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.

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

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!