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by on March 24, 2010 4 Comments

Free Internet Marketing Course – ShoeMoney Extreme

shoemoney-logo

shoemoneyI wanted to get this short post out quickly as I think it will be VERY helpful to anyone who is interested in Internet Marketing and trying to make money online.   Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney Blog fame is giving away his 12 (twelve) week Internet Marketing course absolutely free!   I just signed up and I’m very exciting to get a look at it.

Each week Jeremy will be sending out a different pdf report that covers everything from Beginner Internet Marketing stuff all the way to how to manage your products and making money online!

Personally I think no matter what skill level you are, this course will be super helpful.  I’m really interested in using it as a sanity check and to fill in any missing pieces I may have in my business!

Did I mention its FREE?

Here’s the outline of the twelve weeks…

Week 1 – The Beginner’s Guide To Internet Marketing
Week 2 – Affiliate Marketing 101: Everything You Need To Know To Start Promoting Products
Week 3 - Market Research: How To Crush Your Competitors And Discover Hot Niches
Week 4 – Pay Per Click: How To Earn Cash With Each Click
Week 5 – SEO: How To Rank Higher And Increase Traffic
Week 6 – Site Creation: How To Build A Site With Zero Programming Knowledge
Week 7 – Content Creation: How To Create Articles That Attract Users And Increase Sales
Week 8 – Marketing: How To Use Social Media To Spread Your Brand
Week 9 – Make That Cash: 10 Ways To Monetize Your Site And Increase Profitability
Week 10 – Testing & Tracking: How To Optimize Your Site & Make Sense Of The Figures
Week 11 – Building Your Team: How To Network With Others And Find Long Term Partners
Week 12 – Launch Day: How To Kick Start Your Business And Manage Your Projects

Jason says this guide is for everyone and I’m very excited to  be able to learn from him and put into action the methods that have helped him become successful.

AND IT”S FREE –   AMAZING!

Check it out if you have the urge – Let me know what you think of Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Shoemaker and his 12 week free internet marketing course. Leave a comment below – I’d love to hear from you!

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
by on March 22, 2010 5 Comments

Most Internet Marketing Products Suck – Get a Refund!

yousuck

internet marketingThere is a lot of hype out there, especially in many Internet Marketing circles.  Lots of people selling magic systems and special formula’s to help you get rich quick or at the very least make money online.  But how can you tell the good products from the bad hyped up products.  Today’s post is about Internet Marketing products that suck and how to separate the  creme from the crap.

Most people who begin to start any kind of business online or try to setup any website will no doubt find themselves receiving emails promising the world.  From free reports to now free training video’s, everyone wants to get to know you and everyone seems to be able to help you.  All you have to do is simply fill in your name and email and salvation can be yours.

The majority of the Internet Marketing products being pandered about on the web are simply crap.  Most are just re-hashed reports transcribed from someone else’s tele-seminar in order to get you on their email list.

Now don’t get me wrong – there isn’t anything wrong with trading an email for some free information.  I do it all the time and it helps me get to know the author of the report and possibly develop a friendship.  What bothers me is when this relationship escalates to a sale of an email course, eBook, video course, access to a membership forum or whatever…  and the product is just junk.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, don’t just take it and loose your money.  Contact the author and GET A REFUND!  If the product sucks, then don’t be afraid to fire up an email and ask for your money back.  98% of the information products available online come with a 30-60 day money back, iron clad, no questions asked, even if its 3:00 am in the morning guarantee.   If that’s the case then exercise your right to get your money back.

One way to make sure you get good useful information is to simply visit the author’s blog, leave comments and start a conversation that way. Many blog owners will end a blog post asking if anyone has questions.  And many blogs will link back to your website just for helping add to the conversation.  This is a great way to get to know more experienced marketers and help your own website ranking at the same time.

Another way is to visit some Internet Marketing forums. There are many great forums with a ton of information and advice from their members.  If you have a question about a particular product simply post a question in one of these forums. There are always friendly people that are more than willing to help.

Here is a list of some really good and free Internet Marketing Forums:

IMD Forum

Warrior Forum

Self Starters Weekly Tips

Do you have some good ways to weed out the bogus Internet Marketing products from the good ones?  Leave us a comment below and tell us what you do keep from buying Internet Marketing Products that Suck.

Filed Under: Random stuff Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
by on March 15, 2010 3 Comments

IMD Forum is HERE! And Very Different than Other Forums.

imd forumNot too long ago Josh Spaulding closed the doors for new members of his coaching program at  CoachigwithJosh.com. If you’ve ever had to opportunity to read any of Josh’s eBooks or visit his blog, you know Josh tells it like it is, no bull about it. I personally have been a member of Josh’s Coaching forum for a little over a year and can you first hand that his coaching program is run the same way.

Last Friday I was extremely happy when Josh opened his coaching  forum to the public and is now 100% FREE!  The new site has been polished up and renamed to IMDFORUM.com. IMD which stands for Internet Marketing Discussion Forum is a great place where you can learn just about anything you want to know about any aspect of Internet Marketing.  If your a beginner or a successful marketer working full time, there is much for you to discover, learn and share.  Current membership includes some of the best people in the business, who are there to help you in anyway they can.  Josh Spaulding,  Mark Mason, Milan Kosanovic, Michelle Adams, and many others, including yours truly :-) .  Everyone there is genuinely and honestly having real success with their online business and have some great experiences to share.

The tribe at IMDFORUM.com are all very friendly, active, and honest, and tell it like it is. There is a ton of great information to help you with your business. If there is any question you have, or are curious about some new widget, or perhaps you need an opinion about your website,  you’ll be sure to get quick honest answer. The best thing about IMD Forum is that it’s not a sales fest of everyone under the sun trying to shop their IM products to you, or telling you lies just to get you to buy from them.

Josh started IMDForum.com to be different from other forums like the Warrior Forum, where there is a lot of misinformation going on.

“I realized that although the Warrior forum has a great deal of good information, it also had a BUNCH of bad information!  So while I’m definitely not bashing the Warrior Forum, I do know for a fact it could be improved a great deal!”

And with that simple idea to have a great community where people can share their experiences and ideas without the bull.

IMD Forum officially opened last Friday and for anyone who would like to see for themselves, this forum is surprise you.  Why pay for elite forums and Warrior sales fests when IMDForum.com is free.  Come over and check it out.  Like I said its Free and we would love to see you there!

Filed Under: Random stuff
by on March 14, 2010 Leave a Comment

How Soltaire Showed Me the Secret to Succeeding in Business

sollitaire

Have you ever played the game solitaire? Its a card game where you play by yourself (hence the name solitaire). The game involves laying cards out on the table with a goal of sorting them numerically. It can be a frustrating game that you certainly loose most of the time. So, if you know your going to loose, then why play the game at all? Is it the thrill of the chase? Is it the thrill of chance? Or is it simply the fact that you KNOW eventually you WILL win? In my mind this is the exact belief you need to have when you start a business.

Starting a business isn’t an easy task. Even as easy and as cheap as it is starting a online internet based business, it can still be very daunting. The fear of failure alone is enough to paralyze most people from even beginning to start a business. And if you let that fear consume you, you never start.  If that happens you HAVE certainly failed.  The key is to just start and see where it leads you.

Like in Solitaire, you know you may loose but if you never start you will never know if you would have won.

I have started multiple online and offline businesses. So far every single one of them have failed. In the late 90′s I started a free web based email service that was similar to Hotmail or Yahoo mail at the time. I had 45,000 email accounts in my system running out of my bedroom on small server I built from scratch. All of this was running through a Comcast cable modem. Well, eventually Comcast found out and banned me from their system. I literally became a server gypsy toting my email server from one friends house to another. I didn’t’ have the money for hosting which at the time was around $200/mo and Paypal didn’t exist, so there wasn’t any way to monetize the site. Needless to say that business was doomed.

Thinking back to when I was kid, I tried to start a lawn mowing business and that one failed too. There were many others too.  I tried to start a hosting business, an IT consulting business, and a software reseller business. Each one failed.  So why did I keep going? Because I knew eventually I would win.

Its not a matter of can you succeed, it is a matter of when you succeed.

Today, I run a small affiliate marketing business. It doesn’t make much much money, honestly last year it made around $6000. Its not much but the business IS making money and every single cent that comes in gets re-invested back into my business.

And this business may eventually fail too. eBay, Google, or Amazon.com may change and those affiliate checks may stop coming in. But that’s okay, because each step of the way I’m learning, and each time I’m getting better.

In business, just like in Solitaire, if I keep playing, I’m patient, and persistent, I know I will win… and you can too. You’ve just gotta play to win.

Filed Under: Make Money Online Tagged With: , , , ,
by on March 3, 2010 2 Comments

Moving BANS sites to WordPress

bans-wordpress-collide

bans wordpressAh the gold ole days.  Google would rank your sites, eBay would pay nice affiliate commissions and you could do it all by using Build A Niche Store (BANS).  Those were the days.

Today its all about WordPress.  And many of us still have BANS sites out there.  But how do you migrate your sites from BANS to WordPress without making a total mess of your website?   It can be a little tricky.   So here are a few tips to help show you how you can move to a WordPress blog without too much headache.

Do BACKUPS!

Before you do any work on any of your websites you need to back things up. I can’t stress it enough. Always, always, always do a backup! Simply ftp into your site using filezilla (or your favorite ftp software) and copy down the entire contents of your website folder.  If you have an addon domain or subdomain, just copy the folder of your addon domain.

Now that you have everything backed up, if anything goes wrong you can just copy it back and things should be back to normal.

THERE’S NO EASY WAY

There isn’t an EASY button to push to move everything from BANS to WordPress.  It’s a very manual process. The two systems are not compatible.   The easiest way to move things from BANS to WordPress is to do it by hand.  First build a WordPress site.  Then copy all of your articles and content (either cut and paste or just type it in) to a new WordPress posts. Finally rebuild any of the product pages.  It can take a while do to, but look at it this way, it will give you a chance to really make the site better.

So the first thing we can do is begin by installing WordPress in a new directory under your BANS site.  I usually call this new directory “blog”  or “newsite” or something that isn’t used.  What this does is it allows you the freedom to build and design your new WordPress site without disturbing the live BANS site, especially if the BANS site is making money.

Once you get your new WordPress site built and everything is tested and looks good, we need to do another backup. This time we need to include the new WordPress site you just built.   You don’t have to copy everything down if you don’t want to.  Just copy of the new “blog” folder (or whatever name you gave it)  to your home computer.

Now comes the fun part

What we are going to do delete (scary part – scary music) everything in your website folder EXCEPT the new “blog” folder. Be very careful. Go to the folder that has your website,  select all files except the “blog” folder and hit delete. Your heart should be racing right about now!   Don’t worry you have everything backed up right?

This next step is critical – Log into the admin dashboard of your new WordPress site and go to the settings tab.  Change the WordPress address (URL) and the Blog address (URL) to be at the root of your domain (removing the “blog” directory name).

Next move all of the files from the “blog” directory up to the root of your website.  This would be the folder above your blog folder.  Do this by select all files in your blog folder (not the blog folder itself) and move them to the parent folder above your blog folder.

Once your finished open up your site in your browser and  you should see your new WordPress site where you BANS site once was.

This sounds more complicated than it really is and really is a bit hard to type out so I’ve recorded a quick video showing exactly how I move a WordPress blog from a directory called blog to the main folder for my site.

I have to say I really love working with WordPress.  It’s so flexible, versatile, and easy.

Filed Under: WebSite Development Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
by on March 2, 2010 5 Comments

WP Shopping Pages – Blog Automation for WP Robot

wp shopping pagesFor all of you blog automation fans I wanted to tell you about a new wordpress plugin that was just released from the makers of WP Robot.  WP Shopping Pages is a WordPress plugin that lets you build entire Amazon.com and eBay shopping pages on your blog site in just minutes.

WP Shopping pages looks like its just another Amazon.com and eBay listing plugin designed to pull in tons of product listings to your website automatically.  As the name implies, you literally build shopping pages with this bad boy.  It can be used with or without WP Robot to create a completely automated WordPress blog.

Personally, I’m not a fan of plug ins like this.  It just scrapes the entire page from Amazon.com or eBay and creates pages full of duplicate content and links.  Google hates sites that are thin gateway sites and provide no value.

There are though, a lot of people who love this kind of thing and have had a lot of success with it.

If you’re a fan of blog automation and want a way to create portal style site or online shopping mall, then WP Shopping Pages is the plugin for you.  It’s selling right now for $69 which isn’t too bad of a price considering how much it does.

Please know, I have not tried this plugin.  I do use WP Robot and like it alot and know that the plugins Tom Hoefter creates is best of class and I’m sure WP Shopping Pages is no exception.

If you use WP Shopping Pages and like it … I’d love to hear about it.  Let us all know what you think!

Filed Under: Blog Automation
by on March 1, 2010 6 Comments

My Secret to Massive Website Traffic

boxingfigure

The title of this sounds pretty hypey doesn’t it?  Sorry about that.  But if  I got your attention then I hope I did my job.  I suppose a better sounding title would have been:

$5 Dollar Formula and Unique Article Wizard – A killer one-two punch combination!

Either way, today I want to share with you a method I’ve discovered to get some decent back links and see your sites ranking for the keywords you’re targeting very quickly.   What I’m talking about mainly involves off page SEO through organic (search engine) traffic.  Personally I think is the hardest part of building your internet business.

I use a combination of two resources to drive traffic to my sites and have been getting a tremendous amount of success with it.  I hope you can use this to your benefit and increase traffic to your sites too.

I’m typing this up while I’m at work and hoping my boss doesn’t see, but I wanted to get this out and share it with you as soon as I knew it was working so that you could implement it too.

The First Step – Use the Best Article Directories

There is a free report out from Josh Spaulding called The $5 dollar formula.  If you haven’t read his report, you’ve got to check it out – it’s FREE and will absolutely help you understand what you need to do to get enough traffic so that you can make $5 dollars a day.  $5 doesn’t seem like much but if you do the math – $5 x 30 days = $150/month.  Now rinse and repeat 50 more times – $150 x 50 = $7500!!  Can you quit your day job and live on $7500/month?  I know I can!  Download Josh’s free report here:  http://www.joesinternetmarketing.com/recommends/5dollarformula

Josh’s $5 Dollar Formula is a very specific way to doing article marketing.  It involves alternating sending articles to a very specific small group of article directories and then a large group of article directories when you launch a new site.  There’s way more to it then this, but you get the point.  Again, download Josh’s free report here so you can follow along: –   http://www.joesinternetmarketing.com/recommends/5dollarformula

I follow Josh’s plan exactly but add a slight twist to it – I change up the second step for  submitting articles to a large number of article directories to submitting articles by doing an Article Blast.

Step Two – the Article Blast

To do an Article Blast I use a paid submission service call Unique Article Wizard.  You can use any article submission service or software, I think Josh recommends using Automatic Article Submitter for this step.  But I personally have found UAW to be the best and easiest way to submit my articles to hundreds of article directories and blogs.

Essentially what I’m doing is using a combination of a manual submission following Josh’s formula using the directories he suggests, along with automated submission using UAW. This isn’t a far stretch from the $5 dollar formula at all, but what I’m seeing is that using  UAW as this second step really adds to the success of the $5 dollar formula.

What UAW does is take your articles and creates dozens of unique versions of those articles and submits a unique version of each article to hundreds of article directories, ezine publishers, blogs, etc., It’s an amazing process that saves me a ton of time and floods the internet with unique articles and links back to my sites.

The results I’ve seen so far are really impressive. I’ve launched a brand new site about a week ago and already I’m seeing fantastic traffic for multiple keywords phrases.

It’s Not FREE

The biggest draw back to using UAW is that is costs money.  $67/month for the service.  Please understand,  you don’t have to use UAW if you don’t have the money.  As a matter of fact DO NOT use it if you don’t have the money! You can use Josh’s $5 Dollar Formula alone and will see major improvements to your ranking and traffic.

But, if  or when you can afford UAW I would suggest you give it a try.

Have you ever tried to submit your articles to hundreds of directories by hand? It really sucks.  Even submitting to 40 directories is tough and time consuming.  I’ve tried some submitter software and they just aren’t 100% reliable.  See this review of article submitter software.  With UAW – I submit my articles to UAW  and they are in-turn submitted to literally hundreds of directories and websites for me. No hassles.

Leave a comment below and lets discuss this some more.  If you’ve got a way of your own that works well, let us know! I’d love to hear about it.

I’ve got to get back to my day job before my boss catches on what I’m doing!!   Talk to you soon!

Submit your article to hundreds of sites

Filed Under: Article Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,