Marketing No Brainers

Please read this great article by info product
marketing whiz Jim Edwards.

Which mistakes are you making?

The Biggest Mistakes Businesses Make Online

- by Jim Edwards

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

After 9 years in online business I’ve seen a few things that
would make your hair stand on end, your toenails curl, and
your stomach sink.

I’ve heard just about every “great” business idea and
crackpot scheme and met the full range of online geniuses
and hacks.

Whether they sell a $29 ebook on foot fungus removal or 20-
million dollar yachts to Arab oil sheiks, the difference
between the successes and the failures comes down to making
s few simple mistakes.

Mistake #1 - Looking For The “Undiscovered” Market

Ask any bank robber why he robs banks and he’ll tell you,
“Because that’s where the money is!”

Every smart bank robber who wants to net at least $10,000
per job would not knock over the local 7-11 in the “hope”
they had piles of cash from a busy weekend.

Yet, in the online world, thousands, even millions of people
try to build a business on “undiscovered” markets.

The problem with doing it this way means you will take
longer to succeed and operate with a much higher risk of
failure since you don’t know the market has proven itself
profitable.

Always pursue proven markets where customers already spend
money online and view “competition” as a sign of a healthy
market rather than something you should avoid.

Mistake #2 - Focus Strictly On Product

Many people fall into the deadly trap of spending a lifetime
(or at least a few years) perfecting their product. Whether
it’s a book, a video, a widget, or literally a new “mouse
trap,” they devote all their time to creating the “perfect”
product.

Then, the instant they try to start selling it, reality
smacks them upside the head that nobody wants to buy their
product, or they lose interest once they must get down to
the serious business of marketing.

Even worse, some adopt the attitude that selling is
distasteful and all they want to do is “create.”

Please understand that if you want to operate an online
business at any level, you or your company must consider
yourselves marketers first and product creators second.

Mistake #3 - Swing For The Fence Every Time

Everyone wants to hit a “home run” every time they step up
to the plate, but that’s not physically possible.

Sometimes going for the higher percentage base hit will help
your team win the game rather than you just swinging as hard
as you can to hit one over the fence.

Successful online businesses know that by practicing the
fundamentals they will get a base hit (succeed) more often
and, in the process, hit the occasional home run simply
because they keep getting up to bat.

I would personally rather operate with a couple of dozen
websites that made me a few thousand dollars each, than to
try to create and maintain a website that represented my
entire source of business income.

Mistake #4 - Waiting For Visitors

Once your site works and you know it converts lookers into
buyers, if you want to make it “big,” you must spend at
least half your time finding and evaluating new sources of
targeted traffic to your site.

Too many people want to adopt the “build it and they will
come” mentality, but that’s the surest way to die a slow and
painful online death.

–
Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the
creator of an amazing course that will teach you step-by-
step and click-by-click how to finally create your own
money-making mini-sites…

-=-=-==-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

“Finally! A Quick and Easy Way For YOU to Painlessly Set Up
Your OWN Moneymaking ‘Mini’ Websites… Without Being a
Computer Geek, Buying Expensive Software, or Paying
Outrageous Fees To A Webmaster!”

Click Here for the Mini Site Creator Home Study Course!

Avoid the biggest mistakes businesses make online.

One of these mistakes is the “paralysis of analysis.”
People flounder when they want to get their website
up. This course is not cheap, but it will save you loads
of time. You’ll know EXACTLY what to do to get
your web site up and running.

It isn’t some lame ebook, but it is a course that
you can take at home, with plenty of great insider
info on what to do, how to do it, and in what order.

5 star Marketing No Brainer rating!

Mini Site Creator

Making Money With Blogs Part 3

In parts 1 and 2, you learned how to research a profitable blog topic at Yahoo/Overture, open a blogger account, set up the blogger account, get a domain name and web hosting, and ftp your blog to your hosting account.

Now we’ll flesh out your blog content, link to your affiliate product, install an affiliate banner, and generally clean your blog up and make it look good.

1. Get the affiliate links from whatever Clickbank program you have chosen as your blog topic. If a banner is offered, get one also. If there is no banner then you can make one. Save the links in notepad.

2. Open your blog in your blogger control panel. Go to the template settings and scroll down the window with the template html in it until you find the sidebar content. It is way down at the bottom in most templates. You’ll often find a comment line there saying something like “you can put sidebar content here.” Look above this comment for the “links” title and the html list below it. Generally it is premade, all you have to do is change the html link and text in the list. Basic html skill will be required. If you need help with this Blogger help has sections and links.

3. Replace the links with your Clickbank Affiliate links. There are usually three links by default in this list. Link 1 goes to the affiliate sales page. If your affiliate program has a link to a newsletter page then use that as link Alternately, use a related affiliate program at Clickbank. And if neither of these options work, then word two links differently but point them both to the affiliate sales page. Just delete the third link html in the sidebar.

4. Select a small banner from your affiliate program, and paste the code for it up in the top of the “main” section. If you make mistakes, Blogger lets you back up to a previous state, so don’t worry. Just keep at it until you get it right. If there is no banner for your chosen affiliate product you might want to wonder why. But you can make one yourself from the info product cover and some basic html knowledge.

4. Write a general article about the product topic. Post it.

5. Now wait a day. Write a review of the affiliate product. Post it.

6. Now go to Pingomatic and fill in the fields to ping your blog. The rss line in the form is your blog website name with /atom.xml after it. Ping your blog.

7. If you have My Yahoo, My MSN, and Google accounts you can go in them and add your blog’s feed address - the same /atom.xml address you used in Pingomatic - into your account.

6. Continue on with an article / review every day until you have six or 7 articles done. Ping when your blog is republished, but never ping more than once a day. Never ping unless you have added new content. I usually ping every other day when I add content daily.

7. Make sure you finish the blog on the sixth or seventh post with a review. I do this by writing very short reviews, alternated by articles, as I go along. Then in the last post I summarize all the key points from the reviews into a complete review. You can really do this a lot of ways, some topics are better if all posts are articles until the last post.

Important, if you skip a day, don’t put all your posts into one day, just continue on where you left off until you have your six or seven posts. Do this naturally so Google doesn’t mix you up with the blog spammers.

Also, remember that you can delete entries, add new ones, edit old ones. Your imagination should be able to run with this. It is how you can rotate content to keep your blogsite fresh.

Blogger lets you preview and edit changes to your heart’s content. The only possible problem from this is if you have the “notify Weblogs” turned on, cause then you are pinging them every time you post, but also every time you republish a change. That is why we have it set to off. Since Weblogs is notified by Pingomatic, you also avoid double pinging them by having the setting turned off in your Blogger control panel.

You can get an Adsense account through Blogger. The link is in the templates section and they will automatically place the adsense block for you. I have Adsense on some blogs set up like this, and not on others. Depends on the topic and what the clicks pay. Also you may find that some Adsense formats don’t fit the blogger template you have chosen. Just pick another one that does.

In my blogs that have Adsense I generally put a small horizontal billboard on top, sometimes just the text links showing. And I generally ad an Adsense block - you have to do this manually - to the sidebar, underneath everything else.

Affiliate income should dwarf Adsense income if your article and review copy presells. So don’t get carried away with Adsense unless you want your blog to solely be monetized by Adsense. I see ten to twenty times the revenue from carefully chosen affiliate programs that I do from Adsense. But if after six months or so you’re getting no where with the affiliate product you can convert the whole project to Adsense.

The most important thing I’ll save for last. Put a newsletter signup box on the top of the sidebar. Your autoresponder host has a built-in subscribe form maker. Don’t tell me you don’t want to do this, because it is the biggest sales enhancement you can make to your site.

Capture your visitor’s name and email address. Bribe them for their name with something of value, which can be a teaser summary of the affiliate product you sell. Then follow up at least ten times with the subscriber. You’ve already got most of the content for the autoresponder messages. Just rework your blog posts.

To really get your mind going on the possibilities, Aweber will send your blog posts out automatically as your newsletter. What a concept!

That’s it. Now go and make some money. Comments or questions please, as we’ve gone through this on the fly.

Making money with blogs part 3.

Making Money With Blogs Part 2

In part one of this course, you learned how to select a topic for your affiliate marketing blog and signed up for blogger, and made a test post. Review that post and complete the tasks before going on with this lesson.

Today’s lesson is short. We are going to put our Blogger blog on a real webhost with a real domain name, and get away from the blogspot stigma. Pick a good keyword domain name for your blogger blog. Try for a dotcom name. Use the domain search at Godaddy. Other tools for this are at dotcenter and domainsbot.

You can register a dotcom name at GoDaddy for $8.95.

You’ll need web hosting.

You can use most any host of course. You just need to be able to ftp your blogger blogs into your hosting account. I like HostGator which has the easy install Fantastico Cpanel control panel for when you want to move on with WordPress for your blogs. Hostgator is a great place for Cpanel hosting if, like me, you’ll want more than one blog for your web projects.

Now to the action steps:

1. Register your domain at Godaddy

2. Click on your blogger blog in your blogger dashboard and change the following settings:

Important, do all the following steps before you change your blog to ftp to your webhost.

In the settings: basic tab, change your blog title to have the most important keywords for your clickbank affiliate product. Write a description, using the keywords once or twice. This should make some sense, so use clear sentences because this text will be shown in SE results. Leave all the boxes checked yes.

Still in settings, go to the publishing tab and turn Notify Weblogs to off. We will use Pingomatic to ping weblogs. If you do a lot of editing from within blogger you will be pinging Weblogs constantly. No need to. Once is enough.

Now go to the formatting tab, and change the date header to one showing only days of the week.

In the comments tab, make sure you have enabled word verification and comment moderation. You’ll need to put your email address in too.

In the archiving tab, either pick monthly or none. Make sure the enable post pages is set on yes.

In the site feed tab, make sure site feed is set to yes and enable full descriptions is also yes.

In the template section, look at the templates and see if there is one you like better. Change to this now if so.

Now you have your blog the way you want it. Make sure you save and make sure you publish it. Remember, don’t ftp to your host yet.

3. Make sure your new domain name points to your webspace. Get the nameservers you need to use from your host. You do this by changing the nameservers in your GoDaddy account for your domains. There is generally a few hours wait, sometimes it’s as long as 36 hours, before your domain name propogates across the internet.

4. Go back to blogger and change your basic publishing settings to ftp to your website ftp address. You can find the ftp settings in your web hosting control panel. Save the settings. Publish. Voila, your blogger blog now has its own name and space on the web.

In the next installment we’ll put real content and affiliate links on the blog. Stay tuned.

No Affiliate Manager Training Programs Here

Five days ago I mentioned this topic briefly. I’m getting so many emails on this today that it is the topic today instead of the affiliate blog how-to I promised. More on blogging for bucks tomorrow.

I’m sure Anik’s product is wonderful. But I’m also sure that less than 2% of you out there can benefit from a near $1,000 course in how to recruit and train an affiliate manager.

Do you have at least four hot products with high demand? Are you selling your info-products at Paydot.com and Clickbank? Have you made $1,000 in a month selling info-products?

If so, and you are just overwhelmed by the lack of time to handle all your affiliates , go ahead and get it. If not, spend your time and money getting yourself some of your own products made.

For product creation inspiration, click here.

And stay tuned to the upcoming posts for some Marketing No Brainer affiliate training.