Online Business Out of Control?
Do you feel that despite working really REALLY hard on your business, you’re still not getting the results that you want or expected? Are you feeling dazed and confused about where to take your online business next? Have you put so much on your ever-growing ‘to-do’ list that you don’t know which item to tackle next?
Well, it might just be time for a serious clean up. To help you with that, Alice Seba is putting on a 6-week intensive step-by-step coaching program called “Spring Cleaning to Maximize the Profitability of Your Online Business.”
The course curriculum is good in that it is designed to help you clean out all the extra stuff that you’ve accumulated, identify what’s working in your business and implement strategies for long-term success. You’ll work directly with Alice week-by-week to apply these strategies directly to your own unique business.
If you could use some hands-on help and are ready to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, get over to the coaching information page right away. Alice is only accepting 50 students and registration closes Sunday, April 1, 2007.
BTW, you won’t find a 6-week intensive coaching program anywhere else that gives you direct access to the mentor for the low price of $297… so if you ever wanted hands-on help but found the sticker prices too high, this could be your very lucky day.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Rosalind Gardner to Speak at Affiliate Summit
I will be moderating the “What Affiliates Want” panel which includes Jeremy Palmer, Scott Jangro and Vinny Lingham at Affiliate Summit East 2007 taking place July 8 - 10 in Miami, Florida at the Hotel Intercontinental.
The presentation will take place in Classroom C - Theater on July 9th between 11:30am and 12:30pm and is open to full conference pass holders only.
Don’t miss the affiliate marketing industry’s biggest event! Get your pass now for Affiliate Summit East 2007 today! 
Popularity: 8% [?]
Batter’s Up!
Got a baseball, a sports site or thinking of starting one? If so, you can earn commissions selling both free and paid Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball League accounts from Yahoo! Sports which offers live drafts, custom leagues, multiple scoring options, expert analysis and commentary, and real-time stat tracking for your team.
Here are a few baseball-related items that you can sell on your baseball site:
Base accessories, baseballs by the dozen, bases, bat accessories, bat bags, batting helmets, batting tees, bleachers, books, caps, catcher’s chest protectors, catcher’s helmets, catcher’s leg guards, catcher’s masks, catcher’s mitts, cd-roms, coaches apparel, college & high school bats, duffel bags, equipment bags, field maintenance, fielding gloves, first base mitts, fungo/training bats, helmet bags, kids footwear, little league bats, metal footwear, mlb customized team jerseys, molded footwear other training aids performance tops, personalized bats, personalized gloves, pitchbacks, pitching machine baseballs, pitching machines, pitching machines-accessories, pitching rubbers, practice nets, protective screens protective screens, senior league bats, short sleeve tees, sliding shorts, sliding shorts, socks, starter sets, supporters, team accessories tee ball bats, tote bags, umpire apparel, umpire needs uniform-blank tops, uniform-customizable tops, uniform-jackets, uniform-pants, videos, and wood bats. Don’t forget that you can also sell tickets to major league baseball games!
All these items are available through Commission Junction merchants such as Baseball Warehouse, Baseball Express, Hat World and many others.
The Yahoo! payouts are as follows:
- $1.00 per FREE Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball Account (45 day cookie duration)
- $5.00 per Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball Stat Tracker/Draft Kit purchase (120 day cookie duration)
- $12.00 per Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball Plus purchase (45 day cookie duration)
But hurry and get your offers up there… the Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball League program expires April 28th, 2007. Batter’s up!
Popularity: 9% [?]
He Turned $25 into 60 MILLION
You can now pick Internet marketing guru Derek Gehl’s “The Internet Millionaire’s Protege Bootcamp Videos” for just $2.95. That includes 6 DVDs of LIVE footage revealing the strategies he used to turn $25 into over $60 MILLION in online sales go out the door for the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee…
Spend the next 30 days using Derek’s secrets to FAST TRACK your own successful online business. And if you already have a website, Derek shows how to find pools of untapped customers online, drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, and get top 10 rankings in Google and the other search engines!
Sign up for your $2.95 Trial now. BTW, the first 250 people to take advantage of this $2.95 Trial will receive a special bonus, but quantities are limited so get your trial and free gift now.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Can You REALLY Make Money with Paid Online Surveys?
I list paid surveys as a work-at-home job for those who don’t want to become an online merchant or affiliate marketer, and have been asked many times whether or not it’s possible to really make money with paid online surveys.
My answer - From the little bit that I tried, you can probably make some money, but just like any other opportunity, you’ll have to really work at it to make any significant earnings. But I’m not an expert in that realm, so I found someone who is…
And so, here’s the answer from the ‘opinion expert’, Deborah Casey who has been getting paid for her opinions for the last 30 years and then discovered the first paid online surveys database in 2001.
Read the interview with Deborah Casey now.
Do you have experiece with paid online surveys? Leave a comment and tell us about it!
Popularity: 15% [?]
Search Engine Marketing Tips Report
More on the topic of how to avoid getting Google slapped, here’s a link to Jason Potash’s report that dissects what is happening in the world of search engine marketing (SEM) - including Google’s plans to use LSI,
phrase matching and co-occurrence to automatically seek-and-destroy websites that rely on natural search.
The report is a relatively quick read, doesn’t require an email addy from you and it’ll get you thinking about how to use the strategies that are still approved by Google to get traffic from the search engines now.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Worried about Duplicate Content Penalties?
Hey! I’m back from our 4 week tour of Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam (which was totally awesome BTW) and now that my jet lag is subsiding, I’ve been catching up with what’s been happening in the world of Internet marketing since early March.
As always, there were a number of product launches for the ‘latest and greatest’ ebooks, systems and other sundries during my absence. Pretty much ho hum except for one - Content Composer - which is geared to online publishers who either write their own content, use PLR articles or employ ghostwriters to build content and drive search engine traffic to their sites.
If that describes you (it should) and you are worried about incurring duplicate content penalties with your current publication strategies, or you want to create more unique content in less time, then you’ll be interested in Jason Potash’s new Content Composer software, which was just released yesterday, so I picked it up and went through it last night.
It definitely isn’t some cheap ‘article spinner’ that spits out nonsensical crap. Content Composer is completely White Hat technology that helps you quickly and easily generate unique, natural language articles with a modest amount of work on your part.
Basically, you take one of your original articles (or a PLR or ghostwritten article) then spend 5 to 10 additional minutes rewriting a few key paragraphs, and Jason’s software will generate a dozen new and unique articles for you to use on your site and for distribution to article directories.
So, for example, instead of placing my completely original article both on my site and on EzineArticles.com, I can quickly generate a new article that retains my meaning but poses no threat of penalty to my own site. So, I can relax knowing that I won’t get slapped by Google for duplicate content or for trying to spam the engines. That’s a BIG Plus.
What I like best however is that it ultimately means a lot LESS work for me. (And goodness knows, I’m always ready for another vacation!)
If you’re ready to reduce your content publishing workload, pick up Content Composer. What you save in time and earn through additional traffic could get you a very nice vacation!
Popularity: 23% [?]
How to Stop Blog Comment Spam
Sometime ago, I turned off blog comments on the NPT Blog for awhile, because I was sick and tired of scanning through all the comment spam.
Here is an example of a typical comment that was being posted to the NPT Blog.
Watts Murphy, Roisin Genocide Organ Dandy Warhols Blood Has Been Shed Stapp, Scott Fall Silent Siouxsie & the Banshees Eyes All That Remains Hendrix, Jimi Shock Skrape Tanita Tikaram New Metal Generation Hell Is For Heroes Strange Land Waits, Tom D…
Duh - as if that doesn’t LOOK like spam.
But some blog comment spammers are smarter and more devious. They’ll post word combinations that result in coherent sentences. On occasion you’ll even find complete paragraphs that make sense. Smarter still, is that the comment spammers seem to acknowledge you, your blog and sometimes even a recent post.
Here’s an example of just such a comment that I found on a fishing site - no really, a FISHING site, not a PHISHING site. :
Jim said… Hey, you have a great blog here! I’m definitely going to bookmark you!
I have a Bass Fishing site/blog. It pretty much covers Bass Fishing related stuff. Come and check it out if you get time
Don’t be fooled. This is comment spam, pure and simple. When I searched Google for “Hey, you have a great blog here!” there were 183,000 results. Scan the results and you’ll find entries where the comment spammer forgot to replace the keywords, as follows:
Michael said…
Hey, you have a great blog here! I’m definitely going to bookmark you!
I have a ##KEYWORD## site/blog. It pretty much covers ##KEYWORD## related stuff. Come and check it out if you get time
Barring those who forget to replace their keywords, moderating these longer blog comments is slightly more challenging than the one-two click that wipes out a hundred or more 1, 2 and 3-word comment spams posted by pharmaceutical, gaming and porn affiliates.
However, if you want to stop comment spammers from wasting your time, you need to put a few more defenses in place. First of all…
Popularity: 34% [?]
Are You Alienating Your Subscribers?
How irritating is this? You get an email offer or see an offer (for something you actually want) on a website, click the link and end up on a page that says something like, “Offer not available in your area”.
Otherwise, you send out an offer like the Maxim magazine offer (pictured left), and your non-U.S.-based subscribers get redirected to SurveyScout instead.
Residents of Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand (or anywhere else that isn’t the U.S.) end up on those pages far too often when marketers send U.S.-only offers to their entire list of newsletter subscribers.
There are two big downsides to this.
First of all, you may lose those subscribers through alienation.
Secondly, your affiliate manager may terminate your affiliation with their program when they receive thousands of invalid clicks which then wrecks their EPC.
If you accept newsletters signups from all over the world, subscribers from countries other than the U.S. probably represent a HUGE percentage of your list.
Here are a 3 ways you can avoid losing those subscribers and your affiliations.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Are You Being Held Hostage?
Many folks are surprised when they find out that I do most of the design work on my web sites and have been doing so since I started my business in 1998.
You may think that doing your own design is a waste of time and that it is better to outsource it all. And sure, I have outsourced some of my design work, particularly the ebook covers. But I personally find it frustrating to wait for site and logo designers.
Sometimes you fork out $199 for a logo or header graphic which ends up looking like a 2 year-old could have done a better job; or, you hire the same designer that everyone and his brother in the niche uses, and your design ends up looking like the ’same old, same old’ with only color and text variations.
So, I don’t wait for designers… especially when I can do a good job myself in 10 minutes to an hour. Not to mention that it’s fun! For me, it’s a break from the ‘work’ of writing.
What’s ‘fun’ for me however, is a a DAUNTING prospect for others. For newbies especially, designing or building their own website may seem absolutely impossible..
Quite frankly, however, I think it is a far worse prospect for your business when you let someone else have control over every aspect of your site. Too often the webmasters I talk to have been ‘working on their sites’ for six months to a year and more, and they still don’t have a clue how to FTP a page to the server, let alone insert a table into an HTML page.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s like making your auto mechanic responsible for making sure that there is gas in your car and air in your tires.
For example, one webmaster, with whom I spoke recently, spent a THOUSAND Aussie dollars, (about $780 US) to a company for initial hosting and design work. All she got was …
Popularity: 31% [?]
