No sooner do they release one update with various fixes, than they release another one a few days later with even more fixes. It used to be that you could update to the latest version and then relax for a little while. Now, it almost seems like you’re better waiting for a week or so after a release to see if they offer a newer version still!

What do you do? Do you update as soon as a  new release is announced?

I’ve just received an email from someone who tells me I can get a piece of software for just $4.95. It’s a July 4th Special. Seems a good deal and I have a July 4th Special deal coming up myself. But my deal will be a deal, not an exercise in obfuscation, like theirs.

What's the real price of this?

So if they offer it to me for just $4.95, how come they really want $47?

The only reason that price is mentioned is to get someone to click on the link and take a look. So from that point of view it works. But in terms of credibility it’s just stupid. It means I won’t believe anything that marketer says again. His emails are now going to be history. I have a feeling that I won’t be the only one with that view, so how many people does he ‘churn’ through from his list?

My guess is that it’s impossible ever to calculate properly what he’s earned by doing this, compared to what he might have earned had he not used this tactic. So chances are good that he’ll use the same tactic again. It’s no wonder the internet marketing community has such a bad name.

What’s even worse, is that the software is good software. It’s worth $47, but being hoodwinked into paying that when the price was touted as $4.95 is just terrible. Here’s what the pitch was:

All this for just $4.95.

Not a sniff, or hint that another payment is due in 3 days time.

I already have this software – I paid full price originally – and I’d have liked a copy for my wife to use, so the offer seemed attractive. But as soon as the real deal is made clear, there’s no incentive for me to rush to get it. My previous good impression has been whittled away by – at the very least – confusing pricing information.  It’s not enough to say that the sales page makes it clear what the full price is. The promo email doesn’t – that’s the point. The promo email goes to great lengths to make it look like a $4.95 item, which it plainly isn’t.

I just unsubscribed from 6 lists that I’m on for that marketer. Smart marketing I get, but this kind of thing just sticks in my craw.

What’s most surprising to me is that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. I mean that every time I learn something new I turn around and find that there’s something else waiting to trip me up until I learn about it.

I’ve just learned that in WordPress you shouldn’t use a permalink structure that I’ve been using for every blog I’ve ever set up! It seems that WordPress operates more slowly if you use a permalink structure like www.myblog.com/my-post-name

Thanks for telling me in advance! I stumbled on the information recently. If you have a lot of posts on your blog then it will impact you far more than someone who only has a few posts, but since it can make a big difference, why on earth isn’t the information made clearer on the permalink settings page?

It’s probably too late for me to change my permalink structure now. I don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up 301 redirects for existing posts (I’m lazy) and in all fairness on a lot of the blogs there will never be thousands of pages – so the impact may only be slight. But it’s something that I’m now aware of and I won’t be making the mistake  again.

Talking of blogs, I’ve just seen a promotional email about a new way of using blogs to generate landing pages and sales pages, primarily for PPC campaigns, but they can be use for anything. I don’t want to repeat the post here, but you can read it on my product blog at   sublime-products.com

If you’d like to use a WordPress blog to build clean, unobstructed sales pages then it’s worth taking a look at that post.

Recently, while surfing the web, I came across a great list of resources for free royalty free photos. Rather than repeat the list, let me give you a link to where I found that list.

http://www.affiliatemarketingdiary.com/main/my-top-20-royalty-free-photo-resources/133/

There’s a lot of resources in that list to look through. If you’re thinking of using some stock photography on one of your sites it’s well worth a look.

I mean, seriously. Is that the only way they can think of to make a few dollars? By lie I mean mislead.

I’ve just received two emails from marketers whose lists I’m on. Here’s an excerpt (they’re identical emails, by the way, hmmm….):

I've just received a *private* link to a video that
I'm not really meant to share with you...

The email goes on to tell me I can get my own money making website – they even hope that I can get in because it’s so limited!

Look, if they weren’t supposed to share that link then they wouldn’t have canned emails provided to them to use in their email promotions!

So let me see.

Either I believe that these marketers are low enough to do something they shouldn’t – share a private link – or they’re lying, right? I certainly call it lying because it’s not telling me the whole truth.

Let’s summarise that:

1. They’re low-life pond scum who’ll give out private information that they know they’re not supposed to.
2. They think I’m stupid enough to believe their pathetic lie and sign up, earning them a nice, easy fat and juicy commission.

I wonder which of those scenarios paints them in the worse light? Because whether it’s option 1, or option 2, those marketers should be ashamed of themselves. I mean come on, they didn’t even bother to change the canned email the original promoter obviously gave them. They really ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Clever marketing, if it’s ethical, is perfectly fine. But this is disgraceful. At a time when so many people are looking for genuine chances to earn money, is it any wonder they’re so scared of being ripped off when they see things like this? What’s worse is that it tars the rest of us with the same very unpleasant brush.

I just unsubscribed from both those lists. They’re actually harming people who need help, by perpetuating the idea that internet marketing is all about making a quick buck off people the easy way. It isn’t.

There are legitimate and fair ways to make money online – you need some effort and just a little time. And there are a lot of people for whom that could make a world of difference to their lives, but they might never even try for fear of getting caught by garbage like that.

You know what the saddest thing is? Human nature being what it is, they’ll catch some people with this simply because they’re suggesting you can get your hands on something that you shouldn’t have. And for some people that makes it all the more appealing.

I hit a payment button, which is know works, and the Paypal site gave me an internal sever error message. I’ve never seen anything liki that before. I took a screenshot because it was so unusual.

Instead, I think I’ve found one of the worst.

I have a number of sites that promote affiliate products and I’m always on the lookout for a relatively open sub-niche to explore. I thought I’d found one about an hour ago. They offer you a fully branded website store that you can load onto your own domain. Great. The commissions are only up to 2.5%, but repeat business is good and it’s ongoing commission so it seems reasonable.

I signed up, completed the various branding forms and downloaded an entire site, ready to upload onto my own hosting account. Then I had a look at the actual code of the website. There were a couple of places to configure such things as keywords, descriptions and so on, to make the site a little more personalised.

But then I discovered what was a major problem:This particular company has been quite smart, as in ’smart cookie’ smart, not Harvard researcher smart. They don’t actually provide any content in the downloaded files. What happens is that every time a visitor comes to your site their content is put into your site in an iframe. So all the internal links go straight to them. That’s not really a problem, as such, but what follows is – for me at least.

In an effort to avoid any ‘duplicate content penalty’, they insist that you have a robots.txt file on your site that basically tells the search engines to go away.  If you go in for natural link building, as I do, then when the searchbots come knocking at your door and find it slammed shut in their face there’s a pretty good chance they won’t bother coming back. So your chances of getting any organic search traffic are very slim. Very slim indeed.

So what can you do to get traffic? Well, you can have direct referrals from the links, of course, although that will probably never be anything like as much as you’d get from good organic searches. What’s left? PPC.

That’s right, you can pay to advertise their products. I know that’s a common affiliate promotion strategy, but what if it’s not one you normally use? Should you have to resort to PPC to get some traffic to such a site? What if you’re someone like me, who gets decent free traffic using organic techniques? I don’t want to start having to get into PPC. For one thing I’m not very good at it, but I know how to get traffic for free to my sites and I could certainly generate traffic for this new site that way.

What I’m left with is a great looking website that I don’t want to use. The product is good, the conversions are good, the website is professional, but I’m left with little choice for promotion. They offer a number of different websites and I would have built my own sites around pretty much all of them. BUT since they effectively want my site to be dead to the search engines, I won’t do it. So I lose out and so do they.

I think it’s important to control what your affiliates do. Spamming, for example, should be a no-no every time. False advertising and misleading claims should also be jumped on and punished, quick. But to penalize someone who doesn’t want to use PPC because he can get free traffic to the site? That, to me, seems just crazy. Especially since the duplicate content thing is pure myth.

Still, there are lots of other good affiliate programs out there so I’ll just keep looking. If I ever find the best one I’ll let you know!

I’ve been asked why I recommend different scripts/applications when they can’t all be the best. That’s true, they can’t all be the best, but like so many things we buy, we don’t always want/need the best.

The “best” car in the world is probably not what most of us drive. So what? The “best” TV isn’t sitting in everyone’s home. What does best mean, anyway? Are we talking about cost, value, materials used – what?

Seems to me that the answer is different for each one of us. For an absolute beginner the “best” software might beone that requires no configuration. Literally plug and play. For an expert that might be so restrictive that it’s useless. We all have different needs and the truth is – shock, horror – no software will meet every one of your needs 100%. That’s just a fact.

For online selling I use a whole suite of different programs. I could probably consolidate down to just a couple, but I can say that no single product I have does it all. So I use more than one.

For a complete beginner the $7 Secrets scripts are real affordable. Just $7.  But they’re not that easy to use for real beginners. I know, because I’ve had many beginners pay me to install the script for them. Even the most apparently obvious configuration setting can fox a beginner. So although it’s affordable for pretty much everyone, it’s not a comfortable fit for everyone.

Smart DD is a low-priced, powerful product (especially if you took advantage of Frank’s recent sale). It requires a little bit of care in handling because databases are involved. Not everyone is comfortable with creating databases, even though it’s easy when you’ve done it a couple of times. It also takes quite a bit more setting up for each product you sell, in my opinion. You have to pre-plan a little bit to make the most of it. But once  it’s up and running you can forget about it. You don’t need to touch it again. It just works. And the integration with Kunaki, which means you can sell CDs and DVDs is just so good it’s almost invisible. You just don’t notice it because it works without your intervention.

Butterfly Marketing, which I hope to be getting later today if I’m quick enough, is a much more subtantial product, hence the normal $1,997 price tag. For the average person it’s likely that it would be quite hard work to install it and setting up and configuring the various options would also probably require a degree of care. It’s not suitable for beginners, I would say, unless they have someone do the install for them. For marketers with a range of products, cross-selling opportunities between those products, and a bank of affiliates to promote them, it’s a complete enterprise business automation system.

There are lots of others, like RAP, RCP, DL Guard (I use that too, every day, and it’s excellent), aMember and more.

I’ve done this in the past and I know newcomers will do it in the future. You might have recognised this in yourself. I’ve bought products that were too substantial for what I wanted to do. I’ve ended up spending more time learning how to use them, rather than time spent actually using them to run an online business.

What I’d suggest is that you get a clear idea of what you want to achieve with a script/software, before you ever start looking. Flashy sales pages can be very enticing and all those wonderful bullet points of what the software can do are very appealing. Just ask yourself though, for where you are now and where you’ll be next month, does it fit you?

And if that doesn’t work, think of it like this: If you were 14 years old again which would you choose?

• Clothes that fit you perfectly now
• Clothes that you’ll grow into in about 18 months’ time.

A good fit isn’t just important in clothing. It’s important in the tools you use to run your online business. If the tools are too complex  you’ll never use them, or you’ll miss opportunities. If the tools are too small you’ll constantly be hitting barriers. But get something that’s just right and you’ll find you grow in knowledge and you’re more likely to grow your business, too.

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.

I’m making an offer to anyone who signs up through my link and gets a copy of the software. One of the issues that scares people off powerful software such as this, aside from cost, is the difficulty of installation. For anyone who gets this software through my link, I’ll install it on your domain for you, no charge. Let me take away the technical headache of getting it on your site. I won’t be making that offer after the 5,000 copies go, so even if you pay full price for it later, it will be too late.

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.

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/special-offers/sddv3/

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!

What I’ve found is that if I write a suitable post on one of my blogs, with a link to a new site, the new site gets spidered by Google very fast. The blog is PageRank 3, which isn’t all that difficult to get to, and it looks like Google come calling every day. But what sets the whole thing in fast motion is having new posts ping Google blogsearch and a few other services.

Last new site I blogged about (not on this blog) got picked up by Google in justabout 6 hours, which is fast by anyone’s standards. Of course that might just have been because Google were calling around that time, but even so it’s good to know that you can get lots of benefits from a decent blog, beyond the obvious. The ability to get a new site spidered and indexed pretty fast is one that’s worth real money. In fact there are people who sell such services because of the value.

When I first started in internet marketing I hated posts like this because, well, it was great for someone who already has a blog with a reasonable PageRank. But what about beginners? Well, I was a beginner too and I started that other blog probably 18 months ago. I put in a little bit of work and over time it’s ‘matured’ and got some PageRank. Now, it’s worth its weight in gold to me for getting indexed. So here’s a question for you: how long do you plan to be involved in internet marketing, or site building? If you’re in it for the longer term – and you should be really – then everything you do today can have a massive beneficial impact on what you do 12 months from now.

If that’s the case, why not plan today for the internet marketer you’ll be then? You’ll be glad you did.

I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong since I upgrade dozens of blogs on a regular basis and it’s almost like clockwork now. So I had a good look through my error logs to hunt down the problem. Turns out, in the end, that my FTP client hadn’t properly transferred some of the critical files that WordPress needs. A quick look in the FTP host window showed the file with the right date stamp, so all looked well.

A quick refresh of the files and all is well again, but it occurs to me that I, like so many people, probably don’t make enough use of the error log. Error logs can tell you if someone’s trying to hack your account, if your site isn’t finding necessary files – all kinds of things. Do you check your error logs?

In checking my FTP client I’ve discovered that there is an option to have it verify file integrity after transfer. It will make the whole transfer process slower, but it should pick up silly little mistakes like this for me.

There’s always something new to learn, even with tools you use every day. I once heard that learning process called ’sharpening the saw’. If you don’t sharpen your saw on a regular basis, just how hard are you making it on yourself? Something to think about, isn’t it?

It’s a plugin I’ve recommended a lot in the past, but with limited development work on it it just seemed to stop working with one of the recent releases of WordPress. I think there’s an attempt to bring out a temporary solution until somebody can bring the whole thing up to date, but really the damage is done.

There’s a lesson in there for us all. If you don’t keep up then you fall back.

Right now the plugin I use is called blubbry Powerpress. It works and it’s simple. There seems to be an organization behind it and that in itself is comforting. For anyone who needs a video/audio player plugin, you could do worse than looking at blubbry Powerpress.

Every January 1st we promise ourselves all the things we’ll do and change. Usually, or so I’ve been given to believe, the average person puts 6-8 items on their list. 6-8 big items. You might have done something like it yourself.

1. Lose weight
2. Make money online
3. Stop smoking
4. Go to the gym
5. Learn a language
6. Get a new job

You get the idea. Every list is different, but they all have the same pattern: they don’t contain a plan of how to achieve the goal.

That’s one part of the problem; no plan. Another part of the problem is perseverance. The majority of people just don’t stick to a plan long enough to benefit from the results. You’ve only to see how many people stop going to their expensive gym before February even comes round.

Has that ever happened to you? Do you know someone who’s done that?

That’s an example of lack of perseverance.

But there’s a strange thing that seems to happen if you stick to something long enough for it to work. It starts to become almost self-maintaining and the effort level required to keep it going and growing is much less than it was to get it going originally.

Think of if this way. If you’ve ever had to push a car, when is the most effort required? Right at the beginning, to overcome the inertia it’s hardest. But once you have the car moving it’s easier – not easy, but easier.

Inertia is what stops you from getting moving in the first place, but momentum is what keeps you going once you’re moving. All other things being equal, once you get moving you’ll keep moving without any extra effort. But that only works in a total vacuum with no friction of any kind. In real life, even in outer space, momentum fades because of slight friction, gravity and any other force that passes you by. To keep moving in outer space an occasional boost of energy is required.

What I’m saying is that even if you have a plan and you overcome your own inertia, you’ll still need to add some energy from time to time. Work is a time-honored way of adding that energy, but you can fritter the energy away by applying it badly, or you can maximize your returns by being smart. Work smarter, not harder. Old advice, but good advice.

If you’re making resolutions this New Year’s day, I wish you well and I recommend you take the time to make smart decisions about how to keep up your commitment. Knowledge is always beneficial to help you do just that

For 2009 I’ll be focusing on 2 simple questions:

1. What is working for me?
2. What isn’t working for me?

When I answer question 1, I’ll do more of it. When I answer question 2 I’ll do less of it. And I’ll keep asking those questions throughout the year. I’d recommend you add them to your own journey, because they’re very powerful.

Happy 2009!

Strange as it might sound to a beginner, it does work. For one thing you can collect a name and email in exchange for the freebie and you can also offer an upsell after the visitor clicks on your download link.

But what does it cost that visitor to get something for free? In some cases it will cost only a little time – they end up reading a few emails from the autoresponder series that most marketers will send out.

In other cases it might cost them hard cash.

Here’s an example of a site I’ve just seen. I was emailed a link trumpeting how this was free and that was free and it’s all good. I won’t name the site and in fairness the product is very good, but what’s your reaction to this headline?

For Only $9.95 for S/H We Will Send You The First Month’s Package for FREE!

I’m sorry, is it just me? $9.95 does not equal free, not matter how good the value may be. They’re charging me $9.95 and that’s a lot more than the shipping will cost, so some of that money is going towards the cost of the product duplication. That’s not free! Why don’t they have the courage to say what’s really going on? They’re charging a pretty low rate for something that would normally be more expensive so it’s a fair deal, no problem there at all. So really, why try to fool people, apparently, into thinking it’s actually free?

What do you think? Are people so stupid they will think that $9.95 is free? How much does it actually cost to ship a single CD in the US? This much I can tell you, it’s possible to get a CD manufactured, put in a jewel case and posted out first class mail for about $7, so $9.95 for S/H makes nearly 3 bucks profit on that figure.

Free? Hmm, I’m not so sure anymore.

Let me repeat what I said earlier: the product is good. Why spoil it by looking like you’re trying to hide something?

You know what the real answer is? The answer, sadly, is that it works. There are so many people who will only buy when they see something like that. Spam works the same way. We all hate it, but as long as a few people are clicking on the links and eventually buying, the spam is not going to go away. And I suspect it’s the same with marketing techniques like this.

Next time you’re offered something for free – even if I’m the one doing the offering! – check what it will actually cost you!

Doesn’t surprise me, really. When it was launched it promised a great deal, but the experience of so many people who used it was nowhere near that early promise. A lot of people were very annoyed about it, in fact.

From my experience I simply removed the BlogRush widget quite early on. It didn’t do much for me, but I hoped it would improve enough to be worth a second visit.

Now it’s closed. Perhaps it was just brought to market too soon?

The one thing that strikes me as positive about this is that John Reese had an idea, tried it and got some results. He took action and he’s learned. And from that he’ll probably come up with something much better. I know another Jon who comes up with products all the time and then tries them. Frankly, some of them just tank. But what he learns from the experience usually helps him come up with something that does work. And when his products work they earn him a ton of money.

So how do you define success? Well, I genuinely believe success comes to those who are not afraid to fall down as many times as it takes, but more importantly are willing to get right back up and learn the lessons they’ve experienced. Success does not mean getting it right every time – far from it. Success means keeping on going.

I had some Windows software developed to help me keep going that’s in beta right now. It’s a subliminal message application that briefly flashes positive messages onto your screen regularly, helping you to keep upbeat and keep going. You can set your own messages and you can use it for anything where you need encouragement, whether it’s losing weight, or concentrating on your website building work.

I’m offering a free copy to anyone who posts a comment to this post. It’s in the nature of an experiment to see how I can encourage comments on this blog, which is relatively new. If you’d like a free copy (Windows only), just leave a comment. I’ll email you a copy  of the application asap.

I have no idea why they call it Q10, but I’ve had several months to try the application now and I can tell you that it’s very liberating.

It’s actually almost a relic, certainly in the way it looks. If you’re old enough to remember interfaces like the Q10 one then you’re at least as old as me.

For anyone brought up on modern computers and software interfaces it’s a real shock. If you’ve used Word and then look at this, you’ll wonder how it’s possible to do anything with it.

But here’s the thing. In real life use I would favor Q10 over Word for maybe 80% of what I do now. It’s quick, it’s easy and there are no distractions. I concentrate on what’s important: the words on the ‘page’.

Ever heard of article marketing? Well, it’s powerful and a lot of people use it because you can make money with it. But for a lot of us it’s still work. Writing and editing articles is not something many people do for fun. They do it to make money.

So if you can make it easier to do, you should be able to finish quicker and still make money, right?

That’s what I’ve found. Q10 allows me to think about the words, which is all an article is. I get straight to the heart of an issue with Q10 and I find my productivity has increased. I’ve written a lot more articles with Q10 than I did with Word, Notepad, or Editpad. And that is where Q10, to me, is so valuable.

There’s just nothing there to take your time away from the actual work.

Anything that makes it easier to get in, get done and get out, has my vote. And Q10 certainly meets that description. Best of all it’s free, so there’s no excuse for not giving it a try. If you never write articles you may not need something like this, but if you’re into article marketing I’d certainly suggest you take it round the block to see if it meets your needs.

You just might find you crank out more work with the same effort. And as every article marketer knows, although the quality of an article is of primary importance, the quantity of articles is also extremely important!

I’ve been experimenting with a number of traffic generation techniques recently, but one thing that almost always helps is being indexed in the search engines.

Of course you might have an army of people willing to send traffic to your site, even if not a single page appears in the search engines, but for most of us there is a need to be indexed. Besides, organic search engine traffic is free – which is nice.

There are various theories about how to get indexed quickly, as well as weird and wonderful schemes that may or may not be white hat, black hat, or no hat at all.

One such technique is to get a link from a well-spidered site. Usually that means a site with some PR already. Great if you know how to get such links, but for beginners it’s not always easy and in some cases it costs money.

But don’t overlook your own sites. I have sites ranging in PR from 5 down to 0 and some of them took well over a year to get their reasonable PR. Others did it more quickly. Unique content and an aggresive link building campaign in directories, article directories and the like can all make a difference – but not immediately.

As a test I recently registered a new domain, set up the hosting and uploaded a few pages to the site. Brand new domain.  I then wrote an article on one of my blogs and had a single link in the article pointing to the new site. The blog I used is only a PR 3, but that should be enough to get spidered very regularly. Every day, according to some people (and my server logs!).

How long did it take the new site to get spidered? Well, just less than 2 hours. And here’s what was amazing: that new site was also indexed in that time. Only a single page was indexed, but that’s started the ball rolling.

Easy for me, you might think, since I have some reasonable PR sites to work with. But there’s nothing stopping anyone from building 1 site into something with a bit of juice to it. If you keep adding content to 1 site and submit articles and to directories you’ll get some PR. Once you have PR on that site you can place a link there to get new sites noticed – and indexed.

In my case I’ve used it for one of my own new sites. But there’s nothing to stop me offering the service to others. I’d probably need a little more proof than a single test, but I’m sure there are people who would pay well for such a link. After all, until you’re indexed you don’t exist for the vast majority of the world’s internet users.

So if you have a site that’s beginning to get some PR in Google why not leverage that for the benefit of your other sites? Don’t go mad – don’t try adding 434 links all at once to a single site!

Hans over at CatchThePosts has vowed to donate $1 for each new subscriber to his blog. The money is going to the Children Foundation.

I’m very happy to point readers in the direction of his blog because I think it’s a worthy cause he’s supporting. You’ll also find some interesting discussions going on over there. Why not help the Children Foundation by visiting Hans blog and signing up as a subscriber?

Rather than repeat his post here, let me give you a link to his post. You can read it here.

Seriously. All you have to do is follow the lead of the people out there making a fortune.

And you know what seems to be working these days? Lying.

That’s right. Lying seems to work. It must do, or big dog marketers wouldn’t do it so much.

Ok, so I’m actually not advocating that you lie and I really don’t suggest you try to make money that way. This post is about the underhand techniques some people are falling into just to make a couple of dollars.

Here’s what happened:a marketer whose list I’m on because he’s provided some good content a couple of times in the past has just sent me an email. This is another of those amazing deals that come along every Tuesday. So it must be special, right? He mailed it on the best night of the week to hit my inbox. Must be worth a look.

Then he pitches me long and hard about how this is not like all the other offers out there. You know, the offers from people who are trying to cheat you. This one is different. No cost at all. Specifically not even postage.

My initial reaction? Nobody could afford to do this. It just isn’t viable.

So I had a look to see how it was being done. Where is the misdirection? Where is the small print?

Actually, it was right on the page for getting the product. There is a cost to get it. It’s a shipping charge.

Nobody in their right mind could afford to make the offer without covering their costs, at least. So a shipping charge is not a problem if the product is good. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the product is certainly worth the shipping charge.

But I didn’t order.

And I unsubscribed from that marketer’s list. I like to keep on as many lists as possible to see what’s going on out there. You can learn a lot from being on several lists.

But this is one where I’m happy not to receive the emails anymore. Deceptive emails like this have no place in my inbox. I’ll give the marketer the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s just confused about the offer – in which case he’s not someone I want to hear from. If he can’t take the time to check a deal before making promises he’s not worth listening to.

You know what? If this guy had told me up front that there was a small shipping charge (and it is only small), I’d probably have ordered just to see what the product was like. And I’d have continued being a potential revenue stream for the guy for a long time.

He’s lost all of my future business.

The sad thing is that some people will get suckered in by it and will only realize later that they’ve been misled.

Misleading your subscribers to get a dollar or two is a stupid thing to do.

Perhaps I should have titled this post “How To Lose Hundreds of Dollars”

What do you think?

And you probably do certain things to get that traffic.

Would you like to know about how one marketer made an extra $80,000 pretty quickly and (relatively) easily?

Dean Hunt is a British marketer who’s written an amazing report on Buzz and he’s put it on a service called Scribd, so it’s available for all to see. I’ve put it here so you can take a look at it.

I apologize in advance for the title – it’s not about orgasms(!) at all, it’s about a spike in web traffic.

So if you want to create a product of your own, just make a recording and sell it on.

Except that it’s a bit harder than that. You have to come up with the product and you have to have good equipment to record it. And that costs money.

But there’s an easier way and it’s free (in a lot of cases), or very, very, very cheap in all cases.

If you record interviews with an expert on a particular topic then you will have a product that is likely to be in high demand.  Conducting the interview by telephone is one way of doing it without the cost of air travel, but recording the sound can be tricky and the quality isn’t always great.

Let me cut to the chase: You can use Skype to record both ends of the telephone call and you’ll have an almost instant audio interview product for sale. I say almost instant because you should do a little clean up on the audio to get the best quality for your customers. Offering high quality audio, rather than the poor, noisy stuff that sometimes passes for audio, will endear you to your customers because they’ll be able to hear and understand what was said.

There are some technical issues in getting a good recording quality with Skype and I’ve just come across a resource that explains in some detail how to do it. It’s a fascinating slideshow and I’ve used a couple of the tweaks myself already to get better Skype quality. Here it is:

| View | Upload your own

Everyone who writes will come across it at some point. Not knowing what to say. Sometimes not even knowing what to write about.

Do you have a blog?

Ever needed some inspiration on what to blog about? It’s hard, isn’t it, sometimes, to come up with new ideas all the time. Not only new ideas, but then good content on that idea. Blogging is supposed to be fun and easy, but it can be hard work at times. That’s why

if you’re ever stuck for inspiration you can refer to the list of resources in this post.

When you need a little help on what to write about these resources that can get you unstuck. It’s a very nice list of 12 resources that a blogger called Hans has put together. Actually you can use the list for inspiration about blog posts, articles, the basis for a report, anything really.

Now I didn’t create the list of 12 things to give you inspiration. That was done by Hans over at Catch The Posts which is why I’ve linked to the full list, so he gets credit where it’s due,  but here’s the Cliff Notes version of that list.

• Set alerts on specific keywords.
• Visit new blogs on your niche.
• Browse the most popular articles from other blogs on your niche.
• Look at what people are looking for.
• Look at what people is looking for on your blog.
• Encourage your audience to suggest topic or ask questions.
• Browse through Social Media.
• Browse forums on your niche.
• Look at the most popular things.
• Look for the most recent things.
• Browse articles directories.
• Pay attention to your daily experiences.

Hans goes into more detail about the list and offers some useful links so it’s worth a look.

By the way, one thing you should do on your own blog is give credit where it’s due and offer a link to a post that you found useful. I think this post Hans wrote might be useful for some of my readers and I’m happy to offer you a link to it because it’s useful information.

Even though it takes you off my blog, I hope you remember that I’m looking out for information for you all the time and I’m not afraid to share it.

location, location, location

And I would argue that the three greatest factors in succeeding in any business are:

motivation, motivation, motivation

Of course other factors come into play. A good idea, some skill, a little time to implement something. All those things are pretty powerful and essential. But let me ask you this question. If you have no motivation to get up and do what you need to do, what good is your skill? What benefit is there to having a good idea?

Good ideas are ten-a-penny. I have hundreds a day and so do you. How many do you act on? Hmm, let me rephrase that: how many do I act on? I’m going to be really honest and answer. Not enough of them!

And at the back of that inaction quite often you find lack of suitable and effective motivation.

Jon Leger has just blogged about motivation and in his case the motivation to exercise is spurred on by a very powerful and personal reason. He’s soon to have a baby son who will have more energy than he does. That’s motivating, right?

Yet he still had trouble actually doing the exercise routine he set out for himself. Even with powerful motivation.

That’s because whenever you set up external motivation to change something that is already a habit, you are actually battling yourself. Internal motivation, the kind that can be harder to achieve, is also the more powerful kind because it does not rely on something outside of yourself.

You, like me, spend time at your computer. I don’t know how much time, but I do know you spend time at it. Right now, as I sit typing this blog post, I’m motivating myself 1028 times an hour, completely automatically. I’ve set up my computer to do that for me so that I get a double whammy from my time spent at the keyboard.

Jon Leger leveraged his time on the treadmill with his iPod to make something he didn’t like easier to do. I leverage my time at the computer to make it easier to do the things I want to do – like create an income and a lifestyle for my family.

We’re both motivated by the same need to protect and nurture our families, but we’ve taken slightly different paths to do it.

One other thing you might find brings a smile to your face. If you’re stuck with some tasks you don’t enjoy and some tasks you love to do and you just can’t bring yourself to do the ones you don’t like, try playing the banjo every morning.

B.A.N.J.O.

It stands for blast a nasty job off. Get it off your list. Do it first. I can promise you, having it sit in the corner waiting for you to get round to it is not going to make it more pleasant to deal with!

Let me finish by asking you a question:

What can you do today that will motivate you?

Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

Now I’m not actually going to tell you how to fail, although you could argue that learning how to fail would help you avoid all the mistakes that generally lead to failure.

No, I’ve just read a very interesting – and insightful – blog post by Jon Leger that discusses what it takes to succeed. Some would say luck, some would say a rich parent, but the reality is that plenty of people succeed without either of those.

The reality is also that many, many people fail. In fact Jon says over 90% will fail. That’s a US statistic, but in the UK I think it’s about the same figure so I guess the 90% applies generally wherever you are in the world.

Jon uses some strong language in the post. Quite unlike him, he uses four-letter words that most people shy away from.

There’s nothing guaranteed to contribute to failure than an inability to get to grips with the most offensive four-letter word of all time – WORK.

Let’s be honest, no matter how clever, or lucky you are, it’s hard to beat work when it comes time to create success. I’m not talking about back-breaking work digging ditches, I’m talking about focused work to create your online success.

I’ve analyzed something like 40,000 questions and answers from beginner marketers and experienced marketers alike so I have a good idea where they fail – and where they succeed. I’ll share my observations in another post, but for now let me point you to an excerpt of Jon’s post with a link to the original. Well worth a read.

Depending on whose figures you’re looking at, in the USA, 90% of all new small businesses will fail in their first 5 to 10 years. My personal experience with folks who are trying to “make it” online is that the failure rate is higher and faster. Why? Because when things don’t go as planned many just give up and decide that they are unable to succeed on their own.

Is there a true key to success in running a business online? Yes, there is, and it’s largely psychological.

My wife and I were browsing a local mall recently, as we occasionally do to get out of the house and do something fun. I’m not a shopper — I hate shopping — but I love bookstores, so I always make it a point to stop at the Borders bookstore when we go. My wife calls me ..

Source: internet marketing

But generally, it gives people more choice. Especially for a longish post it can be beneficial to listen to it rather than read it. You can get a lot more of the sense of what the author was trying to say, if he speaks to you. The written word can’t always convey that emotion accurately.

At least, not for the average person doing the writing. Some people are very skilled at it, but most of us are just ok at it.

I use Podpress for my own embedded audios. It’s so easy to use and as a free plugin anyone can try it out. We all like a sense of connection with other people. Speaking to your visitors helps to encourage that.

Blogging is a great way to make a profit, but keeping up with the amount of content creation you need can be difficult. That’s why the idea of re-using your own content, or somebody else’s sometimes, with permission, is so appealing.

However, there’s often talk about a ‘duplicate content penalty’ that Google supposedly slap on you if they find that you’re not producing totally 100% unique content.

Pretty much pure myth, but most people believe it. In fact most people believe it without having any idea why. They haven’t done any research into it. They hear ‘facts’ proclaimed in emails and forums and there’s usually no evidence to back up the point of view – just loud argument.

This report gives the real facts and figures together with techniques for improving your search engine position results

Search Engine Myths Exposed by Jon Leger

That report is no longer publicly available, but it’s available to anyone who signs up to my subscriber list. The signup link is at the top right corner of the blog.

In fact ‘duplicate content’ made Jon Leger money last month. You can read more about that at shareapost.com

Q10 is the name given to what I believe is a brilliant little piece of software. It’s pretty old-fashioned, many would say, but that’s really where its power comes from.

Do you do any writing? Do you create articles, for article marketing for example?

What do you use to create them? Word? Notepad?

I’ve just found a link to a site giving away a very simple text editor. Frankly, it’s so simple it virtually does nothing. BUT that is its great power.

Why?

Let me explain. When you’re creating an article, the only thing you should really be doing is getting the words down on ‘paper’, so to speak. You don’t want to be fiddling with controls, menus, and other distractions. It stops you from the ‘flow’ of what you’re doing. And if you get sidetracked into how your text looks, instead of what it says, you’ll just waste time making it look pretty. And pretty don’t pay the bills! Content does.

We all know that, right?

This product reminds me of an application called Wordstar 4, from many years ago. It was simple and minimalist, just like Q10. And that in turn allows you to concentrate on getting your content right and getting it written. I’m using Q10 to write this review of Q10 – might as well practice what I preach. You can see from the image in this post that there is nothing to see apart from the text.

Q10 shows you nothing but a black screen, the text you’ve written, and some very subtle stats at the bottom of the screen. Nothing gets in the way of your writing.

I can’t tell you how powerful that is in the modern world. We’re all constantly faced with visual distractions on our computer screens. How many of you have several windows open at any one time? Well, multi-tasking is great for computers, but not so good for us. To complete a job we need to focus on it and this little application helps you do just that.

I like the green text on black background. I’ve read in the past that it’s quite restful for the eyes, compared to black text on a white background. But if you like a different scheme you can change it easily.

To be honest, it’s a little bit of a shock to see such a simple interface because we’re all so used to complexity. Ask yourself this question though: does having clutter on your desktop help you create content – or hinder you?

Maybe it’s time to give a free application a try.

You can get hold of Q10 here

Screenshots:

Video right now is hot, for a number of reasons. I think reason 1 is that we all respond more to a movement and action than we do to the written word. It’s just the way we are. But also with video you can actually show a potential customer exactly what you’re talking about.

In fact there was a very effective advert for BMW cars a few years back. They were demonstrating the quality of the build. All they did was show the door closing and as it closed you heard the sound of quality. It’s hard to describe, but everyone knows the sound of a tinny door closing and the sound of something well made. By showing the action and playing the sound BMW established what they wanted. I think they used about 6 words in the advert.

Very effective.

Well, for online marketing the market leader for creating/capturing video has been Camtasia for a long time. Great if you have $299 to spare.

For those marketers who’d like to dabble with video and screen capture I have some good news. You can get an earlier version of Camtasia completely free. They’ll probably try to hit up you a few times in email to upgrade to the latest version, for sure. But that’s not too bad. And the application, although an older version, is not too shabby at all.

Download it from Tech Smith.
[display_podcast]

Just ahead of the long holiday weekend Hostgator sent out an astonishing email asking customers to login and get a new password – by providing their old password.

The email looks almost 100% like a phishing email and it’s generated support calls and emails and forum posts galore. Hostgator must be buckling under the strain of all the questions they’re getting.

But the email is genuine!

Hostgator are forcing their customers to change to a password generated by their systems, to enhance security. Once you get the new password you can change it to anything you like. Anything, that is, apart from the old password, which may or may not be compromised.

The ‘Gator has told a tale of woe about how possible it is for ‘evil’ forces to get your details. But rest assured, that hasn’t happened yet – so they tell us. Many have questioned why Hostgator would act in what seems like such a hasty and drastic way, unless there were some serious threat on the horizon – or even worse a ‘break-in’ already.

Hostgator remain adamant that this is a preventative measure.

Let’s hope so.

But in the meantime it probably pays to think about the passwords you use. Do you regularly use 1 password across many of your online accounts? Do you understand how vulnerable you are if you do that?

I know how much trouble it is to have different passwords for everything. I have several hundred to contend with because I use a different one for every email, site, social site, membership site that I own/belong to. It’s a real hassle, but it beats having someone walk in and trash all of them because they got one password.

And please, for your own sake, don’t use the name of your dog as your password. And don’t use your name with a 1 at the end. If it’s easy for you to think up the password it’s just as easy for someone else to guess it.

Don’t ‘plan’ to ‘get around to it’, because you won’t. If you’re going to beef up your security, start doing it now. Because it doesn’t look like anyone else will.

If you’ve been around the internet marketing world for a while, you’ll have heard so many different things about making money.

A couple of them are almost carved in stone.

The money’s in the list

and

You need your own product to make serious money

Well, I wouldn’t actually disagree with either of those, really, but what I would question is the advice you sometimes see about how easy it is to create your own product. The advice usually falls into one of the two variations shown below.

1) Choose something you’re passionate about and start writing all you know about it. Before you know it, you’ll have a product ready for sale.

2) Just hire a writer and tell them what you want and within a few days you’ll have your own product to sell.

Yes, well, if it was really that easy there’d be a lot more products on the market. Let’s be honest, both of those scenarios have downsides.

1) You may love something (like golf, say) to bits, but who said that makes you capable teacher, or writer? It takes more than being passionate to create a product.

2) Seriously? Just find anything from $250 (if you’re lucky) to $1,000’s to get a product made speculatively? That’s even if you have that much spare cash to tie up for a while. A lot of people don’t. That’s kind of why they’re trying to make some money on the internet.

So how can you create your own product, easily? Well, in truth I don’t think easy is a good way to describe it. You’re going to have to put some work in if you’re doing it yourself, or you’re going to have to dig deep into your pockets if you want somebody else to do it for you.

There is another way that is kind of halfway between those two extremes. You can buy PLR material and ‘finish it off’. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, meaning you can claim the material as your own and do pretty much whatever you want with it.

You see I don’t think most of us find it easy to get going on a product creation program. But if you have something that’s almost there, it’s easier to tweak it round to finish it. If you change the text a little to reflect the way you speak and think, it will be come truly your product. And it will take you a lot less time than starting from scratch. It’s usually cheaper too.

I’ll have more on PLR materials and how to use them in a series of future posts. If you’d like any particular questions answered just use the contact form to let me know. If I use your question I’ll put a link to your website.

Seems on Friday, 30th May, they’re going to have about an hour’s downtime when they won’t be processing payments – so nobody can buy your stuff during that time. At least that’s how it reads to me.

I’m just hoping they don’t break anything like they did a week or two back, when IPN got busted for a while. IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification and it’s the bit that makes it possible for your customer to pay you and then be redirected to a download page to get their stuff.

A couple of days after that they started canceling a ton of subscriptions, it seems, where there was no reason to do so – at least according to the subscription members who contacted me.

Not their best month, I think.

As I say, I’m hoping they won’t do anything that hurts us with this maintenance, but with systems as complex as theirs must be, it’s impossible to tell until it’s too late. A couple of weeks back I wrote about the special offer 2Checkout were having. You could open up an account and get the sign-on cost returned. I did just that, for the sole purpose of having a back-up payment processor for the future.

Boy, am I glad I did that now.

Ok, fair question.

There are billions of blogs now. Everyone and his dog has a blog. But there’s always room for another one and particularly if you learn from what you’ve done before.

Blogs are just ways of delivering content and they’re very good at doing that. And as most people in the IM community know, content and lots of it is what’s needed these days if you seriously want to achieve anything.

So with that said I’ve opened up the doors to my new blog, in my own name. Over the coming years I’ll share what I know, what I think I know, what I’ve done wrong and what I’ve done right.

I hope you join me for the journey!

The only thing that isn’t terribly inspiring about the product is the templates supplied – they’re downright ugly.

No I think that’s a good thing. It means nobody (not in their right mind anyway) will be able to use the templates as is. They’ll have to create their own. That, at a stroke, will make the script better because the sites using it won’t scream out ‘Nickel Sale Script’

I’m designing a collection of templates to go with the Nickel Sale script so that package should be ready within a few days. Right now I’m not really sure whether to sell resale rights to the package. If I get any feedback when I ask a few potential partners I may do so.

If you haven’t got your copy of the script yet I’d take a look quick. It’s currently 3 times the starting price and it’s going up every time another customer buys. Everyone who gets there before you is costing you more money.
Frank Haywood’s Nickel Sale script

UPDATE: 3rd March 2009. For a limited time – and I don’t know how limited because Frank won’t tell me – he’s selling the Nickel Sale script for just $7. That’s a ludicrously low price. But it gets better: after you buy he’s offering a special one-time-offer on one of his flagship products, SmartDD V3. It’s currently available on that one-time-offer for just $20, but only if you buy the Nickel Sale script first. For a total price of $27 to get both those scripts is nothing short of amazing.

Smart DD V3 is a complete digital download solution, but it also incorporates physical product ordering via Kunaki, so if you have a CD or DVD product, Smart DD will take payment and then interface directly with Kunaki for you to place the order. I use Smart DD to automate my own CD product sales – it works beautifully.

Where do you get the Nickel Sale script for $7 and Smart DD V3 for $20? Just click here. Remember, it’s genuinely time limited so if you miss it, don’t blame me!

The product is going to sell for $47, but right now it’s a little over $8. At that price it’s a bargain. I just bought my copy and I’ll be installing it on one of my sites over the weekend.

Anyone who wants a script that will practically force customers to make the decision to buy, take their payment and then give them their download – securely – should take a look fast at this great product.

Frank made over $2,000 in 48 hours using an early version of the Nickel Sale script – he even got several sales out of me with it. I can tell you for a fact that it works.

Take a look now, before other marketers snap it up and force you to pay more.

Nickel Sale Script

As an internet marketer I love blogs – they’re easy to setup and easy to use, so it’s natural for me to create a blog in my own name. Something that’s recommended, even if right now you don’t have a ton of products you want to promote.

So if you’ve ever wondered whether it was time to start your own blog – it is!