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The Best Webcasting Service Is...

The best I have found to date was invented by Rick Raddatz and it’s called Instant Telewebcast. Now, here’s what I do… I use a combination of a bridge line, which you need, and the telewebcast service.

Webcasting is where you hear the call happening through a website.  If you have students overseas, if I have students in Singapore or Australia this is wonderful, because they don’t have to make a toll call.  They can just visit a website and listen through their PC speakers.

However, you still need a bridge line.  The bridge line I recommend is not what Instant Telewebcast has.  They have a voice line or a voice over IP line and the quality is not good if you have lots of people listening.

What I recommend is a hard bridge line, meaning landline.  I recommend RentABridge combined with Instant Telewebcast.  If you're very big I recommend Voice Text with Instant Telewebcast, which is what I do.

The SellfFomYourSeat.com is Voice Text, Rentabridge.com is Rent a Bridge.  You need a bridge line and that’s where the webcasting machine is going to be calling in on - the bridge.  You can just have three people on the bridge line.

The person recording the call, you and the bridge computer or webcasting computer that’s dialing in; you need a bridge line to make that call happen.

Everyone else can listen through the webcast and there’s typically about a ten-second delay.  So I recommend the Rent a Bridge - Instant Telewebcast combination for the best webcasting and slide show service at the best price.

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The Best Way To Host Small Teleseminars Is...

In our experience the best small teleseminar bridge line is www.RentaBridge.com. I don’t know if it’s the best quality wise, it certainly is there for quality, but it has never failed me in having good quality for a low, fair price.  Those are 50 lines or less, 30 lines or less.

If you're a coach or a consultant I recommend RentaBridge.com and that’s exactly what you do; you're renting a bridge line.  The reason I like them is they will guarantee X number of slots.  They won’t play the game with you that a lot of bridge line companies do.

Again, I have used Black and White; I recommend them as well.  I have not used Eagle directly, but I also understand that they do a good job.  You don’t have to have reservations with rentabridge.com; you don’t have to have a reserved time.  You can just choose it at will.

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The Best Way To Host Large Teleseminars Is...

There are many bridge line companies.  Black and White is one.  Eagle Teleconferencing is another.  The one I have found to be the best service and the most reliable, when they tell me I’m getting (X) number of lines, I get (X) number of lines, is Voice Text.

The way to forgo a start-up fee is by going to www.SellFromYourSeat.com. That’s a little re-direct and if you want 200 lines or more, guaranteed.  The way the bridge lines work is they don’t always guarantee the lines.  They may be saying they're guaranteeing it, but they're giving it to you in a shared environment.

When you go with Voice Text 200 means 200; 500 means 500.  They are the most cost efficient, not the least expensive, but the most cost efficient and most reliable I have ever found.

The worst thing you want is for your bridge line to go down.  They have their support team always on instant message (IM) on Microsoft Messenger and they're constantly going back and forth to make sure that everything is going the way it’s supposed to be going.

By going to SellFromYourSeat.com, I won’t get an affiliate commission, but you will save on your start up fees, because I send so much business to them.

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The Best For Advanced In Growing Businesses, Online And Offline Is...

I’m going to put in over three million dollars.  If you do over a million dollars it’s even good, but over three million dollars, definitely Infusionsoft.com.

InfusionSoft.com like MarketersChoice.net like SmartStartSites.com has grown, evolved and has become much better in deliverability and in use.  It has a 24-hour recorded message service, fax broadcasting and email broadcasting.

If you're in the public speaking business and you put on your own events it is the simplest way to grow your business.  I have found it to be the best online and offline system that is available and very high deliverability, extremely high deliverability for email.

That's the best shopping cart/e-business tools suite online and offline over the three million dollar range.

If you do over a million it’s also something good for you that you can grow into.  The reason I put three million is because it’s more expensive.  It’s an expensive start-up, it’s an expensive monthly and it’s not going to cost you less than $100-$200 a month, it’s going to cost you several thousand a month.  In some cases less, but in most cases more.

However, if you're doing three million dollars then you want deliverability, you want online and offline integration, you want your database to be integrated and it’s a lot more powerful than MarketsChoice.net and SmartStartSites.com.

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The The Best Shopping Cart For Intermediate Is...

The best shopping cart that I’ve utilized, the private label that I have is MarketersChoice.net. The non-private label is 1ShoppingCart.com.

The price is the same.  There are some additional benefits with MarketersChoice.net, because there are some additional tutorials there for you, especially for professional speakers and information marketers.

The best shopping cart and e-business tool software I have found and it does have its limitation just like SmartStartSites.com between the $500,000-$3,000,000 range of revenue is MarketersChoice.net.

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The Best Shopping Cart e-Business Tools Resource For Beginners Is...

What’s the best shopping cart e-business tools resource for beginners?

This may shock you.  One of the best I have seen, because of the ability to make your own website, because it has its own shopping cart, because it can be used on ClickBank without a shopping cart, because it can test and track.

It’s SmartStartSites.com and this is for beginners.

If you make $500,000 or less it’s a very simple tool to utilize.  That’s the best shopping cart and e-business tools resource.  It has web-broadcasting, database, check it out. There are some video tutorials there.  SmartStartSites.com, so for an online presence of $500,000 or less it's a great place to start.

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The Best Multi-Question Survey Service Is...

What’s the best multi-question survey service?

To us it’s not Ask Database, because Ask Database is the best single question search.

The best multi-question survey service in our opinion is Survey Monkey. It’s the easiest to use and their tag line, because knowledge is everything.  We don’t agree with that.  We think specific knowledge is everything.

Here’s what Survey Monkey does.  It’s a survey software and it’s the best multi-question software we’ve seen.  In just looking at their user interface where it says feature highlights, video tutorials, 10 reasons why, pricing, testimonials that alone is worth going to Survey Monkey just to creatively imitate what they’ve done there.

They have 10 reasons why you should choose Survey Monkey.  Why shouldn’t every site have ten reasons why?

• Number one we make life easier.  We make you the hero.
• Number two, we are flexible.
• Number three, we are intuitive.
• Number four, we are powerful.
• Number five, we are limitless.
• Number six, we are secure.
• Number seven, we are large.
• Number eight, we are small.
• Number nine, we are secretive and
• Number ten, we are listening.

Is that a powerful ten reasons why?  We’ve never seen anything more powerful than that; model that.

Video tutorials– What a great video tutorial, you can model this video tutorial piece that they have.  Not only their video tutorials, but the video player they have powerful stuff.  If it’s good enough for Survey Monkey, it’s good enough for you.

Pricing– Pricing is dirt cheap.  One hundred per survey is free that’s the basic.  Monthly Pro is $1,000 per month that’s the number of responses allowed per month, so 100 per month is free, 1,000 per month is five cents each, $20.

If you spend $200 a year there’s no charge.  It’s crazy.

We would highly recommend you get Survey Monkey. It’s the best and this is from someone who knows surveys.  Survey Monkey is the best multi- question survey service and the best multi-question survey service website we have ever seen.

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The Best Online Search Engine For Survey Data Is...

We only know of one. The answer is Ask Database. We only know of one to date.

There may be others, but that’s the only one we know of and that’s the one that we think is best.  It was the first so that’s the one we'er going to recommend.

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The Best Website To Get All of Google’s Free or Fee Based Resources Is...

What if you want to go to one-page and see all the resources available…?

Simply go to www.Google.com/options

• Alerts,
• Blog search,
• Google images,
• Google news,
• Google news archives,
• Scholar,
• Web search,
• Regular Google, that’s what everyone knows it to be,
• Google code, Download API and Open source code,
• Google Docs,
• Google groups,
• Google translate; view your web page in other languages.
• Google mobile.

Where can you find all of those resources?  Simply go to www.Google.com/options and you will see it.  It’s there, it’s always been there and hopefully you will go back over and over again that’s where to go.  The best website for all the Google free and fee-based resources and most of them are free.

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The Best Way To Find Affiliate Partners Is...

The best way to find affiliate partners is to join other affiliate programs and find out who the top 10 are when they have a contest.

If you join an affiliate program and you're part of an affiliate contest, the top 10 producers of that affiliate program, even if it’s not you, is showing you who the top producers are.

If that affiliate program has a similar product as yours or a complimentary product then what a great way to legally and ethically find the top affiliate that could be selling your products and services.

Join an affiliate program and find out who the top producers are in the affiliate contest.  If an affiliate program doesn't have an affiliate contest then that’s not going to give you much information, but if there’s an affiliate contest join that affiliate program, because you’ll get the top 10 producers.

The affiliate manager is going to send you the top 10, 15 or 20, so they, being the affiliate manager can egg on or motivate and inspire the other affiliates to sell more.

In the effort to get other affiliates to sell more every other affiliate will see who the top 10 are.  You can contact those affiliates and figure out if they would be good strategic alliance partners for you.

I’ve built affiliate partners this way, what a great way for you to do the same thing.  That’s the best way to find affiliate partners.

The second best way is the link colon strategy.  Here’s the way to do the link colon strategy.  Find a competitor in your marketplace.  If you want to see how many people are linked into their website, meaning many times those are affiliates who are linking into them, because they're generating income.

Find the most closely matched competitor you could possibly find.  If you don't have any competitors you don’t have a market.  The first thing you should be looking for is a competitor, because they are plowing the ground before you.

You’d better hope that they're ahead of you.  You don’t want to be the pioneer; you want to be in back of their wagon not in front of it.

I don't know if this sounds counterintuitive to you or not, but you’re going to save a ton of time and money doing competitive analysis.  Find a competitor and then do the link colon strategy.

Let’s say you go to www.AlexMandossian.com, he’s your competitor.  Once you're on that website you’ll see the complete domain, http://www.AlexMandossian.com that’s Alex’s blog.

Then in front of the http type in link: so now what you would see is link:http://www.alexmandossian.com, the full URL with the http.  What I want you to do is type that full URL in including link: into Google search. This will show you all the reverse links to a website.

If you want to see who is linked to Alex Mandossian, in other words people who are feeding traffic to Alex, if you go to Google.com at the time of this recording over 270 websites are linked to Alex Mandossian and that’s for Google.

Why is that important?  If you're finding a competitor chances are many competitors have affiliate programs and those affiliates are linked to them.  This is a great way to find out if you're not part of their affiliate program yet or if you're not seeing who their top 10 affiliates are, this is a great way to figure out who’s linked into them.

This isn’t for the reason of stealing affiliates this is just to find out who’s linked to them, because if you have a similar or complimentary program you can go to that resource that’s linked to your competitor.

Call them up, do not email them and say I noticed you are linked to such and such.  I’m wondering if you and I could do business as well that's what you tell them.

They can either say yes or no.  If they say yes, you say great.  What are the rules of engagement to do that?  If they say no, you say how come?  They give you a reason and then you move on that's it.  Make a note to self and then you move on.

If you have over 270 people to call then you're going to be busy for a little bit.  You can even have a link manager do this for you; you don’t have to do this yourself.

It gets even better. On Google if I put link: and then the entire URL for AlexMandossian.com I get over 270 links.  If I went to www.Yahoo.com, because Yahoo news is bigger and, because Yahoo is part of a directory, if I type that into the web search for Yahoo; remember I’m typing in link: which is telling me all the backward links going into AlexMandossian.com, and that’s just the URL we're using now.  You can use any URL.

I’ll find on Yahoo over 6,100 websites that are linked into alexmandossian.com.  This can be for any website, but what a great shortcut to find affiliate partners.

I told you the best way is to join an affiliate program and find out who are the top 10 and many times you’ll find it’s on a blog for the affiliate program.

The second best way is use the Link: Strategy.

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The Best Place To Spy On Your Competitors Is...

There’s one place we believe is absolute best as a resource and that’s ClickBank.com. ClickBank.com is the best place to get new ideas for Q & A, for FAQ’s and to find and model other people’s guarantees in your product category.

If you're in one of these categories–

• Business to business,
• Health and fitness,
• Home and family,
• Computing and Internet,
• Money and employment,
• Marketing and ads,
• Fun and entertainment,
• Sports and recreation, and
• Society and culture

Go there and you’ll find the top 10, 20, or 50 websites.  Spy on your competitors just like Sam Walton used to do; it drove his competitors crazy, but competitors are there to be spied on.

They're not there for you they're there for themselves.  Make sure you're for yourself and spend a lot of time on ClickBank.com, because that way you get to find out what other people’s guarantees are about, spy on other people’s sales processes.

If you're a professional speaker you’ll find out if other people are offering DVDs at their speaking gig.  If you're a consumer products company you get to find out if other people have information products that are digital delivery of their own product that they're making available and they sell it on ClickBank.

Every business is an information marketing business.  When someone rolls their eyes at me and says Alex, I’m not an information publisher, I say you are.  Everyone is an information publisher.  A dentist, a CPA, anyone is.

If you have information online, if you have a website you're an information publisher.  If you have a brochure or business card you're an information publisher.  Every business is an information marketing business.  Every business is an information publishing business.

I highly recommend you start accepting that truth and go to ClickBank.com and start spying on your competitors you will save so much time.  It’s there for the lazy.

In fact, if you want to be relaxed and intense simultaneously, if you want to have this  lazy way to be successful, the laziest way to do that is to check on what your competitors are doing, because they have the arrows in their backs.

They have their face in the mud.  They’ve already gone through all the toil and struggle.  They have made the mistakes for you so why not check out what they're doing?  There’s nothing creative about doing something original.  That’s a great way to lose money, but go to your competitors.

Why did Sam Walton become one of the richest men on Earth?  Why is Bill Gates on of the richest men on Earth?  Why is Warren Buffet the richest man on Earth at the time of this recording?

They check out what their competitors do whether it’s a competitive investor, software programmer, manufacturer or retailer they look at their competitors; that’s why you're in business.  That’s the only reason why you market.  You wouldn’t have to market if you didn't have competitors so utilize your competitors.

The single, biggest mistake that people and/or marketers make, anyone makes that I know, students of mine is they don’t do enough competitive analysis.  If there’s anything you take from this course, from this advice its start analyzing your competitors.

Clickbank.com is the easiest place to do that.

Also on Amazon.com if you're an author.  You can also do it at eBay.com.  ClickBank is simple, because it starts with digital products and digital products are very simple to sell so you’ll see the categories and the copy that is selling best.

The information is a very important category to spy on, because sometimes the information itself has the sales copy wrapped up in it.

It’s very difficult to write sales copy for a consumer product, for life insurance or for something that doesn't have information involved in it.  With an information product, if you have a multi-module course such as Teleseminar Secrets or Virtual Book Tour Secrets you can take existing copy from the modules and put that in your sales copy.

That is a great way to spy on competitors.  People are taking their existing benefits from the consumer products, their existing features from their software products, putting it online and selling it in the form of information.

That’s why I believe ClickBank is the single best source to spy on competitors.  You need to spy more often on your competitors.  Spying is legal in business so do it.

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The Best Keyword Phrase Finder Is...

There are many keyword phrase finders available by Overture, which is owned by Yahoo. Good keyword’s was available.  There were some other keyword phrase finders.  There’s Word Tracker of course.

We have found that the least expensive, free is good so that’s the least expensive and the most relevant is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

The easiest way to find the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is simply type in AlexKeywords.com and that’s a redirect link that goes directly to the tool.

The reason this keyword tool is so important is because it allows you to generate keyword ideas for Google.  Google didn't have a keyword tool for a long time.  Everyone used Overture and because Overture pulled from the Yahoo directory and resources it wasn’t as relevant for Google.

Word Tracker, the jury is out on how effective it is although I think it’s an excellent resource.  It costs money and is a little more difficult to use.  The simplest way as a primer to get a good sense of what people are searching on Google is the keyword tool by Google.

I think Google is going to take over Microsoft, because of all the free documents and web resources that they have.  Many people don‘t even realize that it exists.  The keyword tool, AlexKeywords.com, if you go there you’ll go to the keyword tool for Google.

Enter a keyword phrase.  If I typed in a keyword such as paint ball gun and then I type in a keyword sensitive picture to make sure that I'm not a spammer, so I'm getting results that are accurate and it’s not being used by a spammer so it has a little character thing I have to type in that’s identical.

When I’m typing that in I get keyword phrases for paint ball gun.  Under relevance it shows paint ball gun is the most relevant.  Sniper paint ball gun, what’s paint ball?  That’s a game that you can find online and it’s a very popular game.

Best paint ball gun, Eon paint ball gun, spider paint ball gun, paint ball gun parts, angel paint ball gun, paint ball gun reviews and paint ball marker.  What is this?  This gives me keyword phrase ideas.

The reason it’s so important for keyword phrases is because it’s giving me new ideas to have a long tail for Google AdWords.  This works in conjunction with Google AdWords.  Google wants you to spend more money so the keyword tool allows you to spend more money with Google AdWords so you can succeed.

Why?  Because if you succeed with Google you’ll spend more money with them and if you spend more money with them they're going to make more money.  It’s a revenue generator for them.

It only makes sense to use the keyword tool that’s why it’s free that that’s why they’ve let you utilize it.  Data is pulled from the Google search engine and the Google partners, which I believe is a very relevant place to generate a lot of good information.

It also has a website content search that you can look at.  The keyword tool is more than just keyword phrases; it has website content.  Learn it, take the tutorials.  Check out the power of that tool.

It’s the Google keyword tool at www.AlexKeywords.com. That’s how you find the keyword phrase finder, and that’s the simple redirect URL that leads to the keyword tool that Google puts on.

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The Best Google AdWords Tutorial Course Is...

A lot of Internet marketing thought leaders have Google AdWords courses.

What is the absolute best Google AdWords tutorial course?  If you want to learn how to use Google AdWords the absolute best Google AdWords tutorial is by Google and it’s free.

It’s at the Google AdWords learning center.  If you want to do there directly simply type in AlexAdwords.com and you’ll see that there are nine sections at the time of this recording.

1.  Section one is introduction to AdWords.
2.  Section two is getting started with AdWords.
3.  Section Three is Targeting; this is great marketing
4.  Section four is cost and billing,
5.  Section five is tracking ad performance.

That alone is just worth going there it’s a great tutorial.   These are multimedia lessons.  They also have text lessons.  I recommend the multimedia and text lessons, because they both have quizzes.

6.  Section six is optimizing ad performance.
7.  Section seven is AdWords Toolbox.
8.  Section eight is Google Analytics
9.  Section nine is managing client accounts

There are nine sections at the time of this recording.  It is the single best tutorial, it’s free, and why do I believe it’s the best? Because Google puts it on, I’ve purchased others and there are others that are almost as good, but what better than Google?

If you're a Google AdWords advertiser, Google advertising professional or just interested in learning more about Google AdWords, you can use their free training center to sharpen your AdWords knowledge.

It’s both multimedia and text and the technical requirements are just a Flash Player five or higher.  You can get that for free.  You can sign up for the Google advertising professional exam if you want.

Common questions…

• What’s the difference between the text and interactive lessons?
• How do you take the lessons and navigate through the learning center?
• Why should you take the exam?
• What are the technical requirements to open up the training lessons?

All you need to do is go from introduction all the way to managing client accounts.  After one week you will know more about Google AdWords than most people on the Internet, even some of the savviest Internet marketers.

I was ashamed to realize how little I knew about the more elegant uses of Google AdWords until I started studying at the learning center.  In fact, I was recommending the Learning Center way before I even went through all the trainings.

I went through a couple of trainings and said wow, this is cool.  Suddenly I realized, why don’t I go through all the trainings and now I do?  I recommend this to webmasters.  I recommend that every webmaster who’s going to utilize your Google AdWords account if you have one, if you don’t then it’s time to take a closer look at it.

I recommend that any webmaster, any marketer, any web developer should have at least passed some of the tests that are available at the tutorial center.  AlexAdwords.com that is the redirect link that goes directly to the Google AdWords Learning Center.

There’s not a direct domain so AlexAdwords.com will get you directly there.  Once you find it you can bookmark it and go back over and over again.

So that’s Question #54: What’s the best Google AdWords tutorial course? It’s the AdWords tutorial available by Google and it is free, so the price is right.

Again, AlexAdwords.com will go straight to the Google AdWords Learning Center; the lessons catalogue that you’ll find there. You can jump from lesson to lesson if you want, but it is robust and it is extremely helpful.

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The Best Online Dictionary And Thesaurus Resources Is...

In our opinion the best free online dictionary is www.Dictionary.com.

When you go there you’ll also get access to www.Thesaurus.com, www.Encyclopedia.com. Dictionary.com is very robust, because when you go there you’ll see all these free resources.

The way they make money is through advertising, so you can use their free resource and that’s where I go anytime I want to look up a word. Now, that’s the best free resource.

The best paid resource in my opinion is www.VisualThesaurus.com. When you go there you’ll find the coolest way to look up words that are related.  It’s this little system, if you want to use it you can use it for free and you can type in the box that says look up a word and then just look it up.

If you don’t have the software it will download it very quickly for you.  The reason I love Visual Thesaurus is because, whether you're a visual or non-visual person you’ll see all the related words spatially.

You don’t see it linearly like a reference guide gives you.  You're given words linearly, here’s the synonym and here’s the antonym.

With Visual Thesaurus it’s only $20 a year.  I highly recommend you get it.  You can even get the CD version if you want to pay a little more.  For $20 it’s worth it to get Visual Thesaurus and you’ll be a better writer, wordsmith, copywriter and salesperson.

Just hanging out there for five minutes a day you will find your vocabulary will expand.  I do this with my children, myself and it works.

Dictionary.com, and there you get access to Thesaurus.com, which is also free, and then there’s a web guide as well.

I highly recommend that you go to Dictionary.com and you can even register. They have word of the day, blogs, other languages; it’s such a robust resource for you and it’s a very high page rank so they get a lot of traffic.

Dictionary.com is the free resource; Visual Thesaurus is the paid one. And for $20 a year it’s worth it.

That’s the best online dictionary, thesaurus and other resources.  You no longer need an encyclopedia. You have your desktop and the Internet; you got it all.

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The Best Internet Archive to Check Out Old Websites...

The best Internet archive and I believe it’s the largest is called www.Archive.org. You’ll also see it says Internet Archive WayBackMachine. WayBackMachine.com and .org doesn't work anymore. Archive.org does. Go there and you will be shocked at the 85 billion pages they have.

What do you use this for?  Let’s say for example, I want to go to my oldest site, which is MarketingWithPostcards.com. Let’s say I wanted to see what it looked like February 23, 2001.  I can click on that date and it says visit this site later that’s not available.

Now I’m going to go to December 14, 2001.  If you go there you’ll see my old website MarketingWithPostcards.com and one of the oldest opt-in boxes ever.  There’s the evidence right there.

I also have one of the oldest squeeze pages ever this is going back to 2001.  People didn't have opt-in pages in 2001 or 2000.  They didn't have anchor tags back then.  They didn't ask for zip codes.  They didn't have long sales letters like this.

If you want to look at the old web pages 2002-2008, why is this helpful to use the archive website?  If you want to lurk or spy on your competitors and see the evolution of their websites Archive.org can get you there. Question 52: What’s the best Internet archive to check out old websites and see the evolution of how your competitors have evolved over the years… Archive.org. If you didn't know about it, there it is.  Keep it.  Once you know it, it’s always yours.

I don’t buy this whole bit it takes 30 days to create a habit.  I think that’s rubbish.  Let’s say you have the habit of taking certain roads going to work.  If you find a shortcut after day three, you're going to take that shortcut forever.

Once you learn about Archive.org it’s not going to take you 30 days to go there or get in the habit of going there.  You’ll go there from day one.  Hopefully you’ll take that shortcut and know that as far as archiving goes, you're going to go to Archive.org and check it out.

As far as screen capture goes, or video capture, if you want to start utilizing a free resource, JingProject.com, and Snagit.com are the two sources. Once you have those sources they're yours for life that’s the beauty of knowing these tools.  Once someone has found them for you they are yours for life and hopefully you’ll never forget them, especially if you write them down and you’ll have them in the transcripts. Question #52: What’s the best Internet archive website on the net? In my opinion: Archive.org.

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What’s the Best Online Resource for Screen Capture or Video Capture

The best resource for video capture where you can record video online or share online images is www.jingproject.com. It’s free, so go to JingProject.com and utilize it.  My webmaster utilizes it, and you can utilize it, and it’s a great way to exchange video capture and image capture.

If you want to pay $50 you can use what I use, which is www.Snagit.com. It’s by Tech Smith and I believe they're run by the same company, its $49.95 U.S. and that’s what I use to capture website images.  You can’t just do that on Microsoft Word.  It’s not that easy.

When I create my handouts and study guides, all the website capture, all the video capture… all that’s done by Snagit.  It can scroll down a web page it does a bunch of things.  Jing can do as well, but Jing is free and there’s a little more advertising that Jing has, because it’s free.

So the best source for screen capture, video capture, any kind of exchange of online materials, capturing images that you can exchange, send to your webmasters or students, cut and paste on to PDF documents or Microsoft Word documents… JingProject.com, that one’s free, Snagit.com, that one’s $50. Those are the two we recommend.

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My Target Market is eBay Sellers

My target market is eBay sellers and if eBay no longer allows or any other marketplace, the sale of digitally downloaded products in auction or fixed price format what’s your recommendation?

This doesn't only apply to eBay.  This applies to any… not only marketplace, but anywhere selling online.  If someone, some company or organization no longer allows a certain type of species of sale and it may change, from time to time.

For example, Google AdWords doesn’t allow gambling, adult websites to purchase Google AdWords.  They have other rules and regulations.  If you're going to purchase Google AdWords there are certain things that you're allowed to do and certain things you're not allowed to do.

If you buy and sell on eBay there are certain things you're allowed and certain things you're not allowed.  I’m going to tell you, before I give you my answer where to go for digital products without eBay.

Answer: My answer to this question is first a quick story about Sears.

Sears Roebuck was invented, because Henry Ford invented the assembly line for the automotive industry.  The assembly line was invented before Henry Ford and then he brought it after seeing how the assembly line worked as the story goes at a meat packing plant in Chicago.

He invented the middle class, because many people were now able to get cars, the Model T specifically, as a result people could live now in the outskirts of town.  In the rural areas outside of main cities, because he had transportation, it’s not only going for a picnic, but a suburb was invented.

Henry Ford helped invent the suburb indirectly as well as the middle class.

What does this have to do with Sears?  Sears Roebuck, when they had the catalog it was invented, because people couldn’t get into the city, into the stores.

The discount store chain and Wal-Mart’s weren’t invented back in the 1800s, so farmers and other people living in the rural areas would purchase through a catalog.

The catalog would have delivery service.  There was no FedEx or UPS back then, but they would have delivery services and then people could purchase merchandise.

Sears' Clothepin Trick

Here’s what Sears used to do.  Because of the shear buying power that Sears had, Sears was the Wal-Mart of the late 1800s and the turn of the century.  Sears used to do something called the Sears clothespin trick.

If you’ve ever been through an MBA program you know the story.  Sears would work with a factory and back then the factories were all domestic there were none overseas.

The Sears buyers would walk up or visit, because the telephone wasn’t available and they would start becoming 20 to 40% of a factory’s business.

Let’s say you're selling clothespins to Sears, it seems like it’s a trivial thing, but let’s say that 60% of all the clothespins that you're manufacturing are going to Sears; 70 to 90% of all your output, your manufacturing of clothespin sales is going to Sears.

Then two people from Sears and in this case they happen to be vice presidents from Chicago and they're coming from Sears Company headquarters and they visit your manufacturing plant.

They're all smiles, they come by they knock on your door and say hi we're from Sears, we're about 90% of your business and we’d like to buy your factory.

You say wait.  You are great, but I don’t want to sell you my factory.  Then Sears says, I don’t know if you understand what we just asked.  We want to buy your factory we're 90% of your business and if you don’t sell us your factory we'll pull all of our orders.

What do you think happened?  That was called the Sears clothespin trick.

Sears would buy factories for bargain price; bargain terms, because they became the majority of all the business that they would generate from clothespin manufacturers and other manufacturers that would sell to Sears that's the Sears clothespin trick.

You don’t want to fall victim to that online.  You don’t want to fall victim to that same scenario with eBay or with any other resource.

The reason I mention that story is, because if you are focusing on eBay as your only source of income and I know many people who do this or if you're focusing on one marketplace as your sole source of income chances are that that’s going to dry up at some time.

It’s important for you not to focus as your sole source of revenue or business on one source or even a large percentage is because, if for whatever reason there’s an economic change or shift, you haven’t syndicated your risk and your risk isn’t placed over many different sources of business, what happens is you may lose the majority of your income.

If 50% of your income is coming from one source that’s very dangerous, so even if business is good, that doesn't mean anything, pretend that business is not good.

To answer the question where would I go if I were to sell digital products, the obvious answer and this is not only for anyone selling on eBay, but for anyone selling and wanting to do some creative imitation and spy on your competitors, I would go to ClickBank.

There are a few things that ClickBank has, even if you don’t sell digital product’s that’s very important.  ClickBank.com, everyone knows about ClickBank, but people don’t realize the power of ClickBank and the aggregated power that they’ve assembled.

It’s an affiliate network, first and foremost.  The easiest way to learn about ClickBank is to go to ClickBank, click on the FAQ and if you're unfamiliar with it you can learn about it in less than half an hour.

If you go to the buy products tab at ClickBank you’ll see a list of categories:

• Business to business,
• Health and fitness,
• Home and family,
• Computing and Internet,
• Money and employment,
• Marketing and ads,
• Fun and entertainment,
• Sports and recreation, and
• Society and culture

Let’s say I clicked on health and fitness.  If I want it to, it will bring up the top 10 sellers or websites for that category.

Imagine the power that you have if you know the top 10 websites.  The reason they know this is because it’s an affiliate network and they know who’s selling what.  With ClickBank, you don’t have a merchant account you're using theirs.

You're paying more to use theirs and that’s one of the advantages if you don’t have a merchant account, you can work with ClickBank and they can make sure you get paid.  They take a larger percentage, but you get to do business without a merchant account, which a lot of people don’t have.

Because of that they get to measure and they know exactly what people are doing.  They know who has the best and highest selling affiliate programs.  They're actually arranging to pay the affiliate relationships that you have there.  They have a longer guarantee policy there as well.

Read the rules and regulations if you go to ClickBank, but here’s what’s so important about digital products in ClickBank.  With ClickBank that involves DVD, recordings to teleseminars, eBooks and online video such as screen capture anything that’s digitized you can sell on ClickBank.

Read the rules and regulations, anything digital, information products especially on ClickBank are very hot.

If you look at the top 10 websites in each category you’ll be shocked at some of the copy you’ll see there.  You won’t think that it sells, but it does.

One of the things that I like to do on ClickBank, even it weren’t an eBay question like, I can’t sell on eBay anymore, where do I go?  Go to ClickBank and check out the frequently asked questions in the top 10 or 20 websites that you would be competing with.

Remember, the best place to find new customers is from your competitors.

The best way to capture more customers is to figure out what questions are being answered by your competitors and then you answer them better or in a more competitive way.

I recommend that you purchase from your competitors at ClickBank if you have any.  Any business is an information marketing business so find a competitor that’s close to your category and just peruse.

If you spend a couple of hours a week on ClickBank in fact, 20 or 30 minutes a day is more than enough, but two hours a week and you’ll be at the top of the food chain of understanding where the Internet is as it relates to information products and how to repurpose your product.

In fact, many times all you have to do is repurpose something that’s selling well on ClickBank and you have a strategic alliance possibility there or you have a competitive possibility there.

My answer to the alternative to eBay is ClickBank.  It is one of the largest, if not the world’s largest resource and affiliate network for any digital products.  If it can be delivered via the Internet it’s going to be sold on ClickBank.

Some of the best marketers are on ClickBank simply, because they know that it’s a built-in marketplace.  That's what I going to recommend.

If eBay disallows you to sell something and you can sell that something digitally, go to ClickBank instead.

Remember this year’s clothespin trick.  If ClickBank becomes 90% of your business that’s dangerous so go elsewhere.

You can do a tremendous amount of business without selling on ClickBank.  You can do millions of dollars.  There are people who are not on ClickBank that do millions of dollars each year.

ClickBank is not only a great place for you to get started, but to add as an adjunct to your existing business and a great place to spy on your competitors.

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What One Thing Can Grow or Change Sales the Fastest?

Answer: There are three ways you can grow your business.

• New customers,
• Higher dollar value per sale, and
• Higher frequency in between orders

Those are the three ways you can build your business.

If you think about how to grow it from the bottom up you need new customers, you need a way to get higher dollar value.

• If you're a professional speaker you get more per speaking gig.
• If you're a consumer products company you get more dollars per purchase.
• If you're an independent professional that works by the hour you get a higher dollar value per hour that’s what’ higher dollar value is, higher monetary value.

Then higher frequency in between purchases or services, which means if people are buying once a month, then they buy twice a month and you make more money, even if you're dollar value stays the same.

If people are buying from you twice a month or they're hiring you twice a month, then hiring you three times or three and a half times on average a month; how do you do a half?  Over the average, over the course of the year that you can average out into a half if you want and even to a quarter.

The higher frequency, you make more money over the course of the year or lifetime of that customer.  There’s something called LTV, which is lifetime value.  The lifetime value of a customer is fairly difficult to figure out accurately.

Annual value is very simple to figure out.  Annual value is taking the total gross volume of sales and dividing it by the total number of customers.

Let’s say you have $100,000 in sales and let’s say you have 1,000 customers, so you take $100,000 divided by 1,000 customers.  The annual value per customer would be $100.  If you have $100,000 in sales and you have 100 customers then that means each customer’s annual value would be worth $1,000.

Why is that important?  Because the way that you're going to measure success in your business is either to get new customers, to raise the dollar value of each transaction or to raise the frequency in between transactions.

Of those three ways, new customers, higher dollar value or higher frequency, the one that people focus on most is new customers.

How do I get a new customer?  Why?  I don't know, maybe it’s sexier.  We're getting new customers, more people love us and we're going to boost sales, yet that’s the hardest way to increase your revenue.

The easiest, fastest way bar none to increase revenue is to have a higher dollar value and the easiest way to do that is to raise your price.  There’s an amazing thing that happens when you raise your price.  If you're a fee paid speaker you raise your price.

I raise my price by 20%.  You can raise your price by more or by less.  I recommend 20% at a time.  For example, if you charge $10,000 for a speech I would raise the fee to $12,000, $10,000 plus an additional $2,000 or a 20% increase.

Why?  First of all, what will happen through supply and demand, if you have an elastic demand, which most companies and independent professionals do, is you’ll have fewer takers, but you’ll be making more money.

In fact, if you have fewer takers you have fewer problem children, fewer people to deal with and you end up making more money.  As long as I have more than one, I prefer to have fewer clients and make more money.

My model as an information marketer is selling higher end information products to fewer people.  Some people sell lower end information products let’s say less than $100 to lots and lots of people.

There’s a benefit to that and that is, if you lose a few customers you're not going to lose a lot of sale, but there’s also the flip side.  The challenge with that is you have more customer service and when people are buying lower dollars amount products you have higher customer service issues.

If you don’t have a customer service department then it’s not an issue, but you're not going to be in business for very long if you don’t have client care, which I think everyone should.

In looking at what the easiest way is to boost sales and this is the most academic, it’s been under your nose all along is increase your price that’s the easiest way.  If you feel that the market is soft right now, like you're not getting enough business as it is, price has very little to do with it.

In fact, you can raise your price and end up generating more dollar volume and getting more customers, because you’ll be perceived differently.  It has happened to me and to colleagues; it may happen to you as well.

You can grandfather, I’m using that as a verb, your existing clients and that means you can give them your existing price on an hourly basis, a per speech or per service basis for three months   Then you can make an announcement to everyone else and this is what I recommend to my students when they ask how do I raise my price.

You grandfather everyone for a month, two months, three months; I like to grandfather them for three months and then everyone else the price has gone up.  Now your existing clients, students, patients or customers whatever you call them, they feel as though they privileged decision-making, because they don’t have to change.

They don’t have to make a new decision; they have 90 days to do it and you can ease them into the new price.  Everyone else gets the higher price so everyone else is not going to be upset with you, because for them the price is not being raised.  They haven’t been spoiled with the lower price.

If you went from a $10,000 speaking fee, if you're a professional speaker to $12,000, all the new clients wouldn’t know any different and the old clients are happy with you, because they're still at $10,000 for at least three months.

Here’s what happens and this has been my experience.  When you make a price increase like this you end up getting more frequency from existing clients.  Why?  Because they know the price is going out so they pre-purchase.

If you have a pre-purchasing agreement with people, as long as they're pre-purchasing within the next three months they can pre-purchase for a while.  Let’s say they can pre-purchase for the next year or two, they may be purchasing for two or three years for service in the next three months.

Talk about a boost in revenue and they're pre-purchasing it from you.  Just by virtue of your prices going up can be a great boost in frequency as well. That’s why when people ask me between new customers, higher dollar value per transaction and higher frequency, which is the easiest?  The easiest is always the higher dollar value.  The easiest is to raise the price.

If you want the fastest, easiest, most economical way to boost your revenue without spending an extra dime on advertising or marketing costs, raise your price.

It doesn't take courage, it takes common sense.  Just do it and watch what happens 20% is a fair amount that’s the easiest way.

The second easiest way is raising the frequency.  For example you go to Sam’s, which is a club chain just like Costco or BJ’s is a club chain.  Sam’s is run by Wal-Mart.

With Sam’s they’ve maintained a dollar value per ticket purchase.  They sell flat screen TVs and diamonds, which is consistent with what I just said, it's easy for them to maintain a ticket or the dollar value per purchase, per transaction.

Every time someone goes through a cash register, a $400 billion company, of the Fortune 500 they are number one.  It's easier for them to maintain the ticket then the frequency that's why the frequency is the second way I recommend in boosting revenue.

Getting someone to purchase a second as time, now that's not an up-sell.  That's another transaction after another time that they've come to your shopping cart online, they've visited you in a retail store or have called you up that’s a second transaction.

It's very important to make that distinction between that and an up-sell, because an up-sell is one transaction where you're boosting revenue.  That's an easy way to increase revenue, but that is dealing with dollar value, boosting dollar value.

I told you earlier that dollar value boosts are the easiest.   An up-sell will get you that, as well as raising price.  However, increasing frequency is not as simple, because it requires more behavior; it requires a second visit after the transaction or after the time they've purchased from you online or offline.

Higher frequency is the second way I recommend.  That is easier than getting a new customer.  Why?  Because getting a new customer requires a lot more behavioral change.  Remember, marketing is often behavior modification.

A behavior change is very difficult.  For someone to go from someone else to you or from another company to you is a lot tougher then increasing the dollar value per transaction of an existing customer, student, client or patients depending on the business you're in and it's more difficult than increasing the number of frequency purchases in between orders.

If you look at your entire business life and there are new customers, higher dollar value and higher frequency, you're going to grow your business.  If you just look at higher dollar value and higher frequency every time you get a new customer you're going to be a lot more efficient and effective.

If you've already trained your customers to have high dollar value and come back more frequently that means every time a new customer comes through your machine, through your sales process they'll be in the zone of generating more income for you.

That's why I focus on new customers last any time idea of anyone advice to grow their business.

High dollar value, raise your ticket or increase your ticket through up-sells, that's the easiest way to grow your business if there’s one thing you were going to change.

The second thing you would change is increase the frequency.

Ask yourself how can I increase the frequency between purchases?

The third is how do I get new customers?  The easiest way is ask for referrals.  If you have people who have high dollar value purchase and high frequency they're the best people to refer new customers to you.

The other best source for new customers to finalize the question and more on to the next one is a competitor.  Your competitors are your best source for new customers.  Why?  Because you cannot create demand, you can argue over it, think about it, debate over it, but you can’t create demand.

Proctor and Gamble can’t create demand.  Apple Computer could not create demand.  All you can do is re-channel and re-direct it.  You have to look at where the demand is in the marketplace and channel it over to you.

That’s where competitive advantage comes in.  That’s where unique selling proposition comes in unique to what?  Unique to your competitor.

Sam Walton spent more time in his competitor’s stores than he did in his own.  Why?  That’s where all the great ideas were.  That’s where all the creative imitation happens is in your competitor’s store.  It’s not stealing its research.

If you go to many competitors and you see what they're doing that is original that is creative and unique.  Most people are like ostriches they put their head in the sand and they only look at their own business and that’s blind.

Look at your competitors.  It will broaden your mind.  It will expand your mind and it will give you new ideas.  I’ve been using the professional speaker example.  Look at what other professional speakers are doing.  Get their professional speaking packet.

By being different from them you are being original.  You may be the same and you don’t even know it.  The only way you're going to know what’s available out there is knowing what the demand is and the only way to know the demand is to go to your competitors online and offline.

With the online world it’s so much easier to do competitive analysis now.  In fact, when you're going to submit a business plan, one of the key factors is competitive analysis that's what you want to do.  Where is your advantage?  It’s the easiest place to get new customers.

• The easiest way to get new customers is through existing customers or through your competitors.
• The easiest way to increase your dollar value per transaction is to increase your price or to have an up-sell or cross sell per transaction.
• The easiest way to have higher frequency between purchases is to remind people to keep coming back.

It’s more difficult than increasing the average order per sale, but it’s easier than getting a new customer, because getting a new customer requires a new behavior change.

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The Link Colon Strategy Is...

One of the best way to find affiliate partners is to use the link colon strategy.

Here’s the way to do the link colon strategy.  Find a competitor in your marketplace.  If you want to see how many people are linked into their website, meaning many times those are affiliates who are linking into them, because they're generating income.

Find the most closely matched competitor you could possibly find.  If you don't have any competitors you don’t have a market.  The first thing you should be looking for is a competitor, because they are plowing the ground before you.

You’d better hope that they're ahead of you.  You don’t want to be the pioneer; you want to be in back of their wagon not in front of it.

I don't know if this sounds counterintuitive to you or not, but you’re going to save a ton of time and money doing competitive analysis.  Find a competitor and then do the link colon strategy.

Let’s say you go to www.AlexMandossian.com, he’s your competitor.  Once you're on that website you’ll see the complete domain, http://www.AlexMandossian.com that’s Alex’s blog.

Then in front of the http type in link: so now what you would see is link:http://www.alexmandossian.com, the full URL with the http.  What I want you to do is type that full URL in including link: into Google search. This will show you all the reverse links to a website.

If you want to see who is linked to Alex Mandossian, in other words people who are feeding traffic to Alex, if you go to Google.com at the time of this recording over 270 websites are linked to Alex Mandossian and that’s for Google.

Why is that important?  If you're finding a competitor chances are many competitors have affiliate programs and those affiliates are linked to them.  This is a great way to find out if you're not part of their affiliate program yet or if you're not seeing who their top 10 affiliates are, this is a great way to figure out who’s linked into them.

This isn’t for the reason of stealing affiliates this is just to find out who’s linked to them, because if you have a similar or complimentary program you can go to that resource that’s linked to your competitor.

Call them up, do not email them and say I noticed you are linked to such and such.  I’m wondering if you and I could do business as well that's what you tell them.

They can either say yes or no.  If they say yes, you say great.  What are the rules of engagement to do that?  If they say no, you say how come?  They give you a reason and then you move on that's it.  Make a note to self and then you move on.

If you have over 270 people to call then you're going to be busy for a little bit.  You can even have a link manager do this for you; you don’t have to do this yourself.

It gets even better. On Google if I put link: and then the entire URL for AlexMandossian.com I get over 270 links.  If I went to www.Yahoo.com, because Yahoo news is bigger and, because Yahoo is part of a directory, if I type that into the web search for Yahoo; remember I’m typing in link: which is telling me all the backward links going into AlexMandossian.com, and that’s just the URL we're using now.  You can use any URL.

I’ll find on Yahoo over 6,100 websites that are linked into alexmandossian.com.  This can be for any website, but what a great shortcut to find affiliate partners.

I told you the best way is to join an affiliate program and find out who are the top 10 and many times you’ll find it’s on a blog for the affiliate program.

Don't forget the link: strategy.

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The Ideal Time And Date To Host A Paid Teleseminar Training?

It is during the day on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday such as 10:00 am Pacific or at night on a Monday around 5:00 or 6:00 pm.

Why do a training that’s paid on a Monday?

You know you won’t promote on that day and your students have already paid for the call, so they’re going to make that call if they paid for it.

That uses up your Monday, which is a great day to give up for a teleseminar. Here’s the real reason I would do it, because it’s the most amount of time between Monday and Friday. On Friday I like to have the FAQ calls if it’s a teleseminar series.

So if I do it Monday night then by Wednesday I can have the replay available where people can listen to it and maybe the Q&A I do on Mondays after I taught for a few hours then they have three hours of Q&A. Then on Friday I do the Q&A, which many people have already listened to, so they don’t ask the same questions.

Monday’s at night, or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday during the day; those are good times to teach, not promote. You don’t want to promote during the day you want to teach during the day. Then a good Q&A day in fact, the best Q&A day is Friday at 9:00 or 10:00 am Pacific. I like 10:00 am, because it gives people more time to sleep.

The only time you get in trouble is in New York City on Friday’s when everyone is take off to the Hampton’s before 1:00.

I’ve even had people listening in the car as they’re traveling. It’s perfect for a Q&A with me.

Friday is Q&A day, if you have one. And Monday is teaching day in the evening; 5:00 or 6:00 pm in the evening. I love 5:00 on Monday. During the day if you’re going to teach I highly recommend you teach, if your Mondays are taken, that you teach on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Preferably Tuesday or Wednesday is better than Thursday, because if you have a Thursday promotional call you’re going to have a very busy Thursday.

I only have one call per day if I can help it. Tuesday is the least likely promotional day for me. So I’ll teach on a Tuesday at 10:00 am Pacific as I’m doing now. Wednesday is my second choice with Thursday being third choice of times when I’ll teach.

I won’t teach Q&A on Fridays, because people will show up for them if they have a burning desire to ask me a question. That gives them five days, or four and a half at least, to figure out what questions to ask and know which ones will be redundant.