of us there is too much and often conflicting information and advice. We find ourselves over diversifying or not quite getting there because it can get confusing and to succeed you need some clear goals and operating methods. Some of us simply need pushing to achieve our goals and the knowledge that you are doing the best that you can.

When is the right time to get a mentor?

Any time I would say. At the beginning may be good, but you may not be sure what type of online business model will be best for you. Further down the line can be good, when you have built up your business to a certain extent but know that you could do even better if you added more aspects or extra dimension to your business but you are not sure how to do it.

How do you find a mentor?

Careful searching once you know what area you want mentoring in. The Internet is so wide open that you can find feedback good or bad about anybody offering a service. If for instance you want to learn more about making an income as an Amazon affiliate you could search for ‘Amazon affiliate mentor’, tutor, courses, tuition and come up with a lot of options if you check out more than the first page of search results. Look out for those whose name crops up a lot and with good feedback to narrow it down further and then totally scrutinise what they are offering and for how much before you bite.

I’m Getting A Mentor

Yes I am After 4 years and some success I’ve decided to pay for a mentor in my weakest area and that’s list building. To me it’s a strength being able to identify your weaknesses and act upon it and that’s what I’m doing. I wrote a post agonising about list building a few weeks ago, but I’m still not really comfortable with it. To be honest I’m rubbish yet I was good at it with offline mailing.

How Did I Choose My Mentor?

I’ve seen John’s posts on the Warrior forum for several years now and grown respect his knowledge and helpfulness. I’ve known that he offers mentoring in a couple of different areas for a while and his customer feedback is good. So I planned eventually to buy into one or the other or both because they match my weaknesses, but I didn’t get on his mailing list until I bought a Warrior Special Offer a couple of months back.

It was a joint venture with himself and another guy who was heading up the WSO and to be honest I was initially annoyed to have been put on both of their lists and would have unsubscribed to both lists if not for the fact that I wanted to watch how John operated before I paid for his list building course. Since then I’ve bought a couple of times from his emails when I’ve never been much of a buyer from emails. If he can get me to spend money with him via email then he’s got to be pretty good so that’s a thumbs up for his course.

Then the timing was perfect. I got an email announcing his list building one on one course last week, the same day that I got my biggest ever Amazon payout. Also as the mentoring starts today and I have more time because this week is the first week of my cutting back my working hours to part time, I had to go for it.

Why Do I Need The Course?

For a kick up the jacksy. I know how to go about the mechanics of list building. I’ve got plenty of tools and resources, but I need pushing because I’m not comfortable with the whole thing. Watching Google making changes that can affect traffic and earnings makes me nervous for the future so building a mailing list is a must for myself and any other Internet business owner rather than relying too much on the search engines for traffic.

If you want to see and study how I am getting on with mentoring why not fill in the form in the sidebar and join my list:)

P.S. If you can’t afford a mentor check out http://challenge.co A very good free course that updates yearly and you can either do it yourself or in a group. That course started me off earning 4 years ago.

And a very good guide from the deadbeat super affiliate Dan Brock put the icing on the cake.

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Free Hosting

Many newcomers believe that free hosting is the solution, it could be at least for a while but then if you are successful free hosting can become a problem. When I set up my first website in January 2001 I chose a free host but had some awful adverts from the host as headers on my site. As the site attracted visitors and earnings I was able to upgrade the account to paid, use my own domain and lose the overpowering advertising. That was from http://20m.com and you can read my old review here. They are still around but I have no idea if they are as good now as they was back then. That was 10 years ago and I believe now that I was very lucky to have had a good hosting experience first time round.

If you search you can find other free hosting companies but usually they want to plaster their advertising across your site. A few don’t but freebies are usually used to attract future paying customers. I’ve only experienced 20m so cannot comment further on any of the other free hosts apart from saying that free hosts and the smaller companies may not be as up to date as larger companies. That matters when you try to use software or scripts that require the most up to date hosting.

Another form of free hosting is various web 2.0 properties, Squidoo, hub pages, WordPress, Blogger and umpteen other blogging platforms. I use all of those to bolster up my niche sites with backlinks but I would never use any of those for a main website. The reason being that you have no control over it and if the owners decide to take your pages down you lose your work and your income.

They don’t like affiliate links so that’s one reason for them taking your pages down. Other reasons you can’t always fathom. I built a Tumblr blog a few years ago and all it had on it was a couple of articles about Sudoku and a video, no affiliate links, nothing to offend but it was taken down with no explanation after a few months.

If you decide upon free hosting or free blogging platforms I would recommend that you buy a domain name and redirect to your free site. Your own domain name will look more professional and if your site gets pulled you can quickly get hosting for your domain and either install a back up that you have made or copy it from Google’s cache.

Paid For Hosting

I dropped out of home business for a few years and came back in 2007 and went for paid hosting. I must have been mad but I bought a lifetime unlimited package from eBay for £25. Not a lot to lose if it goes belly up I thought but when it disappeared on me 6 months later I was well cheesed off. I had built 6 different sites on the hosting and hadn’t backed them up so I had to rebuild them. Not as bad as it sounds because 3 of them were built with xSitePro and all I had to do was set up new hosting for the domains and upload the sites from my computer. Another was an ebook site that I’d worked lovingly on with masses of fresh content and lots of sales and download pages for the ebooks. It’s never been the same!

Around that time I’d got a separate hosting account at Hostgator for my article directory which was a good move, but I didn’t want all of my eggs in one basket just in case disaster struck again, so stupidly I found myself more cheap hosting, unlimited sites for $10 a month I think. Everything was fine for a while. I rebuilt the sites and built 2 membership sites on the hosting. That took a mega block of time up, the membership software was difficult to use and took ages to set each part of the sites up.

One day I found that all of my sites had been suspended so I emailed the hosts several times before they replied back. A problem their end that would soon be resolved. After a week it was but I couldn’t log into my site’s cpanels or admin areas. A few days later the sites were suspended again and the hosts didn’t reply to my emails. What I suspect now with more experience under my belt is that my hosts were actually resellers for a bigger company and that they must have either not paid their monthly dues or have done something wrong to get their account suspended.

While all of that was going on my Hostgator hosted site was chugging along with no problems so I decided to get a reseller account with them and put half of my sites on that hosting. Remembering the eggs and baskets thing I also decided to pay for a years hosting with the company recommended by the vendors of the membership site software that I was using. The sales pitch made it sound like the hosting was especially designed for that software.

That was a big mistake. When I tried to install the software I hit a brick wall whenever I got to the final stage. It turned out that the hosting wasn’t suitable as it was and that something needed altering in the ht.access file before I could use the software on the hosting. I got that sorted out and started setting up my membership sites again, yes I’d taken back ups but hadn’t downloaded them to my computer. Every time that I worked on one of the sites for more than 10 minutes it slowed down until it virtually came to a standstill. I complained and they said that there was nothing wrong but funnily enough things sped up after that.

I then discovered somthing that I’d missed in the small print. Any more than 4 cron jobs per site and you had to pay extra. As the membership software required at least 12 cron jobs to run to it’s full capacity on each site the extra made average priced hosting very pricy. The thought of paying more when I’d had problems seriously whissed me off and I knew that other companies didn’t charge for each cron job so another hosting company bit the dust.

All along my Hostgator sites were chugging away happily, no downtime, no problems, no stress, so I surrendered and got all of my sites moved to my reseller account. Since then I’ve been happy with this company and have often wished that I had just gone to them in the first place. I probably didn’t because I knew that I wanted to experiment with multiple sites and initially before I started to make money thought the price too high with Hostgator and other well known hosts.

I have had occasional problems, but the service at Hostgator is fantastic. I am a bit technically challenged but the staff on support have patiently helped me whenever I’ve needed help. For instance when somebody hacked into my article directory account and tried to spam all of the authors – that was because of a fault in the script that I used to use. I also had problems with my heavy traffic WordPress sites taking up too much of the resources, but support helped me resolve things without suspending or banning my account as I’ve heard some hosts do.

Since then I’ve fairly painlessly upgraded to a VPS account with a lot of help from support. You can read about my upgrade in 2 parts, here and here.

New To Hosting

Writing about this has made me think about my experiences and wonder what I would do about hosting if I was starting over and know what I know now. Probably I would start small with the cheapest account on Hostgator or one of the bigger well reviewed companies. I wouldn’t recommend using a reseller unless I knew which company they were resellers to and knew that I would be able to contact the company to retrieve my sites should the reseller get banned.

I’m told that it’s better to get your hosting from the country that you reside in so as I’m in the UK I would plump for my favourite registrar and hosting company 123.reg.co.uk who I started to do business with back in 2001, or Heart Internet who I’ve heard good things about. Remembering the eggs and basket thing I may try hosting with a UK company the next time I build a UK targetted website, but I won’t leave Hostgator.

I wouldn’t go for free hosting because when you pay you should get some support, the amount would depend upon which company you were with. As a newcomer you very probably would need support at some point and I believe that it’s worth paying for to keep your sites running smoothly.

When you start small it’s easy enough to upgrade gradually, at your own pace and obviously what you can afford. A decent company will do it all for you and even move your sites free if you are transferring from one host to another. You can always check out niches on free platforms, or use them as I do to help support my main sites, but I would never recommend using them for your money sites.

Use the search engines to find honest reviews of different hosting companies. Unfortunately you will also find glowing reviews from affiliates who want to make money from you. Check out what is said on forums about different companies, usually honest opinions of users. What you will often see is a thread where somebody new asks for recommendations. There will be a whole lot of answers from the bigger companies like Hostgator and Go Daddy to cheap obscure companies. Look at who recommends what and you generally find that the more experienced go for the big companies and the least experienced praise the cheapies, freebies and obscure (even eBay eek!), then I wonder if they will say the same in a years time.

A checklist that I would use now when searching for hosting is:

• Customer feedback
• How long has the company been established
• Level of support offered
• Other services offered
• Variety of hosting plans

If you have any thoughts to add to this overlong post, or any questions please leave a comment.

P.S. I found my first website in the Wayback machine and if you click here you can see a sorta version of what it looked like and even old Amazon and Paypal ads. I loved looking round and found my old message board – spam free would you believe. Those message boards were pretty good but they would get spammed to death now.

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