But it’s rather disruptive to a good work cycle so it’s pushed back several things I’ve been planning. And as many of you will know, catching up is sometimes not easy.

Anyway, I’m just putting the finishing touches to a new product. It’s an automatic niche blog builder service with a major difference. Right now it looks like it will be ready to go live either tomorrow, or possibly next week depending on a couple of outside factors.

It should have been ready a month ago, but as I said, I’ve been playing catch up for a while now. Things are finally getting back to normal.

So, to return to the question in the title of this post: what happens when you’re ill? Do you have systems in place to deal with work? Does your income stop? How does it affect your daily life?

For me, the one thing it shows me is that I need to outsource more of the technical aspects of what I do.  The simpler things are easy to outsource, but that’s because they’re simple. There should never be too serious a problem getting someone to handle those jobs.

But the more complex stuff, well that takes a little more time. Time to build trust, time to teach systems. So right now that’s one of the things I’m going to focus on in the coming weeks.

2010 is coming soon – just a few weeks away, actually. My intention is to start 2010 with a stronger strategy for delegating work.

What about you? Add a comment – let me know your thoughts, ok?

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For most of us, sales copy is the one thing that will make a huge difference to our revenues. You can have a great product, you can have traffic and a great looking site, but if your sales copy doesn’t convert visitors into customers, you’re throwing money away – every visit. So it makes sense that anything that can help us to achieve more sales with good copy is definitely a good thing!

Here’s the problem: most of us aren’t very good copyrwriters. There are lots of reasons for that. So some marketers turn to other people to write the copy for them. And that costs. If you get someone to do it for $500 you got a bargain. If you’re launching a serious product it might cost you thousands. That’s why I’m interested to see whether this $97 video course lives up to its own sales copy, which is very persuasive. Then again, it wouldn’t be much of an advert if their own copy was no good, would it!

Hot Copy Flowchart

HotCopy Downloads!

The whole product is massive. Some of the individual videos are 179 mb  in size – and that’s when they’re zipped!

It will take me a little while to go through the whole course, but I’m especially interested because I have a couple of product launches coming up in a week or so. I’ll be seeing how this course can help me with those.

Once I’ve finished the whole course I’ll update this post with a full review, warts and all.

I should disclose here that one of the course marketers is a personal friend, but we know each other well enough that he’ll expect me to say what I think of this course, bad or good. If it’s bad, I’ll tell you and of course it’s good I’ll be very happy to tell you that too.

UPDATE 3rd November 2009: Although the rest of this review is later than I expected it to be (see this post for why), here it is.

First, the good points. It’s a great course. There’s some really good copywriting information in it and some ways of thinking about things that really work. John Hostler clearly knows his stuff and this course is comprehensive.

BUT – and for me it’s a big but – there is one thing that I just don’t like. I don’t like the way John sounds, or speaks. His style of delivery is not for me. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it irritates me. He’s long-winded and babbles on. If he did in his copy what he does when he speaks, I don’t think he’d sell all that much.

In fact the only way I could force myself to go through the whole thing was to finish this review. Now Jon’s style might work very well for some people. It could just be me who finds it hard to listen to, but I have to tell it like it is. I found him a bit boring.

The content, on the other hand, was great – I can’t deny that. And if I’m given a choice of great style with no content, or great content and a grating style, I’ll choose the great content any day. That is, after all, the whole point of having the course.

Now let me nail my colors to the mast – I’ve bought resell rights to the Hot Chunk Copy course because I think it’s good enough to be worth selling. At the end of the day, great content is going to win, no matter what you think of the style of the presenter. Information – content – is still king.

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The kicker is that it’s a WordPress theme which doesn’t look anything like WordPress. It’s designed for creating single pages that look like standalone sales pages, or landing pages. There’s none of the usual ‘furniture’ that you get on blogs, so there’s nothing to take you off the page itself. No distractions = more sales, so the theory goes.

It’s a sound theory and as far as the product goes it’s not badly priced at $47. You can take a look at it by clicking here.

Before you do though, I should tell  you that it’s relatively easy to create a WordPress theme that does this. Easy, that is, if you already know how to do it. If you don’t know how, it’s as clear as mud.

I’d like to gauge the level of interest for such a specialized theme, because if there’s enough interest I’ll create one and sell it for considerably cheaper than $47!

So how could you use such a theme?

• Have a separate and unique landing page for every product you promote
• Control all your landing pages within your WordPress dashboard
• Use suitable keyword URLs for your pages – no more hunting for keyword domains
• Avoid ‘leakage’ – once a visitor lands on your page there’s nothing else to take them off it
• Use the scheduled post feature of WordPress to change the main “landing page” for your site every week – you could offer a special deal that lasts one week and then sit back and watch as it updates itself. You’re not limited to weekly deals – you could have a different deal every day of the year, if you wanted to. You could even have different deals hourly on special days, like 4th July! Keep your visitors coming back for more!
• Create single page product review ‘mini sites’ around a central topic. You can link them if you choose, or leave them unlinked and separate.

If you’re interested in acquiring such a theme please leave a comment here.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll create the theme and offer it for sale at $17. For anyone who leaves a comment here you can have it for just $7.

So to recap: if there’s enough interest in having such a theme I’ll create one especially and for anyone who comments on this specific post you can have a copy for:

$7

UPDATE 17 July 2009: I’ve created the theme and it’s sold well at $7 and it’s now selling at $17, although I’ll be raising the price to $27 soon because of all the extras I’m adding to it. For everyone who’s commented on this post I’ve decided to give you a copy of the theme for free as a thank you for joining in and commenting. Emails should be with you shortly. If you haven’t received an email please let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.

I’m creating a plugin that will make this theme even better. I haven’t yet decided whether to charge for it, or add it to the theme itself, but I think it will add a great deal of flexibility so I’m looking forward to announcing it once it’s ready.

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Of course I get a lot of spam, as we all do, but I filter better than 90% of it before it hits my email client. I still end up with thousands of emails building up (sales records, receipts, passwords, that kind of thing).

I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and it’s great, but if you have a lot of accounts in it and lots of incoming email, it does slow down. Plus, who wants to keep thousands of emails in front of them all day long? You only need the ones you need and the rest should be filed somewhere neat and orderly.

It occurred to me that many of you might be in the same boat and looking for a nice, simple solution.

There’s a free program called MailStore Home, which addresses the issue of email bloat perfectly. I don’t really know why the creators of the application give the personal use version away for free, because I can’t imagine that many people would upgrade to the Server version for organizations. But I’m glad they do give it away and I find it a tremendously useful resource.

You can archive all your emails, even from several different sources, into MailStore Home, where it’s kept safe in a database for as long as you want. You can also burn archives to disc if they get too big. Best of all is the facility to search through the entire database (reasonably) quickly, searching for any keyword. You might remember that you got an email with Snagit licence codes, as I did when installing Snagit to capture some images for this post – but what if you can’t remember when you got it, or from whom? No problem.

One quick search later, using the keyword ’snagit’ and MailStore Home had found the relevant emails for me. Previously I’ve made notes of licence numbers, printing off the original purchase email, but MailStore Home is much neater and easier.

You can see the application in the images here.

Main application panel

Search page

Results appear in the left column

Displaying the licence code

You can download a free copy over at Mailstore.com and you’ll find it works with most popular email clients, including Gmail, which is very handy. If you receive a lot of email and want to keep it safe, MailStore Home is a good utitility for doing just that.

Quick tip: create a couple of folders for emails from your favorite marketers. As you archive the emails you’ll have a great library of their campaigns. If you go back from time to time and study what they do and how they do it, you’ll see some regular patterns emerging. If you then study those patterns you’ll see what the marketers do that they don’t tell you about. A lot of marketers keep a few tricks up their sleeves, but in using them they leave a trail that you can follow. That trail is easier to see when you can look back through a particular folder of messages and see how each one leads to the next.

Archiving those folders means you can look back for inspiration at any time. You can even, if you want to, analyze marketing techniques used at different times of year. If big marketers are using a particular technique every summer for example, or at the start of the winter, there’s likely to be a very good reason for it.

All in all, MailStore Home is a handly little tool and available for free.

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Both of them are ‘big’ products, with a (normally) high price tag. And for most people they are probably more than you need to get started. But they have both been offered for ‘free’ and I’ve downloaded my copies of both applications. Even if it’s going to be a little while before you’re ready to use them, since they were free you’d have done well to get a copy, ready for the future. Whether you should use them immediately is a different question.

The Butterfly Marketing launch suffered severe server problems (try saying that fast!). The Delavo launch was smoother, but kept getting delayed. Now I have both scripts, what have I done with them?

Well, with BFM I’ve done nothing yet. The whole launch issue thing put me off. It was so problematic it makes me wonder how the software will perform. My instinct is to let the other launch attendees do some site building and see how they get on. If they hit problems, someone will find a solution, which I can benefit from later.

Delavo, however, I’ve installed on a new domain and I’ve added my first product to it. It’s live right now and if you want to have a look – or better still, make a purchase – just visit sublimeproductsmarketing.com. There’s a great set of squeeze templates with audio for sale as the first product – price is pretty good too.

I have to say that the Delavo installation went pretty smoothly. I’ve installed a lot of scripts over the years so I have a lot of experience, but even so, I think it’s a pretty decent install. The power of the basic package is pretty good. It’s not ‘all singing and all dancing’, as I’ll cover later, but it’s a powerful tool for anyone who wants to centralize their marketing operations.

The one thing that some people are already complaining about is the fact that you need to buy a bunch of plugins to get the basic Delavo install up to the full power of Fantasos. A lot of the juicier facilities within Delavo come courtesy of plugins, so you might end up spending a bit of money to upgrade it. Currently that figure is just under $1,000 – if you act fast.

Not everyone will need all the plugins – I certainly don’t, for example. And the basic package is still very capable. It’s also going to be possible to buy individual plugins one at a time. So if I need a facility later, the $97, or whatever they’ll be charging, will be a relatively small price to pay.

In reviewing these packages I can see that they’ve both gone for the ‘do almost everything you can think of’ philosophy. There’s pretty much nothing, one way or another, you can’t do with them. But I’m reminded of what happens to a very large number of Swiss Army Knives: they get left in drawers to go rusty.

What I believe is important for most people, most of the time, is to find a tool that fits and get skilled in using it. Whether that tool is the 7 Dollar Secrets, DL Guard, BFM, or Delavo, it’s really all about what you do with it and not always about how powerful it is. And the simpler tools are often a good way to learn, before progressing to the meatier products.

None of this applies to you if you’re already an experienced marketer, using high end software solutions. But when it comes time to advise a beginner, it’s not always the best thing to recommend what we use ourselves. A beginner may just need something very different.

For me, therefore, I wouldn’t recommend any beginner to jump in with BFM or Delavo. They’d have to learn too much. When many beginners don’t even know what the clipboard is – or even what webhosting means – learning about scripts like those is just too much.

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PLR is one of the easiest ways to get good content for your websites and blogs because, essentially, you’re sharing the cost of having it written with other buyers.

I’ve had an American MD write 8 of the articles in the pack, although you can’t use his name for contractual reasons. These are solid, well written, informative articles that you can use on your blog or website, to create a report, in your autoresponder sequences – almost anywhere, in fact.

And at just $17 it’s a lot cheaper than having them written yourself. I know because I’ve just spent $262.22 on having them written!

If you’ve ever had a bad experience with PLR I’d urge you to look at www.sublime-products.com/articles/products/plr-cholesterol-articles/ because you will be pleasantly surprised at how well the articles are written.

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So, I did what I’d advised my subscribers to do and I went to the site when I got the early notification. Credit card in hand, I was ready to push whatever purchase button was on there.

Except I couldn’t.

The site broke down within a couple of minutes of opening. In fact it was so bad at one point that Mike Filsaime had to publicly ask his visitors to stop trying to place orders because his technicians couldn’t even login into the server to fix it.

Bit of a public mess. And as you might imagine a lot of people got angry that they had to wait, or that they might not get a copy.

About 6 hours later I got my copy so I’m now good to go. Great. But a lot of people are still feeling annoyed. Personally, I think they should be learning from the whole experience, both the good points and the bad points.

Let me break down what I saw as good and bad:

Good:

• Very effective use of affiliates to generate lots of interest
• Extremely high value offer
• Regular updates as to how it was going
• Prizes for the affiliates that meant even newbies had a shot at a prize
• Very clear disclosure that there would be a continuity element
• Honest admissions that their newsletter wasn’t so good before
• Highly persuasive case study testimonials

Bad:

• Not expecting a lot of people to be ordering at once. Come on! Over 45,000 people pre-registered for early access! Isn’t that a bit of a clue?
• Not adequately testing that their site would cope with high numbers of people ordering at once, as opposed to viewing at once.
• Using what appeared to be poor code, not optimized for transaction speed (at least according to someone even more techie than I am)
• Having no backup server/site/order button ready to go ‘just in case’

Not such a big list of things that went wrong, is it?

I suspect most of us are not going to have 45,000 people chomping at the bit for one of our product launches, but it shows what can go wrong. Now of the items I’ve listed as going wrong, all but the first one should have been solved by the technical guys on Mike’s team. The first one, though, is something any of us could contemplate.

It doesn’t require technical knowledge, just a bit of forethought. The second item on the list should have been done – testing of a web site is extremely important. In Mike’s case he’s got a full team of people who could have helped with that and he’s got programmers who could have created ’stress’ tests to simulate a worst-case scenario.

At least they kept people informed as best they could on their Ustream video, although it was a little galling to see them sitting there at times, looking like they weren’t even breaking a sweat to get the thing fixed.

I suppose what it translates into for the average marketer is that anyone can get it wrong, but not everyone has the resources to put it right the way Mike has done. Offering to have extra copies of the product made for anyone who missed out costs hard cash.

And don’t expect too much sympathy from a large crowd if you’ve got it wrong. There were people on the Ustream chatrooms who were very aggressive.

For my own part I apologize profusely if you had wasted time waiting for this to work as a result of my recommendation. Sorry.

I hope you managed to get your copy. If not, there’s still a bit of time left since he’s effectively reset the clock and if you order today you should be able to get your copy at Butterfly Marketing.

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• Mike Filsaime Just Told Me Off

I’ve received various emails from people promoting it. Indeed, I’m promoting it myself, although hopefully without pushing it in your face. I’ve also received emails from someone who is launching a product that’s ’similar’ to BFM. It’s similar in the sense that it handles product sales, affiliates, memberships – the whole shooting match.

The other product looks good. I intend to get a copy, if I can. I like to collect these things as much to learn from them as to use them and there’s always the chance that one of them will turn out to be the ideal fit for what you want to do. It’s like trying on several jackets to see which fit best and which look good…

The point of this post is to mention a pre-emptive tactic used by the other marketer. He clearly knows he’s up against BFM and he also knows that the whole word and his dog has been emailed about it. So he’s referred to it obliquely and his advertising emails ask his subscribers whether they’d rather buy something that’s a couple of years old (Butterfly Marketing), or something brand new for 2009 (his product).

Quite a provocative question, isn’t it? Which would you rather have? Something old, tired and with a catch, or something brand new with no catch?

That’s a marketing technique that’s as old as the hills. Ask a loaded question that can only be answered one way and guess which answer you’ll get? Everyone is going to prefer something without the catch.

The power of the question is in putting forward two views as if they are given facts. They’re not facts, they’re marketing speak. It’s interesting especially because this marketer is leveraging all the buzz about Butterfly Marketing to plant a little seed of doubt in his readers’ minds. Here’s an alternative way to look at the same ‘facts’:

Would you rather put your entire business in a script that’s brand new and ‘untested’ in the real world, or would you rather use a solid, mature product used by a host of top marketers every day to run their multi-million dollar businesses?

If the question was asked that way, what would be the more likely answer? Hmm, might be different than the other question.

If you take away anything from this post, please take away this: when somebody asks you a question and they’re trying to sell you something, the question is frequently loaded. Not always, but enough to make it important to ask yourself why that particular question is being asked.

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This campaign, however, is different and I say that as someone who had an online disagreement with Mike Filsaime in the past. He’s going to be giving away an updated copy of his Butterfly Marketing home study course, the updated manual and the 2.0 version of the software. The Butterfly Marketing scripts have been selling for a genuine $1,997 and he’s decided to give the latest version away. There are a couple of conditions, as you might imagine.

1. There are only 5,000 copies – sounds a lot, but there’ll be a lot of interest in this
2. You have to pay for shipping and handling ($30-$40, depends where you live)
3. You have to take out a subscription to his print newsletter
4. You have to be quick enough to get one of the 5,000 slots – there’s a way to do that

The Butterfly Marketing script is a powerful solution to running an internet marketing empire – or just a single site. It’s probably overkill for most people with a simple salespage site, but for anyone who wants to take their online marketing to another level it offers features to make you drool.

When it first came out I couldn’t afford it, so I used cheap solutions. That’s actually how I got started, using the scripts from the $7 Secrets – which cost $7. I still use them for some projects, together with other software such as DL Guard. I’ll admit it – I like collecting software and I like installing stuff. I’m a little bit of a geek when it comes to that.

But $1,997 was way out of my reach back then. Well, on 24th March at 1pm EST, it’s expected that many tens of thousands of people are going to queue to get chance to own a copy of the complete Butterfly Marketing package, genuinely worth $1,997. Mike reckons only 1 in 15 in that queue will get the chance.

I won’t be in that massive queue. I’m getting in ahead of everyone else 1 hour early.

I signed up for the pre-notification list, so I get a head start on the public. I don’t intend to miss out on this because it’s too good a deal to miss. As for the newsletter, although you have to sign up to get the software, you can cancel at any time so there’s no issue there.

There’s a way you can get in early too.

If you’ve come to this post as a result of one of my newsletter emails, you’ll know that I’m making an offer to anyone who signs up through my link and gets a copy of the software. You’ll also know that the offer takes away any technical know-how issues that might make you hesitate to get such a powerful software solution. I’m not repeating the offer here because, frankly, I couldn’t cope if thousands of people take me up on it.

For anyone who wants to learn more about how to get a $1,997 software and home study course for the cost of shipping, click here now.

P.S. When you visit that page and sign up for pre-notification you’ll get an hour head start on everyone else too. And after sign-up you’ll also get to see some case study videos of what other people have achieved with this software. My favorite story is of Jordan Hall, who is a young man – he’s practically a kid – who’s made a lot of money using this software. I urge you to watch his video after you sign up for pre-notification. There are lessons in there for everyone who pays attention.

P.P.S. You should watch this campaign just for the stunning lessons it gives in marketing a product and adding value upon value to make it almost irresistible. If you took the hidden lessons just from this one campaign and added some of them to your own marketing, you’d likely increase your results significantly. I speak as someone who’s had an online argument with Mike Filsaime in the past. This campaign is superbly well executed and I’ll be incorporating some of the lessons I’ve discovered in it, into my own campaigns in future.

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So I was intrigued today to get a promo email about something Mike Filsaime is doing with Butterfly Marketing 2.0. He’s actually giving away 5,000 copies of his home study course and the scripts – if you’re quick enough. I’ve registered on the notification list and I’ll be there when it’s launched to see if I can catch one of the free copies. I know the power of the script and as an internet marketing tool it’s powerful!

It’s not a completely unconditional offer though. You also have to pay about $30 for shipping – which seems perfectly reasonable as this is a physical product – and there is a continuity element for his newsletter, but it’s clear on his website and the video that there is a continuity aspect.

Personally I don’t mind the continuity element, if it’s clear and up front, as it is here. A while back there was a lot of heated debate back and forth when Mike did a forced continuity. The argument over whether it was a fair marketing model raged for a while, without ever being settled one way or the other. My own view is that the extremely clear continuity element on this offer is perfectly fair. After all, you can always unsubsribe later if you don’t like the newsletter.

The Butterfly Marketing script 2.0 has a lot of features in it. If you’d like your chance to get a copy let me point you to Mike’s pre-launch page. It’s a direct link – I’m not one of his affiliates I’m now using an affiliate link. I’ve just had an invite to JV with Mike Filsaime on this so I’ve spent a lot of time having a really good look at his offer.

I was happy to recommend it before, but now I know how much is in there it’s even better than I realized. BUT by 25th March you’ll probably have missed your chance. I’m offering a bonus to anyone who goes via that link and you’ll be able to read about that bonus on my next post.

But for the quick movers it will save you a chunk of change ($1,997) and then some. And it will give you a platform for managing your entire internet marketing empire.

Have a look here. And after you’ve confirmed your email address be sure to watch the video with Jordan Hall. It’s an inspiring story of a young guy who’s taken action and really done well.

There are some interesting lessons in that little video, if you pay careful attention. Mike Filsaime picked up on points that Jordan glossed over. I’d actually recommend you watch the video a 2 or 3 times, to get the most from it. Jordan Hall made about $40,000 in one week one week!!) using the power of Butterfly Marketing and he now makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The free launch of the 5,000 copies takes place March 24th, 2009. Chances are the copies will be snapped up pretty quickly, so if you’re interested at all then go sign up now. If you don’t, it could be an expensive mistake.

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• Giveaway Fever

I’ve just received an e-mail from a marketer whose products I buy on a regular basis.

His products are software tools which are of value for Internet marketers. The particular product he’s promoting in this e-mail is one called SmartDD V3. under normal circumstances I would have sent out a promotional e-mail myself, as an affiliate, but Frank is restricting the sale to 50 units in total and he has already e-mailed his subscriber base so I don’t expect any units to be left by the time this post is published. You can, however, see the post, if you wish, at this address: www.vendiva.com/xxx

Sorry! Frank’s pulled the page as at 12th March.

If the page is still there I would certainly recommend that you pick up a copy at this discounted price, particularly because version 4 is due to be released fairly soon and Frank’s usual tactic is to give free upgrades, or at the very least to give an extremely heavily discounted price for the upgrade. Version 4 will have full membership capabilities, which meansyou can use it for selling on eBay, running a shopping cart,protecting your digital downloads, running a physical product (CD/DVD) business and running a recurring income membership site. To call it full-featured is an understatement.

I seem to collect software scripts like most people collect collectable items and I have probably five or six membership scripts, which range in price from free to over $1000. Frank’s membership script is one I have been looking forward to, but I had no idea what sort of features would be in it. Well, he’s now let the cat out of the bag by mentioning that he is already using the script himself on a particular membership site he runs. I am a member of that site so now I know how it operates. Having seen it in action and used it as a member I’m excited at the prospect of getting my hands on the script.

For anyone who is thinking about running an online business, whether you intend to sell digital products, physical CD/DVDs, or memberships, Smart DD V4 will be an exciting script to help you do it more easily and efficiently. I’d strongly recommend you get hold of a copy of it, even if you have to pay full price for it. And if you can get hold of a copy of Version 3 at the discounted price of just $27 it’s a steal. It might already have sold out, but take a look here, just in case it hasn’t.

By the way, there’s an upsell one-time-offer after you buy. He’s offering Ticket Deskpro and Adspurt for $20. I have both them of them (you can see TicketDesk Pro in action at my support desk) and I’d recommend getting them while they’re cheap, too. Adspurt in particular is a clever way to make more money by automatically linking to keywords in your site. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog it’s ideal for monetizing content you might otherwise not make a penny on. If you use any kind of auto-building on your blogs (I may have an announcement on that myself in the next few days) it’s ideal for adding to your revenue easily, quickly and on auto-pilot. If I sound like a fan of Frank’s products, it’s because I am. I’ve paid real money for them and I use them myself, so I know how they work.

And they do work!

P.S. By the time this is published there’s a serious chance that the 50 discounted copies will be sold out, but I thought I’m mention it just in case anyone gets chance to pick one up. If you miss out, I apologize in advance! I wanted to let everyone know as soon as I could, but 50 copies is very limited. Smart DD is also much more powerful than the DiscMojo software I mentioned yesterday, but you know what? Since DiscMojo is currently free it’s worth getting hold of a copy anyway. It never hurts to have more than one tool in your toolbag.

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Russell Brunson turned 29 the other day and he’s having an “I’m getting old” giveaway. It’s very time limited – just a couple of days I think -and for some of you, by the time you read this you might have missed your chance to pick up some freebies. So there’s a time pressure here, but is it actually any good?

Well, I’ve had a look. There are 75 pages of products. What I would say is that many of the products have been submitted more than once — that is because some of the products have Master resell rights and giveaway rights and that means that several contributors have added them to the list. In itself, that is not a problem, but it does mean that it takes longer to look through the list to find anything that is worth having.

With giveaway events such as this it’s important to remember that not every item is worth having. I have looked at every single page of products and my personal opinion is that there are maybe 10 or 20 good products in there worth having. One rather disappointing experience was when I signed up for one of the products that was particularly interesting and found that the contributor did what appears to be a bait and switch on me, in other words they did not deliver the expected product, which was a very good product, but instead took me to a rather lame sales page instead. There was no indication that a purchase would be required to claim the free product and having examined the sales page very carefully my personal view of that contributor is that it was a deliberate move. I hope I’m wrong and that in fact it was simply incompetence on their part!

Everyone will have different needs and requirements so I won’t make specific recommendations on which products to look at, but there is one product which is particularly interesting and that is DiscMojo.

If you have any intention of selling physical products in the future, using the Kunaki service, DiscMojo will help you to do so very easily. As you may be aware physical product shipment is beginning to be a big success story and there are ways of automating the process in almost the same way as marketers have traditionally automated their digital download process. DiscMojo script interfaces with Kunaki and automates the transmission of an order to Kunaki for you. That means that as soon as payment has been successfully made or your product, the script will place the order for your customer with the fulfilment house and you don’t have to do anything! I already have this script and I paid real money for it when it first came out. Since it’s available now, for free, even if you’re not sure that you will be doing physical shipment it’s worth getting it now so that you’re ready for the future.

The giveaway was organised by Russell Brunson and you can visit his page here. As you might imagine there is an upsell immediately after you register — I simply ignored it because I wasn’t interested in that particular offering he made.

I think it’s worth having a look through the 75 pages, even though there is, in my personal opinion, a lot of junk in there. There are some PLR products that you can turn into your own product, with a little work, and there is the DiscMojo software which will let you build your own CD and DVD physical product business. If I were you I’d definitely pick that one up because the market is only likely to get bigger for physical products.

Here’s that link again: Russell Brunson’s Giveaway

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Now the title of this post is marketing scams, which is not what that email was. Actually, I’m not for one second suggesting that this particular marketer is perpetrating a scam. They’re not. They have genuine products for sale and a lot of people love their stuff. Many claim to have made a lot of money following their courses. Perhaps a better title would have been Annoying Marketing Emails – that’s how this email made me feel.

But I can’t help feeling that the tone of their emails is directed at the ‘less experienced’ beginner. Here’s an example of their subject line:

Frankly, I’m puzzled Amin…

And here’s part of a line in the email itself:

I’m writing because I’m concerned about you.

That, quite frankly, is so hard to believe. It’s a broadcast email, not a personal letter, so how much genuine concern can there be for me? Especially, as in this case, since there is something being sold on the back end of it. And the concern appears to be because I haven’t ‘registered’ to see if I’m ‘qualified’ to buy their product – so I must have something wrong with me! At least, that’s the implication in my opinion.

I still don’t see your application! Truth is, I find that puzzling.

Really? A marketer with tens of thousands of customers and huge amounts of testing doesn’t appear to have any idea why some people don’t buy from them? To me that’s unlikely, but of course I could be wrong. The person sending the email might have genuinely looked at my details in their database and sat worrying about me. That’s quite touching.

So what’s the point? Well, there are several. Telling people you care about them probably only works when it’s demonstrably true, or they’re very inexperienced, like beginners. Telling inexperienced people that you care about them because they’re making a mistake probably works quite well, given a decent mailing list.

And one of the oldest marketing principles in the world is what’s sometimes called FUD, which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. In other words try to scare your prospect that they’ll suffer if they don’t buy what you have to sell.

Does that really sound like a way to build a long-term relationship with somebody? Doesn’t to me. What do you think?

Do you get emails that are lacking in conviction? I get a ton of them. I hope my mailings never fall into that trap, but if they do please feel free to berate me here!

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It’s a relatively simple technique and in my first month I made a few hundred dollars. By increasing the number of sites I expected to make even more the following month. What happened turned out to be very different from what I expected.

I made virtually no sales. I’d calculated that I should have made many hundreds, possibly into the thousands. The amount of money I made was about $60.

Ok, these sites are set it and forget it sites. You don’t need to keep going back after they’re made, which is always an attractive proposition because passive income like that is easy to multiply over time. That’s where my first mistake came in. I did set them and forget them. I didn’t check them as I know now that I should have done.

Traffic has been going down – along with my search engine results positions – and since this was a new technique I was testing I was disappointed. Maybe the technique doesn’t work longer term? I should have known better and trusted my instincts.

What’s happened is that someone has hacked those sites. They diverted any search engine bot traffic to a page of links of their own choosing. That made my sites look like a real spammer’s paradise. It’s no wonder they’ve gone from first page of Google (I had position 3 for many of them!) to completely off the map. Here’s the thing though. When I checked the sites in a browser they looked fine. It was only the search engines who got the spammy page that had been put on my sites. Of course the search engines are the very ones I’m relying on for organic traffic, so going from #3 page 1 to invisibility was guaranteed to cost me money and lose me traffic.

It’s fixed now and I know what to check for. That’s one mistake I shan’t make again, but in the meantime it’s cost me the affiliate sales I should have made plus the cost of the domains that are now effectively trashed because they’re off the chart as far as Google are concerned.

I should have been getting about 50-60 unique visitors a day on each of those sites. I’ve been getting 1. Even with 1 visitor I made about $30 so far this month. Just by the law of averages if I’d have 50 times the visitor count there’s a fair chance I’d have made over $1,000 this month. It’s been an expensive lesson to learn, but I’ve learned it. I hope you can learn it without the need to suffer it.

Just because a site is said to be set it and forget it, that does not mean you should forget it! Check it regularly, look for foreign files that you didn’t upload. Changed your passwords regularly and don’t use the same one on all your sites (I never use the same passwords and my sites still got hacked – I have my own theory as to why, but let’s say I’ve cancelled that hosting plan).

If you find a decent niche and start making some money on it, keep an eye open for any changes. Even a sudden spike in traffic can be a problem because it might indicate someone is spamming – that can happen if you have an affiliate program on the site. I learned that lesson the hard way too, when I got shut down because someone decided to spam a great offer I was making…

Summary: keep an eye on your sites. They’re your lifeblood and their value can be destroyed by other people. Don’t let them put their hand in your pocket and rob your family of what you’ve worked for.

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I’ve had an experience recently that has made me re-define the whole question of excellent customer service.

A marketer whose products I normally buy sent out a mailer promoting a sale of a product I already bought from him. He also hinted that there was a great product available as an OTO at a stunning price. Naturally I was curious because he didn’t mention what the offer was. The only way to find out was to buy the front-end offer.

His products have always proved worth having. I think I have them all now, so I didn’t need the front-end product again, but it was worth it to me to find out what his OTO was. Turned out it really was a superb offer on a piece of software that can

automate most of your internet marketing, including integration with Kunaki, if you want to offer CD or DVD products.

Unfortunately for me, I had bought the very same product some months before. It’s an unlimited license so I don’t need a second copy. Frankly, for me, it was worth the $7 on the front-end product to find out what the OTO was. In fact I already own and use the OTO software to sell physical CDs that give me access to a whole different marketplace. It works like a dream and quite honestly I just forget it’s there.

Here’s where the re-definition of customer service comes in. I got an email from the marketer a while later. He asked me whether I wanted a refund since I already had a licence to the software. How’s that for good customer service? He pro-actively checked with me to see whether there I had made some mistake and offered to rectify it.

There are 2 things going on here that are important. The first is that his offers are genuine offers so I had no hesitation in buying to find out about that famous OTO. I knew it would be something great and I knew it would be a great price. On both counts I was right.

The second is that  in going the extra mile with me, by contacting me about a possible refund, he’s just virtually guaranteed I’ll continue to buy everything he puts out. I might as well give him the password to my PayPal account and tell him to just charge it whenever he launches a product!

There were several steps employed to gain my custom and – more importantly – my word of mouth advertising.

1. Offer good, solid products
2. Ask a fair price
3. Deliver what you say you will
4. Pique the customer’s interest
5. Make a limited offer genuinely limited. If it’s just a ploy, people see through it and don’t like it. Ever seen those phoney “buy before midnight” messages on those cheesy salespages?

Because he’s given me good value and good products I’m giving my friend something valuable in return – word-of-mouth recommendation. He has a limited time offer on a great Nickel Script, just $7. It’s like the $7 Secrets scripts with a boost and when you’ve bought that you get the chance to buy an incredibly powerful internet marketing script. I’ll tell you now that the offer price is just $20, way below market value.

If anyone buys from my link here I’ll offer free installation of the OTO software on 1 domain. Check out the deal from Frank Haywood now.

, customer service

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I recently bought the exclusive rights to a music package from Ginny Culp.

Ginny is the audio queen: she creates music and sound effects and she creates a lot of great voice audio products, so I didn’t hesitate to ask her – with a touch of pleading – if I could buy the exclusive rights to one of her creation packages.

Fortunately for me she said yes.

Video and audio on the web are changing the way we do business. A lot of people find it much more convenient to listen to information rather than read it. If you couple that with a good video presentation it can be a real winner.

But imagine a bare voice coming to your from the speakers on your machine. I’m afraid these days it’s often not enough. We’re used to the spectacular production values of TV and DVD. That’s why I’ve bought most of what Ginny has produced and have acquired the exclusive rights to Orchestral Impact.

Music, good music, lifts any message and can create an emotional connection with your visitor.

If you get chance today pay attention to how music is used in films. Even when a character is talking there is often

an underlying musical theme playing. It sets an emotional tone. If you turn the sound down you’ll notice how flat and lifeless the whole thing usually seems. It’s not because you can’t hear the dialog, it’s the lack of music.

What would your own products sound like if you gave them a musical lift? Could you turn your ebook report into a spoken audio version, complete with a subtle musical background? Any idea how much that could add to the selling price of your report? Just think how many people like to listen to their daily news on an iPod, or in the car. The same could be true of your latest report.

Let’s be honest though, it probably wouldn’t be very interesting to hear someone just drone on for 30 minutes, would it? Without some kind of background track and audio punctuation it could just be a big snooze fest. Add some suitable audio and you can keep your audience alert, interested and informed.

And there’s no better way to get an audience to give you that wonderful word-of-mouth advertising than by giving them exactly what they want.

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If you’re involved with online selling, of any kind, one of the things you have to consider is what actually makes your visitors buy.

It’s not always obvious and in many cases it’s not even logical.

An advert for a new car got me thinking about this yesterday. The car looks great and it’s got all the gadgets a gadget freak like me could want. I’m not even looking for a new car, by the way, but the advert still got my attention.

When I next change, I’d like that car.

That was my reaction through 85% of the advert. And then it happened: the deal breaker.

They showed the hi-tec looking dashboard with enough information panels to rival a fighter jet. But the backlighting on the panels was orange.

Orange.

If they offered me that car at half retail I’d still walk away. I couldn’t drive a car with that color information panel. Yeuch!

Sitting thinking about it afterward I thought it was strange that that color alone was enough to make me discount an otherwise excellent car.

Then I realized that there was a big lesson in there for me. The actual trigger that converts my visitors into customers might not be the product value, or the contents, or even proven benefits. It could be anything – even something as simple as the color of the background on my ecover.

I don’t propose to split test 128 different color combos to see which works best, but I do intend to be more aware of the point at which people make a decision not to buy. I know there is software out there that can track where on the page a visitor abandons the page so I’m going to look into using that on my own pages.

The point, of course, isn’t specifically that your ebook background color might lose you sales. It’s that the real trigger for – or against – your sales may not always be the most obvious, or logical factor. If you put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer you might be able to feel what really matters to them.

For someone looking for a weight loss product, for example, what they really want might be to feel invisible so that they ‘fit in’ and don’t stand out from the crowd. If your product focuses on how much people will notice them, they’re not that likely to buy from you. Someone looking to lose weight is doing so for complex reasons, usually.

Surveys are also a good way to find out why your visitors did buy – or didn’t. I know of lots of sites that present a survey if you don’t buy from them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a site that asks why you did buy from them. I’m thinking it would be useful to know exactly why, from people who’ve voted with their wallet.

So if you see a survey on my thank you pages in future, you’ll know exactly why I’m asking you. Won’t you?

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This 23 video series is really aimed at beginners, so if you’re already an experienced marketer, it may not be for you. However, your own subscribers may benefit from it and it will shortly be available as a digital download as well as a physical product with an affiliate program so you can offer your subscribers a great course and make some commision at the same time. If you’d like more details please contact me – special deals will be available for anyone with a reasonable list.

You can see more samples of the videos here

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What’s the most popular online payment processing service right now? Well, it’s still PayPal, for all kinds of reasons. It costs nothing to get started and you can have a payment button on your website within a few minutes of first signing up. You can literally be taking payments within an hour – much quicker if you type fast!

For most people starting out with online sales, especially of information products, it’s a good choice. Not the only choice, but a good one.

Just be aware that there will be people who

can’t, or won’t, use PayPal and it’s possible that you’ll upset them just by choosing to use PayPal for your online payment processing.

I say that because I’ve just had a message from one person who feels that we’ve let them down by not offering direct credit card payments. When I read why they can’t use PayPal I was surprised that they’ve blaming us.

Seems PayPal don’t let them have an account because of their association with ‘adult’ websites. And they believe I should feel sorry for their predicament. They actually think I should have started my answer with an apology for the predicament they’re in.

Now it may be disappointing to them not to be able to get what they want when they want it, but since their inability to use PayPal is entirely down to their own actions that’s just how it is. They can’t even use their card via PayPal so they’re completely out of luck.

So what is an online merchant to do? Offer every kind of payment processor there is? Just on the slim chance that one customer might not be able to pay one way or another?

You will never completely meet the needs of 100% of your potential customers

My own view is simple: I won’t ever be able to meet the needs of everyone who visits my sites. For some people what I offer just won’t be suitable. I can’t make it all work for everyone, so I might as well put as much effort into making it work for the people it does suit. After all, they will be my customers and while I want to encourage as many visitors as possible to buy, chances are good that most people who visit won’t buy from me. That’s just a fact of online life.

But the larger question is how many times do I lose a sale and never find out about it? How many additional sales would I enjoy if I offered ‘traditional’ credit card processing with a merchant account? How much would it cost me to change my offering so that someone who wants my offerings is able to pay for them, no matter what problem they have?

For each online seller those questions will have different answers. Ultimately, asking the questions and analyzing the answers will give you a clue whether you need to get a proper merchant account, but it has to offer a return on investment to make it worthwhile. And 1 customer complaining is probably not enough to tip the balance.

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I thought I’d do a quick update of the results of my affiliate marketing business post from a couple of weeks ago.

Right now I’ve earned $189.76 USD in just over 5 weeks. I’ve only got 3 sites up and running and producing revenue at the moment, although I have a larger number of sites actually completed. Of the 3 sites only 1 of them has been running for the full 5 weeks. The other 2 are about 2 weeks old (actually just over 2 weeks).

So that’s not a clear indication of what each site will produce, but what it does tell me is that the technique works. Those sites are sitting there producing revenue and I haven’t touched them since creating them. The sites I do now I can usually do within 90 minutes so it’s really not much work at all.

If we took a simple view and said I had 30 sites similar to my existing ones, I’d expect to be seeing close to $2,000 dollars in that time period. Not too shabby- apart from this one thing:

I’ve learned more about how to do this and I’m better at it now than I was just a few weeks ago. I think I can get better results than I have with those first sites. I’ll have proof of that over the next month or so.

So keep an eye open for a more detailed analysis of the results later.

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Right now, around the world, many millions of people are looking to the future and wondering how to make it better and brighter. Many will have tremendous hope that, this time, they’ll succeed. Whether it’s losing weight, stopping smoking, getting fitter, or making more money online, nearly everyone will follow the same pattern. Goal setting will be done with solemn promises of keeping it up this time.

The initial few days will be full of enthusiasm. Then the cold reality of how much effort is required will start to sink in. Little by little disillusionment will take over. And then, before February comes around, the vast majority of people will have given up. Less than 4 weeks into 2009 their hopes and dreams will fade.

Will that happen to you?

I sincerely hope not. Because everything you dream of for yourself is possible, but you have to work for it and you have to keep working for it. No matter how many gurus promise you dreams of thousands of dollars without working, deep down you know there has to be some work somewhere.

You don’t always have to work hard. Just make sure you work smart.

During 2009 I’ll try to bring you as many ways of working smart as I can. Some of the details will be available only to my subscribers so please sign up now in the form to the right of this post.

Will you still be working on your dreams when February comes around? Don’t be one of the vast majority who don’t follow through. Resolve to make 2009 your year.

p.s. Today I turn 50 – I start every New Year a full year older. So I’m offering my subscribers a special deal on 50at50.net. There’s enough material there to set up several online income streams that you can enjoy throughout the year. But only if you take a little action.

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When you’ve written a great article with a killer headline there are a few things left to do to get the most benefit.

Arguably the most important part of your article – or certainly the second most important part after the headline – is your signature, or resource box. You want to get people to your site. That’s kind of the whole point of your article, for most people.

To make sure your resource box gets read you have to make it interesting. Offering something extra that your reader wants is one way of doing that. It could be more information, a free report, an e-course. As long as it’s something that naturally follows on from your article it’s likely to make them curious.

So offer them something that makes them want to visit your site immediately.

Don’t make it hard work for them. I’d recommend you keep the resource box between 3 and 6 lines. And make them count. In general a lot of blurb about yourself is less interesting to your reader than it is to you. I don’t mean to be rude, but most people don’t care too much if you have a special interest in lace-making, they just care how they can solve their own problem! So give them what’s important to them.

Example?

Learn how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; visit…..

I don’t actually know how you can do that, but if I read an article that promised to tell me how to do it I’d certainly be interested. Which passenger wouldn’t? You could include a little bit of relevant bio if it’s done right, but don’t waste their time with unnecessary detail.

Another example?

Airline pilot of 25 years shows how you can get bumped from coach to First Class when you fly; read how at…..

That’s relevant bio information. Can I show an example that maybe isn’t so good?

John Noname is a respected author with over 20 years of experience. He writes on a variety of topics, including airline travel. Sign up to his newsletter at…

Sorry, but that doesn’t offer me enough to be bothered clicking through. What’s the benefit to me? I get to be on his newsletter? That’s his benefit, not mine.

My own early articles in the self-improvement field didn’t do very well on clickthrough, largely because my resource box was too much like the example shown! I know from personal experience that nobody really cares about my 20+ years’ experience in the self-help and self-improvement field.

As soon as I switched to telling people about the benefits they can receive, results changed. I don’t even mention my name now – nobody seems to care what I’m called. If my name were Tony Robbins then I might make a feature of it, but for most of us who aren’t that famous it probably doesn’t hurt to leave it out. Certainly, you don’t need to make it a big feature.

One other thing you can do, if you are submitting your article to several different sites, is to write a different resource box for each site. Knowing which type of resource box works for your particular niche is a good way of maximizing your returns, but you can only do that if you test different resource boxes. You might even want to have them point to a different landing page, so you get absolute figures.

Naturally, when you find out which type of resource box works best you use it more often. Your clickthrough rates could shoot through the roof if you test, test, test. Don’t forget that your keyword research will tell you the types of ‘anchor text’ you should be using in your resource box, so you should be able to come up with several different resource boxes if you do your research.

To access the password protected posts in this series and receive 3 free gifts sign up to my newsletter on the top right of the screen.

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What you should be doing is building an affiliate marketing business.

I do affiliate marketing myself and I must say most of the time it hasn’t been quite as ‘auto-pilot’ as the big names would have you believe. There is real work to be done and although work is not a dirty word, it stands to reason that the less work you have to do to earn some revenue, the more revenue you can earn for a given amount of work. That in itself means it’s worth looking for efficient and ‘easy’ ways to create revenue.

A major component of getting affiliate commissions is driving traffic to your site, but perhaps an even bigger component is getting qualified traffic to your site. I’d much sooner have 2 visitors who are looking to buy than 100 visitors who just stumbled upon my site. The 2 would almost certainly produce more revenue than the 100.

So, when people are still asking how to get indexed in Google in under 3 months (I know they are, because I get questions like that), it can seem hard to get a site up and running, indexed in Google within a few days, position 3 on page 1 within a week, receiving highly qualified visitors and making hard cash within a couple of weeks.

It isn’t hard to do at all. If you know how.

About a month ago I came across a technique, recommended to me by another marketer, that does all the above. It’s simple, in the sense that you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to understand it, but it’s hard because you have to do the steps exactly as outlined. Most people won’t. That leaves more money available for people like me who will. That’s just life.

I registered my first domain back on 16th November. It’s not yet 1 month on from then and my site is already ranking well for the keywords I chose to target. I used the Google external keyword tool to find the keywords with good searches and Jon Leger’s WebCompAnalyst to help me analyze my competition. Too much competition makes it harder to get ranked, so even if you have a great keyword with lots of searches try to avoid going head to head with the rest of the world. It will only hurt your head if you do!

Ok, so since then 48 products have been ordered through my affiliate link. 39 have been dispatched and the commission allocated to my account. It’s not a life shattering amount. The total amount is about $57 with about another $17 waiting for the other items to be dispatched. That’s $74 in a little less than a month.

So that and a smile will get you a latte and a couple of biscuits plus the latest ebook.

But here’s the thing. It only took me about 5 or 6 hours to study the technique, do my research and build the site. I’m fairly quick at website building because I’m very familiar with a lot of powerful tools, but even so I think most people could build the actual site within about 3 hours. $25 an hour is about what my commissions work out to for the actual site building time. It’s not too shabby, but it’s not enough to retire on.

This weekend I’ll be building another 6 sites. That should only take me 7 or 8 hours because I’ve systematized most of the steps. In the next month I expect each of those sites to generate something like $50+ each. If I’m right that would give me revenues totalling $350+ from 7 little sites that, once set up, I won’t need to touch again.

Now we’re starting to see an amount that for most of us still makes a difference to our lives. A car payment, a holiday fund, college fund, savings plan. $350 a month could go to any of those things. But let me take this process further for you.

What if I build 5 sites every month? There are literally tens of thousands of possible sites I could build based on this technique. Probably more than that actually. I won’t run out of ideas, so 5 sites a month doesn’t even scratch the surface. Can you work out what my revenue is likely to be by March 2009?

End of Jan: 6 sites

End of Feb: 11 sites

End of Mar: 17 sites

17 sites at $75 a month is $1,275 or $15,300 a year.

What difference would over $1,200 a month make to you? Would it improve your lifestyle? Give you some choices over what you do?  Maybe make the difference between just getting by and really living? What would you do with $1,200 a month?

BUT I’m planning to build 30 sites in January, not 5. And another 30 in February. The final 2 weeks of December I’m building only another 6 because I want some time off. My projection now looks like this:

End of Dec: 13

End of Jan: 43

End of Feb: 73

End of Mar: 103

Let’s be really conservative and say each site only nets $25 a month. I think they’ll do better than that especially since I’m confident that some of them will get #1 on page 1 of the search engines, but let’s do the calculation anyway.

103 x $25 = $2,575 a month or $30,900 a year.

Is it worth finding 2 hours a day to make that kind of extra money? It is for me since I like building the sites anyway. But is it worth it for you? If it took you 3 hours a day to build those sites, would it be worth it for you?

Remember I used a very conservative revenue figure. If I plug in the more realistic $75 a month the annual revenue shoots up to $92,700.

Did I mention that I got my results with free, organic traffic from Google?

I propose to update you with my results as I build another 6 or 7 sites. Let me build statistics to prove that it’s not a fluke (and not just because of the time of year) and I’ll keep you posted with the data. If there’s enough interest I’ll give more details about the technique and point you to where you can learn it fully for yourself. If there’s sufficient interest I’ll produce some videos to illustrate it.

One other thing: I’m targeting 1 country right now. I could target other countries too, with completely different sites. That means the scope is huge and there’s actually very little danger of the technique becoming over-saturated. My own researches have shown me that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the amount of opportunity here.

And to those who think it’s ok for me because I can build a site a day and afford to register a new domain name a day let me offer this thought: I’ve started with 1 site that cost me under $10 to register and the hosting is on a web hosting account I already have, costing less than $10 a month. It’s possible to get a domain for 99 cents and hosting for much less than $10.

You can get started for literally much less than $10, make some money and then plough it back into buying new domain names to make more sites to make more revenue. This is not a technique that needs a lot of money to get started. Money will make it faster, easier and more powerful, but it’s not an essential component.

See you in episode 2!

UPDATE: It’s now a day on from when I first posted this. I decided to have another look at my little income earner to see exactly what has been happening. For some reason when I logged in tonight it gave me ‘month to date’ figures, which represents just under 2 weeks. The account is in British pounds and it’s generated £49.67 in 13 days. That works out to $73.88 at today’s exchange rates. That’s not bad going for a little site that isn’t even all that attractive to look at. It equates, all things being equal, to about $150 for a month. Quite a bit more than I originally anticipated.

You can see the account screenshot below. Some of you will recognize where it’s from, but it’s not the affiliate program that’s really what makes it easy to make some money, it’s the particular techniques used on the websites.

I wanted to create 6 new websites over the weekend and I’ve made 3 new ones so far. But more importantly I’ve created an even slicker production process. I now have a single file that configures 80% of what’s needed on any new site and all that’s left is the actual content. In the case of these sites the content isn’t all that much so it’s only an hour’s job, tops. I expect to produce at least 3 new sites tomorrow. If each one produces this kind of revenue over the next month then I’ll consider the experiment well and truly proved.

You might notice that the commission rates aren’t all that high. It doesn’t matter. If it’s easy to shift the products and there’s only the one time setup work to do, the recurring monthly income multiplies over time into a very fair rate. Pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap was a philosophy a grocery store used in the UK many years ago. I think this is the same: if I can move lots of products very easily and earn a little bit on each that’s better than moving a few products with hard work and earning a bigger amount each time.

However, in the interests of learning I’m going to try to adapt these techniques to bigger ticket items once I’ve got the results in from say 20 sites. By that stage I reckon I’ll have a good handle on exactly which bit of the process is producing the results.

Related posts

• Affiliate Marketing Business update
• Why Money Making Niches Didn’t Make Me Any Money

An article on your hard disk is worth nothing. An article on a single website is usually worth a bit more, but not that much. An article on hundreds of sites, all pointing to your money site, now that’s worth something.

When you’ve written an article you can submit them to the article sites in the normal way, but you can also allow other people to put them on their sites. You may want to take some time to look around for good quality sites, and then offer to let them use your articles on their site together with your byline. When you add your article to other peoples’ sites you’re getting free advertising on quality sites in your niche. Not every site will take an article, of course, but you’ll never know unless you try and you might be surprised how many webmasters are happy to take quality content.

This will also help get you listed in the search engines because you will have a one-way link and in most cases you can control the ‘anchor text’ used. That means you can use a highly targeted keyword phrase to point to your site. It’s one of the finest ways to get good rankings for a particular search phrase and that’s a powerful way to make money. Just be sure to check out the sites you’re contacting to see if they have a high rank and are listed in the search engines. Plenty of hits don’t hurt, either!

For you and the other site owner this is a win-win situation. They get quality content and you get free 1 way backlinks. If you spend some time every day looking for quality sites to offer your articles to it won’t be long before you’ll get traffic from their site and from the search engines. Your site will rise in the search engine ranks as your links grow. Getting a first page position on Google isn’t impossible, but it does take a little work. The more effort you put into this technique the better you can do.

1 way backlinks are actually a vital part of any good SEO campaign. Unfortunately Google has an annoying habit of constantly changing how they rank websites. So, these days, it’s critical to get high quality, 1-way links to your website. As well as writing articles, blog commenting and social networking there are link services which can make the process easier.

Reciprocal linking used to be a popular – and successful – technique to get rankings, but reciprocal linking isn’t anywhere near as effective as it once was. If you’re like most people the problem is that it’s hard to figure out how to get enough 1 way links without doing a huge amount of work. Jon Leger has introduced a tool that solves the problem.

1WayLinks is an SEO tool that helps you generate up to 750 (yes, 750!) 1 way links to your websites every month. The links can go to inner pages, home pages, subdomains, even directly to affiliate promotion links. Using the links to spread some ‘juice’ around the various pages of your sites is a great way to increase your overall site positioning. There’s even a way to deal with any potential duplicate content issues.

With 1WayLinks you can spin your post by creating a few variations. The system will multiply the variations into dozens of unique posts for you. Depending on how much effort you put into the spinning process you can have 100% unique content on every blog that picks up the post. That’s a great way to maximize the benefits of your efforts.

Does 1WayLinks work? Simple answer, yes. I’ve seen my own linked pages climb the search engine rankings after using 1WayLinks. You just have to be sure to:

• Target the right keywords, such as the long tail keywords. Primary keywords like GOLF are going to be too hard to compete with
• Spin your post and make sure you benefit from lots of unique versions of your post
• Don’t go mad and post all 750 links to 1 site in one go. It looks reall spammy
• Don’t repeat the exact same links 3 times in your post. You’ll just be wasting some of the link juice.

If you’d like more information about the linking system, just visit 1WayLinks

Related posts

• Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 11
• Bum Marketing Part 6
• Bum Marketing Part 2
• Bum Marketing Part 1
• Instant Article Wizard Pro 2.0

To increase your search engine ranking, be very selective in choosing keywords. It can make the difference between a site earning a few dollars a day and a site earning hundreds of dollars a day.

Keywords, perhaps ‘keyword phrases’ is a better term to use, are one of the, if not the, most important attributes you can use for ensuring that your business is successful on the Internet. Keyword phrases are what people use when they’re searching the web. You must have done searches yourself and every time you did the search engines went looking for matches, so they can give you a selection of sites that meet your needs.

Although plenty of people do a single word search, generally speaking, it’s a little harder to get good rankings for such simple terms, especially in a competitive niche. Even phrases like ‘credit card’ throw up 176,000,000 results so they’re hard to do well for.

That’s where the keyword phrases come in. ‘Credit card application’, for example, has only 3,480,000 results. Still a lot, but much lower than ‘credit card’.  “Apply for credit card” has just over 1,000,000 results.

And as long as there are good numbers of people searching for the phrase, the longer phrases are very often much easier to get ranked for. There’s a 3 word phrase one of my sites ranks for and I get #1 in MSN and #5 in Google. Those 2 results bring me in steady traffic and steady revenue.

If your site uses such keywords it can be much easier to get near the top of the search engine results – especially if you know the right way to implement a link-building campaign.

When you’re writing articles you should think about a range of keyword phrases you want your sites to be ranked for.  Using some of the keyword phrases in the article is a good start, but in your call to action, your resource box, be sure to use the main keyword phrase you want to rank for. Use it as the anchor text to your site. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s an example for this post:

Learn how to make a good keyword selection by visiting www.sublime-products.com/articles

In the example above I used keyword selection as the anchor text. Used in that way it tells the search engines that the website/page it links to is related to that phrase. A single link as I have here probably won’t make me appear very high in the search engines for that phrase, but if I undertook an article writing campaign using that phrase this post would rise up the ranks of the search engines. Any time somebody looked for keyword selection my post would be there.

When you are choosing your keywords it’s worth checking the top 10 results in each search engine to see what your competition is. No point trying to take on sites that already have thousands of links with that anchort text – it would be too hard to climb the search engines with that much competition.

After choosing the main keyword phrase you want to target you should also pick several variations. Try to create new articles based around the various keyword phrases, remembering each time to use the main keyword phrase that you’re writing about as your anchor text. That gives you a chance to appear in the search results for a number of keyword phrases, thus ensuring more traffic.

Of course you don’t have to confine yourself to using the keyword phrases just in articles for submission. You can use the same technique when writing blog posts, for example.

It’s time consuming to do the research on keywords and to find out where the competition is. I use a keyword suggestion tool released by Jon Leger to do my research. For ploughing through the numbers and giving you the data you need to outflank the competition, his keywords tool is fast and easy to use.

The rest of this series of bum article marketing posts is password protected. Subscribe to this blog now to receive the password to read the other parts.

Related posts

• Bum Marketing Part 3
• Bum Marketing Part 2

Do you have it?

I ask the question because I had a subscriber unsubscribe today. Most people wouldn’t bother to leave comments when they unsubscribe, but this particular person did and their comments were very interesting.

You see, if someone takes the time to comment when they unsubscribe you can learn something from them, even if it says more about them than it does about your product.

In this case the subscriber had downloaded a free product I offer. It’s a ready made website and you have to configure it with some of your own details, like URL and Adsense ID, before you upload it. That’s the minimum you have to do to get it ready. If you take the time to make a few additional tweaks it’s better for you.

So having had the freebie the subscriber got one of my autoresponder messages offering some software to be used for link cloaking. Handy if you’re going to promote affiliate offers. At that point he decided to unsubscribe and tell me why.

you guys send me a website that is complicated to set up. I think you can take your freebie and ,..

I assume the “and…” part refers to something rude, although that’s not the point. That was message 1.

Here’s message 2.

boring and time consuming, if you help set up and I start making bucks, don’t you think i’ll pay you more?

Interesting statement and question. Let’s examine it.

don’t you think i’ll pay you more?

Hey, it was free on both counts. If you paid anything it would automatically be more than that!

boring and time consuming

It’s called work. You find it boring? Well, nobody is forcing you to do it. Do you really think anyone actually enjoys configuring a site (77 seconds) and then uploading it (129 seconds)?  Geeks and tech heads might love doing it, but most of us don’t live to do tech stuff. It’s a necessary step to making money for most people – at least until you can afford to pay someone to do it for you.

if you help set up and I start making bucks

Now we’re getting to the real meat of the issue. If somebody else (me, in this case) is willing to do all the work for him, for free of course, he’ll be glad to see money start coming in. Well now who wouldn’t?

I mean come on, if there is anyone out there who wants to set up a bricks and mortar operation for me and let me have the profits I’ll gladly give you my name and email, no problem. It’s a no-brainer. Hey, if all you’re offering is a website and some tools to go with it so I can start to make some money I’ll take it – just as long as you do all the work.

Does real life ever work out that way? Does anyone really believe that somebody else is going to do all the work and hand all the profits over to them? Do you believe that?

Of all the tools and products I offer, paid and freebie, you have to do at least something with them. And right there is one of the seemingly most “hidden” secrets of success of all time. You have to take a little action. And keep on taking action.

There may be a complete system out there that requires you just to look at it once and it will start making money. But let’s be sensible about this. What are the odds of that happening, really? You know those gurus who claim that they work 2 hours a day and make a fortune? Well in some cases it’s true. But they don’t often tell you how much work their team is putting in, do they? That work’s usually got to be done by someone for success to come calling.

And here’s the funniest thing of all. In the time it takes to unsubscribe and leave a comment, then dig out the original subscription email and send a separate comment, my ex subscriber could have configured the website and probably had it uploaded too.

How much money will he make sending me those 2 comments? I’m pretty sure he’ll make nothing. How much money could he have made with the website if he’d put the same amount of effort into using it? I don’t know for certain because a lot depends on him thinking about what he’s doing, but I know that similar websites can make a couple of grand a year on autopilot. But only after you’ve put a little bit of work to get them going in the first place.

“boring and time consuming?”

Maybe, but likely to produce more income over the longer term than walking away and doing nothing but complain.

So it’s up to you: you can complain and quit, or you can quit complaining.

Which are you going to do?

Other posts

• “Dieting Definitely Damages Your Health”
• Bum Marketing Part 2
• Butterfly Marketing Meltdown
• How Often To Blog
• 25,000 Articles

What I know is that Adsense revenues were down a long way yesterday, presumably because so many people were scouring the internet for information about the election results and the next president.

I’m seeing that things are returning to normal again today, as far as revenue is concerned. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days. Will people feel more secure and start clicking more, or will they sink back into that worried state that almost everyone has had recently?

We’ll see.

One thing’s for sure, there are often external circumstances that can affect your income. So it makes sense to build as many different, resilient, income streams as you can.

Other posts

• Free Training Video
• Get A Better Meta to be a Trendsetter
• Capture Hidden Profits with Unlimited Autoresponders
• Get clicking
• Running Out Of Space

See, here’s the kicker. Life does not give us what we deserve. Life gives us what we go claim. And claiming is a proactive process that we have to engage in every single day.

As the lion says in Wizard of Oz, “ain’t that the truth?”.

What you deserve and what you’re going to get are not linked. You already know that. That’s why you see people who clearly are not deserving, who enjoy all the good things life has to offer. Well, it’s available for you too, if you’re willing to step up to the plate and stake your claim.

Stephen is making the short report freely available so I’ve put the link here. You can download it here.

Other posts

• Colour me blue (or color me blue if you’re American)
• A Marketing Lesson from Hollywood
• 2CO Easy Setup
• Free Tools
• Link Cloaking

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• Bum Marketing Part 2
• Does Article Marketing Really Work?
• 7 Dollar Secrets – A New Chapter
• Right or Rich?
• Customer Service

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• Free Tools
• Increase Your PPC Conversions
• MyBlogLog
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• Get A Better Meta to be a Trendsetter