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January 2003
Print and Go Here
is the entire ezine for you to print and take with you. Simply
print this entire web page by using your "File/print"
command. All of this month's articles are included and there is
plenty of room in the margins for notes
Website Technique
Third Party Applications
Using outside vendors can significantly reduce the complexity of running
a money-making website.
When I first started, just about everything I wanted to have on my
website had to be installed on my server and programmed independently at
great expense and frustration. Over the past few years there have been
tons of third party application providers that provide me services
without fancy, expensive and frustrating custom programming on my end.
Here are just a few of the services that I have used myself on my
websites and suggested to my clients:
Shopping cart system
http://www.KickStartCart.com
Surveys http://www.zoomerang.com
Calculators, like mortgage, amortization, car payment, etc.(just type in
"free calculators" in any major search engine and you'll find hundreds
Mailing list management -- Again there are too many to mention
Statistics
What this means to you is that you can use inexpensive and simple
hosting and simply link to the other services, many of which can be made
to appear like they belong to your site.
As more and more of these services appear the less trouble you will have
if you are a MAC diehard. But still, at this moment in time, and for
some time in the future you are shooting yourself in the foot by
sticking with your MAC if you want to be serious about Internet
marketing because the services being offered by third parties are more
mainline and don't support the relatively small Internet Marketing
community yet. Traffic Generation Technique
Images
I got this Idea from Wayne Yeager's
http://www.trafficology.com site. By the way I just got notice from
him that he is not getting anymore good traffic ideas from his
subscribers so he is changing his business format.
The idea is to take advantage of the image search portion of Google.
You can name your images with keywords. When someone looks for an image
with your keyword it will pop up. Apparently the keyword could be in the
graphic or in the text of the page the graphic resides on.
You could actually make up some specific advertising graphics to compel
the person to click on your image if it comes up in a search. A picture
of you won't mean much, but a graphic giving the benefit of your site
will most likely get clicked on.
Although not a barnburner, this is a good and reasonable idea to
increase traffic to your site. Product Development Technique
TeleSeminars Part I (Mechanics) This has been
one of the most profitable and easiest to produce products for me. And
best of all I deliver them right from my basement with no dressing up in
a power suit, no travel, and no airport food. I even delivered my last
one from the kitchen table of my mother's house just before
Thanksgiving. TeleSeminars are just like a giant
conference call except the technology used is much less expensive than a
typical conference call that normally charges you so much per person per
minute. The TeleSeminar technology is called a "telephone
bridge line." You don't have to know anything about this or install
anything. You simply sign up with a bridge line provider, pay your fee,
they give you some number that I'll explain below and away you go. I
currently use
http://www.voicetext.com and have the capability of having 600
people on the line at one time. I started out much smaller with a 30
person bridge line that I subleased from Judy Sabah
Judy@judysabah.com
DRAWBACKS
Even though telephone bridge lines are really great, there are some
things you must watch for. In some cases you may want to opt for the
higher quality conference call technology if you need absolute high
quality. Bridge line noise can be a problem as the number
of people on the line increases. If you want an open discussion your
noise level may be so high that no one can hear anything. You must keep
your group size small if you want everyone to be able to contribute.
On the large seminars that I do I use the bridge line mute feature to
turn off everyone else so that I can be heard clearly. Not every bridge
line has this feature so check before you rent the line.
Cell phones and speaker phones can cause trouble on the line so you
should discourage your participants from using them, although most of
the time it's not a big problem.
Many of the smaller bridge line rental companies don't have anyone
standing by in case something goes wrong. On occasion they'll give you a
backup emergency number to call if the bridge isn't working.
If the seminar before you runs overtime, your seminar participants won't
be able to get on the line or will pop into the wrong seminar and get
confused. I rent mine exclusively 24/7 so I don't have this problem.
With all the above said, TelePhone bridge lines have really made doing
seminars by phone affordable for everyone.
EQUIPMENT
All you really need is a phone and all the participants really need is a
phone. I'm going to tell you what else you need to make more money doing
TeleSeminars.
I really recommend using a headset telephone. You will be making notes,
shuffling papers and possibly watching and responding to emails as they
come in. You will also need your hands free if you're taping, which I
highly recommend.
The big money from TeleSeminars comes from taping them and selling the
tapes. To do this yourself you must have a cassette tape recorder and an
adapter to allow you to plug your phone line into the tape machine. This
can all be gotten from RadioShack. You will also need a "Y" adapter,
also from RadioShack.
Here's the hookup
Your phone line comes out of the wall to the "Y" adapter. One side of
the "Y" adapter has a phone line that goes to your headset phone. The
other side of the "Y" adapter goes to the phone line adapter. The phone
line adapter then plugs into your tape recorder.
I still do many recording of TeleSeminars this way because I can take
the tape and duplicate it immediately as described in the
December 2001 issue.
Since so much rides on my tape I also have the bridge line company
record the event on CD and Fed Ex it to me as a backup.
That's it. Next issue I'll teach you the strategies I use to really make
lots of money with TeleSeminars. Email Technique
You've Got Mail - No You Don't Cause You're Banned
I just got banned this month from emailing to AOL. Am I a bad boy who is
spamming people. Absolutely not! Here's my story.
I was preparing my year end digest edition of "Great Speaking." When I
tried to send it through my list management company, I got a notice that
said, "Your mail is blocked by 1 ISP. Click here for more info." When I
clicked on the link I got a note that I had exceeded AOL's standard of
100 complaints for every million emails sent.
EMERGENCY ACTION
Since it was a weekend and since I had to get 25,000 plus AOL addresses
delivered, I extracted all my AOL addresses and sent them with an
advanced email program called Mailloop.
Then it was time to start investigating.
Background: I have one of the most pristine lists anywhere. I had only
about 20 complaints overall from all sources in over 4 million emails
sent over 4 years. THEN AOL 8.0 came on the scene. AOL 8.0 has a report
spam button right next to their delete button. I got 80 complaints in
one day from just one mailing. Many were from typical AOL goobers who
forgot they signed up, but many were from accidental complaints.
I called AOL to inquire about this and to attempt to get WhiteListed,
which means you are cleared to send things to them. I had a great
conversation with Anna the representative, but bottom line is that my
list management company got their server blocked and I was on it. This
could be from other list owners who are not as conscientious as me
sending out spam or getting too many complaints.
The entire feeling I got after my long conversation with AOL was that
every list management company on the face of the earth is getting their
servers banned temporarily to force them to clean things up and to force
people to call so they can weed out the legitimate publishers from the
bad boys.
I got a call back today from AOL and they basically don't have any
problem with me, but they need me to find another server to mail from or
I'll continue to get blocked when trying to send through the server I'm
on at mindshare.
NOTE: Every list management company that
does any volume at all gets banned at one time or the other. If they are
big enough and have personnel to talk to places like AOL, Yahoo and
Hotmail the ban is usually only temporary, but could recur if something
bad happens again.
They also said that things were settling down some as more people are
using the spam button more judiciously and list management companies are
cracking down on the bad mailers.
I can't talk to mindshare until Jan 2nd, but I'll keep you posted on
what I've done and what you should do. In the mean time, if email
marketing is important to you, you must have a backup plan in case of
minor disasters like this--especially if they occur on a weekend and you
MUST get a mailing out. Copywriting Technique
The Reason Why Technique
by Tom Antion As usual I'm not going to get
into any deep theory here. I'm just going to tell you about a tested
copywriting technique that works. You see and hear it everyday if
you listen to the radio, or watch TV or read the newspaper.
Whenever you make a really great offer simply tell why you made the
offer. You see it all the time:
"We're overstocked" "The boss said
we've done a lousy job this quarter and he wants us to move out these
cars no matter what the price." "Scratch and Dent Sale"
"We've got several brand new washers and dryers that got scuffed up a
little bit in shipment, so we can't sell them at retail"
I'm getting ready to do a sale of Ebooks as a funny
spoof.
"We are overstocked on Ebooks and the boss says move
em out" hahaha and guess what? I'll sell a ton of them.
I guess this technique works because if you didn't give
the person a reason that you are discounting a product, they might think
that you simply couldn't get rid of them because they are junk.
What if the only reason you are discounting is that you need the
money? Then make up a tongue-in-cheek reason like:
"My wife/husband threatened to divorce me unless I cleaned out the
garage of these 200 widgets. Please save my marriage and order my super
3 for 50 deal -- buy 3 and get 50 ---OK just kidding, but you can get 5
for the price of 3 and a thank you card from my husband/wife."
Always give them a reason why you are making a special deal and watch
your sales soar.
I just completed a two hour audiotape seminar on this topic called
Copywriting 901: The Fast Track to Writing Words that Sell.
It is awesome and could make you a thousand times it's cost by
learning the above technique and all the other techniques I put on
the tape.
Click here to order Search Engine Tips
Beware the Experts You probably get spammed
all the time with promises of "Guaranteed #1 Placement" or "We'll beat
the search engines for you." Well if a company is willing
to spam you to get your money in the first place, how ethical do you
think their claims are? Yes, there are legitimate firms
who can optimize your pages for search engines with varying degrees of
success and I certainly don't begrudge a company from making a
legitimate living giving a legitimate service. I just want you to know
the real score on what you can expect if you hire a company like this
and what scams to watch out for. Scam # 1 -- The company
gets you a high ranking on an extremely obscure keyword that no one that
is looking for your service is typing. For instance I could have a
number one ranking tomorrow on the keyword phrase, "presentation skills
for bulemic pygmies." Scam # 2 -- The company simply gets
your deposit and disappears. Scam # 3 -- The company is
fairly sophisticated and pulls tricks that get you a temporarily high
ranking and then you get banned from the search engine.
There are probably many more out there. The old adage applies. "If it
looks too good to be true, it probably is." How about
legitimate companies
This is where the real problem lies because it's relatively easy to
simply refuse to do business with the scammers and go your merry way.
The problem with legitimate companies is for you to understand the
costs, time involved and potential return on investment to hire this
work done professionally. If you're independently
wealthy, or run a relatively large small business, then you can probably
afford to pay the fees charged by legitimate search engine optimization
companies. That doesn't mean your money was well spent.
ROI
I'm not much for buzzwords, but ROI means "return on investment" and is
an important key when deciding to hire a search engine optimization
company. Maybe a company can get you a very high ranking
on one or many of your webpages. That has nothing to do with whether the
people seeing your high ranking in a search engine buy anything, or if
it cost you more to have the optimization done than those extra people
could possibly spend with your company. So maybe you better prove your
pages can close deals with good copywriting before you spend a fortune
optimizing the pages for search engine traffic. You can send small
amounts of traffic with very inexpensive pay-per-click search engines to
do this testing. The next thing you must consider is that
the search engines change frequently. Something that got you a high
ranking one month may cause you to disappear totally the next month.
This means you have to spend more money to re-optimize the page never
knowing how long your investment will pay off.. My
solution
Learn to do the optimization yourself and/or hire low-fee college or
high school students to do the work after you or someone competent
trains them. This method, although dependent on finding reliable young
people at a reasonable rate, will most likely pay off just as well than
spending high rates over and over again with a professional firm.
The technique I find most effective and cheap in the long run is called
the side door technique
which I use very effectively on my websites. So beware
the scammer experts and beware the legitimate experts that might not be
able to give you a decent return on your investment with them.
Click: The Ultimate Guide to
Electronic Marketing for Speakers
http://www.antion.com/click.htm
Cool Software and Gadgets
Software
No new software this month Gadgets
http://www.autoxray.com This is for all you former piston heads out
there. This device hooks up to your car's onboard diagnostic computer
and tells you why you are broken down in the middle of rush hour.
http://www.scottevest.com For you super propeller heads, this jacket
has 17 pockets to hold every gadget you can think of.
http://www.roadwired.com All kinds of gadgets for your laptop
http://www.meade.com/sportsoptics/catalog/captureview/index.html
This is a perfect gadget to get you arrested.
http://www.mobilewise.com/
What's all the hype about wireless stuff when you still have to plug in
your laptop if you want to work for very long. Now you can just sit it
on a pad and you're plugged in.
http://www.verbatim.com CDs that look like old 45 records.
https://www.cybernetman.com/default.cfm/DocId/602.htm Complete PC in
the keyboard. Useful Websites
http://www.techtv.com Find all sorts
of helpful hints on computing.
http://www.urbanlegends.com
http://www.snopes.com/index.html
For God's sake please don't forward these things around and look like an
imbecile. Most are hoaxes made to make you look stupid for sending them
on and telling all your friends how legit they are.
http://writing-world.com/ Being able to write will accelerate your
success even though you can easily hire people to write for you. This
site gives writing courses or it's a place where you can sell courses
and submit articles.
http://searchenginecolossus.com/ Search engines in 232 countries
around the world. Submit your sites to many of these engines. Some won't
accept you because you are not in their country but submit anyway. I
would stick to English speaking countries first and then expand if you
have webpages in other languages.
http://www.botspot.com
All kinds of automated spiders and robots to automate your Internet
marketing operation. I'm starting to use one now that will check all my
sites and alert me if any of them are down. Computer / Automation Technique
Using the Find / Search Function
More techniques
If you do any volume of business on the Internet, the
number of emails you will need to deal with will definitely increase.
Every six months I build up over 10,000 emails in my inbox alone and
that doesn't count the ones I have either manually or automatically
shuttled to a folder and it doesn't count the many, many, many pieces of
spam that I delete.
When I need to find one of these emails, I need to find
it fast and it would be totally impossible to sift through them
manually. This is where the find / search function of your email program
comes into play.
I use Microsoft Outlook as my main email program. You
may have to adjust if you use another program and if you are using older
versions of AOL, forget it. They don't have a search function. I haven't
upgraded to AOL 8.0 yet, but they claim to have a way to sort email now,
but I still didn't see a "search" function. I'll let you know about that
after I upgrade.
For quick finds in Outlook (I use this 99% of the time),
you have to know something that might be in the email address or the
subject line. I just tried searching on the CC line and it would not
work. I'm using Outlook 2000 and I doubt if they've changed this in
newer versions.
DON'T MAKE THIS BIG MISTAKE
This drives me crazy when I do this and I can do nothing but sit around
and wait it out. The mistake is checking the box that says "Search all
text in the message." Yes, I must use this sometime, but if you want a
quick search and you have 10,000 emails in your inbox you are in for a
several minute wait which feels like an eternity when you're busy.
Sometimes you have no choice, but to search all the text
in the message because all you can remember about the email is that Joe
Schmoe's name is in the body of the message somewhere. You can't
remember the email address of who sent it and you can't remember words
that may be in the subject line. So, you search all the text in the
message on the name "schmoe" and wait it out. If you have lots of emails
in your box, only use this method as a last resort.
Either one of the quick find or the "Search all the text
in the message" functions work on sub folders, sent folders or the
delete folder and normally go lots faster because there are normally
only a tiny fraction of your total number of emails in any one folder.
ADVANCED FIND
If you want to do a very specific search and want to narrow down the
emails that need searched through you can use the advanced find. You get
here by clicking "find" and then "advanced find" in the upper right hand
corner of the find box.
Let's say you knew that the email you were looking for
was received last November and that the name "Schmoe" was in it. You can
get very specific using the advanced find to narrow your search and find
what you want really fast and that's what automation is all about.
More
automation techniques:
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Set up your "autocorrect" in
world. If you aren't using
ShortKeys as I talked about in past issue, then use your
"autocorrect" function of Microsoft Word to automatically type long
phrases. Click on "tools" then "autocorrect" put some kind of
identifier/abbreviation in the "replace" box and put the long string
of text in the "with" box. Every time you type the abbreviation and
then hit enter the long string of text will pop in automatically
saving you tons of typing.
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Get really comfortable with
"ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V" in Windows programs. These are the copy and
paste commands and using them over time will save you thousands and
thousands of clicks by doing it the long way.
Miscellaneous Stuff You Need to Know
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Be careful leaving the
power on full time on some laser printers. I used my $2000.00 color
laser printer only a little the last year, but left the power on
full time and burnt up something that cost $500.00 to replace. Check
with your manufacturer if you plan on leaving equipment on full
time.
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Making streaming audio
files for your website is not that hard. I just figured it out. If
you want to learn check out Mike Stewart at
http://www.soundpages.com You can listen to my first try at this
by listening to a 30 minute audio session on creating ebooks. I gave
this away as a holiday gift. You can also listen to a parody song I
wrote and sang.
http://www.Public-Speaking.org/holidaygift.htm
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If you're really serious
about email marketing you might want to get the report from
http://www.marketingsherpa.com on list management companies. I
paid $197.00 for this report and learned quite a few things I didn't
know that are going to increase my email response rate in 2003.
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Wi-Fi wireless Internet
connection update. "802.11g" is coming out in mid January according
to a representative from Linksys, a major provider of wireless
hardware. You may want to wait before you buy one for your home
until "g" comes out.
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If you are installing a
wireless network here are some tips to get extra range out of your
transmitter:
A. Keep the transmitter away from walls unless you want the signal
to go outside to a deck, pool, etc.
B. Keep the transmitter away from microwave ovens and wireless
phones.
C. You may need an extra antenna to extend your range
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Watch out for AOL 8.0 if
you are an ezine publisher. The new "report spam button" is causing
legitimate publishers nightmares. See the
email article this issue.
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I'm going to suggest that
everyone out there reading this get some training. I don't care what
level you are at - get some training. This applies especially if you
are a relative beginner with computers or if you've only been doing
a limited number of things with your computer for many years. There
are so many shortcuts and things to learn that will skyrocket your
productivity. It's no wonder many of you are having trouble with
Internet marketing when you don't even know the basics of getting
around your computer. Hey, I was right where you are and getting
training helped put me where I am today.
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If you are so inclined you
can make a TV tuner and VCR out of your computer with some hardware
upgrades available at any major computer store.
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In most PCs if you hold
the button in for 5 seconds or more it will shut down your computer.
This saves you unplugging the thing if you have a massive lockup.
Upgrading to XP has reduced lockups to almost nothing.
 FEATURE
Advanced Weekly Webmaster Tip from
William Bontrager
(you must check in weekly to see each tip because the current
tip is replaced each week with the new tip-this
tip will only show up if you are online) TRENDS
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Emarketer reports that there are currently 16.8 million household
broadband users which is a 27% increase this year. They estimate
that by the end of 2003 there will be 23.3 million and by the end of
2004 30.5 million. -- To you this means that your market for larger
files and digital products will nearly double in the next two years.
Are you busy learning how to produce them so that you can cash in?
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Also from emarketer. Holiday sales were dismal in the brick and
mortar world. Not online. Sales grew 16% on line in the 4th quarter.
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I can't help but mention one more from emarketer. There were 15.7
million online content buyers in the US alone in 2002 and that is projected
to rise to 21 million in 2003. I've never been too worried about
offending people when I know I'm right. I wouldn't be helping you
and you wouldn't be getting value out of this magazine if I sugar
coated everything. So here goes. If you are serious about the most
simple, inexpensive and low risk way to improve your financial
status -- that being Internet Marketing and sales, -- you are simply
crazy if you don't focus heavily on creating online content AKA
digital products. People are lining up to buy this stuff and it's
just plain dumb if you don't grab your share.
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Cybersource reported that 52% of online merchants are losing between
1% and 5% to online fraud. These figures pretty much apply to big
business and I haven't seen anything like that in my own business.
Even at 5% I would still be enormously profitable, so I don't think
you have to fret over this too much.
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Wait till you hear this. The American Library Association is suing
because it says the Children's Internet
Protection Act (CIPA) is unconstitutional. What is happening is that
public libraries are commanded to (or at least to get money
they must) install filters to catch pornography. The filters,
however, are also filtering many health sites like sites about
breast cancer, aids prevention, condom use, etc.
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Need a friend. A team of researchers
are developing a robot that can sense its owners emotions and offer
assistance. From :"Wired"
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56921,00.html
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Three new Top Level Domains (TLD) are
to be released this year, but it's a secret what they are. Watch for
updates. Note: a top level domain is something like .biz, .net, etc.
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I thought I'd
seen it all until I found this site
http://www.ethiolink.com/EthioGift/index.cgi Apparently you
don't give flowers as a gift in Ethiopia. You give sheep. One of the
choices for a gift on this site is a "VERY BIG SHEEP AND A CHOCOLATE
CAKE." I don't want to sound like Dave Barry, but I swear I'm not
making this up. -- Now if this guy can make a living on the Internet
selling Fettered Rams and Truffles you out to be able to sell a few
ebooks.
End of this issue You will have to print out
the following reference pages separately. They are included in each
issue, so there is no need to print them out every time. Do,
however, check them frequently because I will put new additions to
these pages at the top of each page until the next issue comes out.
Recommended Learning Tools
Search Engine
Resources
Suppliers
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