The Great Ideazine Blog

Super-effective Sales Pages

2010-06-16T23:15:00.000-04:00

For many marketers who are about to launch their very first product or service on the Internet, the job of doing so is fraught with difficulty and not a small amount of stress as well. Unlike the "big boys" who have an army of willing helpers working with them, it's a different story if you are working on your own because it essentially means that everything that needs to be done has to be done by you.

Read the entire article in my free ezine at: The Great Ideazine.

From Café to Walled City

2010-04-21T11:32:00.001-04:00

Word Spreads

Once word of the availability of free Internet spread, adults from the community started showing up regularly. While helping folks use the Internet, the owner learned that most of his clients did not have bank accounts, and were forced to cash their cheques at payday loan companies and pay significant fees. Sensing a needed service that could also be a business opportunity, an alliance was quickly formed with a credit card company that allowed him to cash cheques by putting the money instantly on prepaid credit cards. Several times a month, when the different organizations send out cheques, there is quite a flurry of card activity at the centre.

The requests for Internet access grew, and the demand for food all but disappeared, so more booths were removed and computer work stations installed. At this point, computer usage was starting to overshadow his business and take an inordinate amount of the owner’s time. Some folks were homesteading on the computers and tempers were starting to flare, so a timecodee system was introduced to automatically limit usage. Soon people were offering to pay for additional time, and a new profit centre was born.

As part of his community activist role, the owner did not want people without any money to be squeezed off the computers entirely. First he instituted a program where anyone was able to receive a free 15 minute time code. Then, since he had always allowed those without financial means to do things around the centre to “earn” a soda, bag of chips, etc., he just expanded it to include computer time.
Read the rest of this exciting article in my free newsletter at:
The Great Ideazine

Breath New Profits Into Old Products

2010-03-03T11:42:00.000-05:00

Have you ever decided to buy the hard copy version of an eBook? If you have, you've probably experienced this phenomenon: You find yourself consulting that one hard copy book again and again – ignoring the hundreds of .PDFs littering your computer hard drive.

You shelled out hard cash for a good chunk of those .PDF eBooks. Many of them might actually be more relevant to the problem you're trying to solve.

You don't consult any of them. (You can't even find the ones you want.) You find yourself referring to your hard copy book again and again. You know exactly where it is. And it’s so easy just to grab it.

That's what a minority of shrewd top marketers have discovered - and that's why they are now reworking and producing physical products out of their digital material.

Read the whole article at: The Great Ideazine

Blogging Multi-media Course

2009-07-25T22:54:00.000-04:00

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

The best blogging techniques.
How to get traffic to your blog.
How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

Been Away

2009-07-24T11:59:00.001-04:00

Been away for a while. My wife was very ill all winter and passed away recently. I feel guilty that I haven't kept up my posts, but she was my first and only priority while she was alive. Although I am still a little fragile, you can expect posts a little more frequently.

Forums for Fun and Profit

2009-02-27T00:30:00.001-05:00

Posting on forums is a great way to make money. Although it is possible to use Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click advertising to reach the same audience, forum posting is much cheaper - free, and more fun.

Most entrepreneurs are well versed in the tactics needed to market their products on-line, but getting the initial rush of traffic to their sites is always a problem. Without traffic, it is difficult, well actually impossible, to do split testing, gather feedback and pick up the necessary testimonials.

Posting for Traffic

A great way to get traffic to your site is to post on forums. And you don't have to pay a cent to do it! By posting carefully, you can attract quality visitors to your sites, or your affiliate sites. And you don't even have to search for them, they will come to you.

Eager Buyers

Regardless of your niche, you should be able to find popular forums pre-loaded with truckloads of eager buyers. The folks are visiting the forum because they are passionate about the topic. That means that they are already inclined to buy your product. You just need to convince them to buy from you. Unfortunately, you cannot make an overt sales pitch on most forums. Some forums do have a special place to make offers to the members of the forum, but this is not usually the best way to get people to buy from you.

Read the rest of the article for free at: The Great Ideazine.

Niche Forum Goldmine Video Series

2009-02-23T20:27:00.003-05:00

As you undoubtedly already know, forums bring people together and relationships are formed. Those relationships can become business related, which is where you come in. You've seen how popular message boards get. Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Twitter, and more are examples of explosive interaction. Those forum owners can usually sell advertising or make some good revenue from a strong community no matter what size it is.

No matter what type of forum you run and what niche you are in, there are many ways to earn money with it. Think of how many forums start out even without the idea of making money and can have so many advertisers begging them to put their ads on their site. Or think of how many affiliate related or CPA related offers you could put on the forum? A forum is kind of like an email list, except you have stronger relationships and a lot more interaction, so the conversions can be huge.

Learn how you can set up your own profitable niche forum at: Niche Forum Goldmine.

How to Get Traffic for Your New Website

2009-02-18T15:20:00.002-05:00

You created/bought/stole a product, now you need to make a buck from it. If the Internet is your chosen sales arena, then a website makes immense sense. Okay, so you bought some graphics, wrote some great copy and slapped it all up on the web. Wouldn't it be great to generate a few sales? Unfortunately, most websites just languish with few if any visitors and no sales.

The big challenge is to get traffic to your new website. Although it can be difficult, with a little planning you can attract enough visitors to make your product Profitable. Today, I'm going to give you four tricks to help get that traffic.

Read the rest of this article here: The Great Ideazine.

Make One Time Offers That Convert

2009-02-11T10:27:00.003-05:00

What Is a One Time Offer (OTO)?

An OTO shows up after the front end product is purchased, and is offered only once. The offer is not made anywhere else, and is not a discounted or sale offer.

I recommend that you use an OTO script that prevents a potential buyer from bookmarking your offer and returning later. You want your buyers to know that when you say OTO, you mean OTO ONLY!

What Makes a Good OTO?

Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of trying to turn anything that they have in stock into an OTO. This is a sure recipe for failure. Successful OTO’s are closely related to the original offer.

Read the rest of this article at: The Great Ideazine.

Increase Your Profits With No Extra Work

2009-02-04T12:30:00.001-05:00

Well, almost no extra work. The trick to more profits is to increase your price, even slightly. Depending on your cost structure, a small price increase can mean a huge increase in profits because the entire increase goes to the bottom line. As an example, if you were selling a product for $40, and your product cost and all other expenses (utilities, payroll, delivery, insurance, web hosting, etc.) totalled $35, you would only need to increase your price by $2 (5%) to increase your net profit by 40%!

Panic

I know. I know. The first thing that comes to mind is, “I can't increase my prices in these tough times or I'll be out of business in a week!” This is simply not true.

A recent study showed that given a 15% price increase, many vendors will see an increase in sales - that’s right, an increase in sales. Most will see an increase in profits. Some of course will see a decrease in sales. Aha you say, “That'll be me.” Well, maybe, but keep this in mind, no one who increased their price by 15% experienced a decrease in profits.

You can read the rest of the article at: The Great Ideazine.

Wake The Dead

2009-01-29T11:53:00.001-05:00

What do you do with customers who leave your fold, or haven't made a purchase in long time? These are valuable members of your list, and you need to take action to reactivate them, and get them buying again, if at all possible.

I like to review my customers every three to six months or so. I make a list of customers who have not made a purchase from me within the last year. I write them a nice note. I ask a question using a format something like this:

This will awaken many of your dead or inactive customers. If you repeat this every three to six months, you can expect 10-30% of these lost souls to become your active customers again.

You Too Can Deliver a Profitable Teleseminar

2009-01-09T11:26:00.004-05:00

Before you start to plan your teleseminar, do some research. Find out what your target market wants - make sure you differentiate that from what you think they should want. Decide on a multi-media product you can create to answer the market request. Keep in mind that the lead time for a teleseminar, from concept to execution should be between 60 and 90 days, so they are a way for fairly quick money.

Now you need to develop the content for the teleseminar. Give out good information on what to do, but do not share how to do it. That’s the job of the multi-media product you are going to create.

Administrative Tasks

Register a domain for the teleseminar - it should reflect the topic of your seminar. Get a host for your website. I use 1and1 for both domain names and hosting. They're reliable and inexpensive.

Subscribe to a toll-free teleconferencing system. Set a date for your teleseminar.

Set up an autoresponder (I use Aweber) that will collect the name and email address of your opt-in visitors and then send them to a web page that has the call-in information for your teleseminar. Prepare the follow up email that will also give them the call-in information for your teleseminar. Later on you will prepare a series of four emails to be sent immediately before your teleseminar.

Read the rest of this article at : The Great Ideazine.

Exit Poll Ads

2009-01-07T11:09:00.001-05:00

Been looking at cost effective ways to drive traffic to my sites. Took a flier on Leon Klepfish's exitpollads.com program. I bought $10 worth of ads - 3,333 impressions. I have used up all the impressions and received six clicks, no sales. Works out to $1.67 per click. I don't think that I'll buy any more to see if the numbers improve over time.

Let me know if you have a better experience.

$7 Script Upgrade

2009-01-02T10:19:00.003-05:00

I spent a lot of time working on the $7 script to allow me to use it without customizing every page for every site. Now I only need to fill in the blanks in the config program, put my sales copy on the salespage and oto page and I'm good to go. My name, my company name, my support desk or email address (didn't work in the original), the product name and price, the oto name and price, and the commission are now propagated automatically to every page that needs the info. A big time saver for me. I changed only the config file and text pages, not the script itself, so I think I'm safe if I decide to sell the upgrade. What do you think? Let me know what you think by contacting me at: The Great Ideazine.

Guru Sales Page Distilled

2008-12-23T23:48:00.006-05:00

by Jim Mr Idea Green

I just got a series of emails from one of the "big names" in Internet Marketing. He's got a "great" new product that he is flogging. I thought that I might take a look at his sales page, and distill it down to the bare essentials for you. Once I give you my impressions, I'll give you a link to the page so that you can see just how it is implemented.

The copy starts out with the obligatory headline, screaming out a can't resist benefit of the product. This is quickly followed up by a sub-head that helps to prop up and expand the headline while bringing in the spectre of scarcity.

I was appalled that in a highlighted box that scarcity was emphasized again using a random number script. "There Are Only 10 Spots Left In Thunder Bay, Ontario" which if you reload the page, becomes a random number between three and ten - at least that was the spread I got when I reloaded the page! Destroyed the credibility for me. It was a nice touch of personalization that the script was able to pinpoint the city where I live.

Having set up that I needed the product, and I might not be able to get it for long, the copywriter included a custom buy now button.

At this point, the copy reverts to form. The writer is identified, today's date is included, and I am addressed as "Dear Friend".

Establish Need

Read the rest of this article at : http://thegreatideazine.com/

Digital Powerhouse Secrets

2008-08-30T00:33:00.000-04:00

Chapter 2: How to Bring Ideas to Life

Leveraging on Others

You have the idea for your product and you want to bring it to life because you know that success is looming around the corner. Your confidence is charged up so what do you do next? Charge into the battlefield with your guns blazing?

You have to plan first – your method of execution.

You have to ask yourself this very important question when it comes to a project – should you do it yourself or outsource?

Well, this can be answered in one sentence – DO WHAT YOU DO BEST AND OUTSOURCE THE REST!

Remember that time is money. Don't waste time trying to be stingy when it comes to product creation. Much of your time should also be spent on marketing.

Pause for a moment, though, and ask yourself a few questions. Your answers will tell you if you are better off doing it yourself or outsourcing the work to an expert.

Firstly, are you the best person for the job?

Read the rest of this free excerpt at The Great Ideazine

Video Marketing for Cash Lovers

2008-08-17T19:54:00.000-04:00

On-line videos are one of the most powerful, immediate, and cost effective forms of advertising ever invented. Video marketing is not only extremely effective but also extremely cheap and easy to do.

The author of the report “Video Marketing for Cash Lovers” has several small streams of an on-line revenue in place that literally cost him $10 to get off the ground. Assuming that there are no major disruptions in the way the major video sharing sites operate, he expects to continue growing these revenue streams gradually over time and without spending a penny of his own money.

Many of the video sharing sites very likely will alter the way that they do business at some point in the future. Although they could make it easier for video marketers, it’s more likely that they will end up making it more difficult for new video marketers to succeed. That, the author says, is precisely why you need to get started with video marketing right away.

With video marketing as outlined by the author, you can't complain that a lack of funds is holding you back. The only money that you must spend to get started is the following:

Read the rest of this free article at: The Great Ideazine

Beyond The Newbie

2008-08-08T22:33:00.001-04:00

Are You Ready To Go On?

Why are you doing this?

As a newbie, you are really just scratching at the surface of the Internet marketing money making world. And, in all honesty, there is no definitive or clearly marked point or time after which you stop being a newbie and become an intermediate and then, later, an advanced marketer.

At the same time, most newbies have little or no idea about what they are doing in terms of their on-line money making efforts and, more importantly, why they are doing it. Oh, sure, there may be a couple of reason that they think or believe that they are doing this for, but..

In order to begin the process of moving forward to the next stage of your Internet marketing career (which is exactly what the things that you are doing right now can become if you do things right from here on in) you need to start asking yourself many relatively deep questions.

The first and most important to answer is, why are you doing this?

Now, if your answer is something along the lines of, because you need more money, then I have news for you. That puts you in a very non-exclusive club that contains just about every individual human being on plant earth!

Read the rest of this free article here - The Great Ideazine

10 Actions for Your Success

2008-07-28T11:06:00.000-04:00

1. Offer to Write

Offer to write exclusive articles (that means you only submit them to one place) for high traffic web sites in exchange for a link back to your site. You could also target high subscriber ezines if they include your resource box. These publishers will publish them quicker because they will be the only ones with this content.

2. Create a Positive Image

Create a positive on-line image. Tell your visitors about fund raisers you have sponsored or that you donate a part of your profits to charity. For example, you could say, "We regularly attend fund raisers and donate about 10% of our profits to charities and aid organizations." Before you say this, it must, of course, be true!

3. Improve Your Customer Service

Improve your customer service on a regular basis. Try out new technologies that make it easier to communicate with your customers over the net. For example, you could communicate with your customers or visitors by phone, instant message, website messages, chat rooms, message boards, video conferencing, fax, and email.

For the rest of this free article go to The Great Ideazine

How's Your Internet Video?

2008-07-16T11:51:00.000-04:00

With the proliferation of video on the ‘net, an entrepreneur must give serious consideration to creating videos to advertise her own products. There are basically two kinds of video on the Internet. Video that consists of voice over slides, and live action video. Voice over slides can be done quite simply with your computer and a quality microphone.

If you decide to do live action video, you will need a decent camcorder. Be picky. Read the reviews. Choose the best quality camcorder that you can afford, that meets your total needs. There are so many good camcorders to choose from that you probably won't go wrong if you keep your needs in mind when you buy.

Purchasing a Camcorder

It is important that you do not purchase the first camcorder that you think looks cool. Before investing your hard-earned money, you need to ask around about camcorders. Check with people who have experience using the model that you are interested in. Get on the Internet and read the reviews written by people like you, and some that are written by video pros.

Reviews can help you with find out information on all the different types and styles of camcorders. You'll also surely get advice on which ones you should stay away from. You want to narrow your search to just the ones that your research tells you are the very best for your needs.

Take your time when choosing your camcorder. You don't want to end up paying a premium for one that has features that you will never use, or one that is missing features that are a must for you. My son has a neat camera with a detachable lens that you can attach to your head while your are involved in a physical activity. Makes great action movies, but I don't see me using it to make Internet Marketing videos, but it may be a feature that you can use.

Read the rest of this free article at: The Great Ideazine.

Does Your Copywriting Stink?

2008-07-02T15:46:00.000-04:00

Successful marketers must learn to write quality copy because that’s what puts money in the bank. On the Internet, words are the only tool you have to convince people to buy your product. But you don't need to be the world’s best copywriter to succeed.

Create Your Sales Letter

To be a successful copywriter, you sales letters need only hold the reader’s attention long enough to convince a reasonable number of them to buy your product.

Before you can be successful as a copywriter you need something great to write about. A great offer can consist of one or more components. Your offer is great because of its perceived value. You may need some type of gimmick to give you product this high perceived value.

The number one way that Internet Marketers create perceived value is through bonuses. The more bonuses, up to a point, the higher the perceived value. The better your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), the higher the perceived value. You must of course present your USP in a killer way.

You may have noticed that I talked about perceived, not real value. Your visitors will buy your product based on the value they perceive it to have for them, not what it actually cost you to create and manufacture. Your sales letter will determine for them the value of your product.

Write a Killer Sales Letter

Headline

Your headline is the attention getter that you use to hook your visitor into reading on. It is not a sales pitch, although it should contain your most important benefit, but rather a grabber to get people to read more of your copy. Your headline should shock or intrigue your reader. You should always put quotes around your headline.

Read the rest of this free article at: The Great Ideazine

Giveaway Ends Saturday

2008-06-11T18:16:00.000-04:00

Act fast to get in on this giveaway before it ends on Saturday.

Check it out HERE quickly.

Free Giveaway Started

2008-06-05T00:09:00.000-04:00

"132 Marketers Are Giving Away Over $6996.00 Worth Of Ebooks, Software, And Scripts for FREE - With Absolutely No Catch!"

Be One Of The Fortunate Few Who Get In On This Gigantic Giveaway Stuffed with Products!

Giveaway Dates:
Sunday June 01st 2008 @ 08:00:00 AM MST
To
Saturday June 14th 2008 @ 02:00:00 PM MST

Check it out HERE.

Make Money with Free Ebooks

2008-05-22T00:26:00.000-04:00

Here are five good reasons why this is true today and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future:

1. Ebooks are cheap to produce and don’t take long to set up. If, on the other hand, writing isn’t your forte, you can use rebrandable ebooks that have been produced by others. Just use your favourite search engine and do a web search for “rebrandable ebooks”. You will get a lot of hits and have many to choose from.

2. The way to distribute these ebooks to visitors to your website, as I mentioned earlier, is to give them as a free gift for subscribing to your newsletter. If your ebook contains material that people will want to share with their friends and family, they will pass it along to them… they will pass it along to others…and you will make money.

3. Ebooks are capable of reaching a large audience. The only limiting factor is the enthusiasm or the participants. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that your ebook contain something that people will want to share like timely information or humour. Remember that people like to know something that the rest of the world wants to know. They will willingly pass along something that makes them look like they are in-the-know.

4. Ebooks are a way to sell products other than the one you originally targeted. For example; if you are selling garden products,li your customers could also be interesting in ebooks about lawns, trees landscaping, etc.

5. Ebooks are effective in building your reputation. It is an implied recommendation if you give a quality ebook and readers willing pass on to others.

Read the entire article at TheGreatIdeazine.com

Make Your Own YouTube Videos

2008-05-04T15:08:00.002-04:00

Are you a fan of YouTube? Are you one of the many Internet users who only watch videos on YouTube? Have you thought of being one of the many who post their own videos on YouTube?

Is putting videos on YouTube worth your time and effort? Determining whether or not you should make and upload your own videos to the YouTube website, is a task you should undertake quite quickly. Are there any advantages for you? What are the pitfalls?

Video Topics

YouTube videos can be on just about anything. Popular videos on YouTube right now include comedy skits, video blogs, how-to videos, and music videos from up and coming artists. Many videos contain information about products that are for sale. Successful videos have included information to lead viewers to the entrepreneur’s website. YouTube allows a web link to appear on each video download page. You can exploit this link for your business.

Remember, that even though uploading a video is free, as an entrepreneur you cannot afford to upload worthless content just to get a link. Viewers are very protective of the time spent viewing videos, and will quickly dump any provider that does not entertain or enlighten them. YouTube accepts videos on a wide variety of different subjects, and you should have not trouble to find a niche where you can promote your product or service.

Just a side note, make sure that you don’t record and post anything illegal on YouTube. YouTube works with law enforcement when videos of illegal acts surface. Remember, you never know who will watch your videos.

Video Making Equipment

For the rest of this article, go to The Great Ideazine

Marketing Techniques Compendium Part 2

2008-04-24T18:08:00.000-04:00

Affiliate programming

You can offer your products’ through an affiliate program. Generally, you allow anyone to become an affiliate, as long as they follow your rules. Affiliates get a commission on each sale. It can be paid immediately after the sale, or accumulated and paid out periodically.

Subscriber list

You should provide your visitors an opportunity to sign up for your list on every page of your site. To get them to sign up, you must offer them value for their email addresses. A free gift immediately and the promise of a quality newsletter or free gifts regularly is a good value. Regular communication with them is crucial to maintaining their interest. Asking for their input and opinion about the site is also a very good idea.

Tell-a-Friend

You should place a “Tell-a-friend” script on strategic pages of your website. If visitors recommend your website to other people, you will get more quality traffic. A recommendation from a friend is about the best advertising you can get.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article.

Build Your On-line Business on a Shoestring

2008-04-19T14:50:00.002-04:00

It's hard isn't it? Knowing just where to begin when you're new to the whole on-line selling game.

With so many others already earning money and touting the praises of their methods, where exactly do you begin?

To inroduce my new site, I am giving away a pdf ebook that will show you the specific steps you must take to be successful.

The ebook will go on sale to the public on May 1, but you can get it free just for visiting.

Mr Idea's Ebookstore

Get it now because if you hesitate, you will pay $49 for it!

What Value Your Product?

2008-04-07T17:56:00.002-04:00

It is one thing to put a selling price on a product, it is another altogether to put a value on it. What value your product really has is only apparent after someone has made a purchase. You need to create a high perceived value in your potential purchasers minds so that they will buy your product.

What is Perceived Value

Perceived value is the difference between the prospective customer's evaluation of all the benefits of your product compared to the total price. Viewers are turned into buyers based on the perceived value of your product. By making , sure that your product has a high perceived value, and then delivering on it, is an excellent way to get new customers and keep them, and eventually building a strong relationship with them.

Creating high perceived value products or services is very straightforward. You can do that by putting yourself in their shoes, figuring out what is their most pressing problem, and creating a product or service that will provide great benefits to your customers. Next check out what your competitors are offering. Make sure that your clients feel that they will receive greater benefits and value from your product(s) compared to your competitors' products.

How To Create Perceived Value

1. Find out what your customers value. What do they are really want? It could be anything from saving time or money, clear instructions on how to do something, to a complete resale package including graphics and website.

Read the rest of this article HERE

Secure Your Computer

2008-03-28T15:55:00.000-04:00

This is excerpted from a presentation I gave last week on How to Secure Your Computers, Protect Your Data and Lock up Your Network.

The first thing that you need to know is that you cannot protect against every possible exigency.

Determine your tolerance for loss

First determine how much you can afford to lose - be it an hour, a day, or a week, then concentrate on protecting the rest. You should determine the cost of a loss – both physical loss and data loss, then you should budget less than that for protection.

Should You Back up your data?

Back up any of your data that you cannot afford to lose. Depending on your operation, you may want to have your data copied to several disks immediately – it's called a RAID – or daily or weekly backups may suite you fine. I've come to the conclusion, that off-site backups are a necessity. I have seen too many clients back up their data religiously and then have a thief steal both the computers and the backup device! Off-site storage is comparatively cheap now days.

Software Protection

Make sure to obtain all of the free patches and upgrades to which you are entitled - especially if it is a Microsoft product. Make a practice of doing these upgrades and patches every week.

Antivirus Protection

Do install a reliable antivirus program. Good ones, both paid and free are abundant. Make sure that you update it regularly – at least weekly! Choose the automatic update option for the maximum protection. Run a complete virus scan – overnight is my choice – every week at least.

Email Protection

Email is the most common way that viruses get spread. Your antivirus program will be a great help here as it will check every incoming email for viruses. Never open an attachment you are not expecting, even if it is from someone you know.

A good SPAM filter can be useful – maybe. I find that a SPAM filter is good if your email always comes from people in your address book. If your email is like mine, and comes from different people all the time, SPAM filters are not that useful.

NEVER put your good email address on the web! Spammers will harvest it almost as soon as it is up, then the barrage of SPAM will really start.

A little trick that I have used to cut down SPAM is to set up a separate, throw away account that will be seen by web bots. Change it regularly.

Now, I prefer to use a support ticket system. Neither users nor bots see my email address – they just fill in a request that can either be emailed to me, or held on a server for me to fetch. I use a script that cost me $7 HERE.

Secure Power

Almost all of us are subject to frequent minor power failures as well as the occasional major one. We frequently see surges and spikes, and although a good surge protector can clean out most of the spikes, it is useless if the voltage drops. A better idea is an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) with Automatic Voltage Control (AVC). These normally change the AC mains voltage into clean 12 V DC then turn it back into clean and well regulated voltage for your computer. A good, single computer UPC with AVC can be found for under $100 here in Canada.

Network Security

Wired networks are usually fairly secure, because the router generally provides address translation which makes it difficult for hackers to reach your computer. If you are using a single computer, you should seriously consider installing a router between you and the Internet.

Wireless networks can be a nightmare. You can drive up and down any street in North America and find an open wireless network. Just what the hacker ordered! Your wireless router comes with security encryption. Use it.

If you follow this advice, you should have fairly secure computing.

Evaluating Your Internet Marketing

2008-03-09T14:15:00.001-04:00

Once you have chosen your product, built your website, if necessary, and started an Internet marketing campaign, you have taken only the first step in the battle for profit. I assume, dangerous I know, that members of your target audience are likely to use the Internet to research or purchase the products or the services you offer. These marketing efforts may turn out to be a complete waste of time if you are not diligent about evaluating the response to your Internet marketing. This means testing each change to your marketing strategy. You should evaluate the results of the change to determine whether or not it generated a greater profit for you. If it did, you should keep it, and test another change. If it didn't, you should trash the change.

Split Testing

The best way, in my opinion, to test your changes is by a method called “Split Testing”. In this process, you test your original marketing against a hopefully improved version. To “Split Test”, you offer your old campaign materials to one visitor, and your improved materials to the next one. Once you have had a goodly number of presentations of each material, 100 each is a minimum, you evaluate the two campaigns. You keep the most successful campaign and immediately begin testing this one against your next “improved” campaign. This is important because it will help you determine what is working for you and what is not working.

If “Split Testing” doesn't appeal to you, you can evaluating the response of your Internet marketing in a number of different ways. Customer surveys and embedded HTML code are two of the most popular methods of evaluating the effectiveness of an Internet marketing campaign.

Other Methods for Evaluation

Customer surveys can be as simple or as complex as you like depending on the amount of feedback you would like to receive. However, one of the most effective ways to find out how well your different marketing tactics are working is to include a question asking the consumer where they first learned about your products or services. This is important because if you find a great deal of your customers are learning about your products or services through a particular venue, it is a good indication that this method of advertising is working for you.

Embedding code into your advertisements for the purpose of receiving feedback is also a popular method of evaluating the response to your Internet marketing strategies. Advertisements can be coded so that you receive feedback each time an Internet user clicks through a particular advertisement. This is useful for letting you know which advertisements are attracting the most attention. If you are using two or more different designs for advertisements you may discover that one design is attracting more attention than the others. This may lead you to make the decision to convert all of the advertisements to a more effective style.

Similarly, if you are running the same advertisement on several different websites, you may discover that you are receiving more traffic from one website than the others. You may also discover some websites are not attracting much attention at all. This should give you an indication of which advertisements to cancel and which ones to keep running.

Evaluating Your Test Results

Finally, the response to an Internet marketing campaign should be evaluated by carefully by reviewing website traffic statistics after implementing any changes to your marketing strategy. An unusual spike or decrease in the amount of website traffic immediately after implementing a new stage of the marketing campaign can provide feedback on how that the change was received by potential customers.

Regardless of which method of evaluating the response to an Internet marketing campaign you use, it is important to note that implementing multiple changes at once will make it difficult to determine which changes were the most effective. Therefore if you plan to use website traffic as feedback for how well your marketing strategy is working it is important to only implement one major change at a time so that each change can be evaluated separately.

P.S. Have you seen my new site Mr Idea's Ebookstore. As the name implies it is stocked with ebooks, scripts, websites and more.

2008-03-07T14:41:00.001-05:00

Haven't had much time to work on my websites this week because of computer problems - not mine, customers! I have had a rush of clients with computers that keep restarting without ever finishing a boot. Funny thing, they don't all have the same problem. One had a faulty power supply, several had leaking capacitors on the motherboard, and one just lost its mind and had to have the operating system reloaded. Several years ago millions of 'counterfeit' capacitors found their way into the system. Every manufacturer was duped. Some more than others. I thought that all of the motherboards built with these faulty capacitors had died long ago, but looks like we're in for a second round of dead motherboards. There's no real money in diagnosing these problems - can't charge more than $75 per hour - but I like the challenge *8>)

Are you annoyed by those videos with the chipmunks? Here's how to fix the problem for FREE. Read the article here and Download the Camtasia Audio Bug Fix. The zip file is located at the bottom of that page.

Visited an exciting new free site. Here's a quote from their headline "TokSee = 'The New Googlelicous Kid on the Block'® Imagine a Company that could harness the power of Facebook; MySpace; YouTube & Skype and become much bigger than all of them combined!" Click HERE to check it out.

I am always working to get a higher placement for my sites on the search engines. I am not always successful in getting my sites on the first page of Google. About a month ago I read a new ebook on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and picked up a couple of tips. I was really surprised to find that the three sites where I used the new ideas on jumped from lacklustre placements to the first page on Google, and first place on Yahoo. I ran out and bought the rights to the ebook. If you need some SEO tips for your sites, you can find the ebook on Ebooks and More *8>)

I am still adding to the deals at ebooks and more every day. Check it out.

Ebooks and More

Free, Effective, Internet Marketing

2008-02-25T23:56:00.000-05:00

Why Internet Marketing Does Not Work Without SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered an integral part of any Internet marketing strategy. SEO is important because there is so much which can be gained in terms of effective Internet marketing and advertising. Failure to optimize your website for search engines can result in losing out on a considerable amount of the free advertising which is essentially gained from ranking well with search engines. Today, I will provide insight into what SEO is and will explain why Internet marketing requires at least some degree of SEO.

SEO optimization is a strategy in which a website is designed to obtain favourable search engine rankings from the popular search engines, mainly Google. This may be achieved in a variety of different ways. An optimal SEO campaign combines a variety of different strategies. When optimizing your site, keep in mind that the objective of search engines is to provide Internet users with the most relevant websites for particular search terms. Anything that you can do to help them with this objective will be warmly received by the search engines. Anything you do to trick the search engines will eventually be found out and your sites will be punished.

There are several elements to consider when attempting to optimize your website for search engines. Since it is by far the largest search engine, I will bias my presentation in that direction. Relevant elements include keyword density and prominence, META tags (possibly ignored by Google), titles, image tags and inbound links.

Setting up Your Own Videos

2008-02-13T16:22:00.000-05:00

Why use Videos?

Videos are THE hot item right now, and regardless of your niche, you should be thinking of how you can cash in on this market. Regardless of what you sell, there is room for at least one good video to sell or give away as a promotion. You will be amazed at how your customers will respond to a video. You can offer a single video, or a series of videos that become a course or courses.

These videos are usually offered in multiple, short segments to keep your clients or potential interested in the topic. I have seen videos over an hour in length, but this takes a lot of experience to produce and you must give away a lot of information. Whether you use a short or long video, this type of advertising can be quite powerful and if done correctly, many of the participants will not even realize they are being subjected to a marketing campaign. I have used video courses a number of times. This article will discuss creating and distributing a video course for the purposes of advertising your business, or for selling through a membership site.

Create Your Video

The creation of a video should begin with a solid idea for a series of videos which pertain to your business and will be of interest to your potential customers. Video courses, if sufficiently rich in content, can frequently be sold for profit themselves, either individually, or through a membership site. If you are interested in using the video as a marketing tool you will most likely be offering the video free of charge in an effort to entice potential customers to purchase your other products or services. Sometimes the sole objective of the video is to get readers to surrender their email addresses for the entrepreneur’s email list.

What Topic Would I Use?

Determining the topic of your video is very important because it can dictate the success of your marketing effort. Consider an on-line retailer of health food products. This business owner may want to develop a series of videos on subjects such as proper nutrition, creating a weekly menu, introduction to new foods, proper food preparation, the value of certain health foods, etc. Each of these videos may contain a few segments which offer different perspectives on the subject. These videos are ideal for this business because they are on subjects which are likely to be of interest to the customers of the business.

Distribution of Your Videos

The distribution list for your videos should mostly include members of your target audience. This can be achieved by offering the video as a download on your site or somewhere on-line where only interested Internet users will be likely to find the videos. Another way to deliver the videos is by emailing a link to the videos to recipients who have specifically expressed an interest in receiving more information about your products and services by submitting their email address for this purpose.

Once you decide on a subject for your video, you will need to prepare an outline for your video. You could just gather a bunch of Private Label articles and create a script based on the content of these articles. You could even find PLR videos on your subjects and rebrand them. We will be allowing this on our new site. You must be careful with PLR videos though, as many do not allow you to give them away for free.

Professional Writer

If you cannot write a script yourself, seek out a qualified writer to create the content for your videos. Using one writer for the entire series will help to give your copy a more coherent and professional appearance. The writer can assist you by creating copy which is informative and useful to your readers but is also well written, clear, concise and easy to understand.

If your niche topic is highly specialized you might have to provide the writer with product information as well as research materials to ensure the content is informative and accurate. Additionally, you should review the content once it is completed to verify the accuracy and ensure it sounds like you. You can find writers on a number of “writers for hire” sites on the web.

Once you have the content, you can record your videos using a video camera or digital camera with a video option. If you are interested in doing fancy effects, you can purchase a blue screen cloth quite cheaply on eBay. Camtasia is a wonderful tool to use for assembling your video and publishing it as a Windows or Flash video.

Professional Production
If you do not feel comfortable producing your own videos, you can hire a professional to do it for you. It will not be cheap, but it is better than not having any videos at all. You could also buy PLR videos that allow you to rebrand them with your name and website, but if you are giving them away, make sure that it is permitted by the vendor of the videos.
Feedback

When distributing your videos, you would be wise to request feedback from the users at the conclusion of the video. This should be completely voluntary. You may wish to give a free gift to those that respond. The users that respond can provide you with useful feedback which will be extremely helpful. You can use it to improve your video, or in the launch of a similar video campaign in the future. We are planning to make a special offer to potential customers who will give us feedback on our plans for our video site. I'll let you know here when we make the offer.

P.S. Have you seen my new site Mr Idea's Ebookstore. As the name implies it is stocked with ebooks, scripts, websites and more.

Using Online Courses for Internet Marketing

2008-02-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

Why Online Courses?

Online courses, or email courses are a very popular way for savvy Internet marketers to promote their products and services. Online courses or email courses essentially include short online presentations or emails which include insightful information on a particular niche subject and include a line or two advertising a related product. The better courses today are being offered as a series of videos.

These courses are usually offered in multiple, short segments to keep the students interested in the topic. This type of advertising can be quite powerful and many of the participants do not even realize they are being subjected to a marketing campaign. I have used them a number of times. This article will discuss creating and distributing an online or email course for the purposes of advertising your business.

Create Your Course

The creation of an online email course should begin with a solid idea for a series of educational articles which pertain to your business and will be of interest to your potential customers. Educational email courses, if sufficiently rich in content, can frequently be sold for profit themselves. If you are interested in using the course as a marketing tool you will most likely be offering the course free of charge in an effort to entice potential customers to purchase your other products or services. Sometimes the sole objective of the course is to get readers to surrender their email addresses for the entrepreneur’s email list.

Running Shoes

Determining the topic of your courses is very important because it can dictate the success of your marketing effort. Consider an online retailer of running shoes. This business owner may want to develop a series of email courses on subjects such as training for a marathon, preventing injuries, increasing speed and running for fun. Each of these courses may contain a few segments which offer different perspectives on the subject. These courses are ideal for this business because they are subjects which are likely to be of interest to the customers of the business.

Likewise a real estate agent may opt to offer email courses on subjects such as understanding mortgage options, finding a lender or house hunting. Again these are all subjects which are likely to be of interest to the real estate agent’s clients.

Distribution of Your Course

The distribution list for your online or email courses should mostly include members of your target audience. This can be achieved by offering the course as a download somewhere online where only interested Internet users will be likely to view the course. Another way to deliver the course is by emailing it to recipients who have specifically expressed an interest in receiving more information about your products and services by submitting their email address for this purpose.

Once you decide on a subject for your online or email course, you will need to prepare the course. You could just gather a bunch of Private Label articles and stuff them into an autoresponder, but this is not recommended.

Professional Writer

If you cannot write it yourself, seek out a qualified writer to create the content for your online or email course. Using one writer for the entire series will help to give your copy a more coherent and professional appearance. The writer can assist you by creating copy which is informative and useful to your readers but is also well written, clear, concise and easy to understand.

If your niche topic is highly specialized you might have to provide the writer with product information as well as research materials to ensure the content is informative and accurate. Additionally, you should review the content once it is completed to verify the accuracy and ensure it sounds like you. You can find writers on a number of “writers for hire” sites on the web.

Feedback

When distributing your email course or launching your online course, you would be wise to request feedback from the users at the conclusion of the course. This should be completely voluntary. You may wish to give a free gift to those that respond. The users that respond can provide you with useful feedback which will be extremely helpful. You can use it to improve your course, or in the launch of a similar marketing campaign in the future.

If you followed the Frank Kern “Mass Marketing” launch, you understand how valuable free content can be to your success.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

2008-01-31T14:33:00.000-05:00

I had a little fun this week. I found a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories and put them into an easy to read pdf. These 12 Sherlock Holmes adventures are yours free. You can read 'em, enjoy 'em, pass them on to your friends, etc. I only ask that you do not charge for the compendium. NO signups, sharing emails or anything else can be required for folks to get this pdf. Pick up your copy free at:

http://www.ideamerchant.com/freebies.shtml

How to Run Your Own Teleseminar

2008-01-30T13:40:00.000-05:00

Teleseminars are a great way to keep in contact with your buyers, and maybe even make a buck or two. A teleseminar should be a dialogue, not a monologue, but you can't just let 500 people put in their two-bits worth any time they want. You can however unmute the lines from time to keep to give them a chance to speak by answering questions like, “How are we doing, good or great?” They will invariably shout great!

You need a moderator - someone to participate for the audience. Make sure that you have the audience take notes - the moderator does also. At strategic points have the moderator acknowledge that the note is made i.e. “Got that down Harry?” or “Have you got any questions?” and accept the answer as if it came from the whole group.

To make your teleseminar work for you, you must script the call according to a very specific timeline and know exactly what to say at certain points along that timeline.

The Welcoming

First there is The Welcoming which occurs for 10 minutes before the actual call starts. Do the welcome. Have people say their first name and their city. If you are dealing with businesses, you should ask for their name and their website. This establishes that there are many folks on the line, and with any luck, shows how diverse they are geographically.

Start the Call on Time

Although you want to start exactly on time, you must do filler for a couple of minutes to allow latecomers to get on the line. Latecomers are also potential buyers and you don't want them to miss any part of the main message.

The Introduction

For the first ten minutes cover:

1. Who is being interviewed. Give their name and their background Or if it is just you, give your name and background. People need to be reminded who is doing the call.

2. How the teleconference came to be. Give them the story behind the call. Make it interesting.

3. Why should they be listening. Benefits. Remember to state the benefits of listening, not the features of your product.

The Majority of people will be on the call from minute ten to minute forty so any sales pitch must occur during that period.
Content

For the first 55 minutes, tell stories or how to do something. During first minutes mention that you have two gifts you will give toward end of call to everyone on the call at that time.

Call To Action #1 (CTA)

Make your first CTA #1 somewhere around minute 15 (between minutes 10 and 20 will do). Instruct them to, “Go to my website for the full story.” This should be a full domain, not a directory - you can utilize a re-direct if necessary, but direct them to a full domain. This sets the hook. They should not be sent to phone number or email as there is nothing to learn, just action to take.

Testimonials and CTA #2

Around the 30 minute mark say something like, “I'd like you go to my http://mywebsite.com/feedback and give me your feedback, both positive or negative. I want to know how you feel about the content that we're delivering. Please do so after the call. Just write that URL down now.” Make sure you ask during the call. After the call you are unlikely to get any. At this point, tell them again to go to your website to get the full story.

Call To Action #3

At minute 40 do exactly the same. Send them to the exact same URL you gave them earlier.

Ethical Bribe

Around minute 40 - 55 give them a magic word, private web page, private email to get a special gift. Your gift can be content, money, anything. The objective of the bribe is to get them to take some action. The bribe increases the likelihood of their taking action on a purchase. Mention that you will have another gift at around minute 60 also.

Summary or Recap

Summarize what you have done every 10 to 15 minutes or so throughout teleseminar. You want your listeners to be absolutely clear on what you are saying becasue confused minds never buy. Confused minds never buy absolutely. Recap all of content including the CTAs and the ethical bribe.

Go over the most frequently asked questions (FAQ). Allow unmuted questions on a paid call, but you feed the questions on a free call. You could have them send them in prior to the call.

End the Call

If it is a free call, end it exactly on time. If it is a paid call, you may wish to run over time to finish answering questions.

Thank everyone for attending and remind them of that URL you want them to visit.

You can get free teleconferencing and recording (mp3) from Basement Ventures http://www.thebasementventures.com

The Importance of an Affiliate Program to Membership Sites

2008-01-24T15:15:00.000-05:00

Join Affiliate Programs

An affiliate program isn't really a program. It's a business arrangement.

Affiliate programs are also known as associate programs, associates programs, referral programs and even bounty programs. Most affiliate programs are free to join. Affiliate programs are important to membership sites for a number of good reasons. Mainly, because they are a way to earn money without producing your own product.

Affiliate programs allow your membership website to generate additional (other than the membership subscription) income by advertising products that are relevant to your site’s theme. For example, let’s say the theme of your membership website is golf. You would recommend products that you like yourself such as golf books, golf magazines, golf videos and golfing gear.

When you have an affiliate agreement with the merchants selling those products, they provide you with affiliate links which you paste into your site. Then when members click on those links and buy those products, you earn a commission. Affiliates programs can earn you commissions in three ways: per click, per sale and per lead.

The members of your membership website are helped by the affiliate programs as well. They are given easy access to products that they would otherwise have to search the Internet to find.

Run an Affiliate Program

On the other side of the aisle, you can let other companies post your ad on their sites and pay commissions for sales of your product or memberships. Sure, you may give away 50 percent of your profit to an affiliate; but 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing. If you have several affiliates, you’ll undoubtedly make up the lost percentage in sales quantity. One hundred percent of $1,000 is a lot less than 50% of $5,000. It’s quite worthwhile in the long run.

Beware of Affiliate Spamming!

Since your affiliate marketer earns compensation based on a percentage of each sale, you can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out email advertising the products he makes money for promoting. At one time, this resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. Spammers are severely fined and the newest twist in the anti-spam laws are that the merchants, like you, whose affiliates spam are being held responsible for the spamming as well. So you are well advised to exercise caution when you choose affiliates, and then to supervise them closely.

If you are considering adding an affiliate strategy to your online sales channel you should research the different technological solutions available to you. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions that help to deal with this problem include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

Spamdexing

Search engine spamming or Spamdexing is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing. Many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of optimizing their sites for the search engines. This type of Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.

Frank Kern Free Build Your List Video

2008-01-16T00:58:00.000-05:00

I just watched a video by Internet marketing expert Frank Kern. He’s the one behind the most successful recent launches. I think it’s worth a moment to precis his video.

Regardless what you might have heard, Kern states emphatically that YOU need a list if you are going to be successful marketing on the Internet.

Here is his magic formula for building a list and making money
a. Get traffic
b. Offer a freebie
c. Sign them up
d. Sell them stuff
Pretty self evident. The magic of course is in the execution.

Where do you get traffic?

According to Kerns, you buy it, develop SEO optimized sites, or get if from JV partners. Kern buys it from Google Adwords, Yahoo Paid Search, Banners from Google and Yahoo, and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) drops.

What are CPM drops? Giant emailers with legitimate lists that will send an email telling how to get your free thing for a price per thousand recipients. If you do it right, you will get subscribers (in reality leads) that you can later email to on your own. Treated correctly these leads can be turned into buyers of either your stuff, or stuff you get a cut on (affiliate products). With careful nurturing, these buyers will turn into repeat buyers. If you do this right, you will make more, a lot more, from sales than you spend on lead acquisition. (Kern never goes give the names of the emailers he uses.)

An example Kern gives is:

Pay 10 cents to get a visitor. Create a great page which converts at 20%. You are now buying leads or subscribers at a cost of 50 cents each. These leads should be converted into buyers during the first week at the rate of about 3% - which is about normal for quality leads. So, if you generate 200 leads, you need to generate $100 dollars from six sales to break even.

Kern suggests that you sell a product worth $97 so that you gross $582 and net $482. I am not sure that you will get $97 for a first sale. If, however, you sell a $17 product, you will break even and be positioned to make money on all future sales. You should be able to double your sales of this product to this group by continued marketing. Later, you will be able sell many other products to this group.

This is the way Kern built up his list of 400,000 subscribers. He generates around a million dollars a years from this list, which boils down to about $2.50 per lead per year. By the way, if Kern who is an expert earns only $2.50 per lead per year, you would be wise to budget a much smaller number. When I started in this business, a good lead was worth about $1 per month. I suspect that today that number is closer to $1 per year.

Okay, you know what leads could produce, but what do you give them to sign up? Kern suggests the old standby the free report. Even better, you might try a downloadable audio or video. Just keep in mind that it must be something that your prospects can benefit from and get value from.

Turn People Into Buyers

To turn people into buyers, you must establish a relationship with them. You do this by giving them good stuff. The better the relationship with the people on the list, the longer they will stay on the list and the more stuff you can sell them. Kern has such a great relationship with a list of about 7,000 leads that it produced over $1,000,000 in sales in 22 months!

Kern’s steps to be different:

Rise above the noise and be different. Kern has done that by telling people how to make a list. He suggests that you should:

1 Use some method other than straight print - videos are current.
2 Give excellent value.
3 Be a straight shooter - lies and hype will catch up with you.
4 Help people decide that they want your stuff. Don’t try to sell it to them.
5 Use, audio, video, teleseminars, and email to communicate. Multiple modalities reach an audience more deeply by providing a clearer message.

Why does it work?

Because we trust only a friend or a person of authority. Following this process turns you into both a friend and an authority, providing you are delivering value. He gives the StomperNet launch as an example. The two guys delivered video after video demonstrating that they were friendly, knowledgeable guys. Once they did this, it was a no brainer to generate the huge orders that they did on the StomperNet launch.

Follow these simple rules and you two can have a large, valuable list of your own.

How to Make Your Business "Click"

2008-01-10T16:20:00.000-05:00

PPC stands for Pay Per Click - a popular advertising technique that I use quite frequently. PPC can be found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines. PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These ads are usually placed close to related search results. An advertiser like me pays a particular amount for each visitor who clicks on these links or banners. Advertisers, me among them, set up web pages that these visitors will land on and hopefully buy from.

In essence, PPC advertising is all about bidding for a high, or perhaps the leading position on search engine results and listings. We do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to our products or services - the higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results, the more the people will find the ad (and hopefully click on it) to go to our websites (this is why some people call it "keyword auctioning"). We pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through to our website. Note, that I do not recommend using the extended search network. I have found that PPC sites that are set up just to attract “clicks” do not return traffic that is of a very high quality.

PPC advertising is also known by the following names and variations:

* Pay per placement

* Pay per ranking

* Pay per position

* Cost per click (CPC)

* Pay per performance

PPC advertising is usually done with the following standard procedures:

1. Choosing (and setting up) an account with a PPC search engine.

2. Setting up a payment process (Credit Card) or depositing funds.

3. Creating a keyword list.

4. Bidding on the ad placement, including the search result words or phrases.

5. Writing out ad copy.

6. Setting up the 'landing pages' for our ads.

7. Placing the advertisement in the search engine.

The benefits to Pay Per Click advertising, make it an effective way of promoting a business 'on-line'. Some of these benefits are listed below:

1. Get launched immediately. PPC advertisements are implemented very quickly - they can go 'on-line' within an hour after winning the bid and paying for it.

2. Obtain specific, pre-qualified, and quality traffic. PPC provides you with quality, well-targeted traffic. Visitors are narrowed down into 'qualified' people who are actually looking for your specific products and/or services - those who are more likely to become a 'lead' (a convert) and complete a transaction (either by buying your product or subscribing to the service that you are offering.)

3. Widen your reach. PPC advertising provides additional traffic to your site, aside from the natural or "organic" traffic of search engines.

4. Track your investment. PPC advertising makes use of a tracking system that will determine exactly who comes to your website and what they do once they arrive - the length of their stay on the site and the number of pages (including the actual pages) that they view. These are valuable tools in determining statistics such as return on investment (ROI), acquisition cost-per-visitor, and conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who are converted into customers or leads).

Below are some important things to consider when planning on a pay per click campaign:

1. Know your product. Take an inventory of the product and/or services that you have to offer (before anything else).

2. Stay within the budget. Determine your daily or monthly budget; and stay with it. This means keeping your budget in mind, avoiding bidding wars if possible.

3. Bid correctly. Learn how to bid right - a bid that is too high can exhaust all of your money, while a bid that is too low can make you lose your spot.

4. Watch the bottom line. Measure your profit margin against your spending or expenses. Know when to stop or terminate your PPC program - if you are spending more on advertising than you are recouping on sales.

5. Find the right keywords. Decide which keyword phrases to bid for. Do some keyword research, either by actually looking at existing search terms or with the use of on-line keyword suggestion tools, to know which terms are most used when visitors are searching for items that are related to your business. Focus on specific keywords, not on general ones.

6. Write effective ads. A good PPC ad is one that can persuade and move a qualified searcher. There are several approaches to this:

* Discount offers

* Testimonials

* Celebrity/famous endorsers

* Money-back guarantees

* Free trials or sample offers

* Freebies - beware, you could end up with a lot of visitors who have no interest in ever becoming buyers!

* Reverse psychology

* Major benefits ("Lose weight")

* Direct instructions ("Click here")

7. Be careful that your ad is not misleading. You do not want to pay for visitors who have no intention of buying your product. I try to include the price to chase away those who are only looking for a freebie.

8. Maintain a professional-looking site. Your web content should be regularly updated and checked for spelling and grammatical errors. There should be no broken links or images. The website should be simple - designed in such a way that it will be easy for visitors to navigate and load. Include contact details to create a good impression among potential customers.

Done properly, PPC advertising can be an effective marketing tool that will maximize the return on your investment.

Good luck and great profits.

Boost Your Business With Blogging!

2007-12-28T22:27:00.000-05:00

A business blog is an incredible on-line marketing tool that can save you thousands of dollars while providing a great business opportunity in just one click. Blogs are a user-friendly, customizable and flexible medium for spreading useful information for the effective positioning of your products in the market.

Companies engaging in business blogging have a definite edge over their competitors. Here are some advantages:

Word-of-Mouth

In a recent survey, it was determined that there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added each day. About 30 percent of Internet users are blog readers. Imagine how much your company will gain, if your products are advertised through blogs. With the Internet, information spreads quickly, especially if an impressive write-up goes with your product. Soon your blogs will be passed on to hundreds of possible customers.

Awareness and Loyalty

Open communication with your customers creates trust and loyalty among them. Being there to respond to their questions and comments make them all the more willing to try your products and services.

Feedback

Blogs are good for product research and reviews. It would be easier to improve on your products if you observe your customers’ thinking and behaviour patterns. You can also take immediate action to address your customers’ concerns.

Community Halo-Effect

Bloggers are reasonable, friendly and helpful. They are more than willing to create a blogosphere of comments regarding your product. The only thing you have to do is embrace and take active part in the culture and your product will surely be considered in their next stop to the supermarket.

For better marketing results, actively promote your business blogs by submitting your blogs to blog search sites and directories. Do not forget to paste your URL in your blogs. Be sure that your blog posts contain exclusive information with value and are always updated to keep readers popping in, and reading your posts. You want to be sure that when even though they move on to the next blog, that they will return to your blog frequently for updates.

A blog is like a setup booth in the biggest trade show on earth everyday. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner waiting to boost your sales..

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds

RSS feeds are important too when used in conjunction with your blogs to maximize the benefits of your blog posts. Use effective keyword phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. This will give you a better chances of having people find your blog. More traffic means more potential sales.

Providing an RSS feed will guarantee that your readers can get news of your latest posts as soon as they are made.

Getting Started

Once you are convinced of the potential of a business blog for marketing and targeting sales increase, you are ready to start a blog. The first thing to do is to determine whether or not that you can create a blog that is in tune with your company’s business objectives and determine if blogging will really help you achieve your goal.

There are several blogs dedicated to teaching people the do’s and don’ts of blogging, READ them! Include in your reading materials blogs that are consumer-based to get some ideas about what is being done currently. Once your reading is done, set up a test blog right away.

If your initial blog worked well, you should now start thinking about setting up several more blogs.

Study Blog Design

Blog hosting services provide pre-designed templates. But if you opt for paid blog service, you can ask your artist to design and layout your blog site to match your company’s identity and needs.

Choose a Topic

It’s good to have a line-up of topics that you want for your blogs. Be sure that they are in agreement with your business objectives. This will be a test of your flexibility and open-mindedness since results may not support the blog or blogs you thought were going to be the most productive.

Safety Measures in Blogging

1. legal issues are sometimes involved in blogging; it is safer to include disclaimers and limitations of liabilities;

2. in the corporate world, communication and legal departments are responsible for educating the senior management on how blogs might affect business. In your small business, you may wish to checking out legal issues with your lawyer;

3. create blogging policies; set limits on who gets to blog and what information is allowed to be made public. This is a good exercise even if you are a one-person business;

Best Practices

1. avoid outright marketing on your blog or you will chase away your readers;

2. make sure that your content is updated, relevant and fresh;

3. make sure that your blog reinforces your company’s core values; and,

4. if you have employees, encourage them to use it.

Start Blogging

1. complete 20 posts before going to marketing.

2. once you do have the 20 posts, begin marketing like crazy.

3. regularly monitor the coming and going of your readers.

4. measure your results.

5. based on your monitoring, adjust your blog if needed. You can always play with your designs in the blog site as long as it continues to match your company’s identity.

6. Try to have your blogs in unrelated topics with general and broad appeal.

7. Strive to be consistent with your topic all the time.

8. Schedule updates regularly. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days to update your blogs.

Once you have done all these things, you will rapidly come to enjoy the benefits of business blogging.

Good luck and great profits.

YouTube and Your Business

2007-12-23T15:16:00.000-05:00

Do you enjoy watching videos on YouTube? If you have never visited YouTube before, you are urged to do so, as you will likely find it fun, exciting, and entertaining. For those of you who might never have visited YouTube, YouTube is a video sharing website which allows Internet users, just like you, to upload and share videos that they have made.

Perhaps, the greatest thing about YouTube is that it is free. You can visit the YouTube website to watch videos without having to create a YouTube account.

Registering With YouTube

Although you are not required to create a YouTube account, you may want to look into doing so, as there are a number of benefits to being a YouTube member. The primary one being that you can advertise your business.

Registering for a free YouTube account is relatively easy to do. When you signup for a free YouTube account, you need to provide only a very little bit of information about yourself. This information includes your name, the country that you live in, your zip code, your date of birth, as well as your gender. You will also need to create a YouTube user name for yourself, and of course a password. Your password and user name will be used to log into your account each time that you return to the site. Signing up for a YouTube account should take only a few minutes of your time at the most.

Benefits of a YouTube Account

Once you have created a free YouTube account for yourself, you can then begin to enjoy the many benefits of having a YouTube account. One of those benefits is the ability to rate and leave comments for videos that you watch. As it was previously mentioned, you can watch videos on YouTube without having a YouTube account, but you cannot rate videos or leave comments for the video owner. Rating YouTube videos gives other YouTube users an idea as to which videos are high in demand, which, in turn, can lead to more of your favourite videos being found on the YouTube site. That’s just one of the many reasons why you should not only signup for a free YouTube account, but also rate or leave comments for all YouTube videos that you watch.

Share Your Videos

In addition to being able to rate or review videos, registering for a free YouTube account also gives you the option of sharing your videos with other Internet users. Non-registered YouTube members are unable to upload and share any videos that they may have made. If you have never shared videos online, you may want to think about doing so, as they are fun to make. Many of the videos currently found on YouTube are comedy skits, video blogs, and candid videos. If done properly, a video can help to publicize your website or product. Just be careful not to be crass about how your video advertises your site. Check out these examples of advertising:

Example One

Example Two

Example Three

Example Four

What Do I Need?

All you really need to have is a video recording device, such as a cell phone, webcam, or camcorder, and a piece of movie editing software program, which now comes standard on most computers.

Just to re-iterate, creating a membership account with YouTube is free and it should only take a few minutes of your time. If you market using the Internet, you will not only want to visit YouTube, but you will also want to take the few minutes needed to register for a free account. If you can create a video that gets a lot of play, your business will get a lot of exposure and perhaps gain a few sales.

Good luck and great profits.

Internet Marketing For You

2007-12-14T14:23:00.000-05:00

Just like there are no magic weight loss cures or ways to earn money from home without a great deal of effort, there is no one simple solution to guarantee Internet marketing success. However, Internet marketing is not overly complicated to understand. Many business owners can enjoy at least some degree of Internet marketing success with only limited knowledge of marketing skills. This article will discuss some of the simplest Internet marketing strategies, both paid and free, that you can implement to promote your business online.

Message Boards

Participation in industry related message boards is one of the easiest ways that you can use the Internet as a promotional tool. Message boards are websites which provide a forum for Internet users who share a common interest to share information related to this subject or just socialize. You may opt to join message boards which closely relate to your industry or the products or services youi offer. This is important because doing this gives you access to a group of Internet users who fall into the target audience for your products or services. It also gives you the opportunity to promote your own website. Many message boards allow users to place a link to their own website in their signature. You should do this and make sure that you contribute useful commentary on the message boards to attract potential customers via the this link.

Additionally, some message boards may even allow you to post links in the body of the message. This gives you the opportunity to offer your link in response to questions and comments when doing so is relevant and offers something of value to the online conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the terms of service and all guidelines on the message board before posting links to ensure this is not a violation of the policies of the message board. Failure to adhere to message board policies may result in your removal from the message board or your posts being viewed as spam by other users.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is certainly one of the most cost effective Internet marketing strategies available. This marketing strategy involves having other website owners known as affiliates post an advertisement on their websites to direct Internet traffic to your website. This marketing strategy is cost effective because in most cases the affiliate is only paid when he produces a desired result such as enticing an Internet user to click through your advertisement or to purchase a product or service once they click through the ad. You only pay for the advertisement when it produces a desired effect, but it is still very worthwhile to evaluate the effectiveness of these ads to determine whether or not they are working well.

Banner Ads

You may want to take advantage of banner ads. Although their effectiveness is very much reduced, banner ads can still pay off. If you are on a limited budget you may find banner exchanges to be quite useful. The ideal use of banner ads would include placing your banner ad on a website which receives a great deal of traffic and attracts an audience who will likely be interested in your products or services. Additionally, this website should not directly compete for your business. This scenario may be difficult to find and even if you are able to find this type of situation, purchasing advertisement space may be expensive especially if it is a highly competitive niche. For these reasons you may find banner exchanges to be an affordable alternative.

Ezines

Another very popular Internet marketing strategy is to publish and distribute an e-newsletter or ezine on a regular basis. Ezines are essentially emails which may contain content, graphics, links and subtle forms of advertising. In general ezines should be informative in nature and useful to the recipient but should also serve some type of marketing purpose as well.

Search Engine Optimization

Another simple, but effective, Internet marketing strategy is to hire a consulting firm with search engine optimization (SEO) experience to assist you in achieving high search engine rankings. The concept of SEO can be rather complex and understanding the most effective strategies and how to properly implement them may take years of experience as well as continual education. If you are interested in trying SEO on your own, you may be interested in a tutorial on the subject such as “Basic SEO Explained”.

The ability to hire a qualified SEO firm is as simple as knowing how to interview candidates and select the most qualified one. Handling your own SEO efforts can be rather difficult if you don’t have any SEO experience. Hiring a skilled firm to take care of this for you is not only easy but it can have a significant impact on your website traffic. High search engine rankings typically translate to improved web traffic. This is because Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant websites first and typically only visit the best ranking websites when they search for a particular term.

Consulting Firm

Similarly another simple way to enjoy Internet marketing success is to hire a consulting firm to plan and execute your Internet marketing strategy. Just like SEO, Internet marketing is essentially a full time job. Business owners may have a great deal of difficulty trying to run their business and organize their Internet marketing. Outsourcing this work eases the burden on the business manager and will likely produce more favourable results.

I have just briefly touched on a number of Internet Marketing ideas that may be of interest to you. From time to time, vver the next few months I will try to expand on specific methods of Internet Marketing..

Good luck and great profits.

Rant and Rave

2007-09-19T16:10:00.000-04:00

Today, I just want to vent a little *8>)

I received emails promoting two programs that are to be kind, a waste of time. I am speaking about Cash Creation System by Sebastion Foss, and Ridiculous Income Goals by Rob Toth. I'll speak about them separately.

The Cash Creation System by Sebastion Foss is as close to a scam as you can get. The basic premise is that you can make a bundle doing surveys. I thought that it sounded great, so I purchased it for my wife, thinking that the guy had vetted these survey companies. Not a chance! He just created a database of companies that purport to do surveys. If they had an affiliate program, he joined and included his link in the database.

Once my wife started signing up for these "great survey companies that pay an average $75 to $250 per survey", she was inundated with requests for money. Some were veiled - fill in the survey, get three friends to make a purchase, give us $100 and we'll give you a $10 coupon. Not once in over 100 survey companies that she joined did she ever get one survey that paid anything - never mind average $75 to $250.

Naturally, we asked for our money back. We sent six emails to various addresses given us by Sebastion Foss or his websites, and never got a reply, never mind our money back! Don't get sucked in, stay clear of this one.

The second one is even more blatant. I bought Ridiculous Income Goals by Rob Toth two weeks ago and was totally disappointed. The ebook is basically a pep talk with links to products that he recommends you buy. No real information is shared. It's a product that he should have given away in hopes of building his list, but no, he used the $7 script to peddle it and capture your name for his list.

He was able to suck in 600 folks like me to buy it, and now is offering the resale rights to these same folks. I'm walking as far away from this guy as I can get, and I recommend that you do the same.

For honest products at a real price, check out:

Ebooks and More

Ebooks and More

2007-09-13T23:00:00.000-04:00

Well, the new site is up and running! After many, many tries, I finally got the site configured and running. I have loaded a couple of hundred ebooks and scripts to the site and will be uploading more on a daily basis.

Check it out and you won't be disappointed.

Ebooks and More

How to Make Money in the Niches

2007-08-19T15:21:00.000-04:00

What is Niche Marketing?

It is just one of those hard, cruel facts of life that the big boys have all the money they need to advertise and sell their products and little guys like us are on advertising budgets that are so small they probably don’t add up to what the big boys spend on paper clips in a month. Competing with the big boys isn’t feasible…or possible, for that matter. So what are us little guys supposed to do?

Niche marketing is our answer. We can’t advertise our products and services to the world at large but we don’t have to be able to do that to be able to make a pretty decent living… thanks to the Internet.

Niche marketing is selling specific products or services to a limited audience. One person with a computer, an Internet connection and a good idea can go into business for himself /herself on the Internet and target the people who would be most interested in what (s)he has to sell and do all of the above on a very limited advertising budget.

Finding the right niche for what you have to sell isn’t really all that difficult. Just think about who the people are who would be most interested in what you have to sell. For example, if you have concocted a shampoo formula that will take chlorine out of a person’s hair, you can’t compete with giant companies that sell shampoo but you can narrow your market down to a niche and target sales to those who have swimming pools. You buy a domain, get a server, and build a web site to advertise your product JUST to people who have swimming pools.

In essence, niche marketing is selling a product or service to those who want or need the product the most.

Read the rest of this post at The Great Ideazine

Firesale ends July 14th 2007

2007-07-11T21:15:00.000-04:00

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The $7 Script

2007-07-06T15:30:00.000-04:00

I just love the $7 Script from Jonathon Leger! I particularly love the Early Bird version of the script. Unfortunately, I am not as careful as I should be when I set up a site with the script. This frequently leads to missing email addresses, product names, copyright notices and so on. To prevent this, I end up going over each site three and four times checking and rechecking, and sometimes I still miss a piece of data.

I decided that there had to be a better way. They don't call me Mr Idea for nothing! So I developed some code to solve the problem.

Now all you need to do is write your sales letter and on time offer (there are programs to help you do this) and then run the configuration script. The script coaches you to fill in the blanks for the data for your site. Once you have all the blanks filled in, the script populates ALL of the pages for the site with the correct information.

Now once I have a site up, I know that I don't have to check and recheck to be sure that I got all of the data up there.

If you are interested in more information about the script or my enhancements, check it out HERE.

Make Money With Adsense

2007-06-18T16:19:00.000-04:00

Adsense is considered as one of the most powerful tools in a web site publisher’s arsenal. It enables a person to easily monetize their sites. If used properly, Adsense can generate a very large and healthy income for a web site owner. However if you are not using Adsense correctly and are just trying to maximize the income you can squeeze from it, you are actually leaving a lot of money on the table.

You can start earning money with Adsense easily and quickly. You will be amazed at the results that can be had in a very short time.
Three Steps

There are three steps to keep in mind when you begin writing your ads and building an effective Adsense program.

1. Keyword Search

Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrases. Select the ones which have more people clicking through - use Google’s keyword tool. There are a number of other keyword selector and suggestion tools that some sites are offering.

2. Writing Articles

Start writing quality original content with the keywords from the topics that you have found in your search. Take note that search engines are very particular about the quality of articles that they display. You should key your writing to meet their demands. If you are one of the people who has been given the gift of being good with words, why not make it work for you. If you can't write, hire someone to do it for you. You can earn quite a bit of extra cash from good articles.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Viral Link

2007-05-31T16:02:00.000-04:00

I was searching around and found this. It’s a really interesting concept and takes hardly any time to implement. Not sure how powerful it will be, but I can’t see it hurting.

Follow the instructions below and test it yourself.

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same!

Viralink

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Leave a comment with your blog post URL with that link grid and I will add your link to this grid, and each person who copies the grid from here will also link to your site!

Rules
No Porn Sites
Only 1 link per person (i.e don’t hog the viralink!)
Please don’t tamper with other peoples url’s
Enjoy!

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions above this line———

That’s it, give it a go!

How It Works
Just so it is easier to see how this actually works, below is an example of the linking tree. If 3 people copied the above grid into their own browser, added their link and 3 other people copied from them these are the number of backlinks which would be received with the centre light green circle being this page.

And if the procedure was repeated and each new person told 3 of their friends, the back links travel back to the source they were added!

And once again as word gets around and the link tree develops the number of backlinks grows greatly! So at this stage my blog would have 93 backlinks from only 4 levels of “saturation” and by level 5 your blog will also have 93 backlinks if you decide to take part.

Here are how the numbers add up, I will use the term saturation to describe the spread of the Viralink with Zero being your blog 1 being 1 link down, 2 being 2 links down and so on.

Saturation - Backlinks

0 - 0
1 - 3
2 - 12
3 - 39
4 - 93
5 - 336
6 - 1065
7 - 3252
8 - 9813
9 - 29,496
10 - 88,545

The above numbers rely on 3 people copying and pasting the Viralink onto their blog and that being replicated 3 times continuously 10 times. I think you will agree that the numbers are quite staggering, there are 119 spaces left on the Viralink from this page and I expect that there will be allot of clones which begin to pop up. The best strategy with this is to start early and tell all of your blog partners!

You may be wondering what happens if you are at the end of the chain when the Viralink is full ? What would be the benefit to me? Well there is no reason why you cant add another line of dots to the bottom and keep the process going, or even start another from scratch.

Get more exciting information from The Great Ideazine

Is this Marketing Technique Losing You Money?

2007-05-10T16:18:00.000-04:00

Technology has had significant impact even in the field of marketing. Electronic mail, better known as Email has turned out to be an indispensable medium of marketing on the Internet.

Internet marketing using Email has grown exponentially because it allows your message to be spread over the whole world in the blink of an eye. This makes your Email address accessible to almost every Internet marketer in the country, and the world. Using Emails correctly can make your Internet business seem very techno-savvy and reliable. Unfortunately, unscrupulous marketers are also using technology to generate an almost overwhelming level of SPAM.

Everyone from individual marketers to huge corporations has realized the advantages of Email marketing. There are both advantages and disadvantages to Email Marketing.

Some of the benefits of Email Marketing are:

1. Speed of delivery:

This is one of the main reasons that Email marketing is considered better than most other media for marketing. Email Marketing is fast. Using my desktop computer, I can send over 10,000 Emails hour! Just imaging how fast a dedicated Email server can be. Unlike most other marketing media, Email doesn't have a long lag time between you sending and the recipient receiving the marketing piece. Regular mail can take from one to ten days to reach the recipient. Newspaper and magazine ads can take days to weeks to in some cases months to appear.

Email also has the advantage of high speed of information transfer. If you use just text in your Email the recipient will be able to download your Email in under a second.

2. Speed of generation:

Graphic ads for newspapers and magazines can take days, or even weeks for a professional to generate, while a text Email can be done in minutes. A quality Email with pulling-power can be written, re-written, buffed, shined and ready for sending in under an hour by almost any marketer. Even if you farm the job out, your Email can be ready in under a day.

Read the rest of the article at: The Great Ideazine

Are Your Efforts Being Sabotaged by these Five Time Wasters?

2007-05-07T14:54:00.000-04:00

1. Are you doing some things too many times?

Doing some things once instead of twice or more are the things that will help us save a lot of time. Do some things less often, like cleaning your house once every ten days instead of every seven days – you can do that, it’s normal and the house won't get dirty in those three extra days. If you write a regular report every four weeks, make it only once in six weeks if possible.

Can you reschedule weekly meetings to happen every two or three weeks and be just as effective? Check your list of things that can be done fewer times and make adjustments accordingly.
2. Are you competitive? Then compete with yourself!

Decide how long you would normally take to do a task. Focus, get rid of anything that could distract you and cause you to work less efficiently and try to beat your normal time.
3. Can you find 15 minutes each day that you are using inefficiently?

Is there 15 minutes a day that you could use more efficiently? Is there lost time in your activities? Or maybe even a less important activity that you can give up on? If you manage to save 15 minutes every day, you will in fact win back 91 hours, or over two work weeks, every year!

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Three Things You Need to Survive On-line

2007-05-04T15:08:00.000-04:00

Every Internet marketer is always on the lookout for the market that will give them the biggest paycheck. Some are searching desperately for a magic formula that will make all of their sites successful and profitable overnight. Actually, it is not a lot more complicated than that. It is simply implementing good marketing practices, that have been proven over the years.

These tactics have worked before with off-line marketing and are continuing to work in the on-line marketing world of today. If you implement these top three marketing tips correctly, you will be able to able to increase your sales and thrive in the on-line marketing world.

What are these three tactics?

Unique Web Pages

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of your products together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have one site focussing solely on each and every product.

I have one site that defies this rule, and although it makes a buck, it is not nearly as profitable as it could be. It makes about as much in total for its 20 to 30 products as an average one item site. I use it as a sort of holding site, to keep the products exposed to the web while I am building dedicated sites for each product. I would probably be better off to just kill the site and concentrate on building individual sites, but I'm in love with the site (bad news for any marketer) and just can't convince myself to let it go!

Always include product reviews on your web sites so that visitors will have an initial understanding of what your products can do for those who buy them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are willing to allow you to use their names and photos (a super sales point) on the site of the specific product you are marketing. Whatever you do, don't make up testimonials and put them on your site, as they will come back to bite you and destroy your credibility.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Create a Free Report in one Hour!

2007-05-02T16:53:00.000-04:00

You see ads all over the Internet for Free Reports. Why would profit oriented entrepreneurs waste their time giving away saleable reports? They certainly don't make any money giving away these reports, or do they? Well, not directly, but certainly indirectly by exchanging the report for the name and email address of the would be reader, or entice readers to connect to one of the links within the report. If the Free Report was crafted correctly, the addresses collected and the visits derived from the report are mainly from individuals who are the target market of the entrepreneur.

These are the most valuable folks an web entrepreneur can have contact with, short of actual, previous buyers of the entrepreneur’s products. A Free Report done correctly can become viral and help build the writer’s list and web visits for months, and perhaps even years.

Unfortunately, because they work so well, almost every entrepreneur on the Internet is doing the same thing. The trick is to expose as many people as possible to your Free Report and give them a pervasive reason to download it. Good information is certainly the best way to get individuals to download your offering. Fear is another one of the pervasive motivators. Look at the titles of some of the recent reports and you will see fear in action.

Tools to monitor your website

2007-03-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

You can’t just put your web site on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever-changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other web sites for broken links:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:

Read the rest of this article at: The Great Ideazine

Entertain, Enlighten or Sell

2007-03-14T17:00:00.000-04:00

As an experiment, a friend of mine subscribed to ten different opt-in email marketing lists to see which ones were the most effective. Many web sites and on-line businesses have resorted to sending promotional materials to people who have subscribed to them in an effort to boost their sales or traffic. Opt-in web sites marketers send newsletters, catalogs updates and other promotional materials to web site visitors who have agreed to be updated.

Any Internet user who is on the list will receive updates through emailed articles amd promotions. If a email or promotional material piques their interest they will go to the site to learn more or to purchase the product. For the web site operators or owners, this is a chance to remind their readers of the operator’s existence and to showcase their wares. Since numerous sites on the Internet offer the same products or services in one way or the other, the competition can get pretty rough and it is easy to be forgotten.

Back to my experimenting friend, he tried to find out which opt-in marketing strategies caused the reader to beg for more. Email ranged from the very simple to the extremely outlandish. The quality differences were easy to notice. Only a few have captured the concepts inherent in an effective opt-in marketing strategy. He dubbed them effective because he felt like he just couldn't wait to go their site and learn more. The most persuasive ones even got him reaching for his credit card before he realized he was only researching.

Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using This Could Kill Your Business!

2007-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

Creativity is the one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so much competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn't matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed web site, if people don't know that you exist, it doesn't matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse, your business could just die a quiet death.

There are many methods and schemes used by e-commerce sites today. Some can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. A very effective one of these is Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral usually depicts the actions of a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, in this case, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary doing so just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of those pop up ads and spyware.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Using Free Hosting Services

2007-02-01T16:59:00.000-05:00

Free web hosting is the most basic web hosting service that you can obtain and there are many free hosting companies that are available on the internet. Free hosting services are usually financed by advertisements on web sites that are hosted.

Free web hosting services are extremely limited. If you get a free hosting service you will have ads on the top and the bottom of your web-site and depending on what your web-site is all about, it may not fit at all but for people starting out on the internet it may be the best option if you don’t have a lot of traffic or just a small site.

The type of web domain that you receive when you get a free web hosting is a subdomain with the name that you pick (yourname.webhost.com) or a name in a directory (yourname.webhost.com). For example, if the name of your free host is freestanding.com,
Then your web domain would be yourbusiness.freestanding.com.

Read the rest of the article at: Hosting Guide

Posted to Web Hosting

Capsaicin A Hot Nutrition Term You Need To Know About

2007-01-29T17:09:00.000-05:00

A incredible study was released today that demonstrated that the main compound found in hot peppers can cause certain cancer cells to die.

This compound is called "Capsaicin." This is actually the compound inside hot peppers that actually makes them hot, hot, hot.

So the hotter the pepper, the higher the level of Capsaicin.

In today's study released by US and Japanese researchers, the presence of Capsaicin showed an 80% reduction in prostate cancer alone.

Wow.

I'll tell you this,

The benefits of Capsaicin in hot peppers have been known for years and go far beyond its anti-cancer fighting attributes...

So pay close attention.

Here are the most notable (and dramatic) hot pepper health benefits:

- Anti-inflammatory: Capsaicin has been proven to fight chronic inflammation, a rapidly growing condition in North America.

- Headache Relief: Studies have shown that Capsaicin is extremely effective for relieving AND preventing cluster headaches, migraine headaches and sinus headaches. Another growing problem among many North Americans.

- Sinus Relief: Capsaicin possesses powerful anti-bacterial properties that naturally clear out congested nasal passages. Its no secret that your eyes water and you often get a runny nose when you eat a really hot pepper. That is the cleansing process at its finest.

Read the rest of this article at Healthy Eating

Posted to Weight Loss

Enjoy the Best and Pay Much Less

2007-01-26T15:40:00.000-05:00

Enjoy the Best and Pay Much Less
By: Alan Jenks

"$18/hour. Well you can live on it but it does not leave a lot extra. Extra there is no extra I am going broke!" This was a conversation I had with a client. She came to my clinic for help with stress. Her big stress was not men, career or family, like many people it was money.

I asked her where she thought her money was going and the first thing she mentioned was coffee. I have written previous articles about this expense but I explained it to her a little differently and here?s what I said.

There are several challenges with buying an overpriced coffee most mornings. One is the coffee is not good for you, most coffee houses use the very cheapest coffee available. I always laugh when my European friends come over to visit and they want a good cup of coffee, I tell them to bring it with them. They insist we go out for a cup and they are shocked at what we have been convinced it good coffee.

Another thing about coffee houses is the cost, $5.00 for a cup of coffee is nuts. Even $2.50 for a cup of coffee is way too much. I remember traveling and seeing signs in shops, ?coffee 4 cents a cup?. We are obviously a long way from those days but it is increasing in value a lot faster than gas. Can you imagine paying $5 for a cup of gas?

Read the rest of this article at Deb t Management

Posted to Debt Management

How To Become A Super Affiliate In Niche Markets

2007-01-25T14:00:00.000-05:00

Over the past several years, web hosting has grown at a fantastic rate. It must if it is going to keep up with the number of new web sites. With more companies getting into this business and finding the many benefits it can give them, the demand for web hosting has grown ever higher.

In 2005 alone, more than 38 million people put up their very first web sites. It is estimated that by 2008, the internet sales industry will be the top dollar earner in the world. Many of those sites will be offering affiliate programs that you can choose to participate in.

With this growth in web hosts, it is easier now to find the right web host for your application. With a little due diligence on your part, you should be able to find a quality web hosting company.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Affiliates

Posted to Niche Markets

Choosing Your Fashion Design School

2007-01-24T18:09:00.000-05:00

School, obviously, is the one main vehicle where you can acquire basic and formal training. This is true in all fields and industries. And as such, the fashion industry does not escape this reality.

You may have the talent and the unique sense for fashion but without structured training, you will almost certainly fail to understand and utilize your gifts fully.
One's success in the field of fashion relies partly on your choice of school. In this article, we will give you the basic criteria you can use in exploring your options for a fashion design school.

Cost - This is one of the main considerations that largely affect your choice of school. The sad truth with fashion design schools is that they are too few, and among the relatively small number are only a handful of schools that can truly deliver a quality education.

Read the rest of this article at Choosing Your Fashion Design School

Posted to Fashion Design School

Things to Consider When Looking for an Apartment to Rent

2007-01-23T17:53:00.000-05:00

Looking for an apartment may seem easy with lots of available flats out there but it’s not. Before you can find the right apartment that fits your renting needs, you would probably need to scour the entire metropolis.

Below are some of the things that you should consider. Read on as these things can help you narrow down your search and save yourself from wasting time and effort.

1. Cost

Face it, not everybody has the money and clout that Paris Hilton has. You just cannot go to an apartment, decide that you want it and then have it. For us ordinary mortals, you have to also consider your monthly budget and decide whether or you are able to afford the additional expenses that may ensue.

Read the rest of the article at Apartment Rentals

Posted to Apartments

A Closer Look at Digital Photography

2007-01-22T14:28:00.000-05:00

Digital technology has been a prevailing factor in many inventions that have helped create ease of access in almost anything we do, at home and at work. Many significant inventions were developed to make it easier for people to do their jobs. One concrete example of this type of remarkable breakthrough is digital photography, which provides greater ease and comfort in taking pictures of any kind.

What does digital photography mean?
Digital photography connotes different things depending on how people interpret it. Some people perceive digital photography as something which converts a traditional photo into digital format by simply using a scanner. Others interpret it as something that is done by means of a traditional picture taken from film and then digitized through the computer. While others see it as something captured digitally by means of a digital camera.

Read the rest of this article at Digital Photography

Posted to Digital Photography

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

2007-01-10T16:11:00.000-05:00

Joining and promoting every affiliate program that comes along is a sure recipe for disaster. You need to pick the few that are the best fit with your site(s) and have the potential to make you the most money. Ask questions first before you join an affiliate program. Do a little research about the programs that you are considering joining. Gather as much information as possible about each program to help you make an informed decision.

Fee?

Will it cost you anything to join? Is buying the product a requirement of affiliation? Most affiliate programs being offered today are absolutely free of charge. So why settle for those that charge you some dollars before joining. Then again, can you honestly push a product that you have never seen or used? Sometimes it is necessary to own the product so that you can offer your own opinion and endorsement.

Frequency of Payments

When do they issue the commission checks? Every program is different. Some issue their checks once a month, some twice a month, others every quarter, and so on. Many will hold back a percentage to cover potential returns. Be sure that you are comfortable with the payment schedule before you join a program. Many affiliate programs are setting a minimum earned commission amount that an affiliate must meet or exceed in order for their cheque to be issued.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Affiliate Programs

The Reason for Free Antenna Boosters

2007-01-05T17:29:00.000-05:00

Many believe that nothing today is free. People today see everything in life as a matter of money. You make it, you lose it, or you keep it. This outlook on life is best demonstrated by the hugely popular MasterCard commercials. Despite this lack of hope, however, people still look for items such as free antenna boosters on the Internet.

The fact is, free antenna boosters do exist. They're offered by various companies for a lot of reasons:

Promoting other products – some companies offer free antenna boosters for the sole purpose of promoting their other products. How is this done?

Incentives – companies may offer free antenna boosters as incentives to buy a certain product like a mobile phone. Since people are attracted by the prospect of acquiring something for nothing, they tend to buy products that include various types of freebies.

Quality promotion – frequently people will not try any new product until they have been assured of its quality. This is a major reason why old companies remain popular with people. This is also the reason why new companies usually have a hard time breaking into an existing market.

Frequently, a relatively new company may offer various freebies in order to show potential clients that the products they offer can compete with known brands. By introducing a person to the idea that their company can offer great antenna boosters, a company hopes to convince people to try their other products as well.

Creating a need – it is often the case that a company will offer freebies in order to establish a need. For example, a mobile phone company may give out free mobile phones in order to profit from the service fees. Some companies may offer free antenna boosters with the condition that you turn to them for any future needs.

Some companies also provide free antenna boosters because they understand the fact that there are certain places where reception can be quite poor. Of course, when your phone reception is low, there are fewer tendencies for you to make use of it. This means that the company might lose profit. They offer free antenna boosters so that they can make sure that you will be able to make use of their services in more locations, and thus, increase their profit.

They might also provide free antenna boosters with the condition that you have to switch your network service to them. The philosophy of this technique is "why get a small profit now, when you can get more profit later?"

Helping – some companies just want to help out. If a company offers free antenna boosters to its regular customers, it could be taken as a sign of concern. Many companies understand the fact that there are places where it is just so hard to get clear mobile phone reception. By providing free antenna boosters to their clients, a company will be able to make sure that customers will have no complaints about their service. This, of course, improves the image of a company, helping to get more investments and gather more customers.

Finding free antenna boosters is not impossible. You only need to have the right attitude and the right information to do it.

Read more about antenna boosters HERE

Posted to Antenna Booster

How to Create Articles Using Public Domain Material!

2007-01-02T15:40:00.000-05:00

There are many webmasters that find writing articles for their site to be a very tedious task. Many people who need to write articles also procrastinate as much as they can to delay the amount of writing they need to do. Many people dread writing articles because they find researching the topic and writing down original material is too taxing for them.

You need to have your creative juices flowing. Simply downloading an article would be plagiarism or tantamount to stealing. This is not always exactly the case. Have you ever heard of public domain material? There are articles written by many authors that have declared their works to be public domain, or works on which the copyright has expired. This means anybody can use it for whatever purpose they want. Disney is big on using material on which the copyright has expired and turning it into new copyrighted material - Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and so on.

While most authors prefer to copyright their work to protect their rights, there are a number who do not mind sharing their work. Public domain articles are not owned by anyone and can be used and abused by everyone. The writers rights have been waived or have expired and may use the material any way you see fit.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Create Articles

How Does Air Freight Service Work

2006-12-11T14:22:00.000-05:00

Our present day living is driven by the need to communicate, to be informed and to send various items worldwide. And due to time constraint and the immediate necessity to transfer everything in the fastest mode of transportation available, the airline and cargo industry have devised ways of carrying cargoes while minimizing time incurred during the process.

Cargo shipment by air is now referred to as air freight service. Items shipped in this mode range anywhere from a couple of pounds to as much as 43,000 pounds. Therefore accommodating almost all items with a need for immediate shipment.

Parcels and express letters are typically the easiest to ship due to their relatively handy size and weight. For larger-sized items however, various methods of shipment may be required depending on the number of categories including:

§ The size and weight of the item
§ The duration (number of days) required for shipment
§ The type of item

Read the rest of this article at: Air Freight

Posted to Air Freight

Building Your Business with an Opt-in List

2006-12-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

Before revealing the secrets of the trades, here are myths and fallacies that need to be cleared before one indulges into building an opt-in list. These marketing misconceptions could pose so much of an obstacle towards your profitting well from your business.

Not a lot of people use email

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods nowadays simply because virtually almost all people use email. Check on those email fields or blanks required to be filled up on various forms needed in processing different transactions. A person without an email address is tantamount to a person without an online home, which is one big shameful truth for this generation.

Email marketing campaigns can offend a lot of people

The not-so secret way to surmount this dilemma is through permission-based advertising. There's no harm in trying after asking for permission.

It's stupid to send email to all the people

The key to this predicament is to have a very discerning eye on who to email and who to not email. Better look for some metrics on how to know which group of people would give you high ROI or return on investment.

Read this article and more at : Opt-In Building Tips

Posted to Opt-In List

Your Credit Score

2006-12-06T21:52:00.000-05:00

The good thing about the twentieth century is the vast advancement in technology specifically with the use of computers. At this time and age, people don't have to worry about almost anything.

One can shop, do business, learn and enjoy the world, communicate with family and friends even at the opposite side of the globe, and make new acquaintances using the computer.

There is no need to leave the comforts of one's home, no need to tire and outdo oneself in borrowing references, and definitely no need to wait for long periods of time for letters and business correspondence to arrive, like knowing your recent credit score in the market.

Consumers can now just access the internet and get the latest updates on their credit reports for no fees and less effort. And a lot more can be obtained by being online.

Other related articles on credit can also be downloaded and looked into via the internet. Some of which are the following: Credit Reporting Bureaus, Guide on Credit Scoring, Credit Profiles, Inquiries on Credit Ratings, Tips on How to Improve One's Credit Score, and so on.

To read this and other related articles, go to : Credit Score

Posted to Credit Score

Web Impact Audio

2006-11-25T12:19:00.000-05:00

I ran this special a while back and have been hounded by folks who missed out. I don't want anyone to miss out on this opportunity, so here it is again!

What if I could show you a way to grab your visitors by the ears, virtually forcing them to not only hear most important marketing messages, but actually listen to them? And, what if I could show you how to do all that, with just a few clicks of the mouse?

It's no secret that using streaming audio on your website can be effective, but if you weren't blessed with a voice for radio, your plain-jane tone could be killing your sales.

What you need is a way to start using the same time-tested "tricks" that professional broadcasters and sound engineers have been using for years to take their clients "normal" audio, and turn it into gold.

Impact Web Audio Uses The Same "Trick" That Professional Broadcasters And Sound Engineers Use To Take 'Normal' Voices And Turn Them Into 'Gold'!

Read the rest at 7 dollar deal

Posted to Web Audio

Publishing Your eZine – the Cons

2006-11-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

As with any other types of businesses, publishing your own online newsletter a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One obvious challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer and that you run out of ideas every so often that your publishing schedule is threatening you.

Read the rest of this article at Ezine Publishing Tip

Posted to Publish

Building Your Business with an Opt-in List

2006-11-18T00:57:00.000-05:00

The New Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2006-11-14T16:27:00.000-05:00

I believe that getting good free listings for your site on Google and other search engines is the key to your success. Current research is showing that paid listings are not being clicked in any great frequency by folks with the wherewithal to make purchases. Free listings are outproducing paid listings by a high percentage. Unfortunately, most of the old Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks that could get your free listing higher up don't work and you need to develop a whole new mind set to Search Engine Optimization. After much research, and trial and error, I recommend that you pay close attention to the following suggestions that you can use to get your site to show up high in the search engine listings.
Specificity

Make your site specific to your product, newsletter or service. Do away with unnecessary frills, links, comments and graphics. If your site is about vitamins, don't talk about how great your dog is. Don't bother putting up a lot of links to unrelated sites. As a matter of fact, use as few links to external sites as possible. Make your site a veritable gold mine of information relating to your product, newsletter or service. The more focused your site, the better it will rank. You don't need every page on your site to rank well, just the gateway page or pages.

Read the rest of this article at: The Great Ideazine

Posted to SEO

How to Create an Article Using an Outline

2006-11-09T14:57:00.000-05:00

We’ve done it since junior high. No matter how many times most of us have done it, writing articles has proven to be a task that many have studiously avoided. Now at a time when writing articles could help your job or business, facing the task at hand can still create aversive behaviours.

While there are a great number of people who do not have a bad attitude toward article writing, there are those who would rather walk on red hot coals than do some article writing. What sets people apart from others in their attitude toward article writing is that they are prepared and have some practical methods and procedures for writing articles.
Creating That Outline

One of the methods you can use to prepare yourself when tasked to write an article is creating an outline first. Creating an outline for your article helps prepare you for the task ahead. You have an idea of what to do first and make a plan for your succeeding steps. Being prepared makes the job easier and faster. Being organized will allow for disorientation to be shunned.

An outline can act as the design or blueprint for your article. This will guide you in creating the introduction, body and conclusion of your article. Using point form, you can write down some of the ideas and sentences that you feel will look good in your article. These could become the focal points that could help make your article creative, interesting and appealing to a reader.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Writing

Using an Autoresponder to Publish an Ezine

2006-10-26T15:22:00.000-04:00

Managing your list and your newsletter can be a large pain if you are forced to do it manually. An autoresponder can automate and make this task less tedious.

Using an Autoresponder to Publish an Ezine

If you would be successful on the web, you need access to an autoresponder. There are many practical uses for an autoresponder such as using it to publish and distribute an ezine or newsletter. Since autoresponder services usually are set up to send automatic responses to the people on a list at certain intervals after they sign up, setting up an autoresponder to send out an ezine can be a little confusing.

The Broadcast Feature

Depending on the service or autoresponder that you are using, you will have a ‘broadcast’ feature. The broadcast feature works essentially the same as the autoresponse feature, with one big difference. The messages are not sent out at intervals after a person signs up. The messages can, however, be scheduled to go out on a certain day, which has no bearing on when the subscriber was actually added to the mailing list.

Broadcast messages are ‘one time’ messages that are only sent to your current mailing list. People who sign up for your list after the broadcast has been sent do not receive it, unless they specifically request it from a special autoresponder address, which you must set up.

Using the broadcast feature of most autoresponder services, you can simply go and either type your newsletter, or copy and paste it into the editor, then choose to send the broadcast to your entire mailing list. Most advanced autoresponder services will usually have a broadcasting feature, but you may have to poke around a little to find it.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Autoresponder

Jim Green & Associates

2006-10-18T17:13:00.000-04:00

I just noticed that my computer repair site has slipped from page one on Google to page three. I haven't changed anything so I am not sure what's happened other than that Google has changed its algorithm again!!

For those who live or work in Thunder Bay, Jim Green & Associates is a computer repair shop with an excellent reputation. We do fine work upgrading and repairing computers, and are experts in both wired and wireless networking. We get many calls to come out and fix (make secure) home and small business wireless networks.

Our computer repair services, as described by our customers, are very inexpensive compared to the quality of our work. We guarantee everything that we do, and are never happy until our customers are satisfied.

Give Jim Green & Associates a call in Thunder Bay at 807 767-8008. You won't be disappointed.

Find out more about our services at Jim Green . ca

Posted to Computer Repair

4 Ways To Get Your Subscribers To Trust You Quickly

2006-10-16T16:48:00.000-04:00

Much of the world has developed many barriers and protections to keep their email accounts free from anything but email from their mother. We are interested in those who subscribe to emails that promote products, services and sites that interest them. This is mainly because these subscribers want to know more about what these sites are offering and what can be beneficial for them. They expect to get be kept posted on what they are interested in and what is new in the market or field they have chosen.

You businesses would be very lucky to have these kinds of customers. The basic element needed to entice and subscribe these types of people is trust. When your customers trust you they will reward you with their loyalty. Many Internet users have gone to great lengths to protect their email accounts from SPAM mail. Some free-mail Internet providers and Internet service providers offer SPAM protection while there are also some Internet based companies that screen your mails for you. If you would reach these folks, you need to obtain and keep their trust and permission.

With an opt-in mail list, the mails you send containing your promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and marketing media will go through. Your intended recipient will be able to read and view what you have sent, making it a successful transfer of information. To be able to be allowed to do so, you will need permission from your recipient. To get this permission; you need to be able to get the recipient’s trust. With the great lack of regard for privacy on the Internet, getting the trust of an Internet user you don't personally know is a very big achievement.

To build a good opt-in list you need people to trust you. For a faster and quicker build up, you need to get your opt-in subscribers to trust you quickly. The faster you build your opt-in list the faster word about your site and company gets to be spread. The bigger the scope of your opt-in list the more traffic you get, which normally spells more profits. It’s easy math if you think about it. Getting the numbers is not that simple though, or maybe it is? Here are four ways to gain the trust of your readers and potential readers.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Newsletter

Increase Your Income With Videos

2006-10-11T00:50:00.000-04:00

What better way to wow your prospects and customers than to record and publish top notch, full motion and streaming screen-captured videos. There is nothing like feeling that your hard work is paying off by having your customers jumping up excitedly to buy your product right there and then.

This is web video in action. It is a proven fact; at least that is what the users of web video are saying, that giving your customers something they can actually see can explode your online sales instantly.

You do not need to have a great deal of training and video experience to be able to create stunning videos, from multimedia tutorials and step-by-step presentations available online. The process is like having your customer seated next to you and looking at your desktop, as you show them the things they need to see and hear, step by step, about your product.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Video

Drive Traffic To Your Site With A Tell A Friend Script

2006-10-05T15:31:00.000-04:00

Most webmasters have the recurring dilemma of how to increase the flow of traffic to their web sites. During the past few years many methods have been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them should work, many of them would not make even a small impact on traffic flow.

One of the methods that has spawned many success stories in driving traffic into web sites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something that they find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behaviour to spread knowledge of their products and to increase the popularity of their company or their web site. Viral marketing can make use of almost any media in enticing this behaviour. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addictive flash game, an amusing video, or any other idea that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any web site to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any web site could benefit greatly from a dose of viral marketing.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Script

Blog, Tag and Ping

2006-09-29T13:59:00.000-04:00

Just What Is Blogging, Tagging and Pinging???

There is a new trio in town called Blogging, Tagging and Pinging. It is not a new comedy team or even a singing group, but a new way to attract visitors to your web site and make more money. Blogging, Tagging and Pinging is a marketing tool that can make anyone a viable web site owner.

What’s a Blog?

Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

What’s a tag?

Simply a single term or label that sums up the topic of your blog. It is placed at the end of your blog article and is sent in the ping to the blog search engines.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Blog

Get Traffic For Free

2006-09-19T16:07:00.000-04:00

Setting up a profitable company will require a lot of things, among the most important will be capital. As I am sure you have often heard, to make money you need to have money. But you don't always need cash! If you are low on cash, but have plenty of time, you can use time as your capital. There are many ways you could find on the Internet that could help you optimize the potential of your site or business in generating traffic or sales, without spending one penny.

While cash allows you to access many ways to jumpstart your traffic flow, you can still attract a respectable traffic flow without cash by using your time, imagination and a lot of eagerness. If you have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research, you can generate a great deal of traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to increase the traffic to your site without spending a single cent. If you search the web carefully, you will find many sites that have articles that offer tips and guidelines on how to generate traffic using only free methods. Although it is possible to generate traffic without spending a single cent, it will take time and a great deal of effort on your part. Certainly, you get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I'm going to tell you about.

Read the entire article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Marketing

Advertising Through Articles

2006-09-15T17:41:00.000-04:00

Writing targeted articles can be a very efficient method of advertising your professional services, the products you sell, or even to help you find a better job.

The trick is to write a substantive article about a solution to an actual problem, about everyday life, or your own opinion on some topic of current interest. At the end of the article you should attach a short blurb or presentation on you or your business. Since this blurb must be very short (5 - 6 lines) you should always include a link to more in-depth information about yourself or your business.
Publishing Your Article

Once you have a great article, no one is going to read it unless you get it in front of their face. The first thing you should do is post your article on your own web site and your blog. Once you have done this, search out sites that deal with similar material, and to which you can submit these articles for posting or for use by newsletter editors and other publishers. The only condition you should insist upon is that the site keep the article’s original form, including your blurb, without alteration. This will give you and your article more visibility and is exactly what you want.

Don't stop here. Promote your article any and every legitimate way possible. Put a link to your article in the signature file at the end of all of your emails. If you have a database of your customers' emails, drop them an email pointing them to the article on your personal or professional web site.

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Marketing

Are You Wasting or Investing Your Time?

2006-09-07T17:25:00.000-04:00

Time is the most precious, most valuable resource that you have. Time is the greatest equalizer of human beings. If you don't admit this and treat time with respect then you will only lose what little time you have. It doesn't matter whether you are rich or poor, healthy or sick, you only have 24 hours a day to use wisely, or by default to fritter away.

Like most of us, you probably waste some of your time and energy worrying and thinking about things like how to win more money or how to live a better life. While you are doing this, you are usually forgetting about the most important thing – the time in which to live your life. A wise man will always tell you, “You can always make more money, but you can never buy more time.”

Read the complete article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Time Management

Creative and Profitable Ways to Use Autoreponders

2006-08-25T17:47:00.000-04:00

An interested visitor who has been strolling through your site has finally come to just what she is looking for and is about to make a purchase. It's a sunny afternoon, and her cat, who happens to be sitting on the moss under the visitor's large fifty-year-old snow-rose bonsai tree, suddenly jumps down, and the priceless tree topples over.

In the blink of an eye, your visitor exits your site, and your sale is dust - unless you have had the foresight to utilize an autoresponder that has captured her email address. If you have installed an autoresponder, you can then follow-up with her, and in all probability, make the sale when the poor woman has finished repotting her precious bonsai.

Autoresponders are remarkable, versatile programs that do so much more than just automatically answer your email. Here are a few ideas that will help you to creatively and productively use your autoresponder to transform the casual visitor into a profitable customer.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Autoresponder

Creating Newsletters That Sell As Well As Inform

2006-08-21T16:14:00.000-04:00

Running you own free Newsletter or Ezine can bring huge benefits to your website and profits. In this article, we will discuss how newsletters are one of the most important components for you to drive traffic to your website and build your online business.

The popularity of these newsletters is based on the need for information. The main reason most people are online is because they want and need information. That is exactly what newsletters provide, as newsletter editors are generally well informed about the area in which they write. Newsletters are mostly delivered via email, some like "The Great Ideazine", however are delivered as HTML pages. Newsletters which are delivered as HTML pages still utilize email, as the webmaster will email subscribers notifying them that a new issue is ready.

There are many advantages of starting your own newsletter, however newsletters do require quite a bit of work to get started and maintain so they may not be for everyone. If you lack the discipline to write articles on a regular basis, a Newsletter is likely not for you. Subscribers can be very fickle, and if you do not deliver quality material in a timely fashion, they will auickly become annoyed and hit the delete button when your email arrives and never read it again. If you occasionally have a problem, tell your readers, most will understand, as long as it does not become a habit.

The rest of the article can be found at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Newsletter

Advertising in Ezines

2006-08-17T17:35:00.000-04:00

We discussed earlier the advantages of having advertising space in your ezine. In this article we will discuss advertising in other companies’ ezines and how it can be as equally beneficial.

By advertising in other ezines, you can reach an audience which is highly targeted and cost effective. Moreover, you can never be accused of spamming as all the recipients have subscribed to the ezine. There are so many ezines out there covering so many different topics that it's easy to find highly targeted ones to advertise in. So if you've matched the ezine to the product you're selling, you've reached your target audience to a tee.

Almost all ezines are archived, thousands of people read these archives, and your ad will be seen by these people at no extra cost. This can bring in exposure and extra sales on a long term basis. Besides, ezine publishers may have already developed a trust between themselves and their readers. Just by placing your ad in the ezine, it's more likely to be read because it appears in a publication they like and trust.

The full article may be read at: The Great Ideazine

Posted to Advertising

Blog, Tag & Ping Tutorial

2006-08-14T14:29:00.000-04:00

· How many times have you created the perfect web site only to find that no matter what you do or what you try, Google simply won’t pick it up?

· How many great ideas have you had go down the financial toilet simply because the Yahoo spiders took too long to visit and index your site?

· How many hourshave you wasted submitting your site to every known search engine only to find that four months later you were no further than you when you first started?

Are you ready to get results?

There’s no doubt, the most difficult marketing technique for any Internet marketer to learn is how to get your sites indexed.

Until you master it, the web site that you are counting on to generate sales, build your reputation, or generate AdSense revenue is just floating in cyberspace--worthless.

Posted to Ping

7 Reasons Why You Should Write an eBook

2006-08-10T15:46:00.000-04:00

It's not true that everything that is worth writing has already been written. Since that unfortunate saying came into being, the whole universe has changed. Technology has changed, ideas have changed, and the mind sets of entire nations have changed.

The fact is that this is the perfect time to write an eBook. What the on-line publishing industry needs are people who can tap into the world as it is today - innovative thinkers who can make the leap into the new millennium and figure out how to solve old problems in a new way. EBooks are a new and powerful tool for original thinkers with fresh ideas to disseminate information to the millions of people who are struggling to figure out how to do a plethora of different things.

Everyone has at least one good eBook tucked away in their brain. The trick is to find it and let it loose. You may already have a brilliant idea, and the knowledge to back it up. Using this knowledge will enable you to write an exceptional eBook.

The rest of this article can be found at: The Great Ideazine

Posted to eBook

Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines

2006-08-02T15:51:00.000-04:00

In this article we will discuss how search engines work and how to use them to your advantage.

It doesn't matter how great your web site, if no one sees it,you're not going to make a penny. You can spend days producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no one knows where you are, how are they going to know they should buy from you?

When I first started selling on the Web, the first major problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined Web rings. Those methods all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out how to use search engines.

For the rest of the article, please go to The Great Ideazine

Posted to SEO

Evaluating Web Site Performance

2006-07-20T17:17:00.000-04:00

Setting up a web site is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your web site goals. If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your web site, all your site will be is an on-line announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some type of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your web site is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual off-line promotional activities.

Read the rest of the articles at The Great Ideazine

Posted to SEO

Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines

2006-07-10T14:28:00.000-04:00

This week we will discuss the key to improving your sites listing in the top Internet search engines. There are whole companies dedicated to this mission, so obviously this article will only touch the high points, but that should be enough to get you started.

When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’ into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancy score.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites. Let me say that again - your first task is to make sure that you know which keywords are most relevant for your site.

There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

Read the rest of the articles at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Keywords

Posted to Optimizing

Pay Per Click and Your Business

2006-07-05T15:03:00.000-04:00

Pay Per Click is usually abbreviated as PPC. The theory of PPC is simple. You pay for each user that clicks through to your web site from text ads on search engines or other popular sites. These ads are usually placed close to search results, where the advertiser (you) pays a particular amount (anything from one-cent to many dollars) for each visitor who clicks on your link or banner and lands on your web page. You make a profit if enough of these visitors can be enticed to become buyers, or at least leave their name and email address and agree to receive future mailings from you.

Basically, you purchase PPC advertising by bidding for the top or leading position on search engine results and listings. You do this by bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to your products or services - the higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results, the more the people will find the ad (and click on it) to go to your web sites (this is why some people call it "keyword auctioning"). You pay the price you bid every time a visitor clicks through to your web site.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Pay Per Click

So how can you make your article worth reading?

2006-06-17T13:58:00.000-04:00

It's all about the angle...

You are about to write an article. Your reasons are your own. Maybe it's a promotional article to gain publicity. Maybe it's a contribution to a company newsletter or journal. Maybe you just want to write articles for fame, fortune, or both...

No matter why you're writing an article, it's your responsibility to make it interesting.

So how can you make your article worth reading? It's all about the ANGLE.

First pick your topic. For example, let's say your topic is something that many people may find themselves yawning about. We hear a lot about diet pills. How can you "spice up" your topic? You need an angle!

Then you need to decide what aspect of the thing you want to write about. Are you selling diet pills? Lots of people are. Is there anything new or particular interesting in the world of diet pills that people are interested in that you know about? Is it possible to buy pills that actually make you lose weight while sleeping? Do you have the inside scoop on how the average guy or gal can stay at home and make money selling diet pills? Your job is to do the research, use some creativity, and come up with several different angles. Let's take a look at some popular article types:

Read the rest of the article at The Great Ideazine

Posted to Internet Marketing

Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines

2006-06-09T15:37:00.000-04:00

15 Day Resell Rights Success

2006-06-06T15:01:00.000-04:00

7 Dollar Deal has a new product for the next 8 days called 15 Day Resell Rights Success.

It will allow you to transform your collection of products with resell rights into income-producing assets that put money into YOUR pocket in 15 days!

For the restless, fustrated resellers out there (That's YOU, alright!)... Finally, there as a detailed, step-by-step reseller's plan that You can follow blindly and copy for under $200 - That the average reseller does not!

Post to marketing.

Dumbass

2006-06-01T17:08:00.000-04:00

I was talking to a friedn of mine yesterday while paying my phone bill. Seems that she (Jules Carlysle) has written a book about U.S. President Bush.

Dumbass is the complete compendium of stupid quotes from the grammatically and intellectually challenged 43rd President of the United States. At once laugh out loud funny and infuriating, Dumbass reflects W’s words through the lens of popular culture and history, utilizing clever and insightful quotes from our favorite comedians and historical figures to draw greater insight into the mind of this spectacularly and uniquely inept man.

Dumbass will escort you humorously through years of George's verbal carnage and leave readers wondering how and why someone so stupid was able to usurp America and orchestrate the greatest foreign relations disaster in history.

Republicans and other Bush supporters should feel free to use the 650-page volume to beat themselves about the head until November 2008.

Available at

posted to Bush

Feel, Felt, Found

2006-06-01T16:07:00.000-04:00

Today’s negotiating strategy could easily take up a whole chapter in a book. I've pared it down to the bare essentials in order to have it fit into one newsletter article.

Whenever I have been negotiating a tough deal with another party, there has inevitably come a time when I needed to change the other person’s mind on some item under negotiation. I have seen many a deal lost because one party refused to budge, and the other party couldn't let an item go. At this point, a skilled negotiator earns his keep, if he has a tool or strategy to break the impasse by getting one of the parties to change their position on the item. One of the best methods I have used, when I had strong information to support my position, is called Feel, Felt, Found.

Basically, I build empathy by acknowledging that I understand the other party’s point. I go on to reiterate their position and state that I have held that belief myself. Finally, I outline the information that caused me to change my mind and brought me to my current position.

Read the rest of this article at The Great Ideazine

Post to negotiate

Web Copy

2006-05-26T17:36:00.000-04:00

We have all heard that “it’s not what you say, it's how you say it”. Well, the same applies to website content. In this article we will discuss the importance of web copy and how to turn your visitors into customers.

Your website content should convince visitors that your service is either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of quality or is competitively priced. It should show your potential clients that you can provide the solution that they are seeking. Your product or service will solve their problems, answer a dream, enrich their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the dependable expert that they want and need!

Your website copy plays a major role in establishing and growing your customer base. Web site copy creates the “voice” of a company, just as the look and feel of a site put a “face” on the company and on otherwise intangible products and services. On an e-commerce site, the copy plays a key role in closing sales as well as in up-selling and cross-selling products and services. Good copy delights first-time visitors, encourages return visits and propels both customer acquisition and retention.

Read the rest of the article here The Great Ideazine.

Web Copy

2006-05-26T17:33:00.000-04:00

Marketing Disney Style

2006-05-21T12:12:00.000-04:00

I have spent many years watching Disney grow and thrive. I have even taken courses from Disney to help me to understand why and how they market their empire. Once I had a good understanding of Marketing Disney Style, I undertook to create a plan that would work for my, or for that matter, any small business. Much of what Disney does is to market their brand is beyond the resources of the average entrepreneur, but the rest can be extremely valuable.

I tried to condense Disney’s Marketing Magic into 1,000 words and quickly realized it was not possible for me to do it. I now believe that I need to write a multi-page article to deliver the full goods on “Marketing Disney Style.” Maybe I’ll turn it into an eBook if there is a market.

The complete article can be found at The Great Ideazine