Marketing No Brainers » 2006 » August| Cost Effective Internet Marketing |

Know It All Marketing Gurus

August 29th, 2006Internet Marketing, Rants, Strategy 1 Comment

Do you know a “know it all” marketing guru?

If you’re like me, you get emails from some “experts on everything.” I’ll use a specific example here as it is close to one of my market niches.

Every week I get an email from a young man who has (had?) a site in a narrow niche, which is email list building. Once upon a time, I got on his list because he had some very good home-made videos on the list building process.

But a funny thing happened right after I got on his list. I never got any information on building email lists. I got lots of Adwords, Adsense, SEO, and other kinds of promotional ClickBank type stuff. But hardly anything about eMail.

His list building material was very good. It was specific.

The emails he sends now are primarily canned sales pitches, the same lame pitches that every other “me too - know it all” marketer is sending. C’mon, give me a break. You can’t know that much about everything. Well maybe you can if you’re John Reese, but this guy is no John Reese.

So this is a heads up for all you who have email lists, and I hope all of you do. Stay on topic. Don’t try to be a “me too - know it all” marketing guru. Or at least if that’s what you want to be, then tell everyone up front.
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PDF eBooks Cheap and Easy

August 28th, 2006How To Courses, Product Creation, Uncategorized No Comments

Have you ever been to the point of tearing your hair out over the (what ought to be) simple task of making a pdf eBook? I don’t mean just any pdf conversion of a Word document. I mean one where you can have clickable links.

Over the last couple of months I’ve tried most of the pdf converters out there. The problem was always getting clickable links in my pdf ebook. The hyperlinks I generated in Word weren’t clickable in the converted pdf document.

Somewhere I read Open Office was the answer, but in the latest “stable” installation I tried the hyperlinks were still dead as a doornail. I did like it though, and if you don’t have Office it is a great free alternative.

I Googled the pdf hyperlink subject with all kinds of qualifiers, and finally stumbled upon pdfMachine. The good news was there was a free version, pdfMachine White, which I could try. So try it I did.

And VOILA! Hyperlinks that worked. Now to be perfectly clear, embedded text hyperlinks were nonfunctional. But those that I’d originally typed out in the Word doc like

http://www.pdfmachine.com/genp/download.shtml

worked just fine. So it was a simple matter to change the text in the Word doc file and make valid standalone URLs of all the hyperlinks I wanted in the text.

pdfMachine installs as a printer driver. You just write or edit your original Word doc file, and then “print” with the installed “Broadgun pdfMachine” printer.

I haven’t tried it, but I think you could have a completely free ebook authoring system using Open Office and the Broadgun pdfMachine White. I already had uninstalled the Open office word processor by the time I found pdfMachine. But I can vouch it works with Word, and can see no reason it wouldn’t work with Open Office.

A note for those that want to try pdfMachine. You’ll need to have Adobe Reader installed. If you’re doing pdfs you’d better have it anyway. You can find all the links for the free programs you need at my web resources page.

So now you have a great free tool to use with all that Private Label content. Check out Doug and Xavier’s PLR giveaway for a bunch of files you can customize to your heart’s content.

You’ll have the keys to making a bunch of pdf ebooks with Your Links in the text. If you use this free version of pdfmachine, just remember the limitation and edit out the embedded hyperlinks and instead just type out the entire url in the Word or Open Office doc you are converting.

And of course I feel compelled to mention that the paid version they offer does allow embedded hyperlink conversion. But hey, maybe you can get along without it, as I did.
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What I Learned From a Server Crash

August 22nd, 2006Domains & Web Hosting No Comments

A visit from Murphy

Sunday evening I found out that five of my web sites weren’t working. After a quick try to fix the problems at the web host (ex web host now :-)), I realized that they weren’t going to be any help at all. They are in Germany. It was the middle of the night there. Two days later they still haven’t called me back.

Most of my sites I host on my own server at Bizaddy.com, but for the sake of security, having links to my own sites from different IPs, etc., I had maintained a hosting account at 1and1 for a few years. I have even recommended them to people in the not so recent past. And probably for most people they are ok.

The problem was that I was in the middle of a JV giveaway event. The site for that was one of the ones on 1and1, and was totally dead. I needed to get it up in a hurry. Also the site I use for tracking my affiliate links was kaput on the same host.

So I did the intelligent thing and put them back up on my own server.

I was able to get the tracking site back up in practically no time, but the JV giveaway site gave me fits with the dns resolving. It didn’t help that I was trying to figure this out in the middle of the night. Finally I just gave up and went to bed.

With a fresh mind the next day I was able to get it all sorted out, and of the five sites, only one is totally gone. It was a new site, not backed up yet. I think I have most of the content saved here and there but I’m not sure where.

I learned (re-learned?) three things from this.

1. Customer support is more important than price.
2. Back up your sites, even your brand new ones.
3. Be your own customer, always.

Backing up your sites is elementary. Just do it as soon as you put a site up.

You’d think customer support wouldn’t be an issue with your own server. But it is. One of the reasons my Bizaddy site is such a no-brainer is that I get customer support 24-7, just as any customer does. Sometimes I need it just as much as a newbie. Or more!

Oh and I realize not all of you know Murphy, that guy who said, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” So be prepared.
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Server Crash

August 21st, 2006Domains & Web Hosting No Comments

Just when I thought it would never happen to me, along comes a server crash that trashes some of my sites. Of course it happened yesterday, on a sunday. Of course, since the crashed server was located overseas, where it was the middle of the night, I didn’t get much help.

I took the quick route out with this blog by changing the publishing back to blogspot, (it had been hosted at my server that crashed) and redirecting the domain here temporarily. Ugh, all the post pages are now invisible to the search engines so I’ll have to fix that pretty quick.

My redirect / tracking domain was on the server that crashed. I got that back up, just a few minutes ago, but on a new server where I am pretty sure I’ll get better 24/7 support. I am still working on two other sites, and they’ll be back up as soon as I can resolve the DNS issues. I have full backups of these, so no big deal. Just a bit aggravating is all.

But it looks like one Wordpress site is just gone. It is one I had just put up, and hadn’t backed up yet. Oh well.

If you’re trying to access ListBuild.com today, for some reason the DNS isn’t resolving yet. I’ll email all of you when it gets pointed right and the site actually works again.

Just another day in Internet paradise
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