This is way too important.

Long time readers of Kickstart will remember that a few years ago
I held an appeal to raise money for my Rotary Club to buy
Lifestraws.

Lifestraws, if you haven’t heard of them, are high-tech filter
tubes that allow a person to suck up water from any dirty,
contaminated source and make it 100% safe to drink.

Each Lifestraw lasts a person for up to a year and for those
stuck in disaster areas, where water is anything but safe to
drink, they save lives.

Each straw cost just a couple of bucks. The price of a cup of
coffee.

Right now there are 6 million people at significant risk in
Pakistan and the Rotary Club coordinating the buying in and
sending out of Lifestraws (over 100,000 have been sent worldwide
since the project began) has completely run out of stocks.

The last 11,000 in the warehouse have already been sent to
Pakistan and now the cupboard is bare.

My Rotary Club – and many others – is now organizing a fast
program of fundraisers and bucket collections to raise money to
quickly buy more container loads of Lifestraws.

The need is desperate – you know that I’m sure as the news in the
papers and on TV has shown the sheer unimaginable scale of the
problem.

We can’t help everyone, but every Lifestraw we can get to
Pakistan will help save a life. That’s all we can hope to do –
save one life at a time.

And you can help.

Please help.

I have reopened the Kickstart Lifestraw Appeal – you can find the
page at http://kickstartdaily.com/lifestraw

It tells you about Lifestraws – what they are, what they can do
and why we need your money so urgently. Both to help the
situation right now and to prepare for the inevitable needs the
next time nature strikes.

But more importantly, there is a PayPal donation button there so
you can send us as much as you can afford.

As this is a Rotary Club initiative, the money will go directly
to my club’s account – not to me – and as Rotarians never make
any admin charges 100% of your donation (after PayPal’s fees)
will go straight towards buying and distributing Lifestraws.

Please visit http://kickstartdaily.com/lifestraw right now.

And please give as generously as you can.

Many thanks,

Martin Avis

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I’m going to give you my full, hands-on Market Samurai review, but first let me explain why I’m feeling a little foolish right now. Like the guest who was invited to the best party that has ever been thrown but didn’t go because there was something on TV.

You know that feeling?

It’s like being offered tickets to the most spectacular firework display but going to the cheap one in your local park instead because that’s what you’ve always done.

The reason I’m feeling so egg-on-faceish is because I’ve been deliberately ignoring something that I now know I really, really shouldn’t have ignored.

If you think I’m being a bit over dramatic, let me explain.

Keyword research is vital to my business. Anyone who reads Kickstart knows that over the years I have used, and recommended, a multitude of keyword research tools. Each one offered something a little different to its predecessors and was a little easier to use, or a little better in its functions.

Some, like the excellent Niche Inspector, stopped working eventually and were abandoned by their creators. Some just failed to keep up to date.

My latest favorite was Micro Niche Finder – a sophisticated bit of kit that I’ve been proud and happy to recommend.

For quite a while now, I’ve been aware that a lot of people have been talking about a program called Market Samurai and extolling its virtues sky high.

But I didn’t take a lot of notice. As far as I was concerned, MicroNicheFinder did the job perfectly well and I couldn’t really see what more Market Samurai could offer that would make it a significant step up.

I did download their free trial offer, but for some reason got distracted and didn’t use it in the trial time. So when I did get around to wanting to test it out, my trial period had expired. I was left none the wiser.

Micro Niche Finder did all that I needed, so I forgot about Market Samurai and (a bit uncharacteristically for me) closed my ears and my mind to any of the buzz that kept appearing about it.

I guess I figured that there is only so much a keyword research tool can do and if I was happy with the one I had, why go looking for anything else.

How wrong I was.

I took the plunge this weekend and bought Market Samurai and NOW I can see what all the fuss was about. Hence this review.

[If you are one of those people who have been telling me so all this time, I can quite forgive you thinking 'Told you so!']

Make no mistake – Micro Niche Finder is a fantastic keyword research tool and if you already own it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it …

… it is just that Market Samurai is better. A whole lot better.

What I hadn’t appreciated, but do now (a lot) is that Market Samurai isn’t just a keyword research tool. To call it that is like calling Google a search engine. Yes it is that, but there is a lot more going on.

Market Samurai is a Swiss Army Knife – a whole array of tools to help save time and effort – and help you make money.

There are eight parts to it right now, with a ninth due to be added very soon.

They are:

1. Rank Tracker. You tell it your domains and it checks where they appear in the search engine listings against any keyword that you are analyzing. This is really useful and digs in to give you even more information: PageRank, backlinks, how many pages each search engine has indexed and so on.

Of course, you are not limited to your own domains. Add your competitors sites and you’ll know exactly what you have to beat.

2. Keyword Research. As a keyword research tool, Market Samurai does everything you’d expect of it and a bit more besides. It is beautifully easy to use and includes all the filtering options you need to uncover the best keywords to target.

3. SEO Competition. Here is a useful module. For any given keyword, the SEO Competition module will analyze the top ten results in Google and give you a table showing eight off-page SEO factors and five on-page ones. It gives you a very clear snapshot of what you are going to have to do to rank a page for that keyword. The chart is color coded to make life even easier for you.

A very nice touch is that you can also enter specific URLs (pages you have already created perhaps) and see how they compare to the Google top ten,

4. Domains. Once you’ve decided on a great keyword, the Domains module will quickly discover if it is available to buy as a domain, or if not, will suggest lots of similar domains that are available. Of course, you could just go to GoDaddy to do your own research, but it is a real time-saver to have this facility built right in to Market Samurai.

5. Monetization. The previous modules are great, but the last four are the deal-clinchers for me – starting with the Monetization module. I have been using this one a lot in the last couple of days.

Click on this tab and, depending on which keyword you are analyzing, Market Samurai will let you search Amazon, Commission Junction, ClickBank or PayDotCom to find appropriate affiliate products. You then just have to pick the one or ones you like the look of best.

As if that wasn’t powerful, timesaving stuff all on its own, it is actually just half the story. Once you’ve picked a product, Market Samurai actually helps you create a blog post, a banner ad or a WordPress sidebar ad.

I have never seen anything like this in another program and I’m very impressed by it.

6. Find Content. As the name implies, this module goes out to the Internet and finds all kinds of content that matches your selected keyword. It selects articles, blog posts, pictures, videos, news feeds and more. And having found the content, Market Samurai then lets you analyze it so you can select only the best.

At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, this is really useful and time saving.

7. Publish Content. They really have included everything. This module works seamlessly with the previous Find Content one. Any content that is found can then be passed to an editor screen in the Publish Content module. You then either make changes if you wish, or use the content as is (with content from articles directories you shouldn’t change anything) before clicking one button for Market Samurai to publish directly to your WordPress blog.

I’m running out of superlatives!

8. Promotion. This module is all about getting backlinks from sites that are already considered authorities for your selected keyword.

There are a variety of choices: Web 2.0 sites, Blogs, or Forums, with several option in each category.

Just select the sources you are interested in and in the blink of an eye you’ll be presented with a list of places you can get quality backlinks.

I have Market Samurai running beside me right now and with one click of the ‘Analyze’ button have just found a ton of high PR sites that I can place backlinks on. Really useful stuff.

This overview has only scratched the surface of the major features of Market Samurai. Within each module there are other buttons and options that make them all even more powerful than I can describe here.

I wish I’d listened to the people who have been singing its praises over the last year or so, but better late than never!

Don’t end up with egg on your face like me.

Get It Today For Free!

Now – I’ve saved the very best bit to last: you can try out Market Samurai completely free of charge.

There is a free trial available – of the complete program, not a cut-down version – at Market Samurai Free Trial

Just make sure you use it!

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Seminars are almost always great places to go – if only for the netwoking opportunities. The people you meet are always the high spot, but this time the speakers were top-notch as well. There were loads of them (including your’s truly) but for me, an American chap called Sterling Valentine really stood out. He had some great things to share and I recommend you look him up.

Thinking back to some of the personal stories that the successful speakers shared from the stage, there is one theme that keeps coming up. The people are different and the words describing their situations are different, but when you boil it all down, the people who are now enjoying success almost all went through a similar journey:

1. They were struggling in their lives. Some were flat broke and desperate, some were stressed to the max and at their wits’ end, some were on the verge of complete meltdown. Even allowing for a certain amount of poetic license in the stories told, the recurring theme is that their lives were way less than great and they were trapped.

2. They all tried everything. Or thought they did. They worked several jobs (if they had jobs) and flitted from one scheme to another.

3. Even when they discovered Internet marketing and saw the potential, they found it impossible to focus. Time and again we heard stories of people trying this, and failing, trying that, and failing, and then trying anything else that caught their attention. And failing.

4. Despite their phenomenal lack of success making money online, each and every one of them (and I’m including myself in the group too) absolutely knew – and I mean *knew* at a molecular level – that Internet marketing was real, making money online was possible and success was just a matter of putting the jigsaw pieces in their right places.

5. Success came *only* when, for whatever reason (everyone has their own reason) these people stopped chasing every rainbow and started focusing on creating a business. It came when they realized, at a deep level, that you fly higher and faster on a rocket that is blasting towards a target than on a balloon that is drifting in the breeze.

Everyone had their own solutions, strategies and skills, and each speaker was naturally ‘selling’ his or her own methods. But underneath it all, they were all saying the same thing: stop drifting, stop working hard at achieving nothing, stop being distracted. And learn to focus. You have no idea how much you can achieve if you only make a plan and follow it to the end.

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The basic site building part works fine, but other things promised on the sales page are mysteriously missing.

So what has been going on?

That question has been asked, quite vehemently, on the Warrior Forum over the last couple of days. There have been people shouting ‘scam’ and others talking about how they have already asked for a refund.

As I promoted this – and still stand by my recommendation, I felt it appropriate and honest to write an update of where we all stand. This is what I wrote…

I promoted CBPredators to my subscribers.

As with every product I promote, I asked the creators to give me access in advance of the launch so that I could test it out to make sure I was happy to put my name to it.

As a result, prior to the official launch I had created two sites and had shown them both to my subscribers.

One used the basic FlexSqueeze default theme (and a few articles added that I got from EzineArticles): http://www.factsaboutabs.com

The other had no extra articles, but I had made some changes to the look of the theme to make the site look a little prettier: http://pregnancy-miraclereview.com

I don’t know anyone else who promoted who took the trouble to do that. For me, making sure my readers know what they are getting is more important than positions on launch leaderboards.

The first site took me about half an hour to create – including adding the articles – because I was learning my way. The second one took about 15-20 minutes.

Both sites were indexed by Google quite fast (I added a link to one of them from my blog and put a link to site 2 in site 1) and although neither seem to be ranked high enough for me to find them, my stats show that traffic is starting to come from search engines. (Mainly from Bing). Only a trickle, admittedly, but it is early days.

When I was testing the program, and at the time I was telling my readers about the sites I’d built, I had not seen the sales page, so was unaware of the various promises made. As far as I was concerned CBPredators was simply a quick way to build optimized review blogs.

Could I make the sites without CBPredators?

Yes, of course. But not as quickly. I very much liked that the reviews were pre-written – yes, I knew I had to rewrite them, but it is way faster for me to rewrite something that exists than to think up something new to say on my own. That alone saved me a lot of time.

So I was happy to recommend CBPredators simply on that basis.

I didn’t really notice that there was a lack of training materials because there didn’t seem to me to be much that needed explanation.

That was all prior to the launch.

After the launch, and after I saw what was being promised on the sales page, I was a bit surprised to see how much hype was written.

The claim that you can make money after just 15 minutes is nonsense, in my opinion. I am sure my sites – if they continue to get traffic as they already are – will make sales. In fact, checking my ClickBank stats shows that there have already been ten order form impressions. No sales yet, but at this rate I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one soon.

There are also promises made for parts of the system that don’t seem to be finished yet. I’m not entirely happy about that either – if you are going to launch a major product, I think it should be at least 99% ready, not about 60% as seems to be the case here.

Mind you – they are not the first to rush a product to market and worry about getting it right later, and nor will they be the last.

What will be important is how fast they address the clear issues.

I note that there are more training videos there now – they are not great, but they are a start.

I don’t understand how the system can make other sites for you, ones not based on the prewritten reviews. This seems to be an important option, but I’d like someone to explain to me how to do it.

I also don’t understand how the system adds content, as promised in the sales letter. There doesn’t seem to be anything in my sites that could allow that. Perhaps that is something that is ‘coming soon.’

All in all, I was very happy to promote CBPredators and still stand by my initial recommendation. It is a great idea and as far as the basic sitebuilding is concerned, it works.

I would have much preferred them to have all their ducks in a row before launch, or to have been up front about the delays and either put it back a week or warn new subscribers that there is a hold up. A timetable of when stuff will be added or fixed would have been nice too.

I have skyped with Jerome Chapman and Mike Merz and know that they are committed, and working furiously behind the scenes, so have confidence that this will come good very quickly.

But to all those people who are crying ‘scam’ and rushing to ask for refunds, I have to ask ‘why?’

This is a ClickBank product. You have time to wait. Give it a few weeks and if they haven’t made good by then – that’s the time to ask for a refund. ClickBank isn’t going anywhere.

I’ve created and launched products of my own and understand teething problems. Maybe the problems that CBPredators face are of their own making, but let’s give them a chance to put things right before we send out the lynch mob.

Update: After I wrote the above, Chris Fox posted to answer some of the questions.

He has now promised that the plugin that will add content to your blogs automatically will be ready early next week.

He says that the facility to make blogs that are not based on the pre-written reviews is currently switched off, but will be put on line very shortly.

He tells us that there is already more training material available, with more on the way.

He advised customers that there was a webinar last night and will be another one tonight.

He assured us that they are getting on top of things, are currently training more support staff and sought to put our minds at rest that they are not going anywhere.

Frankly, they have a lot of money riding on this so it is not in their interest to screw it up any more than it already has been.

Now to answer one specific question that has been put to me – what should you put it the input fields for the FTP part of the setup?

Here are two different alternatives (note that the field names may be slightly different, but their order should be the same)-

In this one I have set up the blog on the root directory

Here I have set up the blog in a subdirectory called review1

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It’s the one that was giving away free stuff last week (still is
if you hurry – http://urlnex.us/cbpredators ).

While I was very happy to point you at a bunch of useful
freebies, I was a bit concerned that CBPredators wouldn’t live up
to its promise and I’d have to recommend against buying it. After
all, freebies or not, I don’t want to start promoting stuff just
for the sake of it.

So it came as a relief to get inside and find that a lot of
thought has gone into it and – from my admittedly early
impressions – it seems to be a winner.

So what IS CBPredator?

It is a membership site (with a very low monthly fee – I’m not
allowed to say how much it is yet, but you will be very
pleasantly surprised) that lets you create fully-featured review
sites for some of the top selling ClickBank products.

The makers say that you can create a money-making website with
CBPredator in just 18 clicks of the mouse. I didn’t count, but
I’d say that is an accurate statement as the whole process is
dead easy and you are guided through the entire thing.

At the moment they have about 30 product reviews to choose from,
with more being added by professional writers all the time.

In case you are concerned that they will get so many members all
making sites based on the same reviews, let me put your mind at
rest. There are two safeguards to ensure that YOUR review will be
unique:

1. Each review will only be available to a limited number of
members. Once it has reached its quota it will be withdrawn.

2. In order to publish your site you have to make changes to the
review – spin the text to make it read differently. The process
to do this is very easy, and because it is written by you it will
always be human readable, and not auto-spun gobbledygook.

They don’t leave you high and dry on traffic either.

Building a website for you is one thing, but getting traffic to
it quite another. The guys behind CBPredator are aware that
traffic is a problem for many people and so a lot of effort will
be devoted to teaching you all about what works.

And naturally, the sites are built with the latest cutting-edge
ideas on SEO, so they should start getting natural search traffic
pretty quickly on their own.

The whole system has been built by Mike Merz, Chris Fox and
Jerome Chapman to automate their already established methods of
building successful, income-generating review sites. They know
their system works really well and have devoted their energies to
capturing that successful formula without compromising its
effectiveness.

In fact, their beta testing period has apparently netted the team
over $100,000 in profits!

I’ve already made my first CBPredators site, and can attest to
the fact that there was nothing complicated about the process
whatsoever. You don’t need to know anything about building
websites at all – the software does it all for you.

In fact, I’m very happy for you to take a look at my first
CBPredators site – a review of a ClickBank ebook called Truth
About Abs: The Facts About Abs – it took about half an hour
from start to finish – and that includes me going to GoDaddy to
buy the domain!

It is just a basic WordPress blog, but note that although I’ve
left it as it comes ‘out of the box’, the blog is totally
customizable – you can change all kinds of look & feel things if
you want to.

The basic setup gives you the blog and all the plugins you’ll
need, automatically created for you at the click of the ‘Publish
button’ and the main review page. It also includes those boring,
but important nuts and bolts pages that are linked to at the
bottom of the page: a privacy policy, terms of use, disclaimer,
contact us and about.

Once your blog is set up for you, it is dead easy to add pages
too. In fact, I’ve added 20 articles to be drip-fed into the blog
over the next week. I got them all from an article directory and
it cost me nothing – apart from about half an hour to post them
all.

This really is a very simple system to use.

The CBPredators sales page goes live at 3pm Eastern, tomorrow –
Tuesday April 20th – but I’m thinking that with the limits on the
number of people who can use each review, they may fill up all
their available places rather quickly.

For that reason, if you haven’t get yourself on their
announcement list already (by registering for the freebies they
are currently giving away) then do so now because it’ll be a case
of first come, first served.

And when launch time comes around tomorrow, get in quick at 3pm
EST (8pm UK time) in case there is a server meltdown!

I’m lucky to have review access right now, but I can tell you
straight that if that is revoked after the launch, I’ll be one of
the first in line to pay to join.

http://urlnex.us/cbpredators

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There is a pre-launch promotion going on right now for something called CBPredators that will be on sale next week. I have no idea if the product itself will be worth buying or not because I haven’t had a review copy yet. But not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I was very happy to visit their website to get my hands on the free stuff they currently have on offer.

The guy behind this launch makes a great deal of money from making review pages for ClickBank products and the first (apparently there are more to come as the week goes on) of his giveaways are a video that explains and disects one of his successful review pages and a template that will allow us to make our own versions by just filling in the blanks.

Useful and welcome gifts!

You do have to give your email address – they are obviously going to pitch you for the product launch itself, which may not be a bad thing. However, if you really don’t want to be contacted, I can tell you that the mailing list is run by AWeber, so unsubscribing after you’ve downloaded the freebies is just a one-click job. No big deal.

Free gifts and training is becoming a feature of some of the bigger launches these days. In my opinion, if the stuff on offer is of good quality, everybody wins!

In this case, I’d say grab them with both hands!

CBPredators Launch Promotion

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Sarah and Dave are professional videographers who spend their days filming and interviewing politicians, business people and pop groups, but they wanted to use their obvious talents in online marketing.

They started attending my London Lunches (I don’t think they have missed one since they started coming) and it was a real pleasure to watch as their online endeavours grew.

The culmination of a whole lot of effort and enterprise is an amazing website called MoneyMakersTV where you can watch interviews, see videos of entire Internet marketing seminars or follow Sarah’s own coaching and training films. The value and content that has been packed in is astounding – and it is growing all the time!

At yesterday’s London Lunch I sat down with Sarah to do a Kickstart 10-minute interview. We didn’t quite manage to keep to ten minutes – we ended up at 11! (There is a bit of restaurant clatter in the background so apologies for the sound quality).

It turned out to be a great insight into how she thinks and works and is very inspirational for all of us.

Incidentally, Sarah’s MoneyMakersTV is well worth looking into and I highly recommend it. There is a $1 trial offer right now, so it a great time to give it a go. MoneyMakersTV $1 Trial

STOP PRESS: Sarah has just launched a brand-new video course called $1000 in 3 Days that shows exactly how she does just that (in fact, the promotion she documents made over $2000 in just a week).

Here is what I wrote in Kickstart:

As you might have noticed, one of my favorite types of Internet marketing products is the kind where you get to actually see what someone who is successful really does. I love to watch over their shoulder to discover their personal techniques for making money.

Even though I often know, in broad terms, the strategies they use, everyone brings something of themself to any process and it is those personal tweaks and refinements that I find most fascinating.

More to the point, it is those little things that often make the difference between a system that works so-so and one that flies.

I especially like it when I see tips and ideas that I hadn’t known about before – one small tip like that can be worth thousands to me!

Jason John’s excellent Niche Blog Advantage course that I waxed lyrical about last week was one such product that ticked all the right boxes and judging from the number of Kickstart readers who bought it, and wrote to me to thank me for the recommendation, a huge number of folks agreed.

Well, if you liked Jason’s product, you’ll love the one that is being launched this morning.

Sarah Staar is a familiar name to Kickstarters, and particularly to those who attend the London Lunches. She is one of those people who has entered the Internet marketing arena with the force of a rocket and has built up a very successful business in a very short time.

That’s because she is one of the most ‘get up and go’ people I know. She is testing and tweaking all the time and has a great way of breaking a system down into simple and manageable pieces.

Recently, Sarah made over $1000 in 3 days from a particular type of promotion she ran. In fact, she ended up making over $2000 in a week from just one promotion.

That’s nice, and any of us would be happy to have a one-off success like that, but what Sarah did was not a one off. It was a process that was based on very repeatable steps that anyone could follow.

So, being the marketer that she is, Sarah made a series of videos documenting the entire process. In the seven videos she covers absolutely everything you need to know to repeat her successful promotion, over and over again.

The series of 7 videos is called ‘$1000 in 3 Days’ and, to coin a phrase, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

As I said, this is my favorite sort of product because it is practical, easy to follow and certainly easy to emulate.

When Sarah asked me to review it I was really pushed for time – travelling backwards and forwards to the hospital to see Delia – but I made the time to watch it all and I’m really glad I did. I made a lot of notes!

I get asked to review a lot of products and am quite picky about what I’ll recommend. But I could immediately see how anyone can benefit from using Sarah’s system, and how very unlikely it is that the market will get saturated. If you take action, in the ways that Sarah clearly explains, there is no reason at all why you shouldn’t enjoy the same success that she does.

I’ve even given her a glowing testimonial, so my money is firmly where my mouth is!

Take a look and be one of the very first people to get hold of the ‘$1000 in 3 Days’ system.

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Nicola is a very switched on lady who, apart from the many other hats she wears, is a brilliant coach. In this Kickstart 10-minute interview with her, we really get to find out what motivates her, why she does what she does and what makes her tick.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy it and your comments will be very welcome.

Apologies for all the background restaurant noise – this was recorded on my iPhone at the London Lunch, so under the circumstances I think it sonds pretty good!

Nicola’s book, The Money Gym Book was reviewed here and in Kickstart Newsletter recently, and has been a real hit with everyone who bought it. Money Gym Book Review

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At the recent London Lunch – the premier UK networking event for Internet marketers - I managed to grab ten minutes with Jason to find out what makes him tick.

Find out a little more about the man behind one of the hottest and most recent new product launches.

Niche Blog Advantage (special launch price valid for a few days only)

WordPress DeMystified (Updated for the latest version of WP)

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About a year ago I recommended another product that was all about how to build WordPress Blogs – WordPress DeMystified.

Well now I have news of a brand new product from the same guy who created WordPress DeMystified, Jason Johns, that shows you, in great detail, how to build profitable niche blogs.

Niche Blog Advantage is so hot off the press that I don’t think that Jason has even mentioned it to his own list yet, but for the last few days I’ve been very happily watching the videos and learning a ton of good stuff along the way.

Jason is a really good teacher. His style is to let you look over his shoulder while he actually does the business – and commentates on exactly what he is doing and why for every step of the way.

The result is that there are no stones left unturned and no possibility of confusion.

It also helps that he has a great sense of humor and happens to sound a lot like Ricky Jervais. Education and entertainment all rolled into one – it is a winning combination!

Jason has broken his new course down into four main sections:

* How to pick a niche (11 videos);

* How to master keyword research (12 videos);

* How to build effective and profitable niche-based WordPress blogs quickly and easily (5 videos);

* Everything you could ever hope to want to know about traffic generation (15 videos).

There is a lot of stuff covered in Niche Blog Advantage that is new to me, and if he has left anything out, I have no idea what it could be! But just in case, Jason has added three sets of bonus videos on Twitter, on Automated blogging and on the hot topic of the day, how to make money from CPA offers. There are over 30 videos just in the bonuses!

You’d think that such an exhaustively complete course (and believe me, it IS exactly that) would be priced at the very top of the market. I know if I’d put in the work and effort that Jason has done I wouldn’t sell it for less than $147, and probably even more than that. And I believe it would be worth every penny.

But Jason has decided to keep the cost low. Very low. Stupidly low (and I’ve been on Skype with him this morning telling him just that).

Frankly I hope that he wakes up and sets a more realistic price for Niche Blog Advantage soon, but until that happens, you can get hold of the best value-for-money product I think I’ve ever recommended.

But don’t be deceived by the silly price. The information Jason teaches is worth a bundle – and the clear way he teaches it is priceless.

http://urlnex.us/nicheblogadvantage

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Some people are paranoid about privacy and are convinced that even hinting at their real name online will bring all kinds of stalkers, identity thieves and other undesirables running to their front doors.

So they hide behind silly nicknames or meaningless strings of characters in the belief that they are somehow protecting themselves.

Rarely is that successful. There have been one or two people who have managed to brand their nickname, but in all cases that I can remember their real name was in evidence as well.

Online marketing is very difficult and starting out with negative credibility is like trying to run a race while attached to the starting post by a bungee rope. Sooner or later it will drag you down.

I have always used my own name and have never had any problems as a result. In fact, here in Kickstart I share a whole lot more personal information than just my name! And apart from making me a lot of good friends, it hasn’t ever been a problem.

No stalkers, no crazed lunatics and only one groupie – Kim Standerline who tells everyone she wants to be the next Mrs Avis when I’ve done with the first one! Sorry Kim, but if Delia reads this, YOU might need to change your name!

Having said that, there ARE circumstances where using your real name can be a problem:

1. If your real name is already well known in a different arena. For example, a friend of mine is a high profile public figure who took up Internet marketing as a hobby some years ago. From the get go he used a pseudonym because he realized that people searching Google for his real name would just get confused if they came up with IM stuff.

2. I’ve known people who have ‘escaped’ from abusive relationships and who use pseudonyms online to avoid their ex spouse finding out where they now live. You can’t argue with that.

3. People who operate in several wildly different niches may want to use different names to keep the various sides of their business apart. I do this myself if I’m selling ebooks and reports in different fields because ‘Martin Avis’ is primarily known for Internet marketing and I don’t want to dilute that by having too many search engine results for different subjects.

4. Some employers are easily upset if they think that their employees are moonlighting, so in that case, a budding online entrepreneur might reasonably and sensibly use a pseudonym to avoid trouble with their boss.

5. It is conceivable that a person’s real name is too long or too difficult to read and pronounce for the market they are aiming at. In that case, it is often simply good practice to adopt a simpler version for recognition reasons.

In each of these cases it is reasonable and justifiable to use a false name. However, the key is that the false name should be recognizable as a ‘real’ name and not as some anonymous jumble of characters, or, sometimes worse, as a silly nickname. There is no credibility in these obvious fake names.

It is often said that people like to do business with people, and that is even more true online. There is so much suspicion already, why add to it by giving the impression you have something to hide?

What do you do and what are your thoughts on the matter? Comments are very welcome undear ANY name!

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A world without the Internet huh?

That would be when we went to a library for our info products (only we called them books and the only ones who ever said ebooks were elderly Yorkshiremen).

That would be when social networking meant going out to the local youth club. Or, Heaven forbid, becoming a Boy Scout or Girl Guide.

That would be when a facebook had black pages and the ‘faces’ were stuck in with little paper corners.

That would be when a forum was a place for debate and usually involved cold beer and tipsy girlfriends.

That would be when calling someone a blogger would get you a black eye.

That would when watching a monitor involved staring at the school prefect.

That would be when the most advanced keyboard was attached to a Moog.

That would be when a floppy disc would give you a bad back.

That would be when a payment processor was made of brass, had keys with the denominations and a drawer that went ‘ting’.

That would be when the superhighway was the M1 in the UK or Route 66 in the US.

That would be when CD meant you didn’t have to pay your fines.

That would be when the only time you needed a RAM was when you had a few ewes to be covered.

That would be when a bit was more than you could chew or a byte would need a visit to the dentist.

That would be when Amazon was a river and Google was a misspelled number.

That would be when traffic stopped you getting home for dinner.

That would be when hacking meant you had a nasty cough.

That would be when ‘CB’ would be followed by ‘Ten-four, breaker-breaker, good buddy.’

That would be when file sharing involved manilla cardboard.

That would be when a chat room was thick with cigarette smoke and spilled beer.

That would be when the only place you’d find virtual real estate was on a Monopoly board.

That would be when the only autoresponder in the world was called Kit.

That would be when good hosting meant happy guests.

That would be when second life was what we all prayed for on Sundays.

That would be when Go Daddy involved an egg and a spoon.

That would be when a hard drive was accompanied by ‘are we nearly there yet?’

That would be when being digital meant you could count on your fingers.

That would be when banner ad was a big flag you waved at a football match.

That would be when your bookmarks were made by your kids as school projects.

That would be when one cookie was never enough.

That would be when cross browser support was a patient salesperson in the bookstore.

That would be when going to a flash site got you locked up.

That would be when showing someone your holiday pictures involved a darkened room and a Kodak Carousel.

That would be when an impression was something you made.

That would be when My Space was something you didn’t enter.

That would be when spam was a Sunday treat.

That would be when peer-to-peer networking happened at the water cooler.

That would be when the world was a simpler place; when we didn’t have friends all over the world; when our differences were more frightening; when our horizons were limited; when our imaginations were fuelled by HG Wells or Gene Roddenberry.

That would be when almost everything we take for granted today about technology, the Internet and computers was at best an impossible dream and worst simply thoughts of magic.

That would be the days of our parents – or for some of us, our youth.

And thinking back, it wasn’t so long ago was it.

I wonder what the days of our children will bring.

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The Blogging to the Bank ebook was so popular because it
explained just how straightforward it is to make money from your
blogs.

WordPress blogs are free to produce and only take moments to
install (the process is actually done for you).

Google loves blogs and getting them to rank and receive free
traffic is quite simple.

All those things mean that if you are not yet blogging you should
do so soon, and if you are, you should do it some more.

And now there is another, even more compelling reason to take
notice of the blogging world.

For the last five years, Tony Newton has been making a handsome
full-time income from making simple WordPress blogs and then
selling them. That’s right – the correct term is site flipping
and Tony has it down to a fine art.

Now my friend Tony Shepherd has sat Tony Newton down and got him
to share exactly what he does, how he does it and what he expects
to make from it. They have called their joint product
‘BlogFlipz’.

Your eyes will be opened.

The result is a PDF document (for those who like to read) and 10
videos (for those who like to view) that take you from start to
finish. You’ll learn how he (and you, after you’ve absorbed all
the step-by-step info) can throw up a simple blog and sell it for
up to $100 in a single day – or how he (and you?) easily builds
high traffic blogs over a few weeks that can sell for thousands
of dollars.

The course describes how to build three different types of blogs
and how you can make money from selling each of them.

http://urlnex.us/blogflipz

There is a big market for blogs – but the catch is that they have
to be built, managed and presented in the right way to attract
the big dollars. BlogFlipz gives you all the information you need
to do it the right way.

As Tony Shepherd says, “And remember, this is a FULL start to
finish course – no matter what level of skill you’re at, it means
that YOU can grab this course and start working towards your own
REAL work at home business.”

And as Tony Newton says at the end of the video course: “Now you
have everything you need to make your own WordPress sites, and
sell them.”

BlogFlipz is easy to follow (none of the videos are over long)
and very modestly priced – and there is a full money-back
guarantee if you are not happy with it, so there is no downside.

The upside is that you could be flipping blogs by this time
tomorrow and building your way to a full-time income from a
highly in-demand business.

Don’t miss this one – flipping sites is big business and
BlogFlipz gives you the real low-down in easily digestible form.

http://urlnex.us/blogflipz

Have fun and make great profits!

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Both services allow you to set up blogs for free, and they host them for you.

In effect, they own your blog. And as a result, if they decide they don’t like you, or what you’ve posted, they can instantly delete all your hard work.

And they often do because many people ignore the terms and conditions they agree to when they sign up and create blogs that break the rules.

Doh! Of course they delete stuff they don’t like.

The only surprise to me is why anyone would allow someone else that much power of their business?

Buying a domain is cheap. Buying hosting is cheap. And once you have those two things, setting up a real WordPress site on your own domain, under your own hosting costs nothing.

So why, oh why, would anyone not do that?

I know that the $20-$30 dollars needed to buy the domain and hosting is still money that some people don’t currently have, but unless you are prepared to invest that small amount you can never, ever, say you have a business. You will always be at a third party’s mercy. And ‘Woe is me, the blogs I’ve worked so hard to produce’ threads on the Warrior Forum will continue to be commonplace.

Blogging is an excellent strategy. It can get you very high Google rankings very quickly. And in the process, it can make you a lot of money.

But for goodness sake, stay in control of your own destiny and use your own domains and hosting from the very start.

Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 2010 ebook tells you how to get started in blogging the right way. Incidentally, I’ve been saying that this is the third edition of the book, but I’m mistaken – it is in fact the 4th.

http://urlnex.us/bttb2010

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Twittollower is certainly performing brilliantly and my website traffic is feeling the benefit very nicely.

The secret, if there IS such a thing as a secret, to Twitter seems to me to be the same *secret* that confuses people so much about Google. That is to be as informative and natural as you can be.

So many people think that they can get high Google rankings, or responsive follower lists in Twitter, by churning out impersonal, automated, pitch-fest junk. But thankfully, success doesn’t come via that particular route.

You’ll so often hear people bemoaning the fact that their latest strategies don’t work, when those strategies usually entail buying in garbage articles from barely literate ghost writers, throwing up content-less websites, posting unhelpful, automated blog posts and tweeting endless affiliate links.

Those are not strategies that work. Believe me – I’ve tried them all!

What works is to provide real, useful, naturally-written information.

What works is to put the reader first and your profits second.

What works is to use your common sense: would YOU want to read what you have blogged/posted on your website/tweeted? Because if you wouldn’t, what on Earth makes you think anyone else would?

I’d love for you to follow me – http://twitter.com/imkick

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But very rarely do I read an ebook that makes me wish it was available as a real-life, printed and bound old-fashioned BOOK (without the e).

Well I’m in the middle of reading one such book right now. And I can tell you that it is really, really good stuff.

It is called The Money Gym and was originally written in 2005 by Nicola Cairncross.

I’ve known Nicola for a few years now. Our paths cross at various seminars, she is a regular attendee at London Lunches and I even spoke at one of her incredibly popular Money Gym seminars last year.

She is one of those real people you hear about – not some highfaluting guru type, but a down-to-earth single mother who has gone from the rat-race to become one of the top wealth and success coaches around.

And she is a thoroughly nice lady too.

The people she helps worship the ground she walks on – I know because I know quite a few of them and they have nothing but praise for Nicola and her methods.

Well a few days ago, Nicola sent me a review copy of her latest book – a completely revised, 2010 edition of The Money Gym.

My goodness. I can’t put it down. And with 232 pages packed with real information, eye-opening advice and so many ideas, strategies and suggestions to explode your own personal wealth that I know for a fact that you won’t either.

That’s the good news.

The better news is that it is priced so that absolutely everyone can afford it.

Kickstart is about making money – among a lot of other things. It is my dream that every Kickstart reader can learn how easy it is to make money online and to use that knowledge to change his or her life. Or should I have said YOUR life?

Nicola’s book goes way beyond that dream.

The Money Gym isn’t a book about Internet marketing (although it has an entire chapter devoted to it). It is a book about money – how you get it, how you keep it, how you leverage it, what it means to you and how you can master it to become wealthy.

If it was a hardback book on the shelf of a bookstore it would not only cost a great deal more than Nicola is asking for it, but it would also become a runaway bestseller.

And it would have pride of place on my ‘essential keepers’ shelf right beside my desk.

[You can stop blushing now Nicola and buy me a drink at the next London Lunch! ]

You can read more about it on the sales page at http://urlnex.us/moneygym but I wouldn’t bother – just scroll down to the buy button and get your copy without delay.

And if you hurry, Nicola is offering an extra special bonus to a lucky few buyers.

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“The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?”

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I don’t mean how much are the component parts of you
worth – the water and minerals that make up your body
(a bit less than a dollar for the raw materials, a bit
more if you could sell your working parts).

I mean how much does it say on the invisible price tag
that you have hung around your neck.

$10 an hour? $100? $1000?

You are worth exactly as much as you believe you are
worth.

My friend David is a joiner. He makes stuff out of
wood. Recently he was asked to price up a job that he
really didn’t want. Rather than turn it down, he simply
double his normal rates in the hope that the customer
would be put off.

The next day they were on the phone asking him how soon
he could start.

THAT made David rethink how much he was worth!

Another friend (also called David, coincidentally) is a
central heating installer. He told me that he normally
quoted £800 to fit a new boiler, but recently has been
losing jobs to other companies who charge much more.
When he started asking why he’d lost the job, the
customers told him that they figured the more expensive
companies would do a better job.

Dave immediately added £1000 to his standard price and
has been booked solid with work ever since.

Mike is a management consultant. He recently decided to
increase his hourly rate from £200 to £800. He is still
billing exactly the same number of hours but his income
has quadrupled – and he reports that his clients are
now FAR more likely to do as he recommends.

It happens all around us. People everywhere are
undervaluing their worth because they put their own
value on themselves instead of the value that their
clients and customers would put on them.

Take a look at the value that YOU put on yourself.

Look harder.

Now, whatever that value is, increase it. Live with it.
Let that new value sink in to your subconscious.

Then go out into the world and show them what you’re
worth.

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http://urlnex.us/bttb2010

I wasn’t a big fan of Blogging to the Bank 2 as it went off into
areas of Internet marketing and promotion that I’m not too
comfortable with – a bit black hat – but thankfully, this new
version is whiter than white! and better than its previous
incarnations by far.

Rob Benwell is still a young man, but he has a real talent for
making things clear and simple.

In Blogging to the Bank 2010 he tells how makes over $100k per
month, how his blogging system is easy and fast to set up, how
you need no experience to get started, and how he has personally
used his own strategies to drive over 2 million people to one of
his sites. Very powerful stuff and very easy to follow and
emulate.

I had planned to write more about Blogging to the Bank 2010 when
I first mentioned it, but at the time I was writing a lot about
Twitter and Twittollower, so somehow I didn’t get back to it. But
I’ve just heard that in its first week or two on sale, Blogging
to the Bank 2010 has already sold over 2,100 copies and that Rob
is considering taking it off sale when it reaches 2,500.

That means, at this rate, that there may only be a few days for
you to get this very useful, and extremely low-cost ebook.

http://urlnex.us/bttb2010

There is no question that blogging is a very effective way to
make real money online. Blogging to the Bank 2010 makes it easy
for you to get your share – even if you don’t have any experience
of blogging yet.

And, of course, it is sold through ClickBank so you can buy with
100% confidence.

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Do you want to be a writer?
Do you want to be an entrepreneur?
Do you want to be successful?
Do you want to be popular?
Do you want to be an authority in your field?
What do YOU want to BE?

I’m sure that every single one of us has a list in our
heads of things that we want to be – and a much longer
list of excuses why we aren’t or can’t.

Well think on this for a second:

You are what you are.

You ARE what you ARE.

If you want TO BE a writer, for example, you will
remain wanting TO BE a writer for as long as your mind
keeps ‘writerdom’ in the future tense.

The day you stop saying I WANT TO BE and starting I AM
is the day that the future arrives in the present, and
the day that you become your dream.

When you say ‘I AM a writer’ you no longer have the
luxury of all those excuses. They stop mattering. The
only thing that matters now is how you will find the
time and inspiration to write. And if your mind accepts
the idea that a writer is what you now are, it will
also accept that it has to help out with all the
trimmings. opportunities will open up for you so that
you can sit down to write, ideas will start to flow,
inspirations will start to arrive from places you
didn’t even think possible.

Writing is a concrete example, but how does it work for
the more abstract concepts like success and popularity?

Just the same! Once your mental process has brought the
desire from the future (I want to be) to the present (I
am) your subconscious brain starts to shape your
behaviors so that they fit the concept that you are
manifesting.

That is not to say that you adopt a ‘fake it until you
make it’ approach, but that you start to see the world
through the eyes of one who is where you want to be.

A popular person sees the world differently to an
unpopular one and behaves accordingly. That behavior
reinforces the popularity and so the attribute gets
stronger.

The same with success. How often do we say that success
breeds success? It really does – successful people see
the world as a pool of opportunity and have no qualms
about wading in to take what is theirs. By adopting
that mindset, you can soon be wading with the best of
them!

So today, think about what you want to be. Then instead
of just wanting, start being.

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Today, I don’t know if you’ve had your breakfast or not yet, but I certainly don’t want you to believe six impossible things. Just one will do
to start with.

The one impossible thing that I want you to believe today – and I really mean BELIEVE it with every ounce of your being – is that you CAN.

You CAN achieve success.

You CAN do anything that you WANT to do.

You CAN … fill in your own blank!

With that fundamental belief, anything that is physically possible is within your range. At at times, even disability isn’t a barrier if you
have sufficient belief.

I read just this morning about a young man who was a successful mountain climber. He had a fall and trapped his arm between two rocks. He had a
choice that most of us couldn’t imagine having to take – he could hang there until he died, or he could cut off his own arm. He chose to live.
But that horrific tale isn’t the end of it.

He could easily have decided that without an arm, his mountain climbing days were over, but not this guy. He has the fire of ‘I Can’ burning
like a torch inside of him.

He now has a prosthetic arm, shaped like a pirate’s hook and he is back climbing mountains like he never left off.

You don’t need to cut off your own arm to prove that you can climb mountains – and we all have different mountains to tackle in any case. What
you do need is an absolute, unshakeable certainty that you CAN climb it.

When you KNOW that you CAN, actually doing it doesn’t seem so hard after all.

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‘Many thanks for pushing my wheel.’

It means, thank you for your recommendation.

It often follows another traditional saying, ‘I hope that you will remove the weeds that obstruct my mind.’ (A request for advice and guidance).

We DO have weeds in our minds, all of us, and we ARE often like wheels resting against a wall. Sometimes we can tend to the weeds ourselves, and sometimes we can set our wheel rolling without outside help – BUT most of the time we don’t.

So if someone else helps me to remove my mental weeds and set my wheel in motion I am not going to hesitate to let them – and thank them heartily for their efforts.

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Is it true that keywords and description metatags are a joke and that anyone bothering to put them on their web pages is wasting their time?

In Internet marketing, and particularly SEO, you should be very wary of anyone who makes categorical statements. Especially when those statements are about Google.

The fact is that nobody really knows.

What IS ‘known’ is that Google SAY they don’t take any notice of the keywords meta tag. I emphasize SAY because Google have a track record of saying one thing and meaning another. It really isn’t in their interest to tell you what they really take notice of in ranking web pages.

Having said that, there is probably little or no actual Search Engine Optimization benefit to spending a long time crafting a keyword-stuffed meta tag. There MAY be a benefit, however, in simply putting one or two primary keywords in there. Why? Because even if none of the search engines use the data today, who is to say that they won’t use it tomorrow. Algorithms change all the time and we generally have no idea what is making a difference at the margin.

And if someone comes up with real proof in two years time that pages with keyword meta tags on them rank better you would kick yourself if you’d assumed that putting it on the thousands of pages you may have built by then was ‘a joke’. Especially as that joke takes such little time and effort to tell.

A search on the term ‘keyword meta tag’ will find you all kinds of ‘experts’ who suggest that both the keywords and the description meta tags are a waste of time. That is patently false because you can prove that Google are reading the description tag – that’s where they prefer to get the snippet they use to describe your page in their listings.

There is no evidence that the description tag gives you any ranking advantage, but it sure as anything helps to draw attention to your page wherever it does get ranked.

It seems that Google prefer to use the description meta IF it includes the primary keyword for the page. If not, they will pick a random snippet from you page text that does include the keyword or phrase – as far as possible.

This can lead to some weird listings – as we all know.

To some extent you can control that by crafting a good description meta – one that includes your primary keyphrase and, in a natural writing style, common derivations of it.

As I said at the beginning, anyone claiming to be an ‘expert’ on what Google do or don’t do, and who gives you concrete, black & white instructions about what will or won’t rank your pages is stretching their own reputation thinly and quite probably is looking to sell you something.

And, although I’m not trying to sell you anything, I include my own observations in that disclaimer as well.

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Yet what do all those tests actually prove?

Do those boxes we are shoved into really define who we are? Or do they place artificial boundaries around us that become impossible to break out of?

David Ogilvy, an advertising copywriter who was universally regarded as a genius at what he did once was asked to take an intelligence test.

He was a bit surprised to find that he wasn’t a genius after all. In fact, according to the test, he was barely able to think at all!

If he had been asked to take this test at the beginning of his career, he would have had no career. A great talent would have been stifled.

I heard another story yesterday from a lady who coaches gymnasts. She had a young disabled girl in her class who wanted to do rythmic gymnastics with clubs. The girl was told that because of her disability this was impossible because she couldn’t throw and catch them.

But, unlike most of us, this little girl didn’t listen to the people who told her it was impossible. She did it anyway. She practiced and practiced and eventually could throw both clubs high in the air with one hand and then catch one in each hand as they came down.

They said it was impossible, but she did it anyway – despite being blind.

There must be many of us who have been told categorically that we can’t do something because we fell short on someone else’s scale, yet know in our hearts that we CAN and MUST do it anyway.

When you KNOW who you are – when your heart is telling you that your destiny lies in a certain direction – don’t let anyone else shove you in a box that doesn’t fit.

Like a jack-in-the-box, your spring will simply wind tighter and tighter until it either snaps or you burst through the lid.

I’m all for breaking out of the lids of artificially created boxes – how about you?

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One man was donating part of his liver to his son, who,
due to liver disease, had barely a year left to live.

The surgeon explained to this man that the operation he
was about to undergo had risks and that there was a one
in 150 chance that he may not survive.

The guy didn’t flinch. The chance that he could save
his son was far more important to him than his own
life.

Both father and son survived the surgery well.

So many parents of seriously sick children can only
watch and pray, absolutely unable to influence their
loved-ones health in any way.

But this man was given the opportunity to risk his own
life to save his son’s – and he grabbed that chance
with gratitude.

Who wouldn’t.

I watched that program with tears in my eyes and felt a
whole lot better about the human race at the end of it.

On a side note, I had an operation myself a few months ago and had to sign a disclaimer form after the anethatist explained to me that there was a 1% chance I may not wake up. Of course I signed – I needed the operation – but 1%? Really? Does one person in a hundred really die on the operating table? Surely if so many people were pegging out on such a regular basis the newspapers would be full of it.

I think maybe there is a bit of risk exaggeration going on.

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You see, the other thing that struck me was that the stores that
are trading are, in general, not fighting for business. It seems
like they have either given up or decided to hunker down and hope
for the best. Although there are lots of people here, they all
seem to be wandering around. Look inside the stores and in nearly
every case you’ll see a vacant-eyed assistant or two staring into
the middle distance while the tumbleweed blows around their legs.
They don’t have any customers to serve because the throngs of
people outside aren’t customers until they cross the threshold –
and nobody is doing much of that.

Where are the great offers? Where are the ‘today only’ deals?
Where are people hustling you to come into the store?

Almost every store has a sale on – up to 80% off in some cases –
but all those sales appear to be canceling each other out.

Sure, you can’t turn one of the biggest shopping malls in Europe
into a bazaar, but surely a bit of marketing wouldn’t go amiss?

Over the years I’ve lived through several recessions and a lot of
very tough times, and the thing that has always characterized
them is that they bring out the entrepreneurial spirit in folks.

When making a dollar is tough, you hustle up every dime.

But this time, that spirit seems to have gone into hibernation.

That, in my opinion, is why 2010 will continue to be a tough
year, even though the official figures tell us that we are no
longer in recession. The canny, clever, tricky, wily, ducking and
diving folk have gone to ground. At least on the High Street and
the great offline world.

Even when you do go in a store things don’t get any better. I
went into a big electrical retailer to ask if they sell RAM –
memory for my computer. Although this particular store didn’t,
they are part of a major chain that does, so getting it in for me
should have been easy. But no. The assistant looked at me as if I
was crazy for asking and said, “You do know you can save a
fortune by buying them online.” And then he recommended I look on
a well-known compuer memory website, nothing to do with the
company that pays his salary.

Buying online is a more obvious course of action, apparently,
than buying offline – even for people who work in offline stores.

Online, it seems, things are different. Online we have increasing
numbers of people taking chances, chasing dreams, making
mistakes, making money and keeping the spirit of entrepreneurial
dynamism alive and well and peeking through a browser near you.

All good stuff, but I do wish the offline world wasn’t wearing
such a defeated expression. For every store in this mall, I can
think of endless ways they could scare up more business and
increase their profits. The simplest way of all would be for
complementary, but non-competing stores to ‘loan’ each other
display space. That way they could all increase their footprint
and window space without any particular cost penalty.

Or how about the mall itself creating a promotion among
participating stores?

Or how about a group of stores getting together to give out books
of discount coupons?

Or have door prizes for every 100th customer to increase
footfall?

Or free muffins with every purchase (okay, that one may not make
too much profit, but I’d personally love it!)

The economy IS in turmoil. Consumers ARE tightening their belts.
But retailers have faced this before and by fighting, have won in
the end. This time shouldn’t be any different – IF the fight
hasn’t been kicked out of them already.

Now I’m off to spend some money and have lunch. See you later.

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The problem is, in my opinion, that they overthink the problem.
There is nothing magical about ClickBank. There are good and bad
products there, and good and bad vendors.

Some of the stuff there will sell well, and some wouldn’t sell if
you offered it as a free bonus for a bus ticket.

But just because it is on ClickBank doesn’t mean that anyone can
put up a scruffy web page and rake in the moolah. Real life
doesn’t work that way.

At the very least, you have to attract interested, targeted
people to your scruffy page – and do your best to make it less
scruffy that other peoples’. You might also want to give some of
that traffic an incentive to buy through your link rather than
keep on shopping for a better deal.

The first bit is called marketing. You go out and attract people
to your offer – you create a market.

You might do that with paid advertising (pay per click is one
example) or by free methods such as article marketing.

When you’ve got them to your page the next skill has to be
brought to bear onf them: selling.

Your web page needs to sell the idea of buying something.
Actually, as an affiliate, your focus is on pre-selling – making
them want to visit the product’s sales page where the real
selling can take place.

You might also want to sell the idea of getting a free bonus
report or some useful information so that they will sign up to
receive future emails from you. That bit is the key.

There is a significant cost, in either time, money or both, in
getting a prospect to visit your web page. But if that prospect
signs up to receive future mailings from you, there is zero cost
to get them too come back. Your customer acquisition cost is
negligible. That’s why squeeze pages are so popular and you have
to give out your email address to the most successful marketers.

That’s it in a nutshell: create a market by advertising, capture
the names and email addresses and presell them on the idea of
visiting the product’s sales page. And give a nice bonus to them
if they buy from your link.

If that sounds simplistic, it is. But why make it any more
complicated when simple works?

Over the last year or so I’ve recommended some excellent courses
on the subject, so I know good information is out there. It is
just a real pity that more people don’t buy it, study it, and
apply what they have learned without questioning every tiny
detail.

The most recent one that I recommended is still my favorite:
Chris Freville’s Dominating Niches. Chris is a really nice man,
who comes along to my London Lunches on occasion, who has that
fortunate knack of seeing directly to the heart of a problem and
finding the best way through it to a successful conclusion.

For Chris, that conclusion is a massive annual income that he
teaches you how to emulate.

Dominating Niches is one of those products that if you read,
study and apply it, you will succeed with. There isn’t an single
ounce of BS.

Check out the full details here:
http://urlnex.us/dominatingniches

The SAS motto is ‘He who dares, wins.’ Maybe it should have a
second sentence tacked on: ‘He who dithers, doesn’t.’

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I took the bait and followed the link.

What I came to was a squeeze page that had a very short
promotional video on it telling me about the benefits of the
‘free’ video. But to watch the free video I had to give them my
name and email address.

Okay, I have no problem with that. I’m a marketer too – I
understand about squeeze pages and list building. No problem.

But then I was taken to an upsell that was trying to sell me
something I had no idea what it was, and had no interest in
finding out.

I was there to see a free video, after all!

Eventually I found the ‘No Thanks’ link and so settled down to
watch the video I’d wanted to see five minutes ago.

But no. There was another sales page trying to make me buy a
cheaper version of the first upsell. I didn’t want it then and I
don’t want it now! Enough already!

Finally … finally … I got to the page the original email had
promised and watched the video. It was quite interesting, as it
turned out, although not quite as ‘new and revolutionary’ as the
author seemed to think.

What a palaver! Four clicks, two upsells, a name squeeze and a
promotional, pre-video to sit through. All to watch a short free
video.

I wish I hadn’t bothered.

I know it is marketing. I know that the gurus teach this stuff. I
know that it is effective. Heck, I know that the guy running it
is probably making ten times what I am.

But despite all that, it is still bloody annoying. Surely there
is a better way?

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I was looking back over some old Kickstarts and saw that I first
recommended a membership site called Unique Article Wizard back
in July 2007. I had just joined it and was waxing lyrical about
the success I’d had.

With Unique Article Wizard you write an article and then rewrite
each paragraph a couple of times. Then you upload it to the
service and wait for the magic to happen.

The magic is that Unique Article Wizard ‘spins’ your article and
submits a unique version of it to a huge number of article
directories and blogs. Automatically.

At the moment, they have over 11,000 places to submit articles to
on their database.

The result is that you get a huge number of backlinks.

As we all know, backlinks are the bedrock of success online. The
search engines, and Google in particular, take backlinks to be
‘votes’ for you web pages. The more votes you get, the higher
they will rank you.

It isn’t quite as simple as that, but backlinks are so important,
it may as well be.

And Unique Article Wizard gets you backlinks by the hundred.

To be frank, I join a lot of membership sites, and like most of
us, often cancel after a few months because something better has
come along, or because the promise I saw in the first place
hasn’t been lived up to. It happens.

But I’ve been a member of Unique Article Wizard now for two and a
half years – and have no intention whatsoever of letting it go!

The service has just got stronger of the years.

Article marketing is the easiest way to make money online and
Unique Article Wizard puts article marketing on steroids.

http://urlnex.us/uaw

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Think about that.

If you want to do business with a certain type of person, find
out where they hang out, find out what their needs are and put
yourself in their way.

If you want to sell ebooks online, fine out who wants to buy what
and then put yourself in their way.

If you want to speak at seminars, find out who organizes the
events and get in their way.

People who are ‘in the way’ get noticed.

While most people are happy to shrink into the background and
‘blend in’, successful people – or those on the journey towards
success – know that blending in is the LAST thing that they need
to do.

Where is the differentiation in that?

Sheep on the hillside blend in. All you see is a flock of sheep.
But if one of those sheep happens to have black wool it stands
out and your eyes are drawn to it. It is in the way of your
vision.

You have to find ways to get in the way of the people you need to
further your success. You have to be noticeable and noticed.
Whether that is by the way you act, the services you offer, or
the skills you possess, when you are in the way and you have
something that can solve another person’s problem, you are the
natural first choice.

And where success is concerned you are either the first choice or
you are no choice.

Get out of your blended-in comfort zone and put yourself in the
way of success.

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‘Really bad things are going to happen to me today.’

Did that make you feel uncomfortable? Did you resist
my instruction?

Did you think, “Are you CRAZY Martin? Why would I want
to think THAT?”

I bet you did! At least I HOPE you did!

Naturally, we don’t want to think that bad things will
happen because just by thinking that awful thought it
might just come true.

We know, deep down, that repeating something like
that, over and over again, can trigger the very event
we fear. So we don’t do it.

Or do we?

In fact, we spend our entire lives fearing the worst,
dreading the ‘inevitable’ and secretly thinking
negative thoughts.

And we wonder why our lives don’t run as smoothly as
we’d like!

Here is a thought for you to ponder:

If you won’t consciously tell yourself that bad things
will happen ten times over because you fear the
outcome, why don’t you tell yourself that good things
are going to happen?

Surely if repeating the bad statement over and over
makes it likely to come true, then the same can be
said of the good statement?

THAT is what the whole concept of positive
affirmations is all about. It may seem silly to keep
repeating something like “Every day in every way I am
getting better and better” but it WORKS.

You ARE what you most often think about.

If you think often enough that you are successful,
pretty soon you’ll start to see all the ways that you
ARE already a success and you will be able to build on
them.

If you think often enough that you are smart, it won’t
be long before you start to focus on all the ways that
you ARE smart, rather than the inevitable areas where
you aren’t.

When you think often enough that your life is filled
with positive energy that makes you happy with your
world …

… you guessed it.

So how about revisiting the beginning of this article:

Think hard about this next statement and repeat it to
yourself ten times with real feeling:

‘Really great things are going to happen to me today.’

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If not, please try it – it really works.

Keep an eye out for some small item that seems to
connect with you. You’ll know it when you find it.

It may be a particular pebble – its smoothness and
coloration may speak to you even if you don’t know
why.

Perhaps you will see a jagged piece of tree bark while
out walking and be drawn to pick it up and keep it.

Maybe a small toy – a car, a marble, a wooden animal -
will attract you in ways you can’t explain.

A picture that means so much to you, but nothing to
anyone else.

A bottle of perfume that transports your mind to
another place.

It could be anything.

If you have such an item in your life, you’ll know
what I mean, but if you don’t yet, please keep looking
– your touchstone is out there waiting for you.

When you find it, you’ll see that it has magical
powers. (Don’t panic, I’m not off on some mystic
flight of fancy here). Your own personal touchstone
has power because it connects with your imagination.
When you pick it up and allow your mind to drift, it
is a catalyst that lets your thoughts soar.

Inspiration is there for us all – but sometimes it
need a bit of help breaking through the barriers that
we put up in our daily lives.

When you connect with your touchstone it’s like
throwing open a window and letting the air and light
flood into your soul.

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Anyone who has dabbled in Internet marketing knows that keyword
research is fundamental to what we do. You find your niche and
then you find what people are searching for within that niche.

If you find a keyword (the term keyword can mean just one word,
or an entire phrase, so don’t be confused by it) that has a lot
of people searching for it, and at the same time you find that
the same keyword has relatively few web pages serving it, then
conventional wisdom says you have a winner!

Just go off, build a decent page for that keyword, get lots of
backlinks pointing to it and hey presto, Google will sent you
oodles of free traffic.

It isn’t really that simple, of course.

Yes, the principle is fine in theory. Follow the simple rules and
you will get free traffic from Google and the other search
engines. But not all traffic is created equal.

If it turns out that most of that traffic is window shopping, the
chances of you making a sale to it is slim.

Even worse, if your niche attracts a lot of freebie seekers, then
your chance of making money is even less than slim.

10,000 visitors to your website per day may count for absolutely
nothing if your keyword is too general, too vague, too generic,
or too often used by people who have no intention of buying.

“Digital camera” gets 30,000,000 searches a month. If by some
chance you could get on page one of Google for that keyword,
you’d get a mass of traffic. So much that your bandwidth
allocation had better be unlimited! But how many of those people
are in a buying mood? I’d bet that hardly any are really in the
market to spend any money – yet.

The work you’d have to put in to rank for that keyword would,
largely, be wasted.

Consider though, the keyword “buy digital camera”. Just one more
word reduces the monthly search volume to 135,000. Now they have
told you that they are interested in buying. Your selling job
just got a lot easier. But what kind of digital camera do they
want to buy?

We have made the keyword more relevant to people who want to
spend money, but we’ve still left ourselves a big job to convert
them to buy the specific camera we might be selling. What if we
are selling a Nikon and they are really looking for a Canon?

The answer is to make our keyword even more specific. How about
“buy nikon coolpix”? ‘Only’ 12,100 searches per month, but this
time they are searches by people who are already at the point of
purchase.

And that is the key to effective marketing and effective keyword
research.

We often hear about long tail keywords. Usually that is simply
taken to mean four or five word phrases that don’t get many
searches, but put lots of them together and you have a decent
monthly volume. The trouble is, long tail keywords are no more
likely to include potential customers than any other shorter
keyphrases – unless they include the magic trigger words that
searchers who are ready to buy use.

Words like buy, best price, review, purchase, deals, offers,
sale, specials, discount and cheap. And if it applies to your
market, include the serial numbers too as someone searching for a
specific model number has normally done their comparison shopping
and is now ready to buy.

Don’t fall for the myth of keywords. Broad keywords result in
lots of hard work, general, untargeted traffic and empty pockets.

Keywords that are focused on people at the point of purchase are
gold dust. And luckily for us, very few people are effectively
targeting them.

But Kickstarters know better, don’t we?

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The very first one to respond – literally with an hour – was my
friend Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian.

Dr. Mani is a remarkable man.

By profession he is a heart surgeon, who specializes in repairing
congenital heart defects in children – children who would die
without his life-saving skills.

Some years ago, Mani realized that there are far more children
who desperately need his surgery than can possibly afford it. Dr.
Mani lives and works in India, where medical costs are much lower
than elsewhere, but even so, the $2000 needed to fund each
operation is beyond the means of many families.

Their only option is inevitable heartbreak. Literally.

So Dr. Mani, being the kind of guy he is, decided to create a
charitable foundation to raise money to fund as many operations
as possible – and has devoted his own considerable Internet
marketing efforts to the task.

He is absolutely one of the great guys.

Dr. Mani has recently embarked on a new project to raise enough
to fund 47 new operations – called ’47 Hearts’ and I would like
to ask you to take a moment of your time to have a look.

The focus is on a Valentines Day launch (tomorrow) but you can
see Mani’s website right now.

I don’t normally send you pre-written emails but the following is
what Mani has asked me to tell you – and I can think of no better
way to sum it up…

Dr.Mani, heart surgeon and infopreneur, is launching his second
book on February 14th, 2010.

“47 HEARTS – How To Live Your Dream, With Passion, Purpose and
Persistence!” – www.47hearts.com

It’s an amazing book that has received rave reviews from early
readers – and has a wonderful cause behind it.

All profits from book sales are being donated to charity, and
will help sponsor life-saving heart surgery for kids from
under-privileged families.

I urge you to get a copy if you can – details are here:

http://www.47hearts.com

And as a special deal during launch week, Dr.Mani is also
throwing in a few extra bonus gifts for anyone who buys his book
or makes a donation of $10 or more.

http://www.47hearts.com/bonusgift.htm

One gift is especially of great value, it’s his first book which
was an Amazon.com HOT 100 best-seller…

“Think, Write & Retire – Turning Words Into Wealth”

All you’ll do is order “47 HEARTS” or make a donation and join a
“47 Hearts Group”. You’ll get instant access to several gifts in
digital form, and more important,
you’ll help a child live!

Thank you for your support.

Martin Avis

P.S. – Even if you cannot afford to buy the book, please try and
read it on the Heart Kids Blogathon blog where Dr.Mani will be
sharing it in successive posts, at

http://www.47hearts.com/blog/

P.P.S. It should go without saying that I make nothing from
recommending this to you. There isn’t an affiliate program, and I
wouldn’t want to take anything away from Mani’s charity even if
there was. This is simply and excellent cause, well worthy of our
support.

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The thrust of his email was that he hoped my disappointment
hadn’t extended to his Twitter ebook on ClickBank – and attached
a review copy of TwitMasterClass for me to check out.

I have to say, that after what I’d said earlier, he certainly had
some nerve to do that! The guy must be packing steel, to coin a
phrase!

I opened up the PDF file with some trepidation. What if it was
just another bunch of dross like the ones I’d already seen? Could
I tell him?

Right from the start, though, I could tell that it wasn’t like
the rest. This book makes a lot of sense and teaches methods that
I have already learned a lot from.

After the introduction there are 8 chapters over 48 pages:

Chapter 1 Things to Consider
Chapter 2 How to Set up a Twitter Account
Chapter 3 Building a Following
Chapter 4 Twitter it and They will Come
Chapter 5 Driving Them Crazy
Chapter 6 Just Don’t Do It
Chapter 7 Tips and Tricks
Chapter 8 Twitter Tools

It isn’t a long book, but that is because there is no waffle and
fluff. Each chapter tells you what you need to know without any
padding. As a result it is a quick and informative read.

Chapter 2 is for complete beginners, and chapter 3 tells you how
to do manually what Twittollower does automatically.

For me, the book really comes to life from chapter 4 onwards.
That is where I learned a whole lot of tricks, techniques and
really sensible advice that I hadn’t known or considered before.

There are even two excellent bonuses (I think only one of them is
mentioned on the sales page, but there are two) that are each
worth way more than the asking price of TwitMasterClass on its
own.

And that is because this is one of the lowest priced Twitter
products on ClickBank – but don’t be fooled by the price. Each of
the three products I reviewed and rejected cost more than
TwitMasterClass, but I wouldn’t dream of recommending them to
you.

I’m really glad that Stuart is a Kickstart reader – and that he
had the confidence in his own product to let me see it.

I’m sure you will be too: http://urlnex.us/twitmasterclass

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If it had been in England, even two inches of snow would have
made the roads impassable. There would have been news reports
about how thousands of people were stuck for 48 hours in snow
drifts – and if the buses had run at all, the chances are that
many of them would have broken down or turned over on the ice.

So David was expecting a very long journey.

In the end, he arrived in New York City just one hour later than
scheduled.

We English are said to be obsessed with the weather, but while we
are obsessing, everyone else just deals with it.

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Back then, blogging was fairly new, and Rob pretty much cleaned
up. His book, over three editions, has sold well over 30,000
copies.

Now, as you know, on the Internet, things change very quickly.
What works today, doesn’t always work tomorrow. New things come
(and go) and making money consistently demands that you keep up
with the latest ideas.

That’s why Rob released a new edition of ‘Blogging to the Bank‘
each year. He is constantly testing and tweaking his own blogging
business and once a year updates the book with the latest things
that are working for him.

Some of those editions I’ve liked a lot, and some have left me
cooler. But overall, and having met Rob on a couple of occasions,
I know that he is honestly striving to provide good quality
information that works.

The latest version of Blogging to the Bank, the 2010 edition,
launched a couple of weeks ago and I have just got hold of a copy
to review.

For my money, it is the best so far!

It covers all the basics, so if you are new to blogging, you will
be able to get up and running very quickly. And, importantly, it
leads you through to the latest cutting-edge tactics that Rob is
using to make real, serious money from blogs right now, in 2010.

By sheer coincidence, there is even a section on Twitter – and
you can access a complete Twitter course, called Twitter
Domination, that Rob has produced as a free bonus from inside the
book.

Believe me – it is WAY better than any of the products I
reviewed. And you get it free!

http://urlnex.us/bttb2010

Blogging is very easy – Rob’s ‘Blogging to the Bank 2010′ helps
you make it super profitable as well!

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Maybe, like me, you have seen the potential of Twitter, but have
taken a long time coming to really understand how to use its
power.

Judging from the emails I’ve been receiving lately, there are
lots of people who are in that position. I am one of them too.

I know I can make money by using Twitter – I already am – but am
I really going about things the right, or the most effective way?

Now that I’m approaching 1000 followers, and with, hopefully, a
lot more to come, I figured I should try to get a better handle
on that question, and hopefully find a sensible answer to it. So
I headed over to ClickBank and bought three of the highest ranked
Twitter products listed in their marketplace to review.

Just finding them posed a problem because ClickBank’s new
marketplace seems almost random in the products it displays in
answer to your keyword search. I entered ‘Twitter’ as the keyword
and got pages and pages of products that had absolutely nothing
to do with it! But I guess that’s progress!

Anyway, after some searching I found some products that looked to
offer good advice.

Oh how wrong that turned out to be!

Mostly, they were just plain garbage that taught methods and
ideas that have been outlawed by Twitter and would get your
account banned in a heartbeat.

Some were just plain too simplistic to be of much value.

None, in my opinion, were worth the asking price.

It was an altogether very disappointing exercise and just went to
show how important personal recommendations are when choosing
products to buy!

My personal recommendation to you, if you have a yearning to buy
a Twitter course, is to keep your money in your pocket.

In a nutshell, here is the process I’m using to make money from
my new Twitter account – hopefully you can adapt it to your own
needs.

For me, it all starts with a blog. Build a blog on your niche
topic – preferably with a WordPress on a domain of your own – and
make a series of on-topic posts that are designed to really help
people.

Don’t sell anything yet.

When you start Tweeting, add a plug-in to your blog that will
tweet an announcement of every new blog post you make. There is a
recommendation (and explanation video) in the Twittollower help
section.

If your experience is anything like mine, you will very quickly
start to see traffic heading to your blog, and a lot of that
traffic will look around at other of your blog posts.

Once that starts to happen, make a few blog posts that are
honest, genuine reviews of highly targeted products – and include
your affiliate link. The plugin will ensure that those review
posts are automatically tweeted about, so you don’t have to do
anything more.

Sidenote: You really need to ensure that you craft the titles of
each of your blog posts very carefully, because it is the title
of the post that becomes your tweet. Keep them short, sharp and
compelling.

I just checked my ClickBank account and see that I made $56 just
yesterday from my blog/Twitter combination. And I didn’t even
make a tweet yesterday! Not bad for one day and zero effort!

I’d love to make this more complicated and turn it into a special
repost or even an ebook, but in truth, that’s all there is to it.

I have been experimenting with several systems that allow you to
write a whole series of tweets in advance and then schedule them
to be automatically posted for you at predetermined times and
dates. It certainly makes the process even more hands-off, but I
haven’t found a tweet scheduling service that I really like yet.
If you know of a good one, please let me know.

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Over the last day or so I’ve been spring cleaning my office. I
hate clutter, but somehow it still accumulates faster than I can
I can cope with it!

What happened to the fabled paperless office?

So far I’ve filled two huge garbage sacks and I’ve only done half
the room! And it doesn’t seem to me to be too long ago that I did
the same thing.

The trouble with tidying is that in order to get a good result,
you have to make things a lot worse first.

You can’t clear a cupboard by just opening the doors and looking
in – you have to take everything out and assess the worth of each
item.

The result is that until the process is complete, your room looks
like a tornado has singled you out.

I know I don’t work efficiently in a messy environment, but don’t
have the self-discipline to straighten things away as I go. I
really envy people who are able to keep a clear desk – but I know
that for me, out of sight is out of mind. The moment I put
something in a pending folder I forget about it entirely. So I
have to keep all current jobs in front of me and only file them
away when they are done.

But as we all know, some jobs never get done and the list of ones
needing attention just keeps growing.

I don’t know what the answer is, but every three or four months I
have to have a blitz or mentally I grind to a halt!

And once a year, like now, I need to physically go through
everything in every file, on every shelf and in every cupboard to
weed out the junk and start afresh.

It is a soul-destroying task that never fails to leave me feeling
depressed, but I know it is worth it in the long run because this
act of penance seems to allow my creativity to start flowing
freely again.

Look out world – an uncluttered Avis is about to be unleashed!

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Whatever you call them, they are incredibly useful things.

And they are getting cheaper and cheaper for more and more memory
capacity.

I bought a couple of 4Gb ones today for about $9 each. And if I’d
shopped around, I’m sure I could have found cheaper.

To me, they are useful because I can have one dedicated to saving
all the files I need for one specific thing. So, if I’m creating
a new product, I can save everything onto that one memory stick
and then know where everything is. I don’t have to go hunting all
over my hard drive for files in all kinds of random places.

I know I could probably do the same with folders on my hard
drive, but it is so much more convenient to be able to unplug all
my data from one computer and plug it in to another.

But now that my little collection of memory sticks is growing, I
have hit on an unexpected problem – remembering what is on each
one.

There is no simple way to label the darned things!

The are all different shapes and sizes, and are made out of
different materials. Some will take a small stick on label, but
others, like the ones I bought yesterday, are made out of a kind
of roughened plastic that my sticky labels won’t stick to.

Has anyone solved the problem – or is it just me who is getting
the wrong end of the wrong stick?

Update: Since I wrote the above, it has been drawn to my attention that there are some fake 64Gb memory sticks being sold on unscrupulous websites. I don’t need that kind of memory myself, but if you do, be careful who you buy them from if you buy online.

Security: Another thing that has been raised is the potential security problem if you happen to mislay your memory stick.

We all know about stupid politicians and civil servants who lose their laptops on trains and from their cars, but at least most of those laptops are passwod protected to some degree. Most USB memory sticks are far less secure. It is only a matter of time before a senior government person lets his flash drive, with all the country’s nuclear secrets accidentally fall out of his pocket!

If you are concerned that your data might fall into the wrong hands if you lose your flash drive, there is a pretty good solution – and it is free!

You can download a program called TrueCrypt from http://www.truecrypt.com to make the data of any USB memory stick encrypted behind a password of your choosing. It has to be a new stick though, because the process will format the drive and destroy any data already on it.

Just make sure you pick a password that you can remember – and that other people will not be able to guess!

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You can’t spend more than five minutes on any Internet marketing
forum lately without being subjected to a dozen or more people
moaning and griping that nothing works, that Internet marketing
is an illusion or that people who teach the methods that work for
them are scammers.

Sometimes I actually find myself believing all that crap.

Every now and again, in an unguarded moment, I sit here reading
how hard all this is and how impossible it is to make sales, and
my stomach does a back flip. Have I pinned my family’s future and
security on smoke and mirrors?

Once in a while I suffer a moment’s panic that I’ve fallen for a
line and that my world will come crashing down on me – and all
those people who are constantly bleating on and on about failure
and how making money online can’t be done will laugh and point
and say ‘I told you so!’

Then I look at my PayPal account and the moment passes.

I don’t know why some people seem to be programmed to fail. Maybe
they are not – maybe it is just that they are terrified to
succeed because to do so would force them to shift their world
view.

I do know that the constant negativity can be highly corrosive –
if it even causes me to have doubts, goodness knows what it does
to someone who hasn’t yet learned how to succeed!

The answer is, of course, to avoid places where those people hang
out – including almost every forum I’ve ever been on. But that
would be to cut off my nose to spite my face. I like forums and
learn a huge amount from them.

And once in a while I like to try to inject a bit of out and out
positivity into some of the threads, to show people that it can
be done and that this funny old Internet business isn’t as bad as
they are making out.

That’s not to say that it is easy. Oh no. But it IS possible

“Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our
imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.” Jamie
Paolinetti.

It usually falls on deaf ears, but we do what we can!

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This is part 2 of the Twittollower review I started yesterday.

It is now about 60 hours since I signed up and as at this moment
I have 327 followers already.

Apart from the couple of minutes spent opening my Twittollower
account, I haven’t had to do anything – Twittollower just works
in the background sucking new followers to your account like a
magnet.

I have made a few tweets, of course. Although they have been
mostly generated by a plugin on my WordPress blog that tweets an
announcement that I’ve made a new post.

The results so far are that I can now directly attribute a few
sales to the new twitter traffic (totaling $74.95 in commissions)
and Kickstart now has seven new subscribers.

http://urlnex.us/twittollower

Some questions have been raised by Kickstart subscribers and I’ve
tried get answers…

* “Are the followers you get genuine people or just
auto-posting bots?”

Well, I’m quite sure that there are some rubbish followers
in there. That’s the nature of Twitter, after all. But the
fact that I’m getting excellent traffic to my blog in
general, and specifically to certain pages I’ve tweeted
about, suggests that a lot of the followers are real people
who are both targeted and responsive.

And let’s face it – auto-posting bots don’t buy stuff!

* “Does Twittollower break Twitter’s rules and will you risk
getting your account banned?”

Apparently, when Twittollower first launched, a handful of
people did get their accounts banned for growing too fast.
It seems that Twitter don’t like your follower list to grow
faster than a certain number per day – whether you have
added them manually or by a service such as Twittollower.

To combat this potential problem (it only affected a very
few people) Twittollower set a limit on how many followers
it would add to your account each day. Since then, there
have been no more problems.

I don’t know what that limit is, but as I’ve been getting an
average of 130 per day, I’m not complaining!

* “What’s happened about the price increase after 200 sales?
Surely they have gone past that point now?”

Yes they have. Originally they intended to increase the
price after 200 sales, but a few JV partners started
promoting the service before the official launch date, and
so they had passed the 200 mark before Twittollower was even
available to the general public.

To make things fairer all round – and especially to
customers of affiliates like me who wanted to test the
service before promoting it – they have extended the launch
price until Friday 5th February.

After that, joining Twittollower will cost more.

* “Isn’t Twittollower quite expensive for something you could
do yourself for free?”

There are two answers to this.

The first is that while you can add followers for free,
adding over 130 per day would be both mind-numbingly boring
and time-consuming.

I certainly wouldn’t consider it a good use of my time and
I’m sure most effective marketers would feel the same.

Free has its place, but not if getting free costs you in
other ways.

The second answer is that you have to remember that
Twittollower guarantee to get you 2000+ new followers each
month.

If you think of each follower as a sales lead, that means
each lead has about a 3 cents acquisition cost. And that is
outrageously cheap!

Of course, once you have them, you have them forever, so you
pay to get them once, but can profit from them over and over
again.

My ’1st 24 Hours’ video is still up at

http://imkickstart.com/twittollower-review

And the Twittollower sales page, with Tahir’s very good video
(which you really must watch right to the end) is at

http://urlnex.us/twittollower

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I’m not much of a Twitter fan – if you’ve read Kickstart for
long, you’ll know that I blow hot and cold about it – but as most
of the people who have been promoting Twittollower are my
friends, and the guys behind the service are too, I figured I
should take a closer look.

The real impetus for me to delve a little deeper came at the
London Lunch on Friday, when I met one of the respected marketers
who have been promoting Twittollower and asked his honest
opinion.

He had absolutely nothing to gain from feeding me a line, and as
I’d asked for his views off the record, could have easily told me
it was a load of rubbish! But he didn’t. He actually enthused
about it in a very positive way.

He told me that he had been getting phenomenal results himself.

Spurred on by that, I decided to sign up for the service and test
it out for myself.

So on Saturday afternoon I opened a brand new Twitter account and
signed myself up to Twittollower to see if it is really as good
as they (and my friend) say.

And I video’d the process so you can watch over my shoulder.

Twittollower is extremely simple. It gets you targeted followers.

Nothing more, nothing less. Setting up your account takes seconds
and once done, Twittollower just works away in the background
getting mew followers into your account. You don’t do a thing
(except make the occasional Tweet!)

I set up a fresh Twitter account called imkick that had no
followers and followed nobody. It was a completely blank canvas.

I then added a WordPress plugin to my blog at
http://imkickstart.com that would automatically tweet and new
blog posts I make. This part was optional, but I like to make
life as simple as possible for myself!

Over the next 24 hours I made a few blog posts, and sure enough,
tweets were made to the new account.

That’s all I did.

To say that I am impressed with the results after 24 hours would
be an understatement. Twittollower has far exceeded my
expectations.

And right now – 40 hours on – I’m completely blown away.

My brand new imkick Twitter account already has half as many
followers as my regular account which has been building up for
over 18 months! I’m sure it will have more than my old account in
another day!

And the followers are clicking on my links.

Traffic to my moribund blog has exploded. In just the first 24
hours, uniques went from an expected average of 12 to an actual
count of 54.

Even better, those visitors are looking around my blog like never
before. On average, I expect people to view 4 pages while they
are there – in the last 24 hours they have been viewing 11.3.

And they have been signing up to Kickstart too. Already I have at
least 6 new subscribers who can be directly traced to
Twittollower.

I’m a very happy bunny!

Take a look at my short video that gives you the results of my
test at http://imkickstart.com/twittollower-review

[For some reason, the video sometimes stops itself at 3 and a
half minutes. If you click the play button again, it resumes
playing normally. I'll fix that later if I can.]

And when you done that, head on over to the Twittollower website
at http://urlnex.us/twittollower

There is a brilliant video there to watch – it is quite long at
about 30 minutes, but well worth watching right to the end.

I learned quite a lot from just watching the video!

At last I can really see the point of Twitter. It is an
incredibly powerful tool – but only if you have a big list of
followers who are highly targeted and interested in whatever your
niche subject is about. But getting highly targeted followers in
sufficient numbers to really make a marketing difference is the
problem.

Twittollower solves the problem. I’m really happy I joined them.

And more importantly, very happy to recommend it to you.

http://urlnex.us/twittollower

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Isn’t it funny how just observing something so often changes it!

Not long after I sent out Kickstart I was told about a guy in New
Zealand called Geoff Shaw, who is selling a product called
BumBlogging. The words used by the friend who recommended it to
me were “You should take a look at this – it’s REALLY good.”

I did. And it is.

BumBlogging is a complete system that has been perfected by Geoff
over the last few years. It is a very clear blueprint of how he
actually makes a considerable income himself and as such it
doesn’t include a lot of the theoretical BS that you so often
find in such products. This is step-by-step reality.

The entire course is delivered as a membership site, but one with
a big difference – there are no on-going charges. You pay just a
small one-off fee to join and then nothing more.

The reason Geoff has made it web based is so that he can
continually update the information as either the Internet
changes, or he finds better ways of doing things.

Consequently, this isn’t tired and out of date, it is always
current and totally workable.

Even better, apart from a domain and hosting, there is nothing
more to buy. Geoff’s methods can all be achieved using free
products and services.

And overdelivery! Wow! This guy piles it on!

Since getting BumBlogging I’ve been reading it on my iPhone,
reading it on my monitor, reading it in bed … Delia wasn’t too
impressed with that … and absorbing as much of it as I can. Not
that it is complicated – it isn’t – but to make it work as well
as it can you have to understand the process and follow it
exactly.

And even though I’m crazy busy with offline commitments right
now, I have EVERY intention of putting BumBlogging into practice
as soon as possible. To not do so would be to leave a huge amount
of money untapped.

Two or three times a year I get really excited by a new product –
usually by the ones that give you all the information you need to
succeed. That’s why I love BumBlogging and why I’m so anxious to
get started with it.

And there is another reason to get excited too.

If you go to the main website at www.bumblogging.com you’ll see
two things: one is that the price is $97 and two is that it is
currently closed to new members.

Well as soon as I saw just how good this thing is I emailed Geoff
Shaw and asked if I could offer BumBlogging to you as a Kickstart
reader.

He not only said yes, but he also slashed a massive $60 off the
price.

http://urlnex.us/bumblogging

You’ll get EVERYTHING that full-price members get, but at a tiny
fraction of the original price.

It doesn’t matter if you are a complete and utter newbie or
already an experienced marketer, BumBlogging will be easy for you
to understand and put into action, and full of concepts that will
make you wonder why you’ve been over-complicating Internet
marketing for so long!

Do yourself a favor and get this one.

http://urlnex.us/bumblogging

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I told the story of a roofing contractor who came to fix my
gutters. He told me that he buys ten leads every week from a
company that gets them over the Internet. He pays £33
per lead (a bit over $50) and he is quite happy that the company
selling them to him sells the same leads to two other
companies as well.

That company is making more than $150 per lead, and have told my
guy that they can supply up to 60 fresh, unique leads each and
every week if he wanted that many.

And that is just in the very small market of people looking to
have a new flat roof installed.

Judging from the roofer – and the manager of a
conservatory-building company I also spoke to the other day –
selling these leads is the easiest thing in the world! Companies
are lining up to buy.

The particular lead company I saw offers leads in dozens of
different building-related specialities: driveways, windows,
conservatories, plumbing, decorating, you name it, they can
provide tradespeople with leads for it.

Imagine how much they are raking in!

I wish I could remember the URL of their website – you would be
amazed at how simple it was.

When I wrote about this in Kickstart back in September (I think)
I got loads of emails from people asking for more information.

One of my good online friends, Mark Vurnum, has been incredibly
successful with exactly this business model for the past few
years. He makes simple websites that suck in leads for all kinds
of businesses, which he then sells on for a considerable income.

Of course, Mark doesn’t restrict himself to the building
industry, and neither should you – there are all kinds of
businesses out there who are crying out for leads, and who are
very happy to pay a significant amount for each one.

A year or two ago, Mark created a training course on lead
generation, called Lead Generation Videos, and it was a big hit.
He followed up with a second, updated course called Lead
Generation Videos 2, which was equally popular.

Those course now form the basis of his Lead Generation Blueprint
membership site – and very good that is too!

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Just this week, Mark has come out with Lead Generation Videos 3.

Don’t be deceived by his spectacular lack of imagination in
naming his products! Lead Generation Videos 3 takes the whole
process to a completely different level.

Make no mistake, I could have started 2010 by
recommending any one of a dozen hot new products, but having
looked around, I really can’t think of anything that has the
potential to start this year with more impact.

And guess what?

It is free.

Well almost. You can get Mark’s Lead Generation 3 video for just
the cost of the postage (it comes to you on a DVD). I’ve just
finished watching it – it is 66 minutes long – and can tell you
that there is no fluff at all. Mark explains very clearly and
comprehensively how to create very high ranking websites that you
can then ‘rent’ out to local businesses.

It doesn’t replace his lead generation strategies, but does
provide a very easy to put-into-action alternative method of
profiting massively from local offline businesses.

You also get a free trial to Mark’ Lead Generation Blueprint
membership site that does give you everything you need to know
about the core lead generation business plan.

It is well worth getting the new video just to see inside the
membership site!

There are all kind of high ticket launches going on this month
and you will be bombarded with emails about them. There are also
several ‘giveaways’ where you can get a ton of stuff you don’t
really want or need in exchange for your precious email address.
100 free products just means 100 more people who will incessantly
send you junk.

But you won’t hear about any of them from me.

My number one aim has always been to tell you about the best
stuff out there – the products that can really make a big
positive difference to your life. Lead Generation Videos 3 is my
selection for the very first thing to tell you about in 2010
because it is something you can easily, cheaply and effectively
put into place right away and see great results.

Oh, and don’t worry that the product comes to you on a DVD – it
is great to have a hard copy to put on your shelf and refer to
later, but you can access the video instantly too.

In just over an hour from now you will be able to start building
your own rental websites – there is no skill needed and Mark
guides you through every step of the process.

In case you are wondering, even if every single Kickstart reader
started using this strategy today, the chances of anyone being in
competition with you is minimal – and not a problem anyway. This
is a vast market with massive potential.

Lead Generation Videos 3 is yours for the small price of postage.
Order your copy right now: http://urlnex.us/leadgen3

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Most article marketers submit their work to EzineArticles because
it is the most effective single place to get back links and
traffic from. But that also means that a lot of ‘writers’ (term
used very loosely) submit utter garbage.

EZA do manually review articles before publishing them but their
rules have been a bit vague and garbage has been getting through
- in huge quantities.

So now they are sharpening up their act.

They now say that articles under 400 words are unlikely to be
approved – and all the fast buck merchants are up in arms because
they’ve been writing 250 word pieces.

To put it into perspective, my short review of the ‘Complete
Guide to Website Building’ up above is 418 words. Hardly a huge
article!

250 words is barely a blog post!

EZA are also – horror of horrors – saying that articles have to
deliver quality content and not be rehashed, respun or repurposed
versions of other ‘articles’ the author has already submitted.

Well doh! Why would that surprise or upset anyone?

I have nothing against repurposing content or spinning it to make
multiple versions from the same source, but for goodness sake –
you don’t them post them all on the same directory! There are
thousands of article directories out there, and sending a
different version of your work to each one is a sensible plan.
But not all to EZA!

Common sense, folks.

Writing articles is one of the best uses of your time and efforts
as far as Internet marketing is concerned. But only when done
properly.

If you follow advice from people who tell you to take short cuts,
or advise you that you don’t have to work, or suggest that you
can get away with poor writing and that quantity is more
important than quality – then you are listening to the wrong
people.

Writing articles is a skill. You need to work at it and put out
the very best work that you are capable of doing.

Put yourself in the place of your reader – they have searched for
information on a subject and have found your article. Do they
want to read a hastily cobbled together 250 words of unresearched
nonsense that is only out there to attract poor quality
backlinks, or do they want to find a well researched, 400-750
word, clearly written answer to the question they are asking?

Working out which one is best shouldn’t be too hard and I totally
applaud EzineArticle’s new policies if they begin to teach the
ever growing number of ‘writers’ that quality will always win out
over quantity in the long run.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m in this game for the long
run.

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But is it a problem for you?

It isn’t a problem for me. The reduction in so-called privacy is
inevitable. If Google aren’t gathering it, then other people are.

Heck, even my supermarket keeps a file on every item I’ve ever
bought from them. And there is a lot they can glean from my
choice of toilet paper!

I feel the same way about Google knowing everything about me as I
do about the UK government’s proposal to introduce identity
cards, or the idea of being on a DNA database: I really don’t
care. I have nothing to hide.

I have never really ‘got’ the human rights people’s complaints
that these things are bad.

I mean, if having everyone on a DNA database means that a
murderer or rapist is caught quicker then I’m all for it. I’ll
happily swap the possible threat to my privacy for saving someone
else from becoming a victim of a monster.

The only negative I’ve heard about DNA databases is that one day,
an insurance company *might* get hold of the data and refuse me
medical cover because I have a genetic disorder I didn’t know
about.

I don’t think it is beyond the wit of those who govern to
legislate against that possibility.

I digress.

Yes, Google may have vast databanks of info about each one of us.
But they are not the only ones.

A friend of mine used to work for a company that collects,
consolidates and analyses data about individual consumers from
mailing lists, questionnaires, competition entries and thousands
of other offline sources.

You simply wouldn’t believe how much they already know about each
and every one of us.

They can even make assumptions about the way we think or act from
information they hold about our neighbors!

And yes, they sell all that data to anyone who wants to pay for
it.

Living in the Information Age has its consequences. The
redefinition of personal privacy is one of them.

So I’m not bothered. And even if I was, there isn’t a darned
thing I could do about it short of cutting the wires to the
Internet, crushing my cellphone, moving to a tent in the
wilderness and removing myself from the 21st century completely.

Living off the grid might sound like fun, but it would pretty
soon get very cold and very hungry. And very, very dull.

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In my book Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks I
detail 11 different ways you can use private label
ebook material. Any one of them can make you money and in
combination, the sky is the limit.

What Nicheology offers are two different types of PLR ebooks –
ones called ‘products in the rough’, which are text files that
you can use as the basis of a product of your own, and more
polished ebooks that come with sales letters and graphics already
produced.

As I said on Tuesday, one of the major selling points for me is
not only that you get new products in both categories every
month, but that you get access to the entire back catalog from
the word go. That is invaluable because they have so may books
now, on so many different subjects, that whatever niche you are
in, there is likely to be material there that you can use.

So what can you do with all these private label books?

Well for starters, polish them up, add a few extras of your own
and sell them as your own work. In my researches on ClickBank I
have found quite a few high popularity (i.e. ones that are
selling well) books that are on sale for $47 or more – that I
know are originally Nicheology products in the rough.

And often, several people are selling the same book under a
different title.

I haven’t done that yet (although I’m currently working on
polishing up one title for sale). My use of Nicheology is
different.

First, the site I’m building is a review site of ClickBank
products, themed by a specific niche. I’m using Nicheology ebooks
in five different ways on that site alone:

1. I have taken one ‘Product in the Rough’ and polished it up
into a long-ish (35 pages) report, which I offer as an incentive
for people to sign up to the associated newsletter.

2. I have taken five other Nicheology books and smartened them up
a bit to offer to buyers in each of the sections of the site as a
bonus when they buy a book from that section through my ClickBank
link.

3. Another couple of books have been stripped down into their
component chapters and posted to the site as relevant content
pages that link up to my review pages.

4. Using those same chapters I’ve been able to precis each one
into a 200-300 word blog post. It is very easy to cut down stuff
that other people have written, and fast. I can create about a
dozen good blog posts in an hour this way.

5. All of the books, whether the ones I’m offering as bonuses or
the ones I’ve used as content, are a rich source of ideas and
tips to put in the newsletters I send out to the list that the
site is building for me.

I could, if I wanted to, use the very same material in other
ways:

* Turn each chapter of a book into a short video to put on
YouTube and other sites to provide links back to mine.

* Create podcasts from the material.

* Combine several books into one to create a really good book for
sale in its own right.

* Use each chapter of the books as the basis for an article – by
simply paraphrasing it as you read it. A very fast way of
producing relevant and unique articles.

All this is possible because private label basically means you
can do anything you like (except sell the private label rights
yourself!) It is fantastic!

Now, there will be people who read all of the above and say ‘but
that all looks like a lot of work!’ And they’d be right.

Internet marketing – at least, successful Internet marketing IS a
lot of work – and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
But how much MORE work would it be to create a quality content
site without access to all this good material?

How much harder is it to write a dozen articles from scratch than
it is to paraphrase a book that is already written for you?

How much more daunting would it be to have to research and then
write a whole 50-page ebook to give away as a bonus that to just
read through a few candidates from Nicheology and then tart them
up to look pretty?

It is still work, but a whole world less work than the
alternative!

I don’t really believe in shortcuts, but I do believe in
smartcuts and Nicheology is the smartest investment I’ve made so
far this year. And next time my credit card expires, I’ll be on
to them to give them a new number as fast as I can!

http://urlnex.us/nicheology

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When the obvious is staring me in the face, I so often look
everywhere but right at it. And guess what? I’ve done it again!

As long-time readers if Kickstart will know, I am a big fan of
private label ebooks. The idea that someone will write a book
that you can then take for mere pennies and turn into a product
to sell is beyond magical to me.

In fact, I love private label ebooks so much that I wrote the
first (and as I rather immodestly still think, the best) ebook on
the subject of how to make great money from using them. Unlock
the Secrets of Private Label eBooks has been on sale now for four
years and if I had to sit down to write it again, I wouldn’t
change a thing.

Well, there is one thing I would change (and probably will for
any future updates I release) and that is the section on where I
recommend my favorite source of PLR ebooks. You see, most of the
really good sources have dried up and I haven’t found anything as
good to replace them.

That became a real problem for me a few days ago.

I’m in the process of creating a big affiliate website. It has
loads of ClickBank products that I’ve reviewed and I wanted some
good PLR material to use as content for some of the pages, blog
posts, and tips. My site is themed, so each section is about a
different, but related subject. To encourage sales I wanted to
offer a different bonus book to anyone who buys a recommended
ebook through my link.

I also wanted a really good ebook to offer as an incentive for
folks to sign up to the newsletter I’m launching alongside the
site (actually more of an ongoing autoresponder series than a
newsletter, but you get my drift).

So you can see that suddenly I needed a LOT of good private label
ebook material and I needed it fast.

Trouble was that my favorite membership site has been having
difficulties lately and I couldn’t use them. And none of my other
sources were up to the job.

I needed a PLR ebook site that would give me access to a huge
library of ebooks from the very start – not drip-feed me material
over the months.

So many membership sites only allow you access to the current
month’s offerings and future stuff as it is uploaded. The back
catalogue is either closed to you, or only available at extra
cost. Not good.

The answer, when it hit me, was blindingly obvious.

When I first wrote my book, the #1 PLR ebook membership site was
called Nicheology. I loved it and raved about it whenever I
could. But there was a big problem – joining was very difficult
because they kept on restricting membership and forcing people to
get on a waiting list.

I was happy because I was already a member, but recommending it
to others was a frustrating experience all round.

Then two things happened simultaneously:

1. My credit card expired
2. The owner of Nicheology sold out to someone else.

I vaguely thought that the change of ownership would be a bad
thing (although I had no evidence that would be so) and so never
bothered to give them a new credit card number. My membership
expired.

Well two days ago it struck me that Nicheology might be the
answer to my problem if they are still half as good as they used
to be. So I checked them out.

And was blown away!

I was able to join with no problem at all, had immediate access
to the entire back catalogue and to my joy found that the new
owner has taken the Nicheology site to a completely different
level.

It is fantastic!

Within a few minutes I had downloaded 8 ebooks that fit the theme
of my site – some are fully-formatted ebooks, and some are what
they call ‘products in the rough’, text files that you can format
for yourself.

I have more content that I know what to do with and all the bonus
products I need.

And all for a trial price of just $1!

Of course, I will not be canceling my membership – Nicheology is
just too valuable to allow it to slip through my fingers again!

http://urlnex.us/nicheology

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Not surprisingly, he was asking if he should give up and go try
something else, or if it really is possible and he has just been
doing the wrong things.

The replies were somewhat polarized. Some people said to carry
on, but to focus more. Others said that Internet marketing
clearly isn’t for him and that he should give up right away.

My own view is that if he truly has only made $100 in two years,
he is doing something radically wrong. There must be something
about the process of online marketing that he simply hasn’t
understood.

Of course, without more detailed knowledge of what the guy has
already done, and how he has done it, no advice can be of use to
him.

In general though, while I accept that there is a learning curve,
I can’t see any reason why somebody shouldn’t be able to make
regular income within 6 months of starting out.

The trouble is that many people secretly don’t believe that it is
possible. They subconsciously put up barriers in their own minds.
They over think and over analyze everything to the point that
they either don’t do the things they need to do, or they spend so
long on the unimportant trivial stuff that they forget to take
action on what really counts.

I was just the same. It took me a while to ‘get it’ when I
started out and I remember the frustration of thinking that I was
doing everything right but still making nothing, when all around
me I could see people apparently doing the same things that I
was, but making a fortune.

In the end I learned the most important thing of my online life:
that if I thought I was doing the same things as other people and
they were successful with it but I wasn’t, then the problem was
that I didn’t understand the process properly. Somewhere along
the line I was doing something differently and success would come
when I identified my own error and corrected it.

Making money online is simple, but it isn’t necessarily easy.

None of the steps you have to take are particularly complicated –
so long as you don’t over think them – but there are a lot of
steps and the potential for doing them wrong, or in the wrong
order, is high.

Internet marketing can be defined like this:

Learn what problems people use the Internet to solve and provide
them a solution.

Everything you need to know about online marketing is contained
in those 14 words, but most importantly, in their order.

First comes learning what their problems are.

Most people who try, but ultimately fail to succeed online don’t
start in the right place. They start out by listening to the
worst advice anyone ever gave: go with your passion.

Your passion is only of value or relevance if it solves the #1
question: what someone else is searching for an answer to.

I might be the world’s leading expert on snail mating behaviour
and think it is the most interesting subject known to man. But
despite my total enthusiasm, the chances of anyone ever wanting
to buy my latest ebook on how to breed snails is slim. There
might be a handful of French food enthusiasts, but not enough for
me to start an online empire from!

No. Forget your passions and look for other people’s problems.

Problems come in all shapes and sizes – from curing a disease to
finding a good price for a camera and our objective is to find
one that lots of people share that we can find or create a
solution to.

That is the #1 principle of marketing, whether online or off.

How do you find the problems people have?

Simple – Use Google’s keyword tool. (Google “keyword tool” and it
will be the #1 listing.)

Enter “How to” or “How do I” or “Where can I” and you’ll
instantly have enough problems to last you a lifetime!

The next trick is to decide which ones are worth pursuing! But
that’s a question for another article.

One thing I will say now though is that you must get common sense
on your side and think like a marketer.

For example, one of the top questions people are asking is ‘how
to kiss’.

With hundreds of thousands of people searching for the answer to
that particular problem, you might think that there is a huge
market ready to buy your latest practical e-guide. But think
about it for a minute and you’ll realize that the vast majority
of the people searching for that are going to be teenagers – and
kids don’t generally have credit cards or PayPal accounts.

Even offline marketers make that mistake all the time. I worked
with a company once that gave reward points that could be
redeemed for discounts on CDs. Their fatal flaw was that their
audience was 12-16 year old boys and the redemption could only be
done via a credit card purchase. Wasn’t going to happen!

But carry on down the how to list a little way and you’ll find
that ‘how to make pancakes’ is a very popular search.

Sure, there are endless free recipes online, but you can say the
same thing about chocolate cake too – and there is an ebook that
has been selling well on ClickBank for at least the last 6 years
on how to make the world’s best chocolate cake. (I bought it and
the recipe is almost impossible to get right!)

Could a report or video on how to make the world’s yummiest
pancakes sell for a few dollars? It might be worth a try – and
won’t cost much to find out.

It is a real problem for millions of people and maybe you can
provide (or appear to provide – which is what marketing is all
about) a unique solution.

So, to wrap up, whether you’ve been failing online for two years
or have just started out on this exciting journey, success will
come by getting all the simple steps in the right order. And the
first simple step is to put the other person’s problem at the
very beginning of what you do.

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Stuff that works today, might not work tomorrow, but the next day
there will be something even better to test.

At least, it used to be like that.

I don’t know if my finger has slipped off the pulse, or if the
pool of creativity is running dry, but for the last few months I
haven’t really come across anything that I could class as a new
idea.

Every new product launch I’ve seen has been a rehash of existing
ideas, with very little that is new and inspiring inside it.

There have been some well written and nicely thought out
strategies, but hardly any have been based on really new
thinking.

Does this mean that Internet marketing has at last grown up?

In some ways it is a good thing. Information overload has long
been a problem and new stuff hitting the streets every day hasn’t
helped ease the confusion. But if I’m right, it is also a pity.
Creativity is the lifeblood of this business.

Without it, we’ll all stagnate.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’ll email me to tell me that I’ve
simply failed to notice some startling new ideas. Actually, I
hope you do – in this case, I’d love to be proved wrong!

So what is the next must-do strategy? Where are the next untapped
traffic sources? Who is the next ‘uber-guru’?

Or, heaven forfend, have we got to stop chasing rainbows and
start actually using the stuff we’ve already bought?

Now that would be a novel concept.

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It doesn’t take much to fix a PC so that it will run faster and more efficiently, but you do have to go about things in the right order – and with the appropriate regard to the safety of your data.

To that end, I’ve written this article to give you ten steps to a more efficient PC – and the security of mind to know that your data and programs are safe and sound no matter what might happen to your hard disk!

Each step is an important stage in improving your computer’s speed, so don’t miss any out.

Many of the things I suggest you do are free, or have free alternatives. One or two are items you need to pay for, but think of those as an investment – in making life easier and in giving you peace of mind.

The Kickstart PC Speed Up Action Plan

1. Perform a full scan of your computer for viruses and trojans.

Options for this include:

* Norton AntiVirus

Norton works very well and keeps your computer as clean as possible. The latest version doesn’t appear to slow the computer down significantly. I’ve had my ups and downs with Norton over the years, but have now got the latest version happily installed on three of my four computers – and will add the fourth when its current system expires. Norton offers essential protection from viruses, hackers and privacy threats. (Click here for the UK site)

* AVG
The free version is pretty good. You don’t get the bells and whistles that the paid-for programs offer in the way of control panels and option, but the free AVG is a pretty good AV solution if you are on a budget. Get AVG here

2. Fix any lingering problems you may come across.

Anti virus programs are very good at detecting and removing the bad stuff, but every once in a while they will come up against a virus or trojan that they can’t remove. Hopefully this won’t happen to you, but if it does, don’t panic! Head on over to Google and type “[virus name] removal” – replacing the [virus name] bit with whatever name your AV program has identified. You will almost always find specific instructions for getting rid of these persistent menaces.

3. Perform a full scan of your system for adware, malware and other undesired ‘ware’ programs.

There are lots of good programs that will make this a really easy process. My two favorites are currently:

* Windows Defender:
This free download from Microsoft is pretty good. It won’t remove everything, but will keep your PC clear of the most obvious threats. Click here to download a copy.

* Spyware Doctor.
This is by far my program of choice – I’ve used it for about three years now and wouldn’t dream of failing to renew my subscription. It is a paid-for program, but it is so much better than the free alternatives that it is in a different class.

Spyware Doctor seems to be able to find junk on your computer that nothing else gets close to – and offers real time protection that is superb.

4. Clean out any obvious junk that is on your computer.

The simplest way to do that is by using the tools built in to Windows (sorry Mac users, I have no idea how it all works for you.) On a Vista machine, go to the Start button then All Programs -> Accessories -> System tools. Select Disk Cleanup and wait until it has performed its scan. You will be offered a checklist of types of file to remove – read the labels carefully and get rid of the stuff you don’t need.

5. Remove unwanted programs.

If your computer is anything like mine, you constantly add new stuff, but don’t ever think to remove the junk that you no longer want.

Go to Start button -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System tools again, but this time click on the More Options tab, and then the button in the ‘Programs and Features’ box. This brings up a list of all the programs currently installed on your PC. Go through the list and remove any that you know for sure you won’t be needing again.

If in doubt, keep it. You don’t want to go removing stuff you don’t know what it is – it just might be important!

6. Set a new System Retore Point.

You do this (in Vista) by going to Start button -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System tools and then selecting ‘System Restore’. A box will pop up and the last line in that box will read ‘To create a restore point, ‘ followed by a link to ‘open System Protection’.

Click that link and another box will pop up (Microsoft haven’t made setting a restore point very easy in Vista – in XP is was more straightforward.)

At the bottom of the new box is a button marked ‘Create’. Click it.

What this does is saves a lot of system settings, so if anything messes up on your computer you can, in theory, wind it back to this point.

7. Back up your computer.

There are lots of ways to back up a computer – it is something we all should do on a regular basis, but which often gets forgotten. Until it is too late.

The best way of all is to use software that byte by byte copies your entire hard disk on to another one. In effect you create a clone of your computer, so if the current disk gets mangled, the backup one can just be swapped in – or copied back.

This ensures that you can never lose more than 24 hours data.

* DriveClonePro6
This automatic backup software is reasonably priced and very good at what it is designed to do. Currently it is on sale at $15 off! Take a free trial here and see for yourself how easy it is to secure your data while you sleep easily.

Stupidly, I haven’t yet installed anything so sophisticated on my workaday PC, but am now investigating a different solution!

* Online backup

This is fast becoming a very serious and convenient solution. For a very low monthly cost (under $5) you can back up 150Gb of data every night while you sleep. There is even a free trial option – which may in itself be enough if you don’t have too much data to keep safe.

I’ve just signed up for this myself and have been very impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

8. Repair and Optimize your PC.

My Mac using friends sneer at Windows, and in one respect at least, they are quite right to do so – as an operating system it is rather prone to getting itself into a muddle. At the heart of Windows (of any flavor) there is a big database called the Registry. This keeps a record of the wherabouts of every file and program on your computer in the most astonishingly complex ways.

In theory, every program you install, and every action you take while using your PC  is supposed to ‘register’ itself with the registry and delete its entries there when finished. Unfortunatley, this rarely happens as it should and so the Registry gets quickly filled up with junk – or worse, conflicting entries.

This can slow down your computer, make it work less efficiently and at worst, cause all kinds of crashes and errors.

To combat this, I recently reviewed a piece of software in Kickstart called Perfect Optimizer which cleans, repairs and optimizes the Registry for you – on up to three different computers.

My experience of using the program was very good – some long standing troubles were fixed right away, and the two machines I’ve so far used it on are running much faster and smoother.

As it is possible for anything that works on the Registry to mess up, I would strongly recommend that you perform points 1-7 as listed above before you run Perfect Optimizer, or anything similar. That way, if the worst happens, you should be able to retrieve your data. Dozens of Kickstart readers bought Perfect Optimizer and only one has reported any problems, so I judge it to be pretty secure – but better safe than sorry.

There is a free download trial that will scan your system and tell you just how messy your Registry is!

9. So what next?

By now you have cleaned out the obvious junk, rid yourself of viruses and spyware, thrown away unwanted programs, polished up your registry and backed everything up nice and safely.

The final step is to make sure that all the data held on your hard disk is stored in the best way for your computer to access it.

Computer files are generally sliced up into tiny chunks and stored anywhere on your disk where there is room. This can slow things down a bit as the computer has to search around to piece things back together to run them.

In your system tools folder (yes, that od favorite again) there is a program called Disk Defragmenter. Run that now and it will find all the fragments of files and stitch them together again. It will also identify any programs or files that are run often and will place them on the disk where they can be accessed the fastest. It will then squash everything down into the smallest possible space.

10. Relax … your work is over!

You’ve now done just about everything possible to make your computer run smoothly and efficiently. You’ve also secured your data so that if the worst happens, you are covered.

You might have to go through the process again in 3 to six months time, but meanwhile, you’ll be getting the best out of your machine that you can.

[Please note that while all the processes mentioned in this article are tried and tested, every computer, and computer user, is different and can react in unforeseen ways. I can take no responsibility for any unexpected or unwanted results that arise from following the steps outlined.]

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Every now and again I come across something that I think may be
of real interest and value to you.

When I do, I tend to sit on it for a while, thinking it through
and testing it out. Only then, when I’m satisfied, do I commit to
recommending it to you. There are exceptions – sometimes
something is just so obviously good that I don’t need to ponder
it. And yes, sometimes (rarely, I hope) something doesn’t live up
to its initial promise.

But in the main, the Kickstart way seems to work.

There is something I’ve been sitting on for a few days now that
the time has come to announce to you.

That in itself speaks volumes I suppose, because unless it had
already passed my quality score you wouldn’t be getting this
email!

The ‘thing’ in question is a new membership site called ‘More
Money 365′ that has made me gawp in amazement. (Or should that be
gasp, or gape?)

As you may know, I’ve been pondering starting my own membership
site for some time, but seeing just how much is in this one, and
how professionally run it is, I really don’t think I could
compete. Certainly I couldn’t compete on the price.

You know I’m an affiliate, and therefore you must wonder if I’d
say anything to get the sale (many would, let’s face it) but I
hope that my track record speaks for itself. I’ve passed up the
chance to promote some of the biggest things – products that
could easily have made me hundreds of dollars per sale – because
I wasn’t 100% happy with them or the way they were doing
business.

And I’ve fallen out with quite a few big name marketers as a
result! (I’ve even had a lawyer letter from one of them
complaining that I was too harsh on her client’s product!)

But back to ‘More Money 365′…

What you get is a very professionally put together membership
site that has four main sections:

1. The members’ area.

This is the entry page, which links you to the other areas of the
site, but also gives you access to some great new stuff that has
recently been added (new things are added to ‘More Money 365′
every few days, so not only does your membership continually
increase in value, but there is always something new to explore).

At the moment the featured product is a set of templates for
Amazon affiliate sites. These templates, while not specifically
designed for IPK users, could easily be adapted and would shorten
the Info Product Killer build process substantially.

In my opinion, my membership fee has been more than covered for
several months with these templates alone!

And we haven’t moved beyond the first page yet!

2. Downloads.

The second area is called downloads, but is actually a growing
area of how-to information that you’ll be sure to find useful
whatever your current experience level in Internet marketing.

This is stuff to teach you everything from the basics to some
very advanced techniques.

What I particularly like about this section is that new tutorials
and how-tos are added every three days, so you avoid information
overload when you first join, and have good reason to keep
checking back for the latest additions.

3. PLR

This section is, in my opinion, misnamed because it includes
products that offer resell rights, master resell rights and
giveaway rights as well as the private label material.

But whatever it is called, it is a treasure trove.

There is a huge amount of products there right now – all stuff
that you can immediately offer for sale on your own sites – and
more is being added daily.

If you follow business plans like the very popular one Michael
Green teaches in The Money Tree Challenge, you will know the
value of a ready source of good quality, salable products.

This section of ‘More Money 365′ is like a field of diamonds. You
don’t even have to dig to find dozens of things you can make
money from. Just pick ‘em up and use them.

If you can’t make at least ten times your investment back from
this section alone, you are not really trying.

4. Articles

Finally, there is a large, and growing, section of top quality
articles split into a wide range of Internet marketing related
categories. These are both interesting and useful and serve as a
great place to go when you have a specific question you need an
answer on.

I wondered (it isn’t made clear on the site) if the articles can
be reused on our own websites or in blogs. They are very high
quality, and using them would be a great benefit. So I fired off
a quick email to support and got a response in double-quick time
telling me that provided MoreMoney365.com is credited, members
can reuse the articles. Excellent!

Also excellent was the speed of the response. It is always good
to know that a membership site offers great support.

In summary, I am generally quite skeptical about membership sites
and join very few. They often start out well but quickly
deteriorate. This one seems to be different.

For one thing it is low cost. The monthly fee is very affordable,
and the amount of material available inside makes it incredible
value for money.

For another, I very much like the 3-day drip-feed idea. That
makes you want to regularly check back with the site to get the
latest products and information. One of the big problems I have
with membership sites is that they only update once a month (some
not even that often) and that means you are very likely to forget
you are a member. More Money 365 forces you to take action and
from the perspective of you actually making money, that’s a great
way to go!

There is something else I like about the site too – something
very close to my heart and my wallet. It is something that you
will love too, but you’ll find out about that when you’ve joined.

There is currently a two-week free trial – that shows how
confident Dan Vaughan (the man behind the site) is in the quality
of what he offers – so I heartily recommend you to get in on this
one while you can.

http://urlnex.us/MoreMoney365

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It is often said that the only people who make real money online
are those who create their own products. I don’t happen to
believe that this is necessarily true, but we’ll let that ride
for a moment.

If we do accept that creating your own info products is the way
to riches, why then, are there so many people who have gone to
all the huge effort to make products but still struggle to make
any sales?

The answer is the order in which you do your work.

Years ago there was a successful offline book published (long
before the Internet) called ‘Is There a Book Inside You?’ that
taught the process of turning your own pre-existing passions and
knowledge into a real-life book.

The very idea of ‘writing a book’ seems to be a dream for many
people. We naturally hold authors in high regard, and have a
strange feeling that writing a book puts a person on a different
level.

The book is the end result. Seeing your name on the cover is the
real objective – the concept of actually selling it comes a
distant second.

The vanity publishing industry has grown up to service this
desire to be a published author.

Getting back to the order of work, the old way starts with what
is inside of you – what you know about (or can research), what
you are passionate about and what you will feel proud to put your
name to.

After that comes the process of writing and in third place (if at
all) comes the vague notion of selling it to other people.

For many people that last step is ignored completely – especially
the vanity publishers. To them, having a single copy of their
book on their bookshelf is the end in itself. Selling it to other
people is actually a bit embarrassing!

If all you want is a book on your shelf to make you feel
important in your own eyes and that of your family, fine. This
order of work is no problem. But if sales are on your agenda, if
your real objective is to eventually make money from your work,
then you must order your work completely differently.

The secret is in the word that describes what we are: marketers.

A ‘marketer’ is defined as: One that sells goods or services in
or to a market.

Note that the definition is in two parts:

a. One who sells goods or services
b. In or to a market.

You can’t have one without the other. If you are ‘a’, you must
have ‘b’ – otherwise you are not a marketer, you are a dreamer.

You can write the best book in the world on your chosen subject -
the one that everyone says you have to be passionate about – but
if that subject doesn’t have a pre-existing market, you will be
an author, but not a marketer.

So if you want to be an information product producer who actually
makes sales – and fulfils that promise that info product
producers make the real money online – you must first and
foremost find a market.

And you do that by answering what I call the ‘Five Marketing
Questions’:

1. Are there people out there who want to know what you know?

2. Are there lots of them?

3. Are they hungry for your information or just casually
interested?

4. Will what you have to say satisfy one of the basic human needs
that drive us all: money, health, love, security, self-esteem,
entertainment?

5. Are they already proven to be prepared to spend money on
information products?

These five marketing questions are not optional. To write a
successful information product, it has to tick all those boxes.

The fewer the ticks, the less successful the product will be. It
is as simple as that.

Many, many books (and nowadays ebooks) tick none of the boxes at
all. The author has just gone ahead and written something that he
or she is passionate about in the vague hope that someone will
share that view. But it doesn’t work that way and those many,
many authors end up bitterly complaining that Internet marketing
doesn’t work. All they have to show for their often considerable
efforts is a deep regret over the time they have wasted.

I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t write about things
you are passionate about – only that you need to explore your
subject to find an angle that will make it hypnotically appealing
to as many people as possible.

Before you commit yourself to the hard, and often frustrating
task of writing a book, first ask yourself if there are plenty of
people who might be interested in buying – and why. Ask the five
questions and only start work when you can satisfactorily answer
them all.

Let’s look at a simple example.

If, for instance, your passion is the history of the Roman Empire
in England and you yearn to write a book about your beloved
subject what should you do? Assuming you are not a well-known
academic, it is unlikely that you’ll readily find a paper and ink
publisher, so self-publishing is your only option.

Does your subject tick any of the five marketing questions?

Well, no. Probably none.

But wait a minute – how can you repurpose your subject to satisfy
both your longing to share your knowledge, and stand a better
chance of finding a market and making sales?

How about ‘A Tourist’s Guide to the 25 Most Exciting Ancient
Roman Sites in Southern England’?

Now we have a real possibility. There are lots of tourists and
they are proven to buy guidebooks by the thousand. A good sales
letter can make it appeal to the desire for self-esteem and
entertainment, there is a long history (pardon the pun) of
successful guides to historic sites and tourists are generally
well motivated (hungry) to buy the latest stuff around.

Boxes ticked. And as bonuses, note that the notional title
specifies ‘Southern England’ – leaving the option there for a
sequel or upsell on ‘Northern England’. And how about the next 25
sites? I smell a series!

Rather than seeing the subject as a dry historian, we are now
looking at it like a marketer.

So in summary, selling your own information products is a great
way to make money online (not the only way, but a good one
nonetheless). But it is only a good way if your focus from the
outset is on selling, rather than writing.

My five marketing questions will help you assess your ideas and I
suggest that you vigorously filter all your ideas through them.
Work on your ideas until you have five ticks: anything less and
you’ll be selling yourself short.

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Info Product Killer

For the last few days I’ve been completely distracted from my normal Internet marketing routine. Something happened that has made me set almost everything else aside to concentrate on something new.

The real reason for my current state of distraction is a new Internet marketing product I’ve been reviewing called Info Product Killer. It has got me more fired up than almost anything I can remember for a very long time.

As you probably know, I review a lot of products and recommend a few of them in Kickstart. Some I put into action and generally do well as a result. But on Wednesday morning I got hold of this new product called Info Product Killer – a series of pdf files and videos that teaches the exact process the creator used to make over $100,000 last Christmas, and a lot more than that so far in 2008.

What is this thing that has got me so excited?

What’s nice is that it is Internet marketing, but not to the usual Internet marketing crowd. It is about how to sell real products to real people through real vendors. and make a very healthy profit in the process.

The system that Craig, the originator of the Info Product Killer concept, has developed is a very streamlined and efficient mini site idea. Mini sites are nothing new. Phil Wiley wrote about them seven years ago and several people have brought out new versions of the concept over the years.

What Craig has done is to boil the whole thing down into a very effective system that capitalizes on proven on-page SEO techniques.

The number of people buying stuff online is growing all the time – in fact, the current credit crunch may even accelerate the growth as more people look online for bargains.

Craig’s Info Product Killer shows how to build sites that the search engines love to send free traffic to – traffic that is really targeted, and highly likely to convert into sales. And every times a sale results, you get money in the bank.

I don’t say this lightly, but I am really excited about the idea.

So much so that I’ve already bought a bunch of domains (.info ones that only cost a dollar each) and have built my first Info Product Killer website.

Would you like to see it? It isn’t completely finished, but as near as makes no difference. You can take a look at Baby Born With Magic Potty

Don’t laugh at the subject matter – that is one of this years hottest toys!

The site looks pretty good I think and it was based almost entirely on the template that is supplied.

You will need a bit of HTML knowledge to make a fast start with the IPK system, but quite honestly, even if you don’t have that yet, you’ll soon pick it up.

There is nothing that a newbie couldn’t tackle – there are a huge number of videos in the members area of IPK to help beginners get going quickly, and Craig is awesome at customer service (that’s a word I don’t use very often).

The basic principle of Info Product Killer

I’m not giving a away a secret to tell you that the idea behind Info Product Killer is to tap into the millions of people who are searching online to buy specific products – from my Baby Born With Magic Potty site you can see that I’m concentrating on toys this Christmas, but there are any number of other categories that could just as easily be used – gadgets, book, video games are just a few possibilities.

You build a series of websites, according to the precise details that Info Product Killer provides, to attract a share of those hungry and eager searchers. IPK’s secret is the way you are taught to use on-page SEO to make your sites very attractive to the search engines so they naturally send you plenty of free traffic.

That free traffic is then monetized by sending them on to big merchant sites, like Amazon, who pay you a commission on each sale.

Info Product Killer works all year round – at Christmas the earning potential is concentrated into a smaller timeframe, but people are eager to buy bargains at any time of year – and your IPK sites make those bargains easy to find for them.

A fast process

My first site took me about six hours to build. Now I’ve got the idea, the next one I do will take a lot less. I reckon that I should be able to put whole sites together in under two hours each.

I just got off the phone from Craig, and he tells me that he can create entire sites and have them up and earning in under an hour now – and I quite believe him.

The secret to success with this strategy is to keep building more and more sites, and so getting them up quickly and efficiently is paramount.

The current sales focus of Info Product Killer is on making a killing for this Christmas. Now is exactly the right time to get started – if you can get your IPK sites up by the middle of November you should be well placed to make a good return by Christmas.

But if you want to move a little slower, no problem. IPK is actually based on two strategies – one for Christmas and one for the rest of the year. The year round method is, I’m told, even more effective at raking in commissions!

Did I say how excited I am about this? I can’t remember a product that has made me drop almost everything else to put it into action before. It really is that powerful.

Special Kickstart Offer

The sales page (there are some videos to watch there that are worth taking the time to view) is at http://www.urlnex.us/ipk

As I said earlier, I’ve just got off the phone from a very long conversation with Craig – what a nice man he turned out to be – and he has kindly given me a very special coupon code for Kickstart readers to use to get a huge discount.

When prompted, type MAV777 into the appropriate box and you’ll get IPK at a fraction of what it is really worth.

A final note…

Craig is based in the UK. His earnings for last Christmas – $100,000+ in a few weeks – were entirely from UK traffic. His sites were not aimed at the American market at all. If he could make those sorts of earnings from the relatively small UK visitor numbers, imagine what the much bigger US market would produce!

The IPK concepts are 100% international. They will work almost anywhere. He stuck to the UK last Christmas because, quite frankly, he didn’t need to expand his operation.

The US is wide open for this and those who jump on it fast will make a killing.

No matter where in the world you are, IPK will work for you.

http://www.urlnex.us/ipk

But don’t delay because the time to act is now.

Update: Questions and Answers about Info Product Killer (first published in Kickstart Daily Ezine)

Hi,

This is an extra message that is aimed mainly at the many
Kickstart readers who have recently bought the excellent Info
Product Killer strategy.

If you have no interest in this specifically, or in Internet
marketing in general, please ignore this email.

A huge number of Kickstart readers have bought Info Product
Killer over the last few days. It is probably the biggest selling
product that I’ve ever promoted – and rightly so.

You may be one of those who have invested in it – or you may be
still considering it. If so, this email is aimed at you.

I’m really not sending this to try to sell any more copies – this
is to try to answer some of the many questions and comments that
I’ve received up to now. On the principle that if one person
bothers to ask, there are another ten who are wondering the same
thing, I think it will be a useful exercise.

Okay, here goes.

1. Can you use IPK with WordPress?

I see absolutely no reason why not, but equally, as the template
provided is about as optimised as you need it to be, I also see
no particular reason why you’d want to use WordPress.

All my sites are being made with the template (or rather a close
approximation of it; see a later question) and I’ve had no reason
to want to use WordPress.

2. Can you use XSitePro?

I actually think that using XSitePro would be a very good idea. I
don’t think the IPK template can be easily imported into XSitePro
(although I haven’t tried) but creating a site from scratch that
followed the template’s look and feel would be quite simple.

XSitePro would make building these sites very fast, I believe,
and should save you time. It would also handle all uploading to
your hosting account stuff, so would be ideal for people who are
less experienced with FTP.

3. I’m in Australia/Canada/India/[wherever you live] – can I
still use IPK?

The IPK sales page and videos talk a lot about America, and
Craig, IPK’s creator uses his UK sites as examples, so you could
easily think that Info Product Killer is only suitable for those
places.

Nothing could be further from the truth. you an use the IPK
methods from anywhere. All you need is an affiliate account with
Amazon – and that can be the Amazon of your country, or of any
other country.

For example, I am in the UK and my current Amazon account is a UK
one – so all the sites I’m building right now are UK sites. if I
were to open an affiliate account with Amazon US I could build
American sites.

Where you are doesn’t matter – it is where your Amazon account is
that determines where you’ll make money from.

As a matter of fact, opening an Amazon.com account (US) is high
on my priorities because then I’ll be able to target a much
bigger audience.

4. Your example site doesn’t look exactly like the IPK examples.
Are you using the template ‘out of the box’ or have you adapted
it?

Hands up, I’ve made a few small changes. Nothing of any
particular note though. My programmer brain just wanted to make a
few bits of it easier for me to use.

In any case, a few minor changes are probably a good thing if you
know your way around a bit of dead simple HTML. Otherwise, using
the supplied template is perfectly okay and will lead you to less
confusion.

5. This all seems like an awful lot of work. Is it really worth
it?

It is a lot of work. Whoever said that Internet marketing is easy
should be taken outside and severely beaten with a birch twig (or
is that just me?)

Each site you build is likely to take you 90 to 180 minutes when
you get the hang of it, and you will probably need about 15 sites
to get the needed link juice flowing.

As to whether it will make money or not, time will tell. The
figures that Craig shows are very compelling – and having spoken
to him on the phone several times now, I have no reason to doubt
them. If anything, he is making more than his sales page
suggests.

It is early days for me. Only one of the seven sites I’ve built
so far has been indexed and it hasn’t floated very high in the
search engines yet. It is getting a small amount of search engine
traffic though, so the structure of the site seems to work.

From my years of experience of Internet marketing, I can say that
the methods are totally practical and look to me to be logical
and consistent.

I have high hopes, but it’ll be another week or two before I’ll
know for sure.

6. Isn’t it too late for Christmas now?

Not really. The Christmas season is certainly upon us already,
but online sales don’t really explode until mid November. If you
can work your socks off and get your network of sites up in the
next week to 10 days, there is every reason to suppose that
you’ll get a good chunk of the Christmas traffic this year.

And there is always next year!

As a matter of fact, the Christmas strategy is only half of the
IPK product. The other part is all about using a very similar
method, but with a couple of extra twists, to make money from hot
products all year round.

If rushing to get your Christmas sites up is too much work in too
short a time for you, and I respect that time is a finite
commodity for many people, then concentrate on the year-round
strategy, which can be taken at a slower pace.

7. Christmas is all about toys, so aren’t there going to be
thousands of people building IPK networks to compete for the same
niche traffic?

To start with, only a small percentage of the people who buy IPK
now will put the effort in for this Christmas. But even if they
do, the sensible ones will look for other niches that are also
popular at Christmas. It isn’t all about toys.

Here are a few suggestions for non toy networks that should do
very well at Christmas – and all year round:

* Playstation and games
* XBox and games
* WII and games
* Cell phones
* TVs
* Home Cinema
* Digital cameras
* Apple stuff
* SatNav
* Audio Equipment

That’s off the top of my mind and already is far more than one
person could cope with. The opportunities are almost unlimited.

Just think beyond the box that is Christmas.

8. Who is the product creator? You call him Craig, but he signed
himself Aaron on the Warrior Forum.

I asked Craig about this on the phone and he laughed. Apparently
he has been called Aaron for years as a kind of nickname. (He
used to live in a country where they could pronounce Aaron, but
Craig gave them difficulties!) Anyway, on forums he has stuck
with the screen name Aaron.

Nothing suspicious – a lot of people (probably a lot more than
you’d think) use pen names online. In any case, he isn’t hiding
behind anything and is one of the most approachable guys you
could ever hope to deal with.

9. Isn’t this too hard for newbies?

Absolutely not. There are a few steps along the way that will
make you ponder, and some that might actually make you think, but
there is nothing really complex at all.

Any time a part of the strategy has caused anyone any confusion,
Craig has simply created a new video in the member’s area to
clarify things. Pretty much everything that you could ask is
covered now – but if you still have questions or confusions (we
all get confused over this Internet marketing lark sometimes)
just send in a support request and I’m sure you’ll be sorted out
in no time.

10. How much is all this going to cost me?

You will need to buy up to 15 domain names and hosting for them.
That COULD mount up to a pretty penny (about $10 per .com domain
per year) but you can save a lot of money by buying .info
domains, which are currently being sold by GoDaddy for $0.99
each.

See next question.

11. Your example site is on a .info domain. Isn’t that bad for
ranking on the search engines?

In my experience, .info domains are just as likely to get indexed
as .com ones. it is what is on your site that is important. I’m
very comfortable buying .info domains and have done so for all my
IPK sites so far.

12. Now that so many people have bought Info Product Killer,
isn’t it getting hard to find decent domain names?

That fear crossed my mind too, but in practice it doesn’t seem to
be a problem.

I bought 17 great domains for each of the best-selling toys this
Christmas and had absolutely no problem finding ones that I was
very happy with.

13. Getting indexed in the search engines takes weeks, how can
this strategy work in time for Christmas?

Google is really fast at indexing when it wants to be. The trick
is to ‘seed’ your site by linking to it from another site that
already has plenty of bot visits.

My www.babybornmagicpotty.info site had a link to it in Kickstart
- which was then placed on my archive. That archive gets several
bot visits a day and the new site was indexed in Google within an
hour or two of it going live.

Once it is first visited, if you have some unique content for the
spiders to see, they’ll keep right on coming back. According to
my stats, in the few days it has been up, the Google Bot has
visited 25 times, Alexa 20 times and Yahoo 11 times.

If you can beg, borrow or steal a link to your first site to get
it started, you’ll soon have a feeding frenzy.

Just concentrate on the content. The search engines won’t like
you is they find rubbish on your site, so give them something to
chew on.

13. Have you made any money yet?

I thought you’d never ask!

With only one of my network sites indexed and the directory ‘hub’
site still under construction, I didn’t expect any sales at all
for a while. But according to Amazon I have already made one sale
(albeit a very small one that has generated only a couple of
Pounds in commission)!

But it has begun!

I think that covers everything I’ve been asked so far, but if you
have any other questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best
to help.

You can view the Info Product Killer sales page and videos at
http://www.urlnex.us/ipk/

Best wishes,

Martin

Update: My directory site is up and running now: Hot Toys for Christmas 2008

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Stock exchanges across the globe appear to have stepped back from
the brink after the disastrous falls at the end of last week.
News of governments agreeing to coordinated support plans for
their countries banks seems to have instilled a little much
needed confidence from investors as markets opened again this
week. One can only hope that the glimmer of hope is sustained.

However, what is certain is that regardless of what the money
markets do in the short term, or how quickly the banking system
stabilizes, world economies are heading into recession for the
rest of 2008 and probably most of 2009.

That means that we all face a year or more of financial
uncertainty.

It means that many jobs are suddenly a lot less secure.

It means that belts will have to be tightened and that for some
people, the future could involve some real hardships.

Why am I writing such doom and gloom words?

The reason is that with so many of us staring a bleak future in
the face, it has never been more important to look for ways to
augment and bolster the household budgets.

With tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people facing the
very real prospect of being laid off at work, there has never
been a more critical time to look for alternative ways to make an
income.

I’m not going to try to sell anything in today’s Kickstart -
let’s get that straight from the beginning. Today I want to talk
objectively about a subject that is of real subjective interest
to all of us, and clouding the issue by attempting to make money
from it won’t help matters.

The subject is clearly on many people’s minds, but it has come to
the forefront of mine this weekend because of an email I received
on Saturday.

It was from a Kickstart reader, who shall remain nameless. In it,
he wrote:

“Martin, I’m turning to you for advice because I don’t know who
else to trust and I get the feeling that you won’t blow smoke at
me like so many of the gurus would. My situation is pretty bad
right now and I have some hard decisions to make which I hope you
can help me with.

I’ve been told that I should expect to be laid off at work soon,
and I know that the prospect of finding something else is slim. I
might be able to get minimum wage work if I’m lucky, but there
isn’t much going on where I live. I have a wife and two kids and
very little in the way of savings. I don’t think we will starve,
but I’m really frightened about the future and feel powerless to
do much of anything about it.

My question to you is this…do you really, honestly, think that
I can make enough money to feed my kids and pay my mortgage
through Internet marketing? You write about this program and that
all the time, but do you really think that any one of them could
be the lifeline I need?”

The email was a lot longer than that, but I’ve trimmed and
paraphrased it to make the core question clear.

And what a question it is!

It boils down to this: does Internet marketing really work, or is
it yet another bunch of hooey from people trying to extract money
from people who can least afford it.

My answer might surprise you.

First of all, there are many people for whom Internet marketing
will never work. It is true. Some people, no matter how much they
spend on this program or that, this latest greatest course, or
that over-hyped ebook, will never in a million years be able to
make more than coffee money online. They are just not suited to
it, and it isn’t suited to them.

Why? Well, for starters, there are always some people who won’t
take advice. They read all the books, listen to all the experts
and decide to go about things in their own sweet way. And usually
that way is wrong.

Then there are the people who, no matter how simple you make it
for them, still resent the idea that they have to do some of the
work for themselves. they constantly fight against the idea of
putting any personal effort in – even to the extent of expending
more effort in their resistance of working than they would in
just getting on with it.

And there are people, surprisingly quite a lot, who seem
constantly intent on clutching failure from the jaws of victory.
These are the people who start out well, follow all the right
advice, but somewhere between making a brilliant start and
reaping the rewards of their success, manage to derail their own
efforts. I feel particularly sorry for these people because they
work so darned hard and then just throw it all away.

Sadly many of those people who have a go and fail are then left
with the view that all Internet marketing is a scam and anyone
peddling ways to make money online are con men and scammers.

The truth is that Internet marketing isn’t the magic wand or the
panacea of all goodness that many who sell its virtues might
promise. It is very possible to fail, and usually because of
faults in your own nature. There ARE bad programs out there and
it is very much a case of caveat emptor (buyer beware) but more
often than not the people selling ways to make money have good
intentions.

Failure in Internet marketing is rarely a costly business. You
might be out of pocket a couple of hundred dollars and a few days
of your time, but nothing like the risks involved in failure at a
bricks and mortar business.

Okay, so we’ve established that it might not work – but look at
the reasons for failure again – they are rarely down to the
marketing principle being at fault. The failures are most often
due to the characters of the people who are half-heartedly having
a go.

Let’s flip the subject on its head now and look at what it takes
to succeed.

But first, let me assure you that with the right attitude, and
the correct success-oriented mindset, success is very possible.

I know a lot of people from all walks of life who are very
successful as online marketers. People who have gone from barely
being able to turn a computer on, to making a full time living
online (and yes, giving up their day job) in a remarkably short
space of time.

It IS possible. I should know – I do it myself. Just yesterday
(which was a Sunday) I made more money in one day than many
families make in a month. It was an exceptional day – I don’t
claim to do that every day (I wish!) but it shows that if a
particularly unexceptional person like me can do it, anyone can.

Success in Internet marketing takes a few basic character traits:

* The ability to listen
* The ability to learn
* The ability to adapt
* The ability to experiment
* The ability to keep going
* Persistence

Then you need some other fundamental traits:

* A willingness to seek advice
* An excitement to turn your computer on each day
* An understanding that you are dealing with a vast global market
* The honest acceptance that just because one thing you try
doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that all Internet marketing is a
scam.
* A healthy degree of realism – overnight riches are about as
likely to fall your way as winning the lottery.

Also, you need to understand that ‘Internet marketing’ takes many
different forms. I like to write, so I’ve adapted my online
activities to take advantage of that. Other people are good at
graphics, or are excellent with detail, or are good dealing with
people and build their online businesses around their particular
skills. There isn’t just one way to be successful online – there
are as many different ways as there are successful marketers!

The trick is to find what works for you.

If you already have those traits, or can learn them, and
understand that despite some of the wilder claims made by people
selling money-making plans, Internet marketing takes hard and
sustained work, then you might just be one of the people who it
will work wonders for.

Because for the right people, with the right attitude and the
right mindset to succeed, making money via the Internet is a very
practical proposition.

So, to answer the question: “My question to you is this…do you
really, honestly, think that I can make enough money to feed my
kids and pay my mortgage through Internet marketing?”

I really, honestly believe it can be done. If you start now,
before you are absolutely against the wall, you will have time,
hopefully, to build a real business that can sustain you – if you
have the character traits you will need.

The good news is that you don’t need to spend any real money to
find out. Buy a domain for under ten dollars and some hosting and
create a WordPress blog. You don’t need to buy any high priced
courses or ebooks just yet. You don’t really need to buy
anything. Learn the ropes, consult the Warrior Forum for ideas
and support – heck, even read up on the details of what you need
to do on my free online course at http://imkickstart.com

If the economy is really about to go to hell in a handbasket, it
seems a good idea to me to build some insurance into your life by
starting an online business that might very well see you through
the recession with a big smile on your face.

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Here is a sweeping generalization: People who buy ebooks tend to be early adopters of new technologies and gadgets.

And in the world of ebooks, there isn’t much that is more cutting edge than the new Sony Reader PRS-505.

Having now owned one for a couple of weeks I can categorically say that if you like reading ebooks you are going to love the Sony Reader. It is just a beautiful bit of kit that starts every gadget lover who sees it salivating.

My one has several novels that I’ve downloaded and dozens of Internet marketing PDF ebooks that I’ve loaded into it.

Frankly, the Reader’s ability to display PDF ebooks is a bit hit and miss.

Think about it. Almost all PDF documents are created for US letter size paper or International A4. Most have big margins.

When the Reader tries to display the pages at normal size, it attempts to display the entire page on its 9cm x 12.2 cm screen – approximately one-sixth normal size.

The resultant text is incredibly small. If you have really good eyesight, or excellent glasses, you can just about read it, but it isn’t a comfortable experience by any means.

This isn’t really a fault with the Sony Reader – it can only try to display what it is given.

Where an inherent fault does come in is that the Reader can attempt to magnify the page, but whether that magnification will work correctly is somewhat patchy. I think it depends on how the PDF was originally created, and on what because some ebooks magnify quite well, while others lose their text flowing or, in one of two cases, for some strange reason, make the text smaller when magnifying!

A recent firmware upgrade (which was supplied as standard in the UK launch, but US owners had to download) addressed some of the text reflowing issues, but it still doesn’t work consistently. Again, I think this depends on the PDF creation software used, but I haven’t tested enough alternatives yet to have a definite answer.

Anyway, it seems to me that as PDF ebook writers, we have a responsibility to ensure that our customers can get the best reading pleasure out of the ebooks we sell them. And with the Sony Reader (and others) gaining in popularity, it would be a good plan for us to create versions of our products that would work well in the gorgeous little machines.

I’ve been experimenting and have come up with some settings for Open Office that result in a perfectly legible and comfortable reading experience on Reader.

When you first open Open Office Writer, go to Format -> Page and on the Page tab set the page width to 9.0cm and the height to 12.2 cms. Set the left and right margins to 0.3cms and the top and bottom margins to 0.5cm.

Edit the styles as follows:

default: Times New Roman 12pt; Line spacing ‘At least 0.52cm’.
Headline 1: Arial, Bold, 18pt
Headline 2: Arial Bold 14pt

Then save all that as a template called ‘Sony Reader ebook’.

Now, when you create an ebook, open up a new document using the template and paste the text straight in.

Don’t include any headers or footers or line numbers – they will just mess up the document in Reader and waste valuable screen real estate.

Remember that pictures can display in Reader, but only in black and white, and if they need to be fairly large to be seen on a regular sized PDF, they will be impossible to see on Reader. If you can avoid using too many pictures and explain with text, all the better. Alternatively, you could always provide a web page with any really important pictures that just can’t be shrunk down to the small screen size.

I think that personal ebook readers of one kind or another are here to stay. And are gaining in popularity quite fast.

By embracing the challenges of creating our ebooks specifically for the new technology we can stay on the wave of progress – and earn a lot of brownie points with our customers.

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When designing web pages, we try to incorporate as many things that the search engines like as possible. This is called On-Page SEO. But the problem is that nobody knows for sure exactly what factors the search engines actually do like.

And they are not saying!

We can ‘reverse engineer’ the search engines to some extent – my own Keyword LSI Spy  tool does a pretty good job of analyzing the top ranking pages for any given keyword or phrase, but there is only so far you can go because every page is different, and so many factors can come in to play.

What we need is a means of looking at pages where only a small amount of what is on page changes from one page to the next – effectively allowing us to reduce the variables and find out what the SEs really do with a small set of data. But how do you go about finding a whole lot of pages that you can compare against each other in Google (for example) where we know that only a limited number of things change between them?

It is something I’ve puzzled over for a long time, but this morning I had a brainwave.

Forgive me if this is blindingly obvious to you. It is to me NOW, but you, like me, may not have made this connection yet, so the technique I’m about to share may be very useful.

EzineArticles is an online article directory that has many hundreds of thousands (millions probably) of articles. And the great thing from our point of view is that each one is displayed in a standard template. So, effectively, the only things that change on the page from one article to the next are a couple of meta tags and the article body itself. All the other stuff on the page, particularly for articles aimed at the same keyword, remains virtually identical.

In Google we can search for pages within a website. So by using the search string: “acne treatment” site:ezinearticles.com (using whatever keyword phrase we like between the quotes) we are given a ranked list by Google of articles that they consider to match our keyword from the EzineArticles site. Because of the sheer size of EzineArticles, you’ll be hard pressed to find a niche that doesn’t return a good selection. My acne treatment example pulls up 16,500!

Now we can look at the articles that Google has selected for us and see what, if anything, makes the ones nearer the top of the pile stand out.

 Here are a few suggestions for factors that you could check out:

* Meta Title tag
* Meta Description tag
* Meta Keyword tag
* Article word count
* Article keyword density
* Use of LSI words in the article
* Use of synonyms in the article
* Keyword density in the article title
* Keyword density in the first paragraph
* Keyword density in the last paragraph
* Keyword density in the middle paragraphs
* Average sentence length
* Average paragraph length
* Links and link anchor text
* Recency of article
* Style of article
* Use of subheadings

Unfortunately, EzineArticles have software in place to prevent automated scraping of their content, so it isn’t possible (by me anyway) to write a script to do this analysis in a php program, but with some patience you can easily get some good indications manually.

Try it out – and let me know if you find any surprising new insights!

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I’m thinking about business in general and Internet marketing specifically, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply across the board.

For example, in Internet marketing, although there are literally hundreds of different ways to make money, most people struggle. But every once in a while someone comes along who succeeds effortlessly and makes a killing. How come?

Then that successful person writes an ebook on how they ‘Twittered for Gold’, or ‘Craigslisted their way to success’, or ‘Made Five Figures With Video’ or whatever the latest thing is – and everyone with half a brain reads the book and realizes that nine times out of ten there are no big secrets being revealed – just plain common sense.

[Sorry about the extreme length of that sentence - I could seem to find a way out of it!]

You see, I think that there are people – most of us, most of the time – who get confused because we think that ‘it’ should be complicated. So we look for complex solutions, convoluted processes and contrarian systems. Something inside of our brains won’t accept that success really is simple – we have to introduce layers of complexity. And in so doing, we focus so hard on the process that we lose sight of the destination.

Its like driving – as long as we have a map and know where we are heading for, navigating the route is easy: each new road we take is a step towards our target. But as soon as we stop to think ‘oh, this is a pretty road, let’s see where it leads to’ our focus shifts away from where we want to go and on to where we are now.

The result is we get lost.

Psychologists and animal behaviourists tell us that one of the main difference between humans and animals is that our brains have evolved to be able to imagine a future. We have areas in our brain that can extrapolate from our past experiences and our present condition and create an image of the future. Animals, it seems, either lack that facility, or have it to a much lesser degree.

Somehow, though, when faced with business decisions, many of us suppress our ‘thinking forward’ skill and rely on the far more basic magpie mind (ooh, look at that nice new shiny thing…).

That constant jumping from one good looking idea to another draws our focus away from the destination and firmly on to the process.

Destination oriented thinking is absolutely crucial to your success – and mine. I don’t claim any superiority here – I’m just as likely to be sidetracked and diverted as anyone else. Maybe more so.

But recognizing the problem is a big step towards dealing with it.

So, how do those people who write the books find the ‘secret systems’ that they sell – the ones that, as I said, when you read the book you think are actually blindingly obvious (except that you didn’t think so before you read the book)?

The answer is simple to explain but quite difficult to put into action.

What these people have that most of the rest of us don’t is the ability to focus on what it is they want to achieve, and then to look at whatever process they have decided to study (be that Craigslist, Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Article marketing, or any of a hundred other methods of online marketing) with an eye to finding out what people who are already successful are doing.

There are very few original thinkers – and most of those who can and do come up with truly original concepts are too busy profiting from them to want to teach them to other people (even if they have the communication skills to do so).

No, the ones we end up learning from are the people who make it their business to understand what works. The people who have an innate ability to see below the process and to understand the route. In other words, they don’t focus on the shiny diversions, they focus on the entire map.

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that if you want to be a teacher, you will have to learn the difficult skill of seeing an entire journey and understand how each part inter-relates to each other part. It is a skill that we can all learn, but one that is difficult because it requires enormous focus.

The good news is that if ‘all’ we want is to be a success, then our job is really much easier. We have to learn to follow a map and to ignore the pretty roads we’ll see along the way.

Sightseeing has its place, but not on the road to success.

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About 8 years ago, a book was published that, it is true to say, has influenced more copywriters online than any other. The book, by Dr. Ken Evoy and my old friend Joe Robson was called ‘Make Your Words Sell’. It was – and still is – the ‘bible’ of online copywriting.

Joe, who is a very talented copywriter, and Ken, spent 8 months writing, polishing and perfecting the book. Way back then, ebooks weren’t just thrown together in a few days, they were crafted until they shone!

‘Make Your Words Sell’ is the basis upon which many well-known copywriters learned. And it is recognisably the nucleus of many high price copywriting courses that you can buy today.

Yet, ‘Make Your Words Sell’ was never expensive. As far as I know it was always priced at around $30 – and has sold thousands and thousands of copies.

Ken Evoy has now decided to make the book available for free. That’s right, it now won’t cost you a penny.

Just go to http://myws.sitesell.com/products43.html and download your own copy.

But just because it is now free doesn’t mean you should treat it lightly. If you are sensible you’ll value it above many of the books you may have that cost hundreds of dollars – the information and teaching it contains is really that good.

Get your copy, read it, no… study it … and then put its golden advice into practice.

This is one book that WILL make a huge difference.

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I’m on a crusade and I don’t even own a cape.

Everywhere I look there are businesses who have had websites built for them by flashy high-priced designers who are saying ‘We’ve got a website, but quite honestly, it doesn’t do much.’

What do they expect?

A website isn’t a family portrait that you go to a studio to have taken and then proudly look at on your mantelpiece.

A website should never be built ‘because we’d like one.’

A website should and must be an integral part of your business and a fundamental element of your marketing strategy.

See that word ‘strategy’. It’s important.

I have nothing against design and designers (please don’t send me hate mail!). What I do object to is the blind leading the blind.

Unless you have a clear and defined strategy for the Internet side of your business, your website might as well be a flyer tucked at random into the 20-volume encyclopedia in your local library.

Nobody will see it – and the rare person who does will have no idea what it is there for.

In my offline life I deal with businesses who are often in this position. They jumped on the website bandwagon a few years ago, spent huge sums on the latest (then) flashy intro screens and wacky graphics, approved everything because it ‘looked’ so cool and then waited.

They waited for something to happen and it didn’t.

Nobody flooded them with orders. No search engines bothered to list them. No customers said how good the site was. No-one in the business had any idea what to do about it and so the site floundered.

And the CEO is now convinced that it was all a waste of time and effort.

And it was.

But it needn’t be that way if they had bothered to think like marketers and entrepreneurs and not like over-awed design junkies.

I believe that all of those bad websites can be turned around. Sure they will need to be redesigned and rewritten (at a significantly lower price than they originally cost, I expect). But with the application of sound marketing ideas – and a clearly defined Internet strategy – ANY business can and should benefit from an effective online presence.

A hard-working website can be your window on the world. It is such a shame that so many companies keep the curtains closed.

There is an enormous opportunity for you here. When you have built a few websites for yourself and learned the ropes of Internet marketing, your level of knowledge of what makes a website work will be orders of magnitude greater than the general person in the street. And for local business people who are much more interested in the day to day running of their businesses than in learning new skill about the Internet, you will be a shining star. You will literally be their savior.

A book I read (and highly recommended) recently tells you all about how to turn your online experience into offline income. It is called Offline Gold, by Andrew Cavanagh and it is well worth studying. There really is a fortune to be made in helping offline companies make better use of the Internet – and you could be perfectly placed to grab your share. http://www.kickstartdaily.com/offlinegold/

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Okay, I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to spread it around. This is how the big players make real money on the Internet.

It is called selling to your back-end. Does that sound painful? Well, believe me, pamper your back end and you’ll make piles – piles of cash! Learn about this and you will feel no pain.

The term ‘back-end products’ is jargon that simply means selling additional items to existing customers.

The traditional mail order business, and more recently, Internet selling, depend largely on the power of leveraging (that magic word) existing customers to make maximum profits.

How does it work?

The first point is that there is no rule that says you have to have back-end products. There are many people online who sell a single product and make good money at it. But, in truth, they are wasting a valuable resource, and making a lot more work for themselves, as we shall see.

Let’s look at two examples of how back-end selling works well online.

There is a lady I know online who sells a fantastic topical cream that helps eczema sufferers. She spends time and money targeting her advertising to the right audience so that she can sell as much cream as possible. But she is a one product company. She only sells that one cream and has no plans to introduce new products.

What is her back-end?

More cream. Everyone who buys becomes part of a new ‘super-targeted’ audience. She can email them special ‘repeat purchase’ offers at virtually no cost to her. So she makes these existing customers feel special by giving them great cost savings – and ends up making a higher profit-per-customer than she would have done otherwise. Along the way, these ‘super targets’ also recommend her to their friends and family, so she makes even more sales.

That system works for her because she sells a consumable product, that is effective, and is not available elsewhere.

But what about one-off purchases that do not have a repeat function built in?

As a second example, let’s suppose you want to sell information products, or ebooks. Having created your first book, take a moment and think how you can expand it to add interest to the type of people who would buy. Perhaps a special report, another book on a related topic, a video, a member’s site – the list is almost endless. Only after you have created this second-string product should you launch the first one.

How might this work in practice?

In order to sell anything on the net, you need to invest some money. Don’t believe the people who tell you that it can all be done for free. it can’t. Maybe you need less to start up a business online than in the ‘real world’, but you still need some seed capital. You need money for advertising, web hosting, domain names and so on.

If you are clever and well advised, you will waste as little of your cash as possible. But, spend you must.

Suppose you spend $500 on PPC and you get 5,000 targeted hits to your web site. If you have written a really good sales letter and have a clear message, you might be very lucky and convert 3% of the visitors into sales (very lucky!). That would mean that you sell 150 items and each sale has cost you $3.33.

If your ebook sells for $9.99 you are looking at a healthy 200% profit.

Now, here comes the magic.

You have not just created 150 happy customers, you have also created a list of 150 ‘super-targets’. People who have shown themselves to be predisposed to buy from you.

The next step is to send them an email saying that as a valued customer, you would like to make them an exclusive special offer – a prelaunch special deal on your new ebook – instead of the normal price of $24.99,which it will cost when it goes on general release, they can order it right now for just $17.97.

Your conversion rate against these super-targets should be much higher than before. Perhaps as high as 20%. So you may sell 30 copies and gross $539.10 from these customers that you would not have otherwise got.

At zero advertising cost!

Instead of making $1,498.50 for your $500 investment, you have made $2,037.60. 308% return on investment instead of 200%.

And that is just the beginning, because you now have a loyal following to pre-sell your next product to – and the next.

The lifetime value of your select band of ‘super-targets could be enormous.

I have done a lot of mail order marketing in my time (I worked in the advertising industry for 25 years) and have seen back-end marketing make companies millions. I even did it myself when I ran my own mail order company. We advertised a ‘free’ bottle of aromatherapy oil, which customers just paid carriage on. Thousands responded. We then sent a sales letter with every free bottle selling a great value pack of 6 oils. That sold a lot. Then every customer got a regular order form with additional products on it.

It worked well, and everyone was happy, but believe me, it works even better on the Internet. Repeat contact of customers (often called relationship marketing) offline still carries a considerable cost – paper, printing, envelopes, postage, fulfillment.

Online, all of these cost just melt away.

Leaving you with that lovely, cuddly six-letter word: PROFIT.

So back to the title of this lesson: yes, your back-end does look big. Wonderful, isn’t it?

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I thought that today I’d try to briefly dispel some of the myths that surround this mysterious state of being.

The ‘Internet lifestyle’ has come to mean making loads of money by doing very little. Countless hype-filled sales letters allude to it as a kind of transcended state that only the top Internet marketers can ever hope to reach. Of course, if you buy their book/course/mentoring program, you’ll learn the secret of making money while you bask on the beach too.

That’s the image that the Internet lifestyle conjures up in most people: a tanned, relaxed beach bum who taps on his laptop while rocking in a beach hammock, sipping a pina colada.

That is the Internet lifestyle that we all refer to.

Except, er, it isn’t.

Yes, as an Internet marketer you can make money while you relax on a beach, or do your gardening. You can (and often do) make money while you are asleep. I made more money after I went to bed last night that I ever earned in a day when I had a ‘real’ job. And that wasn’t just a display of gratitude from my wife!

Internet marketers can – and do – make money while they are on vacation. Or while they take a bath.

I went to the gym for a sauna this morning and was nearly $100 better off when I got home.

But all that really has nothing to do with the Internet lifestyle.

When you make your money is a red herring. Making money while you sleep is a function of geography, nothing more.

What the gurus who want to sell you on the dream don’t tell you about is the hours of work they put in before heading off to the beach. The late nights and early mornings. The hours they spent making their eyes bleed by staring too long at their monitor, or the endless emails and telephone calls they had to put in to get JV partners on board.

No – they don’t tell you that Internet marketing is hard work because it is a lot more alluring to sell you on the Internet lifestyle dream.

Am I just being a killjoy then? Am I bursting the bubble and squashing the dream flat?

I hope not – and that certainly isn’t my intention because, you see, I believe that the REAL Internet lifestyle is way more interesting, FAR more exciting and a TON more inspirational than the idea of getting sand between your toes and grit in your laptop can ever be.

The Internet lifestyle that I live, and that most of the people I know who make their livings online live, is not about earning loads and doing little. It is about doing what you love, when you want to fit it in and making a fair income as a result. It is about freedom of choice and freedom from the endless drudgery of a job that you hate.

It is about being able to spend an hour in the garden when you want to – or heading off to the gym for lunch. It is about you being in charge of what you do – not being beholden to the whims of someone else who hates their job as much as you do.

Is it all it is hyped up to be? Probably not, but is it worth aspiring to?

Absolutely.

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In other words, if you can build a good email list, that is responsive to your recommendations, you should never starve.

How you make your list responsive is beyond the scope of this report, (hint: be personal, be personable, be unique and be prompt), but one way of building your list in the first place is what this report is all about.

As an Internet marketer, your email list is your most treasured possession. It needs to be nurtured. But how do you get people onto that list in the first place?

You can set up a website with a name capture form on it – you’ve seen them many times, they usually say ‘Subscribe here’ or something similar.

You can also put a pop up on your page to remind people to subscribe.

Both are effective strategies, but there is one method that is much superior – so good in fact that from the same number of unique visitors to your site you could easily get two or three times the subscribers.

It is called a name capture, or name squeeze, page. Its purpose is to entice your visitor with the promise of great content in your website, or other lovely incentives and then block access to all that good stuff until they have given you their name and email address.

That is the key difference between name squeeze and other type of ‘requested’ email address capture: the visitor has no choice. They must hand over their details or they have to click away.
Not just about building a list.

While building an email list is the end result of a name squeeze page, email marketing isn’t necessarily the objective. For many people who successfully use this technique, the objective is to make their website more responsive.

Forcing your visitor to hand over their email address before they can read the content of your site may seem a paradoxical way to make your site more responsive, but it really does work – for a number of reasons:

1. It weeds out the tire kickers. Many people surf to websites without a clear idea of what they want. Yes, they are traffic, but traffic of a very low quality. Their true interest in what you have to offer is negligible and the likelihood of them responding to your offer is minimal. Forcing those people to actively enter your site will do one of two things – it will crystallize their thoughts sufficiently to make them more aware of your message, or it will turn them away. Either way, the people who get through to your site will be far higher quality, and your conversion rate should increase.

2. If you ‘sell’ the idea of parting with their email address effectively you can create a feeling of exclusivity that makes the visitor feel special. This is a powerful emotion which, if carried through into the website itself, creates a feeling of belonging to a special club.

3. Dr Robert Cialdini, in his book ‘Influence, Science and Practice’, makes the point that one of the strongest ‘influencers’ on people’s buying behaviour is reciprocation. In summary, that means that when you give a person a gift before you try to sell them something, they sub-consciously feel obligated. This sense of obligation can hugely increase their likelihood to buy from you when you do make them an offer. You can easily use this concept in your name squeeze page by offering them a special gift – an ebook, a special report, access to a hidden part of your website, an exclusive tip – the potential is almost endless – for which, incidentally, they have to give you their email address to receive.

Name squeeze pages work because you make a compelling offer to the visitor:

• You offer then a free report for instant download
• You offer them the #1 answer to their most pressing problem
• You pre-sell them on the fantastic content that is within your website

Then, instead of just giving them the download link, or the #1 answer, or a navigation button to the rest of your site, you put up a name capture form that they must fill in to get the reward.

If you are really clever you will make it clear that the next step (whether it is the download, the answer, the entry code to read the rest of the site or some other ‘bribe’ that you have devised) will be immediately emailed to them.

Simply by doing that one thing you disincentivize many of the time wasters from giving fake email addresses just to get your information or your ‘bribe’.

This form of reward-based subscription is extremely effective.

Having said that – there is power in that thar list!

There are two additional truths that make the enforced capture of your website’s visitors email address so important:

“People do business with people they like.”

“It takes up to 7 contacts before people feel confident enough to buy.”

These may be generalizations, but they are based on hard-won experience from many successful marketers.

By capturing the name and email address of your site’s visitor, you gain the ability to begin a relationship with them. You can start to show them that you care about them, that you understand their needs and that you are more responsive and generous than the owners of other competing sites that they may have visited.

Your autoresponder can begin to send them regular tips, personal stories and other suggestions. Each one can have a call to action built in that will drive that person back to your website. And every time they follow that call, their return to your site will be with less and less resistance to your offers.

Over time, as you gain their trust and become more of a friend, you will have earned the right to make other offers too – providing you don’t overdo it!

Avoid spam accusations

These days, it has become increasingly important to make your email lists double opt-in.

What this means is that after the person fills in the form to subscribe to your list, they are sent an email that asks them to click on a link to confirm that they really want to subscribe. Only after performing that second action, the ‘double opt-in’, should they be actually added to your list.

The reason to do this is to protect yourself, as far as possible, from spam accusations.

There are lots of reasons why people yell spam. They may have forgotten that they signed up, or their email address may have been subscribed to your list without their knowledge.

When you can prove that your subscribers have double opted in to your list, you can show anyone who asks that the person positively and deliberately signed up, and, because the confirmation email was sent to their own address, that they were not signed up by anyone else.

When you run a name squeeze page it is important that you make the process double opt in. If possible, your name squeeze script should also log the time and date and the IP address of the computer from which the request was made.

These additional pieces of information are captured in the background – the visitor is unaware that they have been gathered, but are often necessary if you ever wish to transfer your list to a new autoresponder service in the future.

If the incentive that you are offering is good enough, they won’t be able to click on the confirmation link fast enough. They will be yearning for your ‘bribe’!
Factors that can make your name squeeze page even more effective.

An effective name squeeze page is a very simple thing. Too much information can just lead to confusion, and any actions for the visitor to take other than filling in their name and email address defeat the object.

Here are a few things that your page should include – but as with any Internet marketing advise, you should test each one to see how it affects responses in your own specific situation.

1. The page should make it clear who is behind it.

This is generally done with a header graphic or a strong pre-headline. Too many sites are hesitant to say outright who they are and what they do, but with a name squeeze page this is disastrous. You need your visitor to get the point of your site the instant they land.

2. The headline has to ‘sell’ a very clear benefit.

The WII-FM (what’s in it for me?) factor has to be particularly strong in a name capture page. Take time over crafting the perfect headline that pre-sells the content of your site and what it can do for the visitor. Make them salivate.

Only then will they part with their email address willingly.

3. Sales copy.

I have seen name capture pages that used very long sales copy, but they are rare. In the main, the copy you need should be just enough to whet the visitor’s appetite for the content of your site (or for the ‘bribes’ you are offering) and no more. Tell then enough to start them yearning for more – and then make them take action to get more.

4. The opt in form.
 
It may sound strange, but there are name squeeze pages out there that make you hunt for where to type in your details. Don’t do it. Make your opt-in form highly visible and impossible to miss.

5. Audio or video.

There is an increasing use of audio or video on name squeeze pages for the simple reason that they work.

On one of my own name squeeze pages (a sign up page for a newsletter) the simple addition of an audio testimonial increased my visitor-to-signup conversion by almost 300%.

6. Only one possible action.

Never, ever give visitors to your name squeeze page any other choices other than sign up, or go away.

There can be no compromise on that. As soon as you offer any other possible action, some of those visitors will take it and you will have lost them forever.

And that means no other offers, no AdSense ads, no tasters, no links of any kind whatsoever.

Name squeeze works because it forces visitors to declare their interest in what you have to say (by inputting their name and email address) or declare that they have no interest by hitting the back button.

Name capture or name squeeze pages, whatever you choose to call them, are the perfect way to ensure that all the traffic your sites get is targeted, focused on the message you have to give and motivated enough to take action to read it. It may reduce the overall numbers of people who move through your websites, but it will ensure that those who do are the highest quality traffic that you can get.

What you do with them after that is entirely up to you, but my advice is to treat them with respect, never abuse their trust, work as hard as you can to build a good relationship with them and over deliver in as many ways as you can.

That way your name squeeze pages will be among your most valuable tools for your long term Internet business.

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That was quite a start, but it hopefully showed you that writing web pages isn’t complicated once you know a few tags and understand how they fit together.

By the end of today’s lesson you should know how to build a simple sales page.

Firstly, let’s learn a new tag.

Because of the way that CSS allows us to style elements on the page, it is useful to have a way to keep things divided up into discrete chunks. We do that by grouping things together inside a divider tag – called, unsurprisingly, <div></div>.

We’ll start with the code we wrote in the last lesson:

<html>
<head>
<style>
p {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: red;
   }
h1 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 18pt;
   color: navy;
   font-weight: bold;
   }
h2 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 14pt;
   color: blue;
   font-style: italic;
   }
</style>
</head>

<body>
<h1>Main headline</h1>
<p>Here is some text in the body section.</p>
<h2>Secondary headline</h2>
<p>Here is a second paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>

Now, let’s think for a minute about what a sales page needs (it is always useful to plan your pages on paper, so when you come to write your code, you know where everything has to go).

My simple sales page will have the following parts:

1. Headline
2. Subhead
3. Product image to appear to the left
4. 4-5 paragraphs of body text wrapped around the image
5. A testimonial
6. A guarantee
7. Some call-to-action text
8. A buy now link

The page itself will be 750 pixels wide, centered on screen, with a white background. The page that it will rest on will be silver.

Okay, let’s start to build the structure – I’ll only show the <body> part of the code for now to keep it as easy to read as I can.

<body>
<!– The top of page div –>
<div>
  <h1><h1>
  <h2></h2>
</div>
<!– The body text div –>
<div>
  <img />
  <p></p>
  <p></p>
  <p></p>
  <p></p>
  <p></p>
</div>
<!– The testimonial div –>
<div>
  <p></p>
</div>
<!– The guarantee div –>
<div>
  <p></p>
</div>
<!– The call-to-action div –>
<div>
  <p></p>
</div>
<!– The buy button div –>
<div>
  <a></a>
</div>
</body>
</html>

There are a few new things in there, so I’ll explain them for you.

The <div> tags, as explained earlier are used to divide the code up into sections. This gives us a lot of control over how the page will end up looking and although divs are not always absolutely necessary – the top of page div here only contains headline text, which needn’t have gone into a div at all – they do give us freedom to do all kinds of things to the look of the page later.

Note that I’ve commented the code by using <!– and –> to surround each comment. When a browser encounters <!– on an HTML page it knows to ignore everything that follows until it reaches the closing –> part of the tag. The words inside the tag are purely intended to be read by someone who is working on the code – and is very useful when the code gets quite long.

Comments are an important part of writing code because it can be very easy to forget what you were intending to do and get muddled. The comments act as useful reminders.

Next, we have an image tag: <img />

The <img> tag is one of the few HTML tags that don’t have a closing half. In the form of HTML that we are learning here, XHTML, you put a forward slash at the end of the tag, just before the angle bracket to show that the end of the tag has been reached.

Finally, we see an anchor tag: <a></a>. This tag is the workhorse of HTML and is what makes the World Wide Web possible. It is the tag that creates links.

Now, what we have in the code example is a bunch of place holders, nothing more. There is no content
and no styling yet.

Next, we’ll fill in the blanks and create a very simple sales page for my popular script Keyword LSI Spy.

First the headlines:

<body>
<!– The top of page div –>
<div>
  <h1>Keyword LSI Spy: Uncovers the Secret Words the Search Engines Love<h1>
  <h2>Discovers the hidden on-page SEO of top-ranked sites – ANY keyword, ANY niche</h2>
</div>

Then the pack shot image. I have saved the image to my server in the same directory as the sales page, as a file called packshot.jpg.

<!– The body text div –>
<div>
  <img src=”packshot.jpg” align=”left” />

Whenever you display an image with the <img> tag, you have to specify where the image is to be found. The ‘src’ element of the tag means source. In their default state, browsers place an image tight up against the left-hand side and then start any text that appears around them from the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. That just looks silly, so we add the ‘align=”left”‘ instruction to tell the browser to wrap the text starting from the top right-hand corner.

If we wanted the image to appear on the right-hand side of the page, we’d use ‘align=”right”‘

Now we can add the body text:

  <p>Latent Semantic Indexing is a very sophisticated system that the search engines have started to use that assesses the importance of a webpage according to the words that are used on it. At its simplest, a page about ‘horse riding’ would be expected to use horse-related words like: horseback; horses; ride; equine; trail; rides; stables; equestrian; ranch; rider; mountain; lessons; saddle; horseback riding; trail rides.</p>
  <p>Using such associated  LSI words will make your articles and websites more three-dimensional in the search engines’ eyes. They’ll be seen as better authorities on their subjects.</p>
  <p>Keyword LSI Spy looks at what the search engines actually do, rather than what they may say they do. It analyzes the web pages that the SEs actually rank highest for any given keyword or key phrase and reports back to you the words that appear on those pages most frequently.</p>
  <p>This different approach makes sure that you know the words that the SEs really want to see – and uncovers far more of them to make your website and articles as good as they can be.</p>
  <p>Keyword LSI Spy does a whole lot more too. it also tells you whether you niche demands long, wordy web pages, or short, pithy ones. It uncovers the primary keyword density that the search engines prefer for your niche – yes, every niche is different, and this is information you need to know. And it reports back to you all the keywords that the top-ranked sites consider important that are related to your keyword or phrase.</p>
  <p>This is incredibly valuable market intelligence that has been difficult or impossible to find out – before Keyword LSI Spy came along!</p>
</div>

I’m not aiming for any copywriting prizes here – this is an example only. A real sales page would build up a much more compelling story and would expound on the benefits of the product for the reader. But hopefully you get the idea.

The testimonial goes in in the same way:

<!– The testimonial div –>
<div>
  <p>”I knew from past experience that a product from you would be both useful and top quality, but I was still really impressed with your Keyword LSI Spy script. Not only does it dig nicely into new niches based on nothing but a generic keyword, it also gives you everything you need to know to beat all of the competition. The intelligent representation of the keywords is enough to get a PPC campaign running quickly, or know exactly what terms to use to build content that will get visitors.<br /><br />Great Job!<br />Andy Henry</p>
</div>

There is a new tag embedded in that testimonial text. Look closely near the end and you’ll see some ‘break’ tags – written as <br />. These force the browser to start a new line.

Note that the <br /> tag, like the <img /> one doesn’t have a specific closing part, it is complete in itself (with the trailing slash).

<!– The guarantee div –>
<div>
  <h3>Guarantee?</h3>
  <p>Of course!</p>
  <p>You are free to return Keyword LSI Spy 2 at any time, for any reason, up to 8 weeks (56 days) from purchase for a full, no questions asked refund.</p>
</div>

No surprises in the guarantee section. In a real sales page you can make this part as long or short as you like – but if you sell through ClickBank, as I do with Keyword LSI Spy, you must have some kind of guarantee statement that conforms with ClickBank’s terms and conditions (as my one does).

<!– The call-to-action div –>
<div>
  <p>Find out how amazingly useful Keyword LSI Spy can be for you by taking our unique free trial right now. There is no obligation to buy and you can run the program completely free three times. I won’t even ask for your email address.</p>
</div>

Here I’ve explained that the reader can trial the software free of charge without obligation. I could equally have just reiterated the offer and told them the price, but I’ve found the free trial to be very effective in generating the sale.

Finally, we come to the buy button – the take action part of the page.

In this case, I’ll create a simple text link so you can see how a hyperlink is created for a web page, but you can make this an image link just as easily.

<!– The buy button div –>
<div>
  <a href=”http://www.keywordlsispy.com/kls2trial.htm”> Click here for your free no-obligation trial of Keyword LSI Spy</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>

The <a> tag is very simple. It requires the ‘href’ part (href means hypertext reference) to tell it where the link should lead to. Then, between the <a href=”" mce_href=”"> and the closing </a> parts goes any text that we want to turn into a link. By default, that text will always show up in blue.

That’s it – a whole sales page created with just a handful of new HTML tags.

You can see it online at http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage4.htm

… and it looks ghastly! Although we’ve created the content for the page and divided it up into sensible sections, we haven’t yet done anything to style it (apart from the odd bit of styling that has carried over from the last lesson).

Let’s put that right.

Here is the HTML for the header again:

<html>
<head>
<style>
p {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: red;
   }
h1 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 18pt;
   color: navy;
   font-weight: bold;
   }
h2 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 14pt;
   color: blue;
   font-style: italic;
   }
</style>
</head>

I’m happy enough with the headline styling, but the paragraph text needs to be black, and both the h1 and h2 headlines need to be centered.

p {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: black;
   font-weight: normal;
   text-align: left;
   }
h1 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 18pt;
   color: navy;
   font-weight: bold;
   text-align: center;
   }
h2 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 14pt;
   color: blue;
   font-style: italic;
   text-align: center;
   }

Now we need to define the width of the page itself to 750 pixels. We can do that by adding a new <div> tag that surrounds all the visible page contents.
 
<body>
<div id=”main”>
<!– The top of page div –>
<div>
  <h1>Keyword LSI Spy: Uncovers the Secret Words the Search Engines Love<h1>
 .
 .
 .
   <a href=”http://www.keywordlsispy.com/kls2trial.htm”>Click here for your free no-obligation trial of Keyword LSI Spy</a>
 </div>
 </div>
 </body>
</html>

I’ve given this new <div> a name – the id=”main” bit. By calling it ‘main’ I can now style it to differentiate it from the other divs.

In the style section I’ll add an entry for main:

#main {
   width: 750px;
   }

Now take a look at the page:

http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage5.htm
Better, but still no cigar.

Now I will make the page background silver (a kind of grey) and the page itself white with a navy blue border. I will also ensure that the text doesn’t cram right up against the edges by padding the page with 5 pixels all round.:

body {
   background-color: silver;
   }
#main {
   width: 750px;
   background-color: white;
   border: 1px solid navy;
   padding: 5px
   }

http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage6.htm

Now I want to make the testimonial stand out by enclosing it in a box, giving it a nice background color and italicising the text. I’ll do all that by naming its div ‘testimonial’ and styling that:

#testimonial {
  width: 500px;
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
  font-style: italic;
  padding: 5px;
  background-color: yellow;
  }

http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage7.htm

Just a few more things to tidy up and we can finish for today.

We have an h3 tag in the guarantee section that hasn’t yet been specifically styled. Let’s do so:

h3 {
   font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 12pt;
   color: navy;
   text-align: left;
   font-weight: bold;
   }

I’d like the text in the call-to-action section to be in bold and italic so I’ll name its div ‘call’ and add some styling to that:

#call {
   font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: black;
   font-weight: bold;
   font-style: italic;
   }

And finally, the link is way too big because the <a> tag has picked up its styling from elsewhere so I’ll make it look nicer:

a {
   font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: blue;
   font-weight: bold;
   text-align: center;
   }

http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage8.htm

That’s better. There are still a few things we can tinker with, but by and large we have a perfectly acceptable looking sales page.

You can view the souce code in your browser to see how it all fits together.

This lesson has been unavoidably long again. We’ll come back to HTML in the future to see how we can add some more advanced features to our pages.

Meanwhile the next lesson in the Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online will be a lot less technical!
 

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All that HTML and CSS stuff is very much an optional extra.

So why is it then, that so many people learn at least a smattering of HTML?

Because there are times when your site isn’t displaying quite how you’d like, or when you want it to do something that isn’t immediately obvious how to achieve in your site builder software. Those times, it is really, really useful to be able to roll up your sleeves and wade into the site’s source code.

HTML is quite straightforward. It isn’t like a scripting language that forces you to learn all kinds of functions and expressions just to get a display online. HTML has a very simple syntax and a remarkably small list of commands to learn. And many of those are never needed.

In the next couple of instalments of the course I’ll take you by the hand and show you how to write a real working web page from scratch – using nothing more than the Notepad text editor.

You see, text is all that a web page is. You may see a graphical interface on your monitor, but all that eye-catching display is written in easy to follow text.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and it was the single invention that turned the Internet into the World Wide Web.

There have been many versions of HTML over the years and people have added features and functions as the Internet has developed and needs have changed. The version that I’ll be teaching you here is, technically speaking, called ‘XHTML transitional’ with CSS styling. But you really don’t need to know why – just follow the rules and you won’t go far wrong!

What is a web page?

A web page is made up of two sections – the head section, where information about the page is passed to the browser so it knows what it is looking at, and the body section, where all the stuff you see on your monitor lives.

Everything in a webpage is wrapped up in things called ‘tags’ that tell the browser what sort of information is coming up and how to display it.

The first tag is the one that tells the browser that the document it is looking at is an html page, so naturally it is called the html tag.

Almost all tags come in pairs, an opening tag and a closing one (there are a few exceptions which we’ll cover later) and are always enclosed in angle brackets – there will be one at the front of the information they define and one at the end – so a basic web page will start with <html> and will end with </html> (closing tags are the same as opening ones, but with a forward slash at the front.

As I said, the document that makes up the webpage has a head section and a body section and they are defined by their own tags:

<html>
<head></head>

<body></body>
</html>

That’s it – a complete, webpage. If you were to put those few lines into Notepad and save them with a filename something like mypage.htm, you could upload it to your hosting space and it would be valid. Wasn’t hard, was it!

Note that HTML webpages can be saved with a file name that ends with either .htm or .html. Both work equally well.

Of course, the example is a web page that displays nothing and does nothing, so it is pretty useless, but fundamentally all web pages are just expansions on that basic model.

Let’s add some text so our new web page has something to display:

<html>
<head></head>

<body>
Here is some text in the body section
</body>
</html>

If I now save that as mypage.htm and upload it, what do you think will show up when I point my browser at mypage.htm?

That’s right – the browser displays ‘Here is some text in the body section’.

Take a look – http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage.htm

Boring, but one step up from a blank screen!

Now, the first thing to see here is that we have done nothing to tell the browser how we want that text to be displayed, so it just puts it on screen using its standard default settings. The default settings in the various browsers that people use may or may not be the same, so essentially we have no control over how people will view our words.

We can impose control – so that all browsers will show it the same way, by wrapping the text in a tag of its own and applying some styling to it.

The text is a new paragraph, so it makes sense to wrap it in a paragraph tag: <p>Here is some text in the body section</p>.

So that you can see one of the main effects of <p> tagged text, I’ll add another paragraph below it (see the code example below).

We still don’t know how any individual browser will be set up to display text within paragraph tags, and that is where CSS styling comes in.

In the head section, we add a <style></style> tag (remember, the head section is the place we pass messages to the browser).

Inside the style tag we define how we would like the <p> tag to be displayed:

<html>
<head>
<style>
p {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: red;
   }
</style>
</head>

<body>
<p>Here is some text in the body section.</p>
<p>Here is a second paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>

Oooh – is it getting complicated? Not if I break it down and explain what is going on here.

The <style></style> tag tells the browser that everything inside is to be taken as an instruction for how to display something.

In this case, the ‘something’ is whatever is put inside of a <p></p> tag.

The syntax of the styling block is straightforward:

1. First we say what we want to style – in this case the p tag (we don’t type the angle brackets because the browser knows that is what we are referring to.

2. After we’ve said what to style, we type an open curly bracket to hold all the different styling elements for that tag together.

3. Then we say what about the tags contents we want to style and how we want it to appear on screen. Each element has a name followed by a colon, the styling itself, and then a semi-colon to show that the element is complete.

4. It is usual to place each element on a new line, for ease of reading, but so long as the semi-colons are there to tell the browser which bit is which, you could put them all on one line if you prefer. It would be very messy to debug later though!

5. A closing curly bracket completes the styled section.

Here, I’ve told any browser that reads the page to show anything inside of a <p></p> tag using the verdana font if it exists on the viewer’s computer, otherwise to use the arial font. If the viewer is using a Mac, then I’ve specified helvetica (it is the arial equivalent for Macs) – and if none of those are on the viewer’s computer, to use whatever standard sans-serif font does exist. We can define as many fonts as we like, or have the patience to type out.

Next I’ve told the browser to display as 10-point text.

Finally, I’ve told it to display the text in red.

Here it is: http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage1.htm

See that gap between the two paragraphs? That’s the main effect of the <p> tag that is built in to all browsers that I alluded to above.

The <p> tag is the workhorse of web pages. You’ll use it a lot. But it are not the only tag you can use to determine the look of lines of text.

We can also use headline tags – there are 6 built in to the HTML standard – <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on, up to <h6>. All closed in the usual way.

Let’s see what they look like by adding some headlines to our page:

<html>
<head>
<style>
p {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: red;
   }
</style>
</head>

<body>
<h1>Main headline</h1>
<h2>Secondary headline</h2>
<h3>Sub headline</h3>
<h4>Headine 4</h4>
<h5>Headline 5</h5>
<h6>Headline 6</h6>
<p>Here is some text in the body section.</p>
<p>Here is a second paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>

Take a look here: http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage2.htm

Personally, I’ve never needed to use more than <h1>, <h2> and <h3> – I suspect that the others were originally included in the HTML standard so that official documents and scientific papers could be displayed online.

Of course, I don’t know which browser you are using, and so can’t be sure that you are seeing each of the headlines in the same way that I am. Hence we can – and usually should – fix the way they look by styling them with some CSS.

I would like the main headline of the page to be in bold and navy blue and the subhead (I’ll use <h2>, to be in blue and italic. Both will still be shown in verdana font for those who have it.

Here, then is the new code:

<html>
<head>
<style>
p {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 10pt;
   color: red;
   }
h1 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 18pt;
   color: navy;
   font-weight: bold;
   }
h2 {
   font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 14pt;
   color: blue;
   font-style: italic;
   }
</style>
</head>

<body>
<h1>Main headline</h1>
<p>Here is some text in the body section.</p>
<h2>Secondary headline</h2>
<p>Here is a second paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>

http://www.imkickstart.com/course/html/mypage3.htm

Note that the <h> tags all automatically put a gap below their text, just like <p> tags do.

Modern HTML – this thing I’ve called ‘XHTML Transitional with CSS Styling’ differs from the original HTML in one major way – in the past, HTML didn’t have the <style> tag to allow all the ‘presentation’ instructions (the bits that don’t affect WHAT is being displayed, but do affect HOW it is displayed) to be kept separate. They had to be written into the flow of the text. So, for example, the main headline of our little example page would have had to be written like this:

<h1>
<font face=”Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,Sans-Serif”>
<font color=”Navy”>
<font size=”18pt”>
<b>Main headline</b>
</font></font></font>
</h1>

Quite a lot of extra code – and when you consider that all that has to be retyped for each headline and for each paragraph, you can see why writing web pages was quite tedious and resulted in bloated files sizes.

Old-style HTML had no memory. If you told it to display one paragraph in 10-point Verdana it wouldn’t remember that for the next paragraph – you’d have to tell it all over again – and again.

With the new way of doing things we can determine the ‘presentation’ data once – as we’ve done in the style tag in our example code, and then be comfortable that our display choices will be used throughout the entire web page.

And if we change our mind and want to have each paragraph display in a different font or size, we don’t have to change endless <font> tags throughout the script – all it takes is changing one line in the <style> section and the change is actioned everywhere.

Keeping presentation separate from content is wonderful thing and is the whole driving force behind the move to XHTML and CSS.
I think that’s probably enough for this lesson – we have learned about 11 tags already: html, head, style, body, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 and p. Also we’ve seen how CSS is written and looked at a few simple examples. When you consider that even the most adventurous website builders rarely use more than 30 or 40 HTML tags, you can see that this isn’t brain surgery – in fact you are already on the road to becoming an expert!

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Some people get very worried about thieves stealing their ebooks. There are a lot of people online who are less than honest and think nothing of hacking their way into your site’s download page, ripping it off and distributing your hard work to all and sundry.

Is this a real problem?

Yes. I once received an email from a subscriber who said this:

“Why do you bother to try to sell your book to people in my country? They won’t buy it. Don’t you realize that as soon as any ebook is published it will be copied by people from my part of the world and sold for a fraction of the price you are charging?”

Well, maybe. I do sell quite a lot of ebooks at full price to people from that person’s country, so his sweeping generalization cannot be completely true. But even if there is an element of reality in it, should we worry?

My personal view is no.

I doubt very much if any of the people who are grabbing my ebooks for pennies on the dollar would have ever bought a full price copy in the first place. Have I lost a sale? No, I don’t think so. But I have gained an opportunity to get my name distributed more widely, and to advertise affiliate links, or subscription sign up pages within the ebook that they have taken.

Although there are reasonable safeguards that I can put in place to deter casual pirates, the ‘professionals’ will get my book whatever I do.

In Internet marketing, time is money, and I figure that the more time we spend worrying about the threat of piracy, the less time we have to make money. Not to mention the stress all that worry may cause.

Here is what I do.

I normally create the ebook in Adobe Acrobat with the security settings set so that the book’s contents cannot be changed or copy and pasted. This affords a small measure of protection against casual plagiarism.

Password protection. I don’t like it and don’t use it, but if you are really worried about security, you can create PDF files that can only be opened with a password. To my mind, this just annoys legitimate purchasers and does nothing to deter pirates (who can easily pass on the password anyway).

Another problem with password protection is that inevitably ‘real’ customers will forget their password and you will have to provide customer service for an indefinite period.

Now for some common-sense safeguards.

When you upload your ebook to your website ready for customers to download it, put it in a folder that nobody can guess the name of and on a web page with an equally obscure name. The URL may look something like:

http://www.mydomain.com/a3f7t/eht38s.htm

(Don’t bother to click on it as it doesn’t exist!)

You’d be surprised how many ebooks are stored on easy-to-guess URLs like http://www.mydomain.com/thankyou.htm

Those ones are just asking to be ripped off

Another way to add an extra layer of security is to make your download URL point to a redirect page. For example, the URL http://www.mydomain.com/a3f7t/eht38s.htm would arrive at a page which is comprised of the following HTML code :

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” Content=”0;URL=http://www.mydomain.com/q5tge6/et35h.htm”>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”><font face=”Arial”>This page will redirect in a few seconds.</font></p>
<p align=”center”><font face=”Arial”>If not <a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/q5tge6/et35h.htm”><font face=”Arial”>Please Click Here</font></a></font></p>
</body>
</html>

This page will then redirect the visitor from the first URL to the one embedded in the page.

The benefit of this is that you can change the actual download page and folder – even the entire domain – anytime you like by simply amending the html on the redirect page – without ever having to worry about old customers having dead links.

An even better, and faster way to accomplish the same thing is to use a PHP redirect. With this, you create a page that comprises just this line:

<?php header(‘location:http://www.the-redirect-page.com’); ?>

(Change the URL to the appropriate one.) Save it with a php suffix and when you point a link to this page, it will immediately redirect the viewer to the one you’ve coded.

If you want to take security to a higher level, software solutions are available that will make sure that only the person who has made the purchase can access your download page.
What should a download page include?

* Zip or not?

Even though PDF files are already compressed to some extent, they can often be quite large. Running them through the Windows XP or Vista compression program (right click on the files or files, select ‘Send to’ and then select ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’) or using a program such as WinZip will often make them a little smaller. The result is that the file that you offer for download is now called myfile.zip rather than myfile.pdf.

For users or most modern browsers, that is a crucial difference because they generally have PDF reading capabilities built in. That means that if your thank you page offers a PDF file for download, your browser will open it to display rather than download it. And THAT can cause no end of confusion because customers do not end up with a copy of your book on their hard drive. As soon as they close their browser the book is lost.

If you are offering a PDF file from your download page, you must tell your customers to ‘right click on the download link and select ‘save target as’. This forces the browser to save the file rather that just display it.

However, .zip files are downloaded correctly so by offering your ebook in compressed form (whether that process actually makes a smaller file size or not) you are able to avoid the confusion.
Back to what your download page should or could include.

* A link to the ebook.

This is one of the things that appears to most confuse Internet beginners, so I’ll explain how you make a link to a book.

When you have made your ebook into a PDF and zipped it (if you want to do that). You will have a file called something like ebook.zip

Upload that file (usually by FTP) to your web space – ideally into a folder with an unguessable name. It doesn’t have to be the same folder that the download page itself is in. In fact, it is probably better that it is not.

Now your ebook will be in a location something like http://www.mydomain.com/hel28d/ebook.zip

Create a hyperlink on your download page that references that URL. The HTML that achieves this would be:

<a href=http://www.mydomain.com/hel28d/ebook.zip>Click Here to Download</a>

Now, when anyone clicks on the link they will be asked if they want to download the zip file.

* A link to an unzipping utility.

Windows XP and Vista are pretty good at unzipping files, but some recent versions of programs like WinZip can baffle it. It always best to explain the zipping and unzipping process to your customers and to offer them a link to the latest WinZip trial (currently http://www.winzip.com/ )

It is a good idea to also inform Apple Mac users that they can get a free decompression tool from Stuffit Expander. The URL for that is http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander/index.html

* A link to Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Once again, Windows can display PDF files perfectly happily, but as not everyone has that operating system, it is a good idea to tell your customers where they can get a free copy of Acrobat Reader. This is the link you’ll need to display: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

* Instructions and contact details

Never assume that your customers have as much knowledge about ebooks, downloading and reading them as you have.

In fact, it is safe to assume that some will have almost no idea what an ebook is.

I actually got this email from a very nice lady who had just bought one of my ebooks:

“I’ve bought your book, but my printer hasn’t started yet. Can you make it start from where you are, and how can you add the cover if I don’t have thicker paper?”

There is always one!

Try to explain everything that they need to know or do, in plain English.

However, there will be people who are confused, so make sure you display a contact email address prominently so that they can get in touch with you. It is also worth mentioning which time zone you are in so that they don’t panic if they hear nothing for a few hours.

* Payment details.

It is also a good idea to reiterate how much their credit card has been charged and who the payment has been made to (i.e. ClickBank)

* Upsell

The best time to extract more money from a customer is just as they’ve parted with some. If you have already prepared a backend product, now is a good time to tell them about it and perhaps to offer a special deal.

* Bonuses

If your product is sold with bonuses, create download links for them and add in any instructions that may be required.

* Opt-in form

The thank-you (download) page is a great place to grow your email list! Explain to your customer that by purchasing your book they are eligible for free updates if and when the book is revised, but in order to notify them, you will need their valid email address. It is acceptable also to explain that by providing their email address they will also receive your newsletter as an unadvertised bonus!

Note that you should set your autoresponder to double opt-in these people.

* Privacy statement

Naturally, if you have an opt-in form, you must display a privacy statement to the effect that you will not share their email address with anyone.

Some Optional Extras

* Some people use their thank-you page as a valuable advertising medium in its own right. Among the clever uses that I’ve seen are:

* Cross promotions with other ebook marketers – in other words, you display a small ad to their ebook on your thank-you page and they do the same for you on theirs.

* Offers of subscriptions to other ezines (where those publishers also display your sign-up details.

* Affiliate ads to ebooks on related topics.

It is up to you!

How many of these ideas you use is entirely up to you. At its simplest, a download page doesn’t actually need any of them at all – even a download link is optional! Many Internet marketers have a download page that consists only of an email sign-up form and nothing else. The customer has to fill in the form to be emailed the ebook. Their reasoning is that they simultaneously capture the buyer’s email address, and avoid the need to protect the download page – as there isn’t one.

I personally prefer to make my download pages as informative as possible as I see them as the beginning of a relationship with my customer.

And in my experience, a confused customer is one who is far more likely to ask for a refund.

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In that case, you need to look at buying or acquiring the rights to the product. Depending on which ‘rights’ you buy or are given, you can then sell the product from your own site, in your own way, and keep all the money for yourself.

What are reprint rights, and how to profit from them.

When you buy an ebook or a program online, you generally buy the right to read it yourself, or use it on your own computer. Anything beyond that basic usage is usually forbidden.

That means that

- you cannot give it away to anyone else.
- you cannot change it in any way.
- you cannot sell it.

Even if there is no obvious copyright mark, the author of all published works (ebooks and program scripts included) is automatically awarded the copyright to their work as soon as it is published. The © mark acts as a reminder, but is not strictly required.

So how is it that some people can sell other people’s ebooks and programs, change them, rename them, give them away as free bonuses, and even sell you the rights to do the same?

It all comes down to the original author selling certain ‘rights’ to those works.

There are a few different types of ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across online. They are all quite different in what they allow you to do, so it is always wise to read the terms very closely to be sure you know exactly what rights you are actually buying.

Here are the most common ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across and what they generally mean. There can be variances though, so be sure to check the small print carefully.

Resale Rights.

The simplest of all. When you buy resale rights, you are given the right to sell the product on. While you can effectively do that as an affiliate, the difference here is that the product becomes your own. You have to handle the orders (through your own payment processor account) but you get to keep all the revenue from each sale.

Effectively the product becomes your own except that you cannot change it.

You will sometimes see resale rights being sold that attempt to dictate the price at which you will sell the product. While this is generally a good thing from the product’s point of view (if people start selling a $97 ebook for $1, the value of the book will fast disappear and resale rights owners who are charging the full price will find it hard to compete) it is almost always illegal.

Price fixing in this way is not allowed.

However, it is usually in your own interest to adhere to the recommended price.

Buying the resale rights to an ebook usually costs 3-5 times the normal selling price, but you don’t need many sales to start to see a good return on your investment.

Reprint Rights

Reprint rights are similar to resale rights, but differ slightly in as much as they confer on you the authority to have the ebook printed out to sell as a physical product.

This right is not seen as often as resale rights (and indeed, sometimes the resale rights licence will give reprint rights as well).

It can be very useful to have this right to print as a lot of extra money can be generated by offering ebooks that you sell with a physical product option. Simply by printing out an ebook and putting it in a nice binder, you can often command a much higher price from your customers.

Master Rights.

M