Tag Archives: online business

Copywriting, Internet Business, Traffic

5 Ways To Milk Your Articles To The Max

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Milk Your articles for all they're worthWhen most marketers write articles, the typical scenerio is to submit them to their favorite article directories.  Many article marketers also invest in article submission software to help speed up to process and to get their articles out to hundreds & even thousands of article & ezine directories.

After that, they’re finished.  On to the next one… But why stop there?  Why not milk that article for all it’s worth?

You might be thinking, “well what the heck else can I do with it?  I’ve already submitted it to a zillion article sites, c’mon Jack!”

Well, don’t just stop at the article directories, here are 5 quick tips to super charge the pulling power of your articles.

1. Stick your article on your blog and convert it to a podcast using Feed2Podcast.com.  Now submit the podcast to itunes and other podcast directories.  Don’t have a blog?  Not to worry.  You can use ReadTheWords.com to create a podcast from your article instead.  ReadTheWords.com will even covert .pdf files and other documents.

2. Now format your article into a press release and submit it to PRWeb for premium exposure.  If you prefer the free route, try some of these links:

i-newswire.com
clickpress.com
free-press-release.com

3. Modify your article into a step by step tutorial format.  Now you can submit your tutorial to eHow.com and Tutorialized.com.  If this is a really good article, you could also use it as a bonus incentive to include when marketing your own product, or an affiliate product.

4. Now that you got a snappy tutorial created, why not convert it into a PowerPoint presentation?  Remember to add your link to the first & last slides so that people can click through to your site. You can now submit it to ScreenCast.net & SlideShare.com to name a couple.  Give this an extra kick by breaking it up into a couple parts & link part 2 back to your website.  This is sure to get them clicking through.

5. Finally, convert your tutorial into a .pdf file & upload it to sites like scribd.com, or yudu.  Sites like these get tons of exposure & the .pdf files tend to rank pretty decently in the search engines as well.  I recommend using OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice Writer has a button right in the toolbar to convert to .pdf.  OpenOffice is a free office suite and just as good, if not better than Microsoft Office.

As you can see, by using your imagination, you can stretch out a simple article into a whole host of things that can drive traffic and revenue to your online business.  You can even turn a well written article/tutorial into an info product, especially if you took your PowerPoint & used Camtasia studio to step through your PowerPoint while elaborating on each point in your slide.  Voila, instant info product!

All this from one article.  Just imagine if you made this a regular practice when writing articles.  You will discover that a little extra effort goes a long way.

Internet Business

The Portability of Internet Business

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Photo from flickr - anyakaWell, it’s been over a week now since I arrived back in the good ol’ USA, and I have to say that it was a great trip.   Every time I visit China I discover new and fascinating experiences that make the trip just that much more rewarding.

While we were enjoying ourselves in China, seeing the sights and experiencing the sides of Beijing that normally only the natives are privy to, my internet business was still perking along as if I had never left.

My product & affiliate sales continued right along just like clockwork.  This is one of the biggest perks of having of an internet business.  Portability!

Back in the day, I owned a ‘brick & mortar’ business.  It was an electronics repair shop.  The income was pretty decent, but the problem was that there was no freedom to go with it.  It wasn’t unusual to work 15 hour days.  When all the bills were paid & given the number of hours I worked, I was usually left over with less than what I would make on an equivalent day job.

I was one of those people that got caught in the classic self-employment trap of the day.    I took my skill and turned it into a ‘business’.  The only problem was the the ‘business’ was really a J.O.B., only I was the boss.  If I wanted to get paid, I had to work alot of hours & be at my store everyday.

Taking a vacation was unheard of.  My business would have been tanked in a week.  Looking back, I now know that a freedom system could have been built into my business, had I thought about my core desires in the beginning.

What I love about online business is that you can start a very profitable business for almost nothing compared to a traditional brick & mortar type.

Creating a freedom system is also very easy compared to the latter.  Online business procedures can be automated in many ways including software & outsourcing.

For example, for digital software products, you can set your autoresponder & thank you page to automatically send the download info to your customer after they pay for their product.  This is the basic concept of ‘autopilot income’ that you hear about so often.

Affiliate marketing is another such example.  As an affiliate marketer, you are providing a service to your visitors.  You are recommending products that may benefit the visitor and referring them to the vendor.  In return, you are automatically paid a commission when they purchase the product.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world as long as you have a laptop & an internet connection, you are in business.  You can be living in Brooklyn, but sitting on a beach in Maui with a laptop and a wireless internet connection and monitor your business anytime.

Never before has starting a business been so inexpensive while giving you exposure to potentially millions of people. Never before has it been so easy to just pick up and go anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection, and still run your internet business.

Home no longer has to be a fixed location.  Home can be anywhere that you are.

Like any type of business, building an internet business takes effort, practice & time.  Many things will fail before seeing any impressive results.  Don’t buy into the ‘automatic riches with no work’ B.S. out there.

It takes focusing on one objective and seeing it through until you succeed.  You must take your online business just as seriouly as an offline business.

Once you accomplish success in your online business, you can take your ‘office’ anywhere.  You have achieved portability.

Making the decision to start your internet business is the first step.  Taking action on making your dream a reality is the second and most vital step.  As your business grows, start outsourcing & automating the repetitive procedures so that freedom is part of your formula.  If your business can run without you, then you have attained true freedom.

That’s what being an online entrepreneur is all about.  Without the freedom principle in your business, you are just working another J.O.B. minus the boss.

If you haven’t taken the plunge yet, then make today the day to declare your freedom!  Join the ranks of the portable lifestyle and discover what you have been missing.  It all starts with taking that first step, and then never looking back.

Internet Business, Other Blog Stuff

The High Road To Beijing

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Right now I’m flying along at around 35,000 feet with my wife Tingting & son Kevin to Beijing.  If you haven’t done much traveling, you should consider getting out there and creating some memories to cherish and look back on when you’re old & decrepit.

Every time I visit China, I experience something new and exciting.  I’ll be sharing pics and videos that I’ll be taking during my 3 weeks there.  I hope you’ll follow along and share in my experiences. 🙂

Helpful Tips & Tricks, Internet Business, Product

Instantly Beef Up Your Affiliate Conversions

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Affiliate Marketing Money PictureWhen I first got into the online marketing scene back in late 2005, I immediately came out of the gate with my first product.   To me, it seemed logical that having your own product line is ultimately the best way to build a business online… at least for me.

There’s tons of ways to make money online, including creating e-commerce stores, providing services to online & offline businesses, affiliate marketing, etc.

Well, in the beginning, I had no Idea how to market my product, so I stuck it on eBay & did quite well with it.  This was when they allowed digital products.

In the mean time, I was also curious about affiliate marketing.  The idea of putting up a review site with a couple affiliate links, then passively making money every month seemed very appealing.

No tech support, no dealing with refunds, none of the typical headaches that come with having your own products.

So like everyone else, I jumped onto the affiliate review sites & landing pages bandwagon.  I put up my product reviews, pointing out how great product ‘X’ was and pointing my visitor to the affiliate link where they could make the purchase.

I remember after setting up my first affiliate review page thinking that the money was going to immediately start rolling in.  I would check my email about every 10 minutes looking for that coveted “Congratulations! You Have Made a Sale” type email.  Really! No kidding, almost every 10 minutes, heh heh!

Needless to say, that first day came & went, and so did the next… and the next.  Hmmmm, maybe they don’t like the way I write?  Does the product suck?  But it’s a hot seller!  So I started testing different variations of the review page.

Hmmmm, two weeks and counting – still no sale.  Uggggh!  I had already sold dozens of my own product, but nothing from these stupid affiliate products.  Maybe affiliate marketing was just a crock.

About this time, I was ready to pitch the whole affiliate marketing thing out the window.  Around this same time, I had injured 3 of my fingers pretty badly on a Skil saw, and they were sliced up pretty good.  I had lost much of the feeling in them at the time.  Because of this, I was interested in finding some type of skin cream that could help my fingers heal faster and maybe even minimize scarring.

So I did the next natural thing.  I Googled for “best skin care for injuries” and many variations including keywords like “review”, etc.

Well, wouldn’t you know it.  Every website I came across had affiliate reviews of how great THEIR product was.  Hmmm.  I didn’t put much credibility into it because I knew that they were probably just trying to get a sale.

I searched onward…  Onward some more… and more!  I must have went through a hundred results before I finally found ONE site that didn’t appear biased.

This site pretty much had a fact sheet format which did comparisons of different skin care products for fast healing & scar reduction.  I was able to use this information to make an informed decision and I bought the product through their link.

YIKES! I suddenly had the “Duh!” moment when I realized how aggravated and frustrated I was getting, trolling hundreds of search results just to get some real info on what I needed.

I already had made my mind up that I wanted to buy, but I had to have real validation that my purchase decision was okay.  I went back to my own affiliate review page and realized that it didn’t look any different in format that those other hundred sites that did absolutely nothing for me!

This time, I changed my landing page from a fluffy, feel good review, to an informative fact sheet, modeled after the website that I had purchased through.  It wasn’t an exact copy of course, but by educating the customer in a complete non-biased fashion, using bullet points and snippets of customer reviews from other shopping sites (with credit back to them of course), I suddenly realized that this page was now an authority page, not a pre-sell.

This time I was excited again, but I didn’t check my email every 10 minutes like I did before.  The next morning while checking my email, there it was… “You Have Made A Sale!”.  I could hear the angelic music in the back ground as I clicked the email link.

I’ll never forget the excitement of my first affiliate sale and the valuable lesson I learned from that whole experience.  I started to realize right then & there not to follow the herd.  Do the opposite.  As marketers, its easy to get so focused on making a landing page, and pushing your visitors to that affiliate link, that we forget about their real needs.

I have found that the real secret is to intercept the buyers.  People who have already decided that they are going to buy.   Generally, we need to validate our decision before pulling out the credit card and that’s where you should come in.  No need for pre-sell, just the facts validating to your visitor that they had made the right decision, and now it’s time to click the link.

It’s brain dead simple.  Not something the ‘gurus’ want you to know, LOL.

From that point on, I stayed in the affiliate marketing game which ultimately inspired my next product.  That product was AmazingCloaker.   Between the fact-sheet layout and the AmazingCloaker embedded-cookie feature, my affiliate projects became a whole new ballgame!

Copywriting, Internet Business, Reviews

Being Proactive is Hard

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By magnusmagnus on Flickr

Did you know that nearly everyone that jumps into the “make money online” arena spend tons of cash on how to do this, and how to do that?  Perhaps they’ll shoot out of the gate running and register a web domain & get hosting.  They might even go so far as to put up a web page with a few affiliate links (but not likely).

It’s sad, but true.  I would estimate that a good 98% out there never take any action whatsoever on the information that they purchase.  You might be thinking “well maybe that’s true, but I’m an exception.  One of these days I’m going to get moving and get myself online and making some serious bank, just as soon as I find the right system.”

Hmmm, I hope that everyone reading this blog succeeds.  That’s the point of being here, right?  The keys to success is based on two major factors.  Learning to market online, of course, but it must be followed through with taking decisive action.

This means stepping outside of the comfort zone.  This is unexplored territory, which is a scary place to be if you are to venture out into changing your future.

This is why 98% never actually follow through.  It’s more comfortable to keep ‘working on building a business’.  As long as you are ‘working on it’, you are not failing.  The down side of always ‘working on it’ is that you’re not getting anywhere either.  Before you know it, another year is shot and it’s time to make that new year’s resolution that THIS time, you are going to really do something.

If you fall in this category, do yourself a favor.  Don’t make a resolution this year.  Instead, stop what your doing right now and get that domain that you’ve been thinking about all this time.  Really!  I’m serious!  Go get it right now… I’ll just wait here until you return…

Got it?  Great….  What?  No we’re not finished yet!  Now let’s monetize it.  No matter what you heard, you need to DO something to make money.  Yes, everybody who is making anything off of the internet is selling something.

It could be affiliate marketing, or maybe you like to write and you created an ebook, report, or audio/video CD.  Ok, now let’s find a decent sales page with a similar product from another site and study it.  What is it that makes you want to buy their product?  Nothing?  Find another sales page.  Ok, now what is it?

Write out that sales page by hand to train your mind how to write decent copy and to be persuasive to your visitors.  This is a great way to improve your copywriting skills.

If you are into affiliate marketing instead, go out to some good affiliate review sites and do the same thing.  By the way, you can learn the ropes of affiliate marketing here.

Now download a copy of Kompozer and create your sales page.  Sign up for a Clickbank account and put your product into the affiliate system.  The cost to register your product is $49.  If you’re broke right now, get a PayDotCom account instead… Your first product is free to sell through them.

Paste your payment link into your sales page and viola! you’re in business!  See?  That wasn’t so hard.  Now you can drive traffic to your site.  That will be the subject of my next post.

Staying in a reactive cycle of broke and searching for opportunities is much easier than being proactive, getting out of your comfort zone, and going for it.

Remember what I’ve said before; being broke is a direct result of inaction.  Inaction to build your business.  Inaction to spend your money wisely, etc… etc.

Act on getting your online business started and you will quickly see that actually DOING is a lot easier than you think!

Internet Business, Product, Reviews

Submitting to Blog Carnivals Can Be Painful

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pic from www.halfpixel.comLast year when I first started submitting to blog carnivals, I often wondered if it was worth it to go through all the tedious work of looking through the list of several hundred blog carivals to find the ones relevant to my blog post.

To be effective, the best way was to start at the beginning of the drop down list and scan through each listing until you find a blog carnival relevant to your subject matter.  Select it, fill out the form and click Submit.  Then repeat the process until you’ve made it all the way through the list.  Usually, it took me about an hour to do the whole list.  I kept coming back because the results were really making a difference.

The problem was that since I didn’t want to outsource it (outsourcing time consuming tasks is good by the way), I would have to muster up the ambition and time to do it.  That didn’t always work out so well.

I finally reached the point where I thought to myself “there MUST be a better way, Ugggh!”

When looking for a solution for this problem, I made the most logical move… I Googled it.  I searched for “blog carnival submitters” and a zillion variations of it.  I found a number of blog carnival submission services & some weren’t half bad.  Robert Phillips was way up there on my personal list.  I was pretty surprised that there was no software to handle this task though.  Heck, even if I had a submission service, I would find this very handy!

Well, being that programming is one of my favorite past times (I know, I’m a geek), and making money is another, I did the next logical thing… created my own blog carnival submitter!  Anyone following my blog for a while is likely familiar with Xingla Pro.

This is my favorite piece of software that I have written and I’m quite proud of it.  Today I just officially released version 3.

Xingla Pro 3 has some exciting new features that weren’t available before.

For example, Xingla Pro 3 now has a Quick Finder search feature.  Before, you still had to troll through the entire drop down box to build your list.  By saving your list, you still saved a ton of time with Xingla Pro 2, but I was still haunted by the tedious process of building the list itself.

Now with the Quick Finder, you can type in a keyword relating to the type of carnival you are looking for and it will list out all the available blog carnivals for that keyword!  Then you can simply select and add to your new list, or your current one.  Yesterday, I built a list of 23 carnivals relating to “internet business” and “making money” in under a minute.

The next thing that I felt the new Xingla needed was some way to let you know when you had dead carnivals in your list.  Blog carnivals come & go, and before you know it, you have a list speckled with dead blog carnivals.  You might think you have a list of 30 but maybe only 22 of them are still active.

This is where the “Check Inactives” feature comes into play.  Now you can simply click a button and it will instantly scan your list for dead carnivals.  You will then be shown a list of the dead carnivals and asked if you want to delete them.  Pretty cool stuff if I don’t say so myself.

Other new features include a smart dupe checker to warn you that a carnival already exists in your list if you happen to be modifying your list with new carnivals.

After filling out the form fields, you can now simply press the ‘Enter’ key to begin the Auto Submit process.  Previously, you had to be careful not to do this or the “Submit” button would activate from within blogcarnival.com.  Anytime I fill out online forms, just by shear reflex, I hit the ‘Enter’ button as soon as I’m ready to submit.  Adding the ability for Xingla Pro to auto submit upon detecting the ‘Enter’ key press was a natural evolutionary step.  It’s a convenient alternative to clicking the ‘Auto Submit’ button.

The Auto Update feature has also been improved.  I noticed that in some Windows configurations, people were not always able to update smoothly.  Now it should be a breeze for everyone.  Xingla Pro checks for updates in the background when you start the app.

Also, I’ve had numerous requests to to have an affiliate program for Xingla Pro.  As of today, Xingla Pro 3 now has an affiliate program with a 50/50 split after merchant fees.  At the moment this is a $47 payout.

Finally, Xingla no longer requires the Microsoft dotNet Framework!  I rebuilt Xingla Pro from the ground up in an entirely new programming language that is Win32, and doesn’t force its users into installing the dotNet Framework if they don’t already have it.

Some of my customers didn’t have the dotNet Framework on their machines which made for a long beastly install as it auto downloaded from Microsoft and configured itself. Afterwards, it required a restart of their PC just for good measure.  It kinda reminded me of the classic double glove slap… Wap-Bap!

Xingla Pro has a sleek new look, and my testing indicates that it’s rock stable.  If you have a blog, or are running a submission service, you should check out the video on the sales page here:

http://www.KeiferSoft.com/XinglaPro

BTW – Next week I’ll be raising the price on Xingla Pro to $147.

Helpful Tips & Tricks, Internet Business

Top 10 Internet Marketing Web Design Mistakes

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Internet Marketing Web Design Mistakes

Does your website grab your visitors and keep them around wanting more?  Or does it send them running the other way vowing never to return again?

Here are the top 10 most common mistakes that I see in bad web design.

1. Audio loading automatically in your web page

In my opinion, this is one of the most irritating things that send me running the other way every time.  Never assume that your visitors are going to want to hear your music, advertisement, or your speech when they arrive.

Set any audio options so that it doesn’t start automatically.  Just give the visitor the option to turn it on if they wish to hear it.

2. Poor background & text colors
Dark background colors combined with dark text, or light backgrounds with light text are very difficult to read.  If I have to struggle to see what you have to say, I’m outta here.

3. Flash intros & graphics
Using flash in your website is just a bad idea if you’re an online marketer.  Not only can they chase away some of your slow dial-up visitors, but they do absolutely nothing for your SEO.  Flash is invisible to a search engine spider, so if your home page consists of a flash intro, Google sees no content on your page at all.

Use fast loading web optimized graphics instead.  This way you can take advantage of the “alt” tags in your HTML code and insert your important keywords for your images.  This will help your rankings in the SERPS.

4. Excessive pop-ups and flash fly-ins
If you want a guaranteed way to send your visitors packin’ & pissed off, try loading your web page with a bunch of pop-up windows.  While you’re at it, throw in one of those flash or java adverts that follow you around every where you go, as well.

Pop ups are pretty much blocked by every browser anyway.  A better alternative would be to use a javascript pop-up to capture emails in return for some type of value to your visitor, or an exit pop-up of some type.

5. Dead links
Dead links on a web page tells me that you don’t maintain your site and that your products are probably old & outdated as well.

The other thing that irritates me is clicking on links in the navigation menu and landing on “under construction” place holders.  If you haven’t created a page yet, either don’t create a link for it, or at least add a “coming soon” label to the link text.

6. Adsense
If you have a sales page or a product review page, Adsense is about the worst thing that you can do for your conversions, not to mention your search engine rankings.  According to James Brausch, Adsense actually lowers your rankings.  This is most likely because there are so many junk “made for adsense” sites out there that the googlebot will likely lump you right in with this ilk.

Unless you’re getting 100,000 visitors a month, I would avoid it.  It’s not worth the 2 bucks a month payout. In areas where adverts won’t kill your sales, try Advaliant as an alternative to Google. This can make you real money, not just pennies & nickels.

7. Huge paragraphs & run on sentences.
Web surfers generally are scanners.  They want to skim through a web page quickly to see if it’s interesting or has what they’re looking for.

Having excessively long paragraphs may work in a novel, but not online.  Keep your paragraphs limited to 1-3 sentences.  Even though your former English teacher may give you a rash about it, this is what works. This is especially important for your sales or affiliate product review pages as well.

8. Busy web pages
Don’t fill your web pages with too many graphics, columns and adverts.  Some web pages are so crowded with pictures mixed with text and poorly spaced columns.  Thus causing the paragraphs to almost collide with the adjoining paragraphs and making for an unpleasant & difficult read.

Keep your web pages clean & easy on the eyes.

9. Poor Navigation
Make your website easy to get around in.  Don’t make your visitors have to click on excessive links to get somewhere.  Having to guess where to find something is no fun either.

You should design your website as if you were expecting dear old grandma to visit your site, who’s never used a web browser before.

10.  Welcome to the 90’s
Do you have cheezy animated graphics created in 16 colors scattered all throughout your web pages?  Or the java-script snow falling in the background along with the midi-music playing as well?

Back button, take me away!!! Come on man, get into the 21st century.

So… there’s my top ten. Did any of the above look familiar to your own web site? If so, it could be costing you in lost visitors which equal lost revenue.

Sometimes it just takes a simple change to make a huge difference.