Archive for June, 2006

Every now and again, something comes up that’s really good. It’s especially good if it’s free!

This is a 33-page report called The Internet Business Manifesto. I found out about it from the Web Profit School forums, and many people there are singing its praises. If you’re on any of my mailing lists, I’ve already told you about it, even though I don’t actually stand to gain from doing so; I am not providing you with an affiliate link.

Actually, I’m surprised not to have heard about this through any other lists yet. Perhaps some marketers are scared to promote it, because not only does the report tell you that you need to stop buying every product promising instant wealth, it also tells you why.

I’m not afraid to promote this product at all! I don’t make claims that my products will generate instant wealth for you, which are virtually always exaggerated. All businesses need time to build up! However, there are quite a few products out there that do seem to promise instant wealth. I won’t ever be doing that, so I’m not scared to promote this report.

If you become successful at Internet marketing, I may benefit from your success! You may purchase products of mine that you otherwise would have had no need for. You may decide to focus on affiliate marketing, learn the best ways to succeed in that business, and sell some of my products. You may even develop a product that I can help market for you, and make money from affiliate sales.

You’re certainly not going to be doing these things if you don’t become successful! Eventually, your enthusiasm would wear out, so I really want you to make a success of your business. Perhaps I do stand to gain, after all, but I’m talking about long-term gain, and I’m not talking about a gain at your expense.

So get your copy of The Internet Business Manifesto now! It’s worth your time. I promise.

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer

If you have an RSS feed on your site, there’s a really nice, easy way to promote it! I’ve just started doing it for The Affiliate Marketer ezine. Some email autoresponder services such as Aweber have the capability to take your articles from your RSS feed and automatically construct emails from them that are suitable for sending to your subscribers. The best thing is that this can happen automatically!

What you need to do to promote your site this way is to get people to sign up to your ezine. This is really great for you! People get a short summary of each article or post from your site (possibly a WordPress blog) and they can decide whether they want to read the full article by clicking through your link. You have just as many possibilities for monetising this traffic as for normal web traffic from the search engines; in fact, probably more, as if you provide a quality service then you’ll be building up a relationship with your subscriber base.

Depending on what you told your customers they would be receiving when they subscribed, you could also send them details of products for which you are an affiliate, although do make sure that you don’t overdo this approach. I believe that if you make your primary focus providing quality content, people will see that that’s the case, and you’ll be building a relationship with your subscribers.

Imagine that you get a visitor to your site; they click on an ad and leave. You’ve made maybe $0.50 out of them. On the other hand, imagine you get a visitor to your site; they decide that the content is good, and they sign up for your ezine. You’ll probably get many clicks from them in the future, perhaps some affiliate purchases, and they may well tell people about your site! I certainly know which of those events I would prefer to happen!

Just one point to note: If you use WordPress, it changes your standard ASCII quotes into fancy quotes (“smart” quotes or “curly” quotes). These characters cannot appear in ASCII text-based emails. I am looking for a solution to this problem, and when I’ve come up with one, I will post it. For now, I am manually editing each broadcast to tidy it up.

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer

Here’s how you should be using Tag and Ping, and if everybody did this, then the value of tagging and pinging would be maintained:

1. If you’re going to tag your own site at the social bookmarking sites, that’s fine, but do it one time only for each site. Don’t set up multiple accounts to do it; that’s cheating the system. Instead, encourage your users to use a social bookmarking service to bookmark your site. You could even find it worthwhile to tell your users about social bookmarking sites and the benefits of using them, because there are plenty of people out there who still don’t know about these sites.

2. Make sure you give your users the opportunity to bookmark your site easily, with links to common social bookmarking sites on each page.

3. In my opinion, products designed to subvert the search engines by making use of multiple accounts on social bookmarking sites should be avoided. Even if you do secure a high ranking for important keywords, this will not last. The search engines employ people to search for sites that are using “black-hat SEO” techniques, and this is about as black-hat as they come. As soon as what you’ve done is discovered, you will be de-listed.

4. Why not make use Jean Philippe Schoeffel’s excellent, new Socialize-It service? It’s free, using advertising revenue to pay for itself; it’s easy to set up; and if space on your web pages is at a premium, it’s ideal! You don’t need to keep track of the social bookmarking sites, as this will be done for you, and it means that whatever the user’s favourite social bookmarking site is, they’ll be able to add it quickly and easily. If you click through the link, you’ll see the variations of code that are available. I’m using the Javascript version here.

5. Don’t neglect other methods of optimising your site pages for specific keywords, such as article writing, link exchanging and emphasising desired keywords within your page layout.

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer