Online Millionaire Plan Notes

Ya gotta love Hype to do Affiliate Marketing

2011-02-13T09:37:00.000-06:00

Ya gotta love Hype to do Affiliate Marketing

Just got an inflated email today from Andrew Trister - Coffee Shop Millionaire founder.

And the point was to get affiliates excited. He says so in his video's inside the site. You want affiliate marketers heavily pushing their lists on your behalf.

He gave away some "cool" prizes to the top three affiliates. Of course, with my list, I'm nowhere near that. But the value here, and why I'm blogging, is study and learn from these materials.

My warning to you is to get your self scam free before you get into this. You can then go into this with both eyes wide open. And the fact that you're getting hyped doesn't bother you so much.

The inspiration for this post was simply that he through out some figures which didn't add up. The link to the blog which was getting all that response was simply a squeeze page to get affiliates to sign up to his list.

A search on Google did show up a blog on his domain - but it had only four posts and no comments.

But I'm not blaming Andrew for stretching the facts. As you watch his videos (and there's a ton of them on his Coffee Shop Millionaire site) you'll see exactly where he's coming from. That's the way he's wired and the Kool-Aid he's drinking. The nature of the beast, as it were.

I'm a believer in Honest Internet Marketing, however. That's why I took an 800-page book filled with PLR and re-wrote it from the bottom up into what I called "The Online Sunshine Plan" - to throw some light on the truths behind what marketing is, whether it's online or not.

Sure, it's relatively easy money to get a list of buyers and keep putting offers in front of them. And I could diverge here to say that this is exactly what lead-generation companies do. In fact, I found that my name was recently being sold all over again, some 3 years after I got scammed by them. (One reason I got onto an unlisted, throw-away cel.)

Your list is actually a reflection of your community. The people there are real and actual. They have jobs, they have lives to lead, they have families and homes.

And remember that Golden Rule: what you send out is right now coming back to you. It might be delayed, but as you hype, you are going to get hyped. If you rip off, you are going to get ripped off. But - as you deliver incredible value, then you'll recieve this in return.

One caveat that came up in the videos was that it's OK to do "aggressive" marketing if your value is way higher than what they pay, well - the ends justify the means.

I say, No. That's not the way to do it. People can look up what you say on the web now and verify everything. (This is making career politicians a dying breed.) The real scene you have to deal with is your own life. As you give, you'll get back - in spades.

That's the difference between me and Andrew Trister.

Now, I still say you should sign up for this product if you get someone promoting it to you (like this link - Click Here). Because I've signed up for it and I consider that abour 4 dozen videos which can actually help you improve your life are quite worth it. There's tons more value than you would pay for otherwise.

Consider if you put all these onto DVD's how much space it would take. Then how much you would have to pay for the packaging and shipping to get those to you. Just invest the bandwidth and download them to your drive in some way you can then study them. And then do study them.

For the price he's currently asking, it's way more valuable than most "make money online" study systems out there. IMHO, anyway.

PS. A more complete rundown of all this is over at http://coffee-shop-millionaire.blogspot.com Visit today!

New novel published on Lulu - "The Dreamer Dreamed." Hero finds people influencing his dreams - and life - then deals with them by their own medicine. http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-dreamer-dreamed/9768664

2010-11-30T05:05:00.001-06:00

rabbit does human

2010-11-27T20:38:00.001-06:00

Irony? You betcha

Another novella complete - next stage.

2010-11-09T16:33:00.001-06:00

Well, it's over. Did the National Novel Writing Month thing.

Problem was, my novel wrapped up before the wordage limit was reached. I also joined the National Blog Posting Month site - but that was really too easy. Just post a bunch of stuff in advance and spread it out over a month. Heck, I'll post 5-6 or more per day, so someone who's got over-verbose fingers like me doesn't have a challenge there.

So I missed the target by about 6K words. That's a couple of days of writing, but when it's done, you just move on, right?

If you want to check out a modern, New Age novella about the alternate realities of dreams and dream influencing, then go see http://funny-enlightenment.blogspot.com/ and knock yourself out.

Meanwhile, I'm back to my other stuff, now that this is out of my system.

(For the record, it was started on the 1st and now it's the 9th - so about 10 days, averaging nearly 5K words a day - more toward the last of it.)

Luck to us all - now I'm going to clean things up a bit and get back to my cartoons.

Cheers!

PS. Might set this up for publishing along with my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel. Yes, stay tuned, it will be published on Lulu (http://stores.lulu.com/robertworstell/).

Age Old problem solved, the Zen way.

2010-11-02T06:08:00.001-05:00

How a glass is both half full, half empty and completely full at the same time

Update: going live with new replacement for wordpress. See http://robertworstell.com/lifeguide/ for a preview (skin and bones, anyway...)

2010-10-17T06:59:00.001-05:00

Just working on another book. Hoping to get it done before I get deluged with more sites to webdesign. Another few pages to go.

2010-09-22T16:00:00.001-05:00

Modern Entertainment hasn't changed.

The banker, the lawyer, and the politician are still our best bets for a laugh. Audiences haven't changed at all, and neither have these three professions. Will Rogers - August 11, 1935

How Video Traps are Being Used to Get Your Money

2010-09-15T06:18:00.001-05:00

There is a repeating marketing ploy being used to part you from your money.

photo: Wendy Seltzer

Of course, you think you are too smart for this. You've been around the pike and done all these things, so it's hard to get fooled and you are on the look-out anyway.

OK, that may all be true.

But remember, I wrote the book about how to Get Your Self Scam Free, so I know a few things about this.

It's the videos.

Video's are being used like those overlong, high-pressure sales pitches that telemarketers use.

You really can't go back through them and listen to them over and over. You can't just look at the key parts and then work it all out for yourself.

And these videos suck bandwidth - so you have considerable investment in them. They need to be right, so you tend to believe them in spite of your best ideas.

I've seen several of these recently, and the only thing which differs is that now days they are hyping high-priced packages. All the sales pitch is the same - but they just use overlong video's instead of overlong sales pages.

They get you to opt-in and then send you all sorts of disrelated offers, hoping you'll buy in.

Look, the guy who really has something will give it to you in several forms. Because it's more important for them to simply help you find this system than it is for them to personally get anything out of it. If you look through history, you'll find this is true for all the great businesses which started as well as the great movements.

Where people set something up which is limited, they have no real lasting effect.

So ignore the overlong video pages, unless they also offer a nice website with data, downloadable PDF's and Excel sheets you can use as well as powerpoints that you can review in your spare time.

And especially be wary of people who show you a check or bank statement right off the bat. They are after people who are more interested in money than anything else. They think credibility is showing how much they conned people out of.

Sorry. What's credible is how I or you can put it to use for ourselves and prove it with our own business. Not a bunch of hokey, made-up "testimonials" with pictures of people gotten from god-knows-where.

It's how you can put it to use.

Here's a test. Pass right by the opening video's and see if they give you anything you can download or site you can visit. This should be within the first three mailings you get. If all those sites are just opt-in's, you know they are just scammers and make their money from affiliate-sales, not any valuable breakthrough they personally have created.

If they don't, opt-out. Spend your time finding out of print classics like Earl Prevette - and know that people who want to help you improve your own sales expertise are there to help you, not their own bank account.

Mexico Goat faces Auction, Late Night Talk Show Hosts...

2010-09-08T16:55:00.001-05:00

Mexico's latest celebrity - with more Facebook fans than residents in Mexico - is due to be auctioned tomorrow, about 19 hours from now (and counting). He's been in a secret location (allegedly borrowed from Dick Cheney) until then, as there were threats of "busting him out" ahead of time.

But the Goat has kept his sense of humor, since the mini-goats and comedy hosts keep him laughing. http://bit.ly/9niWlu
- - - -

The auction is already on!! Everyone is excited to get a chance to bid on Billy next Thursday Sept. 9th! All proceeds are going to a great cause, Mexico Animal Shelter.

Come on people of Mexico, make sure The Mexico Goat stays in our local area. Come next week and bid to show your support!

Busy getting the word out about #mexicogoat auction in less than 19 hours from now. See his facebook page for details http://bit.ly/9niWlu

2010-09-08T16:50:00.001-05:00

Support Term Limits: Vote

2010-08-31T16:45:00.001-05:00

I'd support voting every mother-loving one of them out of office if we could.

Just finished up 4 online lesson series - whew! http://bit.ly/9B723d Sent to all my earlier subscribers just to let them in first. Lots of work. Ready for more...

2010-08-25T18:43:00.001-05:00

Personal Religious Beliefs

2010-08-21T06:28:00.001-05:00

1. Creative thought is senior to everything else. This is why God and religious belief (not Religion) trumps everything else. This all had to be put here first. “In the beginning…”

2. Personal power of choice. This is akin to creation, but not necessarily of that magnitude.

3. Natural law. Occasionally “bent” by miracles, otherwise, pretty much consistent all over the place.

4. Governmental laws and rules. Petty, shifting, convoluted, conveniences. No real religious belief takes these seriously. Neither should any person with religious convictions based on Natural or Divine law.

- - - -

Everyone should post their own religious beliefs page and stick to it.

Teddy says: Just Be.

2010-08-18T19:42:00.001-05:00

Try this to get more peace into your life - just be...

Heckuva Job, Barry!

Give the President a warm fuzzy feeling and improve his approval...

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint

2010-07-26T11:54:00.001-05:00

The reality of Affiliate marketing is quite simple. And I lay it out in the link for this article.

Now I'd do it a little differently these days, since I've found more tools.

The blueprint for this is just a few steps:

Do your research and discover a long-tail niche that is underserved. Find the keywords with high KEI and low R/S ratios with a product that is in demand.
Out of that homework, research for the data you need to write a half-dozen good articles. If you already have PLR on this, that's even better - but they'll still need to be re-written so it sounds like you and not a translated version.
Get a CMS to set up a mini-website just with that original content. Link this up properly to your affiliate site and have scattered internal linking so that the viewer is invited (along with search engines) to check out the other pages on that site. This can be a subdomain or subdirectory on a hosted site (not a free web host, as these can disappear.) Make sure you plug-in analytics to this before you leave it.
Now spin those articles into several versions and post them to the main article directories which actually do send traffic. Set up your system for this so you can repeat this process.
Set up Hub pages, Squidoo, and half-a-dozen or more high-SERP sites with variations of those articles and linking back to your main site again.
Also from that homework above, get out and contact the relevant blogs which have conversations going about this subject area. Make sure you can leave your website address at each one - and leave deep-linked pages, not necessarily the front page.

That's the essence of it.

Now, you can pretty this up by putting all your content into video's and post these, then embed them into your pages at #3. Then come back and link them into your remote hubs at #5. Some article sites will also accept video's. And you can go find other video's on YouTube and others to leave your video as a response - where it's appropriate.

Just make sure your posted videos always links back to your main site.

Your squidoo and hub pages can also have videos, which makes them more interesting - and gives you traffic to your video pages as well.

A follow-up would also be to then take that site and make it into an ebook (pdf is best) to give away on your site for an opt-in gift, and then also post that on the various doc-storage sites as a paid download.

Affiliate marketing is actually rather easy. And you just keep repeating the above for each niche you find, testing and tweaking to improve the results according to what your analytics say.

The only secret in this is how long it takes someone to find out about how to do it. But right now, it's a piece of cake - other than in how long it takes to do all of the above thoroughly and get your actual results.

The theory and reality of remote blogs

2010-07-26T09:43:00.001-05:00

Remote blogs aren’t worth it for most people.

Remote blogs are blogs hosted by another company for free – to you at least. Most are advertiser-revenue-driven.

The majority of people really just want to vent and play around with whatever they are interested in at the moment. This is why Facebook has taken off so well. Hobby-minded people love it.

Professionals who want to make a living online are interested in getting the top spots of the SERPs because that is a simple way to get traffic. 80-90% of the SE traffic from Google comes from the first and second pages.

So the use of setting up remote blogs is similar to article directories – backlinks and potential traffic for your main site (which needs to be an SEO-optimized CMS.)

However, out of the minority who would go this route, few want to have to log in and out of these remote blogs and keep them current pm a regular basis in order to keep them all on top of the rankings.

It means you have to join the elite few who can produce tons of content every week. The more blogs you maintain, the more content you have to produce.

The workaround is possibly to treat them as article directories and spin your single post into several.

Now, when you have multiple blogs on the same host, you have to ensure you don’t have duplicate content on that server. So you have to be able to “theme” each blog on that server to have it’s own material. (Which is fine if you are pushing several product lines.)

Otherwise, you can post the same stuff on several different blogs, but don’t expect anything but “supplementary result” vacuum. And no traffic, but you might get some incoming links.

Spinning your content is the only way to do this. And you will have to figure out how to also get your content posted to all these blogs.

There are workarounds for this as well, but I’ve given enough clues already in this blog post. As well you have security issues on all these blogs just to avoid them looking like spam blogs (splogs).

I do have to keep an eye out for the blackhats (who already spam my comment boxes already.)

Freedom Lessons for Free

2010-07-07T16:28:00.001-05:00

Life is simple - unless you've bought into the ideas advertising and politicians have told us all our lives. Freedom is naturally yours. Claim it

chicken road crossing quote

2010-06-27T21:54:00.001-05:00

Chicken Metaphysics and Ethics

Anti-matter Politics

2010-06-19T16:06:00.001-05:00

From http://survivingtheworld.net/Lesson664.html - might have relevance in our politically correct environments

Simplicity

2010-06-14T13:19:00.001-05:00

The simplest solutions are often the cleverest. They are also usually wrong

Obama admits his ass is first to kick

2010-06-11T18:37:00.001-05:00

Jon Stewart points out that his May press conference put his own butt on the line as "responsible."

Oil Spill Experts Reveal to Obama “Whose Ass to Kick”

2010-06-11T14:59:00.001-05:00

President Obama, after extensive interviews of experts about the Gulf Oil spill, finally discovers "whose ass to kick." http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=4671

Freedom Is - Lesson12 - Bonus Resources

2010-06-10T20:24:00.001-05:00

Now you've finished all the lessons and are well on your way to the Freedom you've always had, but didn't know how to let show up in your life. This lesson gives you a simple summary of the Levenson releasing technique - all in one place for reference.

Freedom Is - Lesson11 - Summary and Action Steps

2010-06-10T20:15:00.001-05:00

Now you know everything you need to regain your freedom. If you've been doing these lessons every week, you are well on your way. Here's a rundown of logical steps you can take to regain your Freedom, Happiness, and Peace quickly...

Freedom Is - Lesson10 - Finding the Freedom Within

2010-06-10T20:05:00.001-05:00

Your Freedom is already within you. The trick is letting it out. And it's only kept down by the other counter-programs (called thoughts, feelings, and desires) which you've collected just for that purpose. There is a simple method to release these...

Freedom Is - Lesson09 - Your World Created

2010-06-10T19:58:00.001-05:00

The world is just as you create it. So anything you are missing has to be something you changed so it wouldn't show up. Freedom, Happiness, and Peace are native to you - it's only the counter-thoughts, feelings, and desires which keep them from showing up...

Freedom Is - Lesson08 - What This Means

2010-06-10T19:50:00.001-05:00

The process of getting your native Freedom back can mean a lot more than it sounds. What you've learned by this time, the tools you now know, will start also returning some basic Happiness, Joy, and personal Peace you may have been missing...

Freedom Is - Lesson07 - Releasing Freedom

2010-06-10T19:45:00.001-05:00

There is a relatively unknown method of being able to release the Freedom that is native to you. All you have to do is get rid of the cross-programs you've accepted that keep you from being your self...

Freedom Is - Lesson06 - Serge Kahili King

2010-06-10T19:25:00.001-05:00

Dr. King is one of the most well-known Huna teachers on this planet. And in his essay on the 7 principles of Huna, he gives key data you should know to get your own Freedom showing up in your life immediately...

Freedom Is - Lesson05 - Earl Nightingale

2010-06-10T19:16:00.001-05:00

Earl Nightingale did more for the world by telling it's "Strangest Secret" - he also told other secrets in that recording, which give you some of the vital clues you need to know in order to get all the Freedom, Happiness, and Peace you could ever want...

Freedom Is - Lesson04 - Wallace Wattles

2010-06-10T19:08:00.001-05:00

Wattles' "Science of Getting Rich" is much more than how to gain your fortune - it tells how to get abundance in every part of your life. It's also a key description of how to regain your freedom, happiness, and peace of mind...

Freedom Is - Lesson02 - Napoleon Hill

2010-06-10T19:00:00.001-05:00

Napoleon Hill is one of the most renown and effective self-help authors based on his "Think and Grow Rich". Here, we examine the key principles he used to help people find their own Freedom - something we've had all along...

Freedom Is - Lesson03 - Charles Haanel

Haanel is known for his Master Key System, which is essentially a blueprint for how the physical universe operates. Find out how this can help you get your Freedom...

Freedom Is - Forward and Introduction

2010-06-10T18:50:00.001-05:00

All the Freedom, Happiness, and Peace you could ever want is already within you. The trick is to know how to let it show up in your life.

Freedom Is - Lesson01- Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie has influenced perhaps more people than any other self-help author. His basic principles influence self-esteem and are the basic first step to finding all the Freedom you could possibly ever want.

More noise and silliness. One report says both the CEO BP and Goldman-Sachs did a major sell-off of stock just before the Gulf Rig explosion...

2010-06-10T16:52:00.001-05:00

Zombies, Scammers, or Saints?

2010-06-09T06:47:00.001-05:00

An irreverent and controversial look at humankind and how it operates.

Homeland Security Corporate News Reporter

2010-04-13T21:59:00.001-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/borisvienna/212474998/

Self Portrait - Lookin' Good...

2010-04-03T18:16:00.001-05:00

Health Care 2014

Michelle's nightmare: unfortunately placed ads

2010-04-01T13:37:00.001-05:00

Reason Steele distancing self from expense account

2010-04-01T13:27:00.001-05:00

The Problem with Socialism is....

2010-04-01T12:58:00.001-05:00

... that you eventually run out of other peoples money! http://www.flickr.com/photos/sully_aka__wstera2/

Liberals: Constitution a Living Breathing Document

2010-04-01T12:53:00.001-05:00

wstera2 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/sully_aka__wstera2/

If You think Healthcare is Expensive Now!

The Debt Star - not the hope you are looking for

2010-04-01T12:46:00.001-05:00

wstera2 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/sully_aka__wstera2/

Don't Ask Don't Tell in El Paso

2010-04-01T11:57:00.001-05:00

Nevada Tumbleweed http://www.flickr.com/photos/us_army_rolling_along/

Change we didnt' really need...

2010-04-01T11:46:00.001-05:00

by Nevada Tumbleweed http://www.flickr.com/photos/us_army_rolling_along/

Busted - lack of credentials

Nevada Tumbleweed - http://www.flickr.com/photos/us_army_rolling_along/

How much to remove my Obama bumpersticker

Nevada Tumbleweed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/us_army_rolling_along/

Heaven is within you; Hell is just what's leftover. Share the Love you know and feel with others. http://robertworstell.com/lifestyle-choice/not-just-board-game-live-others-order-improve-your-own-life/

2010-03-25T07:09:00.001-05:00

World's Worst President

2010-03-22T02:43:00.001-05:00

Obama hits new low

Splogs, Robo-blogs, and Article Directories - pick your poison

2010-03-10T22:12:00.001-06:00

The question was raised recently about one of the remote blogs I was operating. The reader said it might be a robo-blog, but wondered, since the quality of the posts was very high.

And that is really what the difference between a splog, a robo-blog, and a remote blog is: quality of content.

Splogs are spam blogs and simply put the same content out over and over.

Robo-blogs are low-quality posts which are not identical to other blogs, but are only modified enough to "fool" the search engines. (Which are noone's fools and actually penalize such blogs the same.)

True remote blogs contribute to the community they are found in and are nearly indistinguishable from other main or principle blogs they link to and support.

The trick is how to pull this off. You don't want to spend your life creating original content for all these blogs. Or simply make too-numerous alterations so that each post appears "original".

There are several points to approach this with:

Use a high-quality article spinner to turn out alternate renditions of each major blog post from your main blog.
Create personal pages on each remote blogs and identities (aliases) which show real care.
Keep each remote blog specific to a single line of content and not a lot of disrelated posts for various affiliate products.
Ensure each remote blog also links out to relevant content across the blogsphere and the web to assist others with their own rankings - paying it forward in advance, providing service just as your "main" blog does.
Get a post creation and tracking system which won't kill you off from tedious over-work.

And since the get-rich-quick guys won't do all the hard, detailed work above, they only creat splogs - or at best, robo-blogs.

The overall point is to create versions of posts, and treat each remote blog as you would an article directory. But unless you want to create an article directory from a blog (and this is possible with self-hosted Wordpress now) you want to keep to a single, defined category of interest so that your remote blog becomes another trusted authority to the search engines - and even competes with your main blog. (I've seen some of my remote blogs rank higher than my main blog at times - which is fine, since it also links to any affiliate product I'm supporting, and my own book sales.)

Essentially, then, you are just continuing the "conversation domination" techniques. The same as if you created Weebly sites, Squidoo lenses, or post your blog articles to Zimbio, post presentations of that same material to Slideshare, record podcasts and host on Archive.org, or make videos and post through Tube Mogul or PixelPipe.

But if you try to take the quick route - you wind up penalizing your main blog and wiping out its standings.

Your choice of poison.

- - - -

Oh - you might have seen that if you take our excellent content and have a quality article spinner to run it through, you can also post it to numerous article directories - or unique versions of it, any way. Write once, publish many times and ways... Check out your blog production flow and see if this might not make it more efficient.

SOHO Man - Small Business Blog: How to Use Google Queries to Find Backlink-Friendly Sites

2010-03-08T09:43:00.000-06:00

Thought you'd like this one: How to simply and easily find places on the Internet who actually want you to add an incoming link to your site. Like even Squidoo...

Another trick involves Squidoo.com and their system of establishing lists. Go to Google and do this search:

“add+to+this+list”+”keyword phrase”+site:squidoo.com

This search query will pull up a list of Squidoo.com pages (many with good pageranks) that allow you to add your site to their list, and, in many cases, even choose your own link text.

SOHO Man - Small Business Blog: How to Use Google Queries to Find Backlink-Friendly Sites

Getting a Blogroll from Blog Desk to Blogger to Wordpress

2010-03-03T21:18:00.001-06:00

Situation: Had a ton of links and blogs but didn't want to spend the time laboriously copy/pasting them into Wordpress.

Before, the solution was to create a page full of links when I was reviving an old wordpress blog I'd exported.

Did some homework this time.

Found a nice how-to over at Blogger-in-Draft, which tells you how to get them exported out of Google Reader.

So a simple work-around was to open each one of them up in Firefox, then subscribe to the feed in Google Reader. That way, I had all my feeds in one place.

Then I followed their instructions and had this nice OPML file which imported just dandy.

Trouble was - it sent everyone to my shared Google Reader folder where the RSS feeds were kept.

I wanted to actually give hard links on the other site pages so that the Search Engines would share the link love.

So: more research.

Found this nice on-page script that ran just great in order to turn HTML to OPML. Because was was interesting is that this list showed up as links in html, but would send the browser over to Google Reader instead. Well, at least one version I found after I'd imported it into WP.

Solution: This meant I scraped the page of links and then pasted it into a new OpenOffice HTML document, saved it and viewed the source.

Pasting this source into that last linked script gave me a workable blogroll (finally.)

But it's great to be able to take 35 links at one pop and import them back into all those blogs so they could share the wealth with each other. One quick import and I was done.

Recipe:

Subscribe to all the RSS feeds through Firefox.
Convert your Google Reader feeds to OPML.
Import once into a WP blog.
Scrape this and paste into OpenOffice to get an HTML doc.
Convert HTML doc to OPML and test import. (Tweak in text editor to taste.)
Import into all the WP blogs you want to, via their Import function (under Tools in 2.9)

And having gone through that, I'm sharing it with you.

How Grass Fed Cows Could Save the Planet

2010-02-12T06:27:00.001-06:00

Cattle on this Hardwick, Mass., farm grow not on feedlots but in pastures, where their grazing helps keep carbon dioxide in the ground Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1953692,00.html#ixzz0fK7vpYY8

2010-02-11T13:33:00.001-06:00

Watch out for "obesogens" - Stick to grass-fed beef and know where it came from... "It used to be that diets meant cutting down on the fat and calories, more exercise, more fish in the diet, more fruits and vegetables. That was a healthy diet 50 years ago. Has human anatomy changed? No, but food has changed a lot. Foods that were healthy 50 years ago may not necessarily be healthy in 2010. Today, according to Stephen Perrine, author of "New American Diet," we have all sorts of chemicals in our foods, pesticides, growth hormones, antibiotics, and plastic pollutants, to name a few. He says they aren't good for the environment, they aren't good for our bodies, and they also cause you to be overweight. "

This is Why You're Wrong

2010-02-08T12:57:00.001-06:00

found on Dump.com

Obama gives a freudian gesture to Rep's.

2010-01-31T06:31:00.001-06:00

Apparently a gesture used in debates with opponents

How to Get Rich

2010-01-23T19:27:00.001-06:00

Nearly everyone wants to get rich, to have abundance, to enjoy prosperity in their lives.

There are only a few basic steps you have to take in order to get whatever riches you want in your life:

1. Learn, study, apply.

2. We are all connected. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

3. Know what a scam is.

This video goes over these three steps in more detail.

http://robertworstell.com/scam/how-to-get-rich/

Recession-proof your life - Bonus Lesson 08

2010-01-22T20:10:00.001-06:00

When you know how to get your self scam free, you also are able to master these recessions we have. Because they are basically caused by scammers. Get your freedom back...

Living a scam free life - Summary Lesson 07

2010-01-22T19:57:00.001-06:00

And a summary of these Get Your Self Scam-Free lessons. Scammers have no effect on you as you apply what you've learned here - no matter how good their pitch is...

Recipe to get yourself scam free - Lesson 06

2010-01-22T19:50:00.001-06:00

Here's a simple recipe to get yourself scam free. Just a couple of steps to take which will move you completely beyond any scammer's clutches as they seek your wallet...

One-Word Formula to stop telemarketers - Lesson 05

2010-01-22T19:37:00.001-06:00

Here's a simple one-word formula to drop your telemarketers by about 90%. It's an easy way to get your freedom back from scammers with their "business opportunities"...

How your basic desires get you scammed. Lesson 04

2010-01-22T19:21:00.001-06:00

While Lester Levenson was sent home to die at age 42, he instead devoted his "last" days to solving the mystery of his own life. He discovered we have basically just 3 basic desires.

And the method he developed to defuse these will enable you to never be scammed again.

What you want and how telemarketers make you want it - Lesson 03

2010-01-20T09:38:00.001-06:00

Telemarketers use your own urges against you...

Maslow's work explains Cialdini's later research, and why telemarketer sales
work at all.

Comparing Maslow to Cialdini, you can see that while some have
used Cialdini to just pick the key points to use in triggering their sales, with
Maslow's theory as a base, you can also identify your customer and see what
they are most likely to want next. However, most telemarketers are
operating on the law of averages and only 1) want to make their sale, and 2)
resell your name and number to another telemarketer.

How to Quit Being a Patsy - Lesson 02

2010-01-20T09:06:00.001-06:00

To get yourself scam-free, you have to first quit being a patsy. . .

A patsy, a chump, a dupe, a target, a victim – - you know, one of those guys with a big target on their back which says “kick me”. . .

We’re all that way a little bit. Even Professor Robert Cialdini, author of the book “Influence” says he’s one in the opening line. But after 15 years of research, he came up with an incredible book which is still being circulated and brought out in new editions with updates. I got a copy of his fourth edition after I read where a scammer said he had the reasons people will buy whatever you have to sell.

6 rules to get rich without scams

2010-01-20T06:53:00.001-06:00

Only 6 rules govern the scammer universe. Understand these and get scam free in your life.

Video: The World, You, and Your Mind

2010-01-19T11:42:00.001-06:00

http://robertworstell.com/sedona-method/world-mind/

Get Your Self Scam Free - Introduction

2009-12-31T22:34:00.001-06:00

How do you quit being a victim to every slick telemarketer out there? Is there anyway to see a scam and get out of their way?

I've been there and done that.

There are reasons people have been trained into being dupes. And all these reasons can be un-trained as well - if you know how.

I wrote the book this video is based on from the research I did to dig myself out of the hole I had been scammed into.

I decided not to get mad or get even – just get my money back somehow, write up what I had encountered, and then move on. And writing this book is part of moving on.

This video is the introduction to these lessons on how to get yourself scam free.

And so, any scam, fraud, telemarketer, or "business opportunity" that comes your way won't get the best of you.

Enjoy your new-found freedom!

sosocialist

2009-09-12T16:39:00.001-05:00

local bus stop

Internet Marketing ladder: one step closer to the top

2009-06-12T19:50:00.005-05:00

photo: Josh McMillan

Getting there, one step at a time. Finally got my refund today, and a friend said he wanted to take over the Internet Scam site - so I'll now be free to simply concentrate on streamlining and publishing what I know about Internet marketing.

One interesting point which has come to light just over the last 24 hours is that most of promotion is link-building. And while this is still a great majority of what you have to do in Internet Marketing, it gives us structure to what has to be done.

My take on this is going to fill about a dozen sites on the same host, with a dozen books, a dozen email courses, and a dozen CD's/DVD's filled with videos (as well as online).

If you've been following this blog intently, you may have noticed some data going up and then coming down again. I'll be able to explain this more thoroughly in these books, since now I've lived through and refined what can happen to a person when they make certain promotional steps. And more of what needs to be done to ensure these are properly effective.

This, of course, isn't the last of this - since the Internet itself is evolving and so are the lessons we learn daily as we go.

One of the more interesting mentors I've been working to catch up with recently is Charles Heflin. He's from a ThemeZoom SEO background, so is thoroughly engaged with real-world studies on what is effective site-building. As well, he is very active in the social media scene and can tell you exactly how to build an effective social network that really brings home the bacon.

While I've got a desk full of notes on this area, I'll start sorting and weeding these through tomorrow. Don't know if these will result in posts or not - since some of it is so esoteric to be nearly gobbledegook until it's all sorted through and aligned.

As well, I have to research the keywords and competition for 12 different sites in order to present them in a fashion that will be effective and useful.

One immediate spin-off is that I'll be able to do a sort of "Chicken Soup" transmorgrification, making it possible for this data to be used by all sorts of niches from small organic farmers to Fortune 500 companies, from WAHM's to Boomers - and everyone inbetween. If my heart were in it, I could spend the rest of my life just marketing this to all the various niches which need to be on the Internet to expand their own product offerings.

My work in this is to actually just perfect the marketing channel itself, so that I can move into a much tougher set of niches to crack - personal improvement.

And there are some trees beyond that section of forest as well.

I imagine that I'll be adding to this area as I find more about what happens after - particularly in building a subscription site. (Internet marketing has plenty of velvet rope areas already, so I won't bother in this one - too much inane competition. I've got bigger fish which create far more impressive changes for this planet than simply making tons of money.)

But I wanted to keep you up to date.

And if you haven't, subscribe to this blog as it will be an outlier promotion line for this new baker's dozen of products coming out. You won't want to miss this insight as I dissect the basics and show how simple it is for anyone to do this - and why most people don't...

More Genius Social Media Insight from Charles Heflin

2009-05-26T08:43:00.003-05:00

(Well, after the third try, I'm having to import from a text file to quote from a blog - Blogger doesn't like the copy/paste from Chrome.)

Here's real genius on how to deal with the flux of data from the Internet:

How do you create a social media marketing campaign?

Here’s how I do it…

Publish a new blog post.
Syndicate the post to 2 or 3 social news sites with large market share (many eyeballs).
Increase the visibility of the syndications by garnering comments, votes and shares on each network where I syndicate my blog post. (I use a tool called Synnd for this function)

As content gains votes and comments it becomes more visible to a larger and larger audience.

It matches a post I did today on genius, Free Will and the Universe as a data aggregator.

The point is the punchline to this old joke:

"Q: How to you get down from an elephant?

"A: You don't, you get down from a goose?"

Social media is designed to network, not produce results. Marketing has ROI as it's base, since you are working to gain return on your investments. Social media isn't remunerative in it's base - you add value to your commercial offerings by including the community your business is supporting. Warts, in-laws and all.

(and no, the quote function on Blogger is currently broken. Sheesh.)

Auto blogs don't work - but twitter does

2009-05-26T05:38:00.002-05:00

I've been working with various "pipes" situations, rigging aggregators and whatnot in order to acquire and utilize data.

A few notes on this:

Google Alerts piped to Blogger eventually get shut down. Usually the Google Alerts just disappears. Once I got a notice that Blogger thought one of my blogs was a "spam blog" and so I shut it down myself. Apparently content that is only built through Google Alerts can be considered a "spam blog" but one which has human-edited content originally isn't.

Google Alerts piped through an imaginary friend on Friendfeed to Twitter is a success - as well as mixing it in with other news RSS feeds. I've got an imaginary "http://twitter.com/joethunk" which was developed simply to give me news feeds and an alert which is all the "how to's, learn to's, and ways to" which show up on the web. This has over 466 followers as of today. I imagine if I put a babe as an icon, it would get even more. Just the way life works. But its right now the content which is valuable to people.

Using Alerts to pipe to Friendfeed and then using that RSS back to a blog (probably a WordPress plugin) would be the next approach. A direct Google Alerts to Blogger using a mail-to approach leaves the header in, so is easily worked out. When those alerts go through Friendfeed, that header disappears. Posting it on a Wordpress blog would be a workable auto-blog. While Google could lower it's rankings, it couldn't stop it as it does with Blogger.

Now, if you could do that with a video feed, you'd be really popular, depending on how you themed it...

All for now, a couple more posts to do elsewhere.

Oh - remote blogs do work, you just have to watch your subdomain names and not directly "take over" trademarks. Research shows that adding "blows" or "sucks" after a tradename is legal.

Marketing Insight: Watch your trademarks and linklove mojo

2009-05-05T04:56:00.006-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkadog/

(If you go to that link, you'll find the entire story of how this trademark dog, Nipper, came into being.)

If you read up on Robert Kiyosaki's books and lectures, he infrequently tells of creating a line of "surfer wallets" made up of nylon - and building a factory in Hawaii to get them made, only to see his product be undercut by foreign manufacturers with knock-offs. Lost the factory as he couldn't compete in price. He hadn't trademarked his products and so could actually have blocked those imports into this country if he had.

Lesson here: make sure you trademark along with your keyword strategies.

The advantage of trademarks is that they don't expire, like copyrights or patents. You can keep renewing them indefinitely - which, for Burrough's Tarzan, was a nice little inheritance for his descendants.

- - - -

I remember someone got a lot of traffic during the last presidential election with isobamamuslim.com and had a simple one-word site: "No". But that person went further and also grabbed the variation, isobamamuslin.com - and the answer was: "No. Muslin is a fabric."

If the guy were really smart, he would have set up t-shirts with just his domain name on the front and the answer on the back. And link to Cafepress where people could buy his product.

Monetize, always.

So watch your defenses closely. Most big (and smart) corporations will actually tie up all the domain variations of their brand names. And if they are really smart, they'll hire someone to build some static mini sites which link to their main site.

When you are working to develop your linklove mojo, you build it by sharing.

But you have to think entirely outside the box regularly - or hire people that do. And if you do have a person like this, give them rein and don't just load them up with work to solve. Let them try things out - give them a small budget to try experiments, plus a percentage of those profits to expand their experiment-budget when they are successful. That will fine-tune their genius. And your profits will grow exponentially.

The point in "Marketing Warfare" is never to take on the competition directly, but take them on by developing a very narrow front - one torpedo in the right spot may not sink a ship, but it can stop it dead in the water while you keep steaming right along and get to that port ahead of them to sell your product.

A final point. Competitions are never won by going head-to-head. The more creative person wins. Period. Don't buy how you were trained in school, with equally-matched teams on two sides in different-colored uniforms. Doesn't work that way. Ask Microsoft. Or Apple.

SEO Marketing Mix: Never thought I'd have so much fun complaining

2009-04-30T09:46:00.006-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnjoh/

Yes, I love to stop telemarkers' Internet scams - and the way to do this is by complaining.

Visit my links to complain about scammers at http://stop-telemarketers.midwestjournalpress.com

- - - -

//Sponsor//

For more information, I've been writing a book about Internet Scams - and a free online/email course. Come visit - let me know what you think...

Service and Exchange: Some social media sites just don't get it.

2009-04-28T19:13:00.004-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/voght/

Got into a couple of new social sites today and they basically sucked.

Reason? They were pristine Ivory towers. Also known as silos. You couldn't link other sites in or import even tiny parts of your lifestream - and no one could get a link from you to check out. Everything was internal.

Much like the students above - a very inward facing group with their own little set of agreements which no one else makes much sense of.

The problem is that the group doesn't contribute outward and so will eventually wither and die off. Groups need to both service and exchange, internally and externally in order to survive and expand.

One of these groups had a good idea - to get people in to write reviews. Only problem was - they were essentially whoring. The people writing the reviews got really nothing out of it. These guys wanted to attract people who needed reviews of stuff. So it's a cute, but dead, idea. It's not social except within that tiny group of people who want to write reviews in 800 characters or more. If you could only live in Twitter and couldn't post your blogs or import your Friend Feed - or even have tinyurl links to share. Boring. Boring and whoring.

Probably only Facebook and FriendFeed really get this. (Google's social attempts are also probably on the mark all except they were started by a company, not a bunch of like-minded individuals and then popularly adopted.)

"Social" has gone beyond simply getting along with people around you. Now it's finding and building your own niche of like-minded people. And you are going to have several niches. Great for marketing, since more and different products can be offered and exchanged easily.

Nothing like the Internet for setting things on their ear, eh?

Article Marketing - Dusting off an old stand-by

2009-04-27T18:07:00.004-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/

Just like meeting an old friend again - or picking up an old baseball mitt and ball, remembering the days of sunshine-sprinkled catch and impromptu games with the ball going wild and no one playing that position...

Picked up Article marketing more or less as a way to force myself past the death of one old machine (two hard-drives gone) and another one on the mend (actually, I have to get out the manual to mend it, still.)

As well, I needed to translate some great over-long blog posts into tight prose needed for articles, podcasts, and videos. So writing articles seemed the best way to try it out.

I found that I'd not submitted any articles since last fall. And nothing really significant in any volume for well over a year. But I'd been busy with research and it was a perfect time to try out these new tools I'd assembled (yes, I know, men and their tools...)

So I took advantage of this opportunity to cobble everything together and blog all about it for you.

There's a lot to cover about article marketing, so much that it's filled a single volume out of the Online Millionaire set of books (anybody have a better name for that subject, please let me know...) Today we are simply going to cover a simple recipe for producing non-duplicative articles and submitting them to multiple directories.

What's non-duplicative?

Non-duplicative articles isn't writing the same one over and over and over. How tedious and boring, that would be. It's taking your original article (short essay) and working out how to make it say the same thing with different words for every article directory you want to submit it to - well, at least those which show up on the top Google standings.

Some authors (namely Michael Campbell of "Striking it Niche" and "Nothing but 'Net" fame) found that the Google penalties for duplicative content fell out if around 40% of an article was changed out. Articles didn't have to be entirely fresh (which gives hope for all those PLR article collections which are clogging your hard-drives right now.)

That being said, how do we write an article?

Same as always - get an inspiration and hammer it out before it passes. You can write this on anything. More recently, I've been excited by the use of Google Docs, which is based on OpenOffice. This way, as long as you have an internet connection, you have all your documents all neatly (or not) organized and available.

But at some point, you are going to have to convert this to pure, straight text. Here's where I recommend NoteTab (http://www.notetab.com). And I say to get the free version, and look around for pre-5.0 version. (Because I use their feature to strip out HTML tags, which disappeared from the free version after 4.95 or thereabouts.) But you can use Note Pad in Windows or any other straight text editor. You want something which will take the straight text out of copied data and paste it into some other application without the formatting included. A filter, nothing more or less. (And it helps if that application will count words for you - something we'll find useful in meeting various article directory word limits.)

This article writing also assumes that you've already done your research and picked out your niche, found it's profitable keywords and still were inspired enough to crank out some copy.

Take a second and look at Top 50 Article Directories by Traffic, PageRank. This is a regularly updated list which gives you an idea of the huge amount of article directories and which ones have clawed their way up to the top by providing far more relevance and service. You can see right now, that even if you wanted to just post at each of these, you are going to have to be very creative for a long period of time in order to come up with original articles for each of them.

Save your fingers - let a spreadsheet do your creating.

There is a broad subject of article spinners, which are programs that simply replace various words with synonyms and so "spin" a new article out of old cloth. Problem is, they look and smell like old cloth that's been patched several times too many. They don't have the same quality as actually human-edited. Like someone put the article through a foreign language translator and then back. Awful, unreadable stuff. Means people aren't going to read down to your resource block and click on your links there.

Enter Chris Smith (http://profitswithchris.com) and his article-rewriter. (Free download from link.) He tackled the problem of editing articles head-on and came up with an elegant solution. He got a spreadsheet to use some simple math formulas and generate new versions of your original article. You simply separate the article into short paragraphs or sentences and then create two more versions of each of these. The random math function he's built in takes your three versions of that article and then recombines them by their paragraphs into different formats. He figures you get well over 200 different versions of each original and it's two additionals.

But are they at least 40% different?

Lets go to Dupe-Free Pro - another free download, ad-supported. This great tool has two panels left and right where you plug in your original article on one side and your newly re-written article on the other. Hit the Compare button and you'll quickly see by what percentage the new version is identical to the original. If you come up with more than 60% or so, just go back to your article re-writer and generate a new one.

This is where your NoteTab (plain text) editor comes in. Copy/paste from article rewriter into NoteTab, then copy/paste from there into DupeFree Pro. Otherwise, you can wind up with some messy looking stuff, since there's some formatting on the spreadsheet you don't really want.

But you now have the capability to generate new versions at will. Far more than you need.

Go to eZineArticles and enter your first one. Means you have to sign up.

Now take the next on the list and post your newly re-written version. Make sure you change the headline and the summary blurb. Otherwise, it's just copy/paste. (You still have it in your NoteTab editor.)

Next article directory, generate a new re-written article, change the headline and blurb slightly - and so on, etc.

Who, me - cheat?

Isn't this cheating? Well, did you actually write each article yourself? Are they different enough that Google isn't going to penalize you or the article directory for duplicative content? Then what's the problem?

Ok, then, there's still more. How about the thousand or so remaining article directories out there?

Here's my tip. Give the top of the heap your best shot, always. Most of these are completely uniquely coded and have to be hand-entered, which takes time. But an interesting point is that the lower rankings mostly run on the same basic script.

Save your time, submit to the multitudes semi-automatically.

There is another body of data called article submitters. These automate the production. Essentially they work because there are only a handful of scripts which people use to create article directories. The largest majority of these are based on Article Dashboard's free script.

In my searches and trials, I found one Article Submitter which did the trick and was worth paying for (less than $50. Simply because they re-coded an existing codebase (yes, there are tons of article submitters out there just with this name) and have continually updated their product. You want to buy support, not headaches and expire-ware. This one is from SubmitSuite.com. And yes, they have additional products.

What this does is take a single article and post in on around 1000 directories if you want.

I say it's semi-automatic, as it is trying to act like a human would and every now and then hangs when a website isn't delivered right on time. And some websites simply go "4 legs up" every now and then. So keep it open on your desktop (or another monitor or computer) so you can debug it from time to time.

Wait - isn't this just duplicate stuff again?

Why do we want to post duplicative content after all that work? Is it, like Clinton, just because we can? No.

My argument is this:

Look at the Bell Curve and the Long Tail. The bulk of your traffic is going to come from a few sources. Practically, the top 5-10-15 article directories are the only ones which will routinely send you traffic - if you routinely post to them. The rest of the article directories have very nichefied traffic and loyal readers who go there first for data. Just the way it is.

You are only going to get drips and drops of traffic from these niche sites. Posting by hand isn't efficient to do 500 or so article directories at a go. In practice, because these directories are so niche-oriented, I actually only get about 150 or so posted from any single article. Cat-article directories don't want the same articles as Real Estate article directories. And their clients don't search through other directories for their specialty articles, either.

But if I'm a cat fancier article writer, I'd post my original articles on the Big Box article directories and also a copy on any cat-niche article directories as well. Cover all your bases.

Article Submitter from Submit Suite allows you to help the niche directories build up their services while you also have set up your main supply of paying traffic through the top article directories. (If you want more on this subject, check out my work over a year ago on article directories and article submitters.)

- - - -

All that great work deserved an update - and so there you have it.

The advantage of posting articles is that it gives you back links and potential traffic for years to come. Like blogs, you have to maintain a constant supply of content, as the new articles are featured and older articles archived. Human nature, again. (Otherwise, used bookstores would always be the first place we look.)

But again, this is really the point of creating once and publishing many, many times. Your job as content creator is to be first in all these various venues with your brilliant ideas to share.

Articles are another vital venue to get those potential viewers who want this particular type of data delivered in that particular content-type. And it's our good fortune to be able to satisy their needs.

Good Hunting, then.

Care and Feeding of Social Media: a remote blog-outpost primer

2009-04-23T18:04:00.009-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leeco/

Sure, social media dominates Google - by their choice. Because social media already has been "vetted" by others and so is popular. And Google simply follows things that are popular and helps others find them.

Homework for our first lesson is to get a copy of "Bending the Web" from Jack Humphrey. While you're out there searching, find a copy of his "60 day plan" in PDF format so you get an even broader clue about what he's talking about.

Essentially, the point is to get your content on as many other sites as possible for any given keyword.

Now, this video (which I did a year ago - my how Internet time flies) shows you a simple route to do this:

But your mileage may vary. For this example, I didn't take some hot keyword with a lot of competition or even figured out how to push a particular product with it. The general idea is there, though - write your content once, publish it many ways as fast as you can. And make sure it all links with the same keyword to the site you are promoting.

Good Hunting!

Use of remote blogs to subvert someone's keyword ownership

2009-04-23T14:51:00.005-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sookie/

The only thing missing in that headline is "dominate".
(But the photo's worth a thousand links...)

Unlikely theory and potential Black Hat SEO use - post removed...

Using Google bookmarks to track your social outposts

2009-04-22T21:42:00.005-05:00

(At the outset, I have to apologize for the housekeeping over at robertworstell.com - going through some changes as I optimize the site for better bandwidth consumption. And generally evolve it.)

But the point I wanted to bring up tonight is using that Google Toolbar with it's bookmark function to track your own social outposts.

Social outposts is a term coined (more or less) by Chris Brogan. Essentially, the social sites you visit and leave your profile at are advance scouting parties for your content-production-line.

Trick is that you can sign up for stuff and then forget where you'd been a month later. So these various places are just sitting out there - while you've been moving on and creating all sorts of content everywhere else.

. . . .

The trick is to be valuable with your content - and release it in valuable formats.

Using your Google Toolbar with it's bookmarking simplicity looks to be a key tool to use.

Good Hunting!

Personal Computer Woes: upgrades and old machines - too full

2009-04-21T20:40:00.006-05:00

When it rains it pours - two computers down out of four, and the other is running Win98...

Tried about five more times to get Ubuntu upgrades on my server - but it still sticks at boot. Next is to take two of the hard-drives out and make it work on the one that's left.

Other machine that went south today (just the Main HD, actually) is running on another Ubuntu Live CD so I can either copy (too big) or delete some files off it so it will run again. XP just blue screens on me. And there's some ominous clunking going on down there, so I expect the end is soon...

One other note: I think WordPress is top-heavy. Seems again I've caused a bandwidth problem simply by accessing my own admin page on WP - plus posting from within that platform instead of outside it. This one on a different host than the other.

Solution is to use Scribe-Fire to post to it (maybe Blogger, though this doesn't always work) and then tweak the settings once it's there. Keeps my own access to a minimum.

But what I'm trying to do with that site is to lower it's bandwidth - however, I have to access the admin to do that.

Still using Yslow to see how I can speed things up. However, the cache I use gets in the way when I want to see changes - and then my time goes up if I turn it off. (I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough.)

. . . .

Good Hunting!

Wordpress Optimization: speed up or get out of the way

2009-04-19T09:36:00.003-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramsesoriginal/

(While this is another one of these technical posts, I'm posting my notes as I run into getting a web business operating online - so you can learn from my efforts and mistakes.)

Ran into this when running Wordpress MU on a site (setting up subdomain mini-sites) and finding all about bandwidth - by running out in the first week of a new month. And then again, the second week. Got it bumped up twice, but it took me off my regular game of posting content over into figuring out how to optimize a site for fast loading. (And this was with just two mini-sites running...)

Luckily, the Internet is full of answers. Lots of surfing with different sites (sorry I can't link to you all) gave me a few simple rules:

Smaller is faster.
Don't call up more than you want to chew.
No pix, no slows.

Smaller is faster.
Essentially, the static html page, text only, is the fastest loading page. The less content, the faster it loads. Kinda like security - if nothing gets through, then nothing can get leaked.

Obviously, since we like nice graphics and nice-looking text, and like to talk to each other - the above statements aren't workable.

Next up from that - CSS-styled pages which look nice but don't take a lot of time to load - meaning the server doesn't have to work at bringing these up. Means you want to compress all the line-breaks and white space out of these CSS pages so that they are more machine-friendly (and nearly impossible to read or edit.)

Don't call up more than you can chew.
Finish off your CSS loading before you call any Javascript - and keep those calls to a minimum. Again, ideally your CSS would be a single document, but the reality is that you have different style sheets for different aspects of the site - human editing benefits, mostly (although some would argue with me on that).

Javascript should load last so the page is there to be read, even if other stuff is coming in the background.

Enter database calls. Same deal. The more you call to your database, the slower the page is to load, and also you are going to use up more bandwidth. So your database has to be optimized internally so that it finds the data quickly and efficiently. Extra tables and entries are removed, which keep the files small and quickly accessed.

No pix, no slows.
Minimalist designs tend to be faster, because a single graphic can be bigger than the entire text on the rest of the page. The more graphics and icons you have on a page, the slower it's going to load.

Your graphics - if you have to have them - should be compressed as much as possible without degrading their quality. (And a two-color GIF still rules.) However, you can do a lot with colors in CSS, so don't think you're limited to a monochrome scene to get a fast-loading page.

While people like pictures on their sites - think these over carefully before you drop a bunch of stuff in there to make it look "pretty".

- - - -
Links:
http://wordpressgarage.com/tips/38-ways-to-optimize-and-speed-up-your-wordpress-blog/
http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/wiki/css-compress
http://www.boydcreative.net/blogging/10-ways-to-optimize-wordpress-for-more-traffic/
http://www.johntp.com/2007/10/24/5-ways-to-increase-the-loading-speed-of-a-wordpress-blog/

- - - -
Tricks and Recommendations:

Host your images on another site or a subdomain - this way they load in parallel to your text body.
Host your feeds on Feedburner - doesn't speed up your page loads, but does preserve your bandwidth.
Don't use an ecommerce plug-in on your WordPress install - host these externally as well. Scripts like ZenCart are amazingly fast as they are designed to specifically deal with ecommerce. WordPress is designed around blogging and ease of use. Make your external ecommerce script do that heavy lifting. (The ecommerce plug-in I used to use had all sorts of javascript calls - when I finally got under the hood to look at it. Now I'm looking at a simple PayPal button to do everything I want - but the jury is still out on that...)
Always, always refine by function - actual use - rather than bells and whistles. Practically, leave entertainment on entertainment sites and then link or embed them. Let them pay the bandwidth and give you a sitelink as well.
Skip ads, unless they are text links. a) People continue to look at fewer and fewer ads. b) Most are graphic heavy or javascript "endowed". c) Content pre-sells best - then link to the page which will give you PPC or affiliate commissions. (Adsense is still notoriously poor-paying.)

Bottom line:
Serve optimized text only from your server, then call to other hosts for the extras. Sounds austere - but if you keep these in mind with your designs, you won't have the big problems later when you have to find out how to make your site's bandwidth footprint much smaller out of necessity. (And I've already had a domain kicked off one host for violating their *ahem* terms of aggrement - you get what you pay for.)

Good Luck - and Good Surfing!

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #9 - Remote Blog Outposts

2009-04-11T14:53:00.009-05:00

A short FAQ about the care and feeding of remote blogs.

What are remote blogs and why?

When you use an IR keyboard and large screen TV so you can blog from your bed - remotely... (grin)

Have fun - don't take social media engineering too seriously... Some of these theories just don't work in practice.

Marketing Insight - the return of mini-sites and mini-webs

2009-03-31T13:53:00.007-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwl/)

Just had to tell you about this one. Too neat.

(Warning: advanced terminology ahead - Geek Alert)

Dr. Andy Williams reminded me about it with his recent newsletter about site building.

I've been playing around with the idea of subdomains as minisites and have finally gotten it working. Mini-sites go back to the days of page-rank as King of SEO, and Michael Campbell (Striking it Niche, Nothing but 'Net, etc.). The idea is that you would build mini-sites around your niche and people would find all sorts of fascinating content within that mini-site and they'd bounce all around within it and build up your pagerank, making your SERPs improve.

Then you'd link these mini-sites together and you'd have a mini-web. Since the links were by related content, you could actually take over a major niche just on pagerank.

But the days of pagerank are ebbing, if not gone. Google doesn't think that metric is as important these days.

However, the concept is a fascinating one. It allows you to group your content by niche and then cross-link to related content on another site you also created and maintain. So link love can still be shared, along with subscribers (if you liked this blog post, other readers also found these blog-posts fascinating...).

Enter the idea of sub-domains. Now for the time being, Google still gives subdomains individual pagerank and treats them basically as their own site. Meaning that when you link from one subdomain to another, you are crosslinking sites. So you are giving authority to another of your own sites.

But this has been tricky to do, since other than hand-coding mini-sites, the best way to build a site was with WordPress (or some other CMS scripting platform). Meaning that if you wanted to set up a subdomain and install WP on it, you'd have several installs on your hard-drive with multiplicitous files duplicated in every subdomain.

Enter WordPressMU. (Multi-User.) It has the option of being able to create new blogs and assigning them a subdomain name - used on WordPress.com and many others. So each person runs a single blog, but the underlying program really runs them all as one huge mega-blog.

Here's the deal: Set up WPMU on a host and then create a new "blog" for each keyword niche. Posts in that blog are all germain to that subject and so build authority within that subdomain. Every subdomain is it's own subject - and so you actually build mini-sites again - and a mini-web, after a fashion.

What makes this really take off is that you can have completely separate look and feel for every sub-domain blog. It looks like it's own blog - which it is. And templates make it much, much easier to configure - but far more powerful - than mini-sites.

An example is Midwest Journal Press - this is set up as a main site for all the books I want to promote as a publisher. Every book is to have it's own blog. My latest project is How to Stop Telemarketers' Internet Scams. Note that the link goes to a subdomain on that main blog. I'm in the process of writing this book right now. And it will have all sorts of links off the site, but also to the other related books which I publish. It becomes an authority for the keywords of "stop telemarketers", if not "Internet scams".

The great part about it is that I can build an opt-in mail list just for that book (coming today, I hope) and so get subscribers on this particular niche completely independent of the other books I write/edit/(re)publish. Also, I'm not limited by a single template's foibles, but can actually grab and install various templates until I have the one which is appropriate to that particular niche. (A person looking to solve their "I've-just-been-scammed-by-a-telemarketer" problem will expect a more dramatic look and feel than the "I'd-like-to-lose-more-weight" person - who needs more reassurance.)

In short, WPMU looks to solve a variety of problems with a single install. Sure, there are some tricks that have to be mastered, but it's not a particular problem compared to learning HTML and coding pages by hand.

And to think - you probably heard it here first!

Your comments? Suggestions?

Marketing Insight - WordPress site-building sequence

2009-03-31T12:55:00.003-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/)

This post on Marketing Insight is how to build your site. (And those are silo's above - where grain is stored before it is shipped to processors.) Dr. Williams (below) is offering one concept about how to build a site. He's actually converting old hand-coded sites over to a new WordPress platform. And I respect his work.

ezSEO Blog: "The overall idea of this new system is to concentrate on sub-niches, one at a time, and build those sub-sections before moving on to the next one.

THINK OF EACH SUB-SECTION AS A MINI-SITE

Suppose my website was on dieting. This is a huge niche and to try to do the keyword research up front would be a monumental task. A large part of my site would probably be the various diets that people could go on, so I would start off by setting up my Wordpress site with a super category called 'Diets'.

I would then pick one diet at a time, e.g. the Sonoma diet, and carry out the keyword research only on the Sonoma diet. I’d keep this data in a separate database in KRA Pro.

I could then concentrate on the Sonoma diet, creating a main page for that diet as well as articles on the diet that can link back to the main page.

When you are finished with the Sonoma diet, pick another area you want to work on, e.g. South Beach Diet and repeat.

IT’S LIKE ADDING LOTS OF MINI-SITES TO THE SAME DOMAIN, AND LINKING THEM WITH THE HOMEPAGE AND MENU SYSTEM"

I would take a different approach. And as you know from following this blog I use RankTracker to query WordTracker to get my niches (which is a whole lot cheaper and more powerful).

Now, as I've discussed, my approach is to distill my niches and their keywords. This gives me what keywords add up to the targeted main keywords I want to use to create content. I simply line them up by KEI and then work on them in that way. I don't take a certain one and then create content for all the pages like that. I don't do all the dog-collar keywords and then do dog-leash keywords. I'd work all of the long-tail niche keywords for dog in order of their KEI. Sure they'll cross, but what you are trying to take over is "dog" as a main KW - and that is what your blog is named. (Yes, that is a lousy choice as a "niche", since it isn't really, but it gives a good example. )

Under dogs, you'd have categories (silos) of dog-collars, dog-leashes, dog-dishes, and so on. As Andy says above, I don't really hold to silos either. Mainly because people don't want their content served up that way. And your "back" button is there by default on every page you visit. So bouncing from a too-content-limited page is easier than not.

And WordPress has the option of viewing all your categories on the sidebar. So while they might be interested in dog-collars, they might want to compare with the content you have for cat-collars. Or just Cats. Those are all on your categories - and allow you to nest categories as well.

I recently imported a Blogger blog into WordPress and found that now I had tons of default categories. So that screwed any idea of having category-silos without editing every single page out of hundreds. (And I have more to study up on the use of both categories and tags for posts - both of which cross-link posts, making it easier for viewers, but ridiculous if you are trying to maximize page-rank.)

Another reason I like to post by KEI rather than category is to break up my week. While I still have lots of research to do on the various keywords, it gives you more diversity and options if you are posting for the best traffic/competition first. And when you have all the long-tail keywords established, you can come back to work them all in sequence again (or several times) because you already have the research done.

My writing is what I am inspired on - so I jump from blog to blog, depending on what I'm covering at the time. Lately I've been hobby-horsing how to stop telemarketers' Internet scams, but this also gave me a post on hate-addiction, as well as putting up a new post from an old draft about expanding your marketing mix beyond email newsletters I had hanging around on that imported Blogger site. So I'm working on several keywords at the same time. Each with different publics. Keeps me from getting bored, but it's mainly to get those-type thoughts out and written down before I forgot about them and lost the inspiration. (Plus, it makes my friendfeed life-stream far more interesting, let alone twitter.)

And this method of writing for just a single blog also makes more sense to the search engines, since a person doesn't just talk about dog-collars for twenty articles over a couple of weeks and then fascinate on dog-leashes. This also breaks up your flow if you are doing posts, so your subscribing public isn't bored to tears by dog-collars, then bored by dog-leashes. A simple approach would be to write in one category, then do your next post in the next-best KEI category, and so on.

But I'm pretty sure with both tags and categories, any idea of a silo is pretty shot. Silo's are actually a hold-over from the days when PageRank ruled SEO. And pagerank has been pretty back-watered for some time now.

The general rule is that search engines follow viewers. So Content is King - like nothing else. Build a great site and you'll get more subscribers and they'll stick around for more (as well as buy).

The point of doing your articles/posts by KEI then targets your most likely traffic first. Rotating through these keywords until you have several articles for each long-tail-KW - and a good leg-up on taking over the main phrase, this keeps your readers interested and coming back for more.

Just my thoughts on the matter. What are yours?

Don't start marketing a product unless you want to help build a community

2009-03-29T08:38:00.004-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/)

In working over a new product, it occurred to me that there is a very tight relationship between the company, its product/service, and the community it serves.

Just in that statement, you can see tons of information alone.

Communities have needs and wants. Like corporations, they have a growth or decline. They have participants. Those participants (mostly) share common needs and wants. Doesn't mean they can't or don't also belong to other communities because of their other needs and wants.

So my story is this: I was scammed almost exactly a year ago and haven't made back the money they promised I was supposed to have in 3-4 months. The companies in this scam are Internet Income Solutions, Bright Builders, and Thrive Learning - all Utah-based companies.

While I'm pursuing a refund through Rip-Off Reports, as well as other complaint routes (FTC, FCC, FBI, state attorney generals, BBB), I'm also writing a book about these adventures and using the research I've done into this area over that past year. And I plan to promote that book down social media lines.

But then I plan to move onto other venues. I've got a lot of stuff that I need to get done, and other than this handbook, I don't intend to become a consumer advocate by any means. So my investment in the community of "stop telemarketers' internet scams" will draw to a close. (But my involvement in book writers/editors/publishers community won't.)

And so, while I can go full bore in promoting this book with social bookmarks, podcasts, videos, forum posts - why would I want to? I've got a whole series of books which are demanding my attention, forcing me to get this one up and off my lines, so to speak.

And that's the question I think that everyone should ask themselves about their products that they pitch or services they offer. Why am I promoting this product/service?

Is it for the community?

Is it just to "make a buck"?

Is it for personal fame?

If you look up or follow Dr. Mani or Chris Brogan and you'll see people who are completely working to build communities and to help others openhandedly.

Do Comcast or Dell or Home Depot really work to build the community - or are their social actions and participation simply CRM with a twist?

Now, if you follow Scott Monty, you'll see that you are dealing with a person who is trying to help a somewhat enlightened brick-and-mortar car company transition into our modern Internet age. And he's got his job cut out for him (but Ford didn't need to take bail-out money, did they?) If you check out his blog, you'll see he is tackling some tough issues that are actually contributing to the social media community as a whole.

As a book writer/editor/publisher - I have to ask myself about the products I'm bringing out: do they actually contribute something to improving this culture, our global communities?

But - what do you think?

Keyword research - an example of a very deep and wide niche

2009-03-25T22:23:00.004-05:00

(photocredit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koalazymonkey/)

Index-mining of a huge niche - an example
(a dull and boring, left-brained exercise)

Had to sort out some other stuff, so I've been vacant from marketing insight posts. But I was able to get some work done on the side, because an upcoming mess was staring back at me - so I put the old RankTracker to work at digesting stuff it wasn't designed to do.

My example is the huge, vast "niche" of self-improvement/self-help/personal growth, etc. It's that big because all humankind's adventures fall under it. Any time you push the condition of a person forward, it's self improvement in some guise or another. (Because actually, only the person himself can improve or worsen their own condition...)

So there were really far too many words to describe this area. And those terms above either gave no useful terms or too many when I ran them through my Adwords/RankTracker/OpenOffice system.

But I'd been doing this for months, getting various insights and doing trial searches. All of which resulted in lists and spreadsheets of words, but nothing definitive.

Finally, I decided to take a rather adventurous leap (like some cliff diver) and assembled all these numbers of lists into RankTracker and made it digest them. Turns out it was far more difficult than I thought. It chokes the WordTracker component at about 240 words, so I had to split these up - meaning my 6000 words took about 120 times to get them all ranked by KEI. (Several days' work in the background.)

And then I tried to get it to find alternate WordTracker suggestions - it doesn't choke so easily, but RankTracker can appear to hang after a thousand or so...

Finally, I got most of these done and wound up with over 12000 keywords (that's right - what a masochist). Extracted these to a spreadsheet, cranked up a database from that (OpenOffice is a wonder) and then built queries based on the top single-world keywords.

Turned out I had about 20 or so real keywords that were applicable (and not porn or popular culture related).

Now, I copied these by hand into a text editor, and then pasted that list into a new RankTracker project. Right now, I'm getting the WordTracker suggestions for these, which I'll run several times until I quit getting any decent KEI new keywords.

All this just to tell you how to take something that doesn't really seem to have a keyword set for that niche you know is there.

The steps:

Compile all the lists you have into RankTracker and find their KEI and suggested alternates.
Copy/Paste this into OpenOffice spreadsheet, then convert that to a database format to do queries and narrow down to relevant terms.
Take that short list and run it back through a new RankTracker project to find the real bottom line.
Convert that into a spreadsheet database and mine it.

Some notes:
If I had these all in spreadsheets to begin with, I'd probably been able to just extract the top KW from each and drop them into RankTracker. But some of these were simple text files from my earliest research into the subject.

Now I'm up to date and should shortly have a concise set of huge KEI niches (in the thousands, literally) that can be approached with finding the QAT (in quotes, in anchor, in text) for these and then lining up content and products to start this approach.

- - - -

The results: about 3700 keywords gave me just over 1100 usable (above 2.0 KEI) terms. Of these, there are nearly 50 which are over 10K KEI (rare). To get that kind of KEI, nearly all are under 300K competing pages (rule of thumb says that I probably have less than 1,000 actually optimized pages for these terms) and those high-competing pages have around 3K visitors every day.

While that mega-digestion took days, it now sets me up with some apparent uber-niches to develop. (Let's hope I can find a product for that niche which serves the community...)

So: there's your example of what is possible. I imagine if you took something as broad as pets, you'd then also be able to digest this down nearly as profitably. (I may go back to those top terms I had before just as a test, but I'm really going to have to have some free time on my hands...)

Good Hunting!

How to get Started with Google Analytics

2009-03-17T04:16:00.001-05:00

This little link is the simple how-to in starting to understand Google Analytics.

Analytics Help

There are some more free resources to track down - but since so many people are selling paid versions of their own courses in the subject, I thought to get this link out to you and save you some dough.

Google has its own course - and when I find it again, I'll link. When I do the course, I'll review...

Marketing Insight: Keywords which don't tell you anything about the Gorilla in the room

2009-03-16T13:18:00.003-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticpuppy/)

Marketing Insight: Not getting the right keywords
won't tell you anything about the gorilla in your room.

That's the problem with a lot of these niches we deal with. When we are simply trying to sell a product, we fail because some of these niches simply don't have buyers in them. And worse, some people are telling you that the way you find buyers is to see if people are advertising in that area. (Really? How come people are advertising where there isn't even any traffic? Google says they do - just look on their Adwords tool and see where there is "competition" even when there aren't enough traffic results to make up a monthly tally...)

Since I got myself all worked up with that (above-linked) post, I then had to see what was actually going on.

So I set up my Keywords Genies: Google Adwords Tool and RankTracker and started to get to work figuring this all out. I started using Google Adwords to see if it would give me bigger and bigger traffic keywords through its synonyms. After I amassed about 12,000 keywords, then I quit to digest them by OpenOffice database.

Now, this is completely the reverse of what my research says to do. I was purposely looking for stuff that couldn't possibly be a niche - waaayy too big. Of course, one of the first things I found out was that Google and WordTracker don't agree on what the traffic for something actually is. (Big surprise - all these tools only deal with their own estimates of traffic. Your mileage may vary, as well - only your own analytics knows for sure.)

But what I did find is that there seem to be a huge number of really good one and two-word keywords with decent KEI. Even though they could (and some did) have literally a trillion pages of competition. No, you couldn't dream of trying to get these on their own. So the niche theory of marketing empire-building still holds.

The review of these niches and their main keywords started showing something else (other than the fact I was really straining RankTracker and WordTracker - you can only check about 240 KW's at a time before WordTracker shuts you down). That something else was the point that people who search on Google are just that - lookers. Doesn't mean they are buyers. And you have to check that keyword on eBay or Amazon to see if people are actually able to sell something like that.

Even more striking was the observation that very little "stuff" was turning up with these keywords. Specific camera's, or toys, or gadgets or books or authors weren't coming up. But the big-ticket Maslow-pyramid-type phrases were. As niches.

But didn't I just say you couldn't sell anything in a niche that didn't have buyers in it?

Sure. The trick is that the motivations to buy are there, not the stuff you can sell.

This means that people are actually searching for their wants and feelings, not just specific stuff they want to buy - although that happens as well, but not in two words or less (most of the time, anyway).

Your niches show up in four-word or longer phrases.

But something even more interesting showed up - you aren't selling stuff, you're offering solutions.

All of these wants and feelings people put in their search engine forms - these are just problems they are having in their lives (more or less). What they are plugging away at searching for are solutions which would improve their lives.

Again, go back to Maslow and Cialdini. When you take these two giants together, you see what people as individuals and as groups/niches are trying to solve in their lives. All these things people buy are somewhere on Maslow's pyramid. And what you see selling on eBay or Amazon are translations of these items into the tribe-dominated Cialdini 6 (or 7) principle triggers.

Being blonde, young, trim, athletic, rich, famous, etc. - all of these have definite products associated with them. But below all these states are very definite wants and needs - and between those and the products that represent them are the person's feelings. Which are what all sales are based on - feelings.

My point in this actually goes back to what I've spend the bulk of this life on - personal improvement and self-growth. Recently, I've been studying marketing to see how selling this type stuff is done. And so, now I know how to sell almost anything - find out what stresses are hitting people's lines and offer solutions. Stresses are tied into feelings - and they come from a person's purpose, something seemingly disrelated to marketing.

The reason I'm telling you all this is to keep you up to speed with what I've been discovering.

Practically, with proper market research, starting with keywords and then finding what products are selling in that niche - you could conceivably sell sun-tan oil to Eskimo's if you wanted.

It's all sitting there in the keywords.

So, go ahead, compile your own list of 12,000 Google Adwords and see what comes up.

May you be just as pleasantly surprised.

Keyword Research Marketing Insight - Don't think the inmates know how to unlock the sanitarium gates...

2009-03-14T22:07:00.004-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/)

Marketing Insight:
Escaping the sanitarium profitably with your keywords
-- don't ask the inmates for directions.

Sometimes I get fed up with people who use advertising as proof that people are buying or not buying stuff in any particular niche.

I've been doing a heckuva lot of research on keywords recently and can tell you this - advertiser are generally clueless about what people are going to buy. And they are caught up in this insane addiction to buying advertising as a way to get leads which will convert to paying customers.

The reason I say this is I've pulled in my Ranktracker files from Google adwords KeywordExternalTool and found that there are some fascinating keywords being used that have a lot of advertising competition, but no one is actually visiting these sites. True.

Now, this doesn't say all advertisers are this way - but when I've now run into the fourth or fifth "authority" saying that you look at these sites which tell you what advertising is being bought as an indicator of whether people are buying products in that area - and I say "BULL".

If you want to see if people are buying that product, check out eBay with one of the free analysis tools out there. This will tell you if there is a real buying market for it. Now, eBay is a bit different from Google, as people who are looking (google) aren't necessarily buyers (google and ebay). But if you use Terapeak, you can see over the last two weeks (for free) if anyone is looking for a product in your category and what types of products (and prices) they are willing to pay in an auction. (One caveat - auctions are for 1] Collectors, and 2] Bargain Hunters. So prices are unreal here - both too high and too low.)

Right now, I don't know of any other area where you can find out actual sales data. You want to be able to look at the records of buyers buying. Terapeak and HammerTap both license eBay's database records to generate their data. Another source would be WorldWideBrands - even though their entry is rather high, even for a lifetime subscription. But they can tell you the rough value of an area and whether there are buyers for that product. WWB does have an online trial where you can check out your keywords in a limited degree.

Oh - but you could check out Clickbank, which does (in a round-about way) give what is selling and you can work out roughly whether you could actually make money at that stuff. Also has return rates (as some of those digital products aren't worth the digital paper they're printed on...)

But when someone tells you to see if people are advertising as an idea of who's buying what - just smile and nod and thank them - then go right on by. Because those people are probably going to be there for a very loooong time. And you should be out in the real world earning money by the carloads.

So:
Places to find out if someone is actually buying products for your niche:

Terapeak
WorldWideBrands
Clickbank.

Good Hunting!

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip: Keyword Article-writing tool - OpenOffice

2009-03-14T18:24:00.004-05:00

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip:

Writing articles while keeping your keywords in mind just got easier.

Now, as you know from following this series of blog posts, I'm a big fan of using RankTracker to compile a spreadsheet of keywords - then mining that spreadsheet with a database.

Then you write your articles keeping those keywords in mind. And you can do this all from OpenOffice.

I used to keep a list of keywords to hand, and then started keeping a spreadsheet open on a second monitor while I wrote my articles on my main one. What I found out today is that you can search your database in the same window while you have your article open - saving desktop real estate. Look at this partial screen capture:

(image opens to larger version)

The database is opened up above your editing window, so you can see the keywords you've already culled from your RankTracker research. In this case, I'm working on a series of articles on telemarketing - and you can see the highlighted keyword "telemarketer training" right above the article with that keyword in it's title. Note that it's all in the same window.

Makes it easier to see what you're talking about. Now, if you have multiple databases, they'll show up there as well (right now, I only have the "refund02a" database registered, but more will be coming, rest assured). So you can switch easily from one to the other to find the cross-keywords you need, which helps you out with your Latent Semantic Indexing.

As you update your spreadsheet on a regular basis, that keeps your database current, so when you are writing articles, you can tweak them however your research sends you.

A probable sequence on this would be to

set out your categories according to your research,
pile all of these into one massive spreadsheet and then
set up multiple queries so that OpenOffice Base can do your heavy lifting.
Then, set your categories in your WordPress blog to align with your keywords.
Once you have all this, then you simply set your publishing schedule to account for holiday cycles and start sending content to social media about the niche products you are offering and so take over top search engine positions.

Follow your publishing schedule and then it's downhill for your work, and uphill for your sales and bank account.

Just wanted to keep you up to date on the latest and greatest - make us both more efficient that way, eh?

Good Hunting!

PS. Coming soon: How to break into Google Analytics without breaking a sweat - a newbie's guide.

Marketing Insight: Hype Curve, Bell Curve, and Long Tail - how to profit regardless of the economic downturn

2009-03-11T06:02:00.003-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/selectah/)

Marketing Insight: Where Hype Rubber Hits the Laggard Road

I've recently been proving all those Madison Avenue psych studies right. By studying Cialdini, Gladwell, and Godin it pretty much says that we are actually being herded along in our tribes quite nicely. Of course my secret weapon in this is to study Maslow and then see that these tribes are far from being destructive, but are actually heading toward a better future quality of life for all members.

Madison Avenue has been helping, in their odd way, to enable people to spend their way to a better material quality of living. To do this, they need to keep earning more money than they have before. And people get sold on getting their kids through college (another tribe grist-mill) and living better lives.

Our use of this, of course, is to learn not to become effect of every marketing frenzy that comes along - and to re-learn our own mental habits so that we can make our own independent decisions. But meanwhile, as we become the lighthouse on the rocky shore for other ships passing through this storm we call life - we have to use these data to help people find our routes to success. Not that they have to follow it exactly - you just want people to be able to find it and utilize it. And if they become independent thinkers as well - hey, we might wind up with a huge tribe of people who care for each other and do the right thing more instinctively. Better for all of us on this small single world we share.

OK, today I wanted to tell you more about this tribe stuff and some fascinating explanations of what we go through.

Gartner's Hype Cycle, Bridging the Gap, and Fads Vs. Evolution

First off, there's Gartner's hype cycle - which of course is full of hype. But it tells us that not everything is a fad. Somethings make their way into society and do quite nicely after they are widely adopted. Beany Babies aren't one. Fire and the Wheel apparently are.

Someone else approached the same concept of technology adoption and talks about Bridging the Gap for early adopters, using the Bell Curve to show where early adopters, mainstreamers, and laggards show up. Unfortunately, this model only says that demand dies out for every new adoption.

A really bright lad made a great point over at Trashmarketing when he superimposed the two graphs. Not all of his arguments follow, but it's a great start.

He opines that hype is much greater during the early adopters phase and that the chatter drops off as the mainstreaming begins.

Gartner is talking about technology and adoption curves. Use of the bell curve and this gap theory is fine for fads - but says that people won't continue using an item.

I think that we are somewhere in the middle of these two curves. (And you'll see that the Long Tail curve also is represented there - if you look closely around "Late Majority and Laggards')

But you'll see what I mean when you look at Detroit's growth and decline. Compare the Edsel and the Mustang and you can see where Ford missed the boat and made it. Social media is going through this same scene, as some platforms are bought up and drop off. Practically, Nasdaq and our current real-estate economy bubble burst (thanks to Bill Clinton, Barney Franks, ACORN and Chris Dodd for our US version) show this same hype curve to some degree. At least for now.

And technology stocks as well as real-estate will always be with us - much as Jesus talked about the poor. So there is some combination of these to start making sense out of things. Sure, the hoop skirt never caught on, but the mini-skirt is still around - just not as hyped as before (but just as enticing to males).

How do we use this? Realize that your marketing efforts have to be way out ahead of everyone else. What you are looking for are early adopter evangelists and "sneezers" (per Gladwell's Tipping Point) in order to help your product get critical mass. And be prepared for that Dip (Godin wrote a book about it - which I haven't read).

But you are wanting to keep true to your main, core idea and purpose - both of yourself and of your business. You are there, actually, to help move society and this culture forward - to help it evolve. Don't worry if your company and product get snapped up and incorporated into some behemoth current juggernaut. Turn it over and start your next one - you've now got your own financing as that startup just went mainstream. Time for your next startup.

The main point is to keep on keeping on. Don't listen to the Joneses - but figure out what they really need next and offer them a better solution than the one they have. Like the fries at MacDonald's which formed the basis for a world-wide trend in fast-food. Or that entrepreneur who found out that selling everything for a little less made a lot more profit - Sam Walton created a very recession-proof business which has improved the lives of millions through his ideas like spoke-and-wheel distribution.

So: the sky is no limit, actually. Just get out there and create your tail off. Learn from the best and do better than them. With what we can now know in this Internet Age, anyone can retire several times over after creating their booms, not bubbles.

A simple (mostly) way to keep on track with smalll business marketing keywords

2009-03-10T06:31:00.007-05:00

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralphunden/)

Here's a simple way to keep on track with keywords
while doing your small business marketing.

But it's a little left-brained, so be warned.

If you've swallowed my efforts to teach you how to find really good keywords, and have fallen in love with the idea of spreadsheets - I've now figured out how to make it simpler to use the results.

The other caveat is that this is a bit tougher to set up originally- but when you do, it's easy to set up everything else.

Your goal is keywords with high KEI, good traffic, and low competition. And not spend forever extracting them. And you are really only using affordable (or free) tools to determine your natural SEO keywords.

The recipe:

Your raw ingredients are Google's Adword KeywordExternalTool, RankTracker, OpenOffice Suite (haven't tried this with the Word Suite), and Web1Marketing's Keyword Competition Estimator.
You research your keywords from Google, dump these into RankTracker to find their KEI and WordTracker associated terms, and then dump these results into an OpenOffice spreadsheet (as linked above). This new version means you don't have to do anything to them until after you have the spreadsheet - all big and raw and filled with stuff you don't need.
OpenOffice has a database (called Base, of all things) which you can use to do all your calculations. Simply set up queries with your parameters (I'll remind you what they need to be in a second - hang on there) and then set up reports which the queries produce.
The queries:

Sort by KEI: less than 2.0 - these keywords you won't be using, but need a list to check when you're copywriting.
Sort by Competition: greater than 4 million, KEI: greater than 2.0, and Length: less than 3 - these results give you likely major keywords.
Sort by KEI: greater than 2.0, Competition: less than 4mil, # of Searches (traffic): greater than 100 - these results are your likely niche keywords. This is what you will author content for.
Sort by KEI: greater than 2.0, Competition less that 4mil, # of Searches less than 100 and greater than 20 - this gives you your lower traffic sub-niche which you work on after you've filled the top niche keywords with content (or if that is all you get for this niche...)

Now, you can take the queries at this point and have fun. But, I'd suggest you garnish them with their actual competition:

Find your desired keywords by searching for them with "Find All" and then give their background a color. (It's a neat trick - once you've done it once, your hooked.) Remember, you're working from the good-KEI-but-too-much-competition words through your niche and sub-niche terms.
Take these one by one (sorry I haven't found a tool for this yet) and run them through Web1Marketing's tool to get their "QAT" value - in quotes, in anchor, and in text.
Then plug these in by the appropriate keyword you are looking for - all in their own column on the spreadsheet.
Repeat 2 and 3 until you have all your (colored) keywords done.
Update your queries and reports to include the QAT column.

Now you can print your reports and have fun. If you want, you can save the report in native OpenOffice Writer format and then highlight all those terms with QAT you've found - then print it off in color so you can find them easily.

With these reports, it's easy to simply work up your publishing schedule and also see what other keywords you can sprinkle into any content you have in order to get gains on those, too.

Now, I still prefer spreadsheets myself - at least at this point. But I'll probably move over to simply doing the database route, as I don't have to do all these queries manually every time I create a new spreadsheet.

The real advantage is that you can update your spreadsheet by simply running all the keywords through RankTracker any time you want to update their usefulness - and then just re-run your queries to get updated reports. The query automatically dates the report, so you're set - particularly if you run your results and print your reports the same day.

The point of all this left-brained exercise is to save you time and make your life less of a hassle.

And make it easier for you to work at getting these top keywords by grabbing their lower-end niches. Plus, be able to update your work quickly to see what you should be targeting this week.

Obviously, if you are doing this as an SEO consultant, for an Internet viral marketing campaign, then you have an incredibly valuable tool here.

(But since this blog has few subscribers right now, our little secret is safe...)

- - - -

Update (about 4 hours later):
Found out how to search for terms with wildcards (had to figure there was a way).

So now you can add to the above to look for certain phrases within your spreadsheet base.

Meaning, you take the top single- and double-term items to winnow out just the top keywords you want to rank for. Then put these as part of the search so you wind up with lists of only the ones you want.

What this is then great for is combining several searches and using the database to crunch the terms instead of RankTracker (which runs on Java and so is only as fast as the amount of memory and CPU size you have onboard.) In other words, basically - slow. OpenOffice Base is remarkably fast with it's queries.

Now, the idea is that you take a spreadsheet and find maybe four keywords which are appropriate to your product line. Then get all the similar words and related words which help you describe it. Get RankTracker to boil these down for you and then OpenOffice to distill them into a ready package. Update that basic database once a month or once a quarter and you're set to run your campaign and keep it accurate.

[Additional: Just to give you an idea of what I'm working with, my RankTracker output rolls up to 1280 keywords right now (soon to be expanded). Within literally seconds, I can sort these down to the 14 major keywords, 50 or so niche and sub-niche KW, plus the 8 pages of alphabetical listings for terms I don't want to use. Nice. The whole cycle takes probably an hour or two to do the first time, then updating maybe 1/2 hour once a month.

Sounds like I could really open up a paid service if I wanted to... Because all I have to do to take any other set of keywords from a spreadsheet is to set up another database and then copy the SQL formulas over. Sounds far more nerdy/geeky than it is.]

Great stuff, eh? Let the computers do your work for you, so you can simply concentrate on polishing your natural SEO content.

Cheers - and Good Hunting!

Use Reverse-Cialdini to Stop Telemarketers

2009-03-08T17:17:00.002-05:00

Cialdini's data is enough to stop telemarketers from exploiting you.

The trick is that the 6 points Dr. Robert Cialdini mentions in his "Influence" classic - if known by the individual and consciously used - explain all sales pitches, advertising, and sales campaigns. And if you have studied them carefully, will actually start to free you up from the "Sheep-think" which too often paralyzes our decision-making.

But all, yes - all, advertizing and sales pitches have most or all of Cialdini's 6 points in them. And they are all designed to hit those beloved Madison-Avenue triggers which tend to make us respond in one way or another.

The advise is to get his book (which has far more useful examples than these short lists which are broiling around on the Internet). Then study it completely (the 4th edition even has quizzes at the end of each chapter.) And be prepared to start re-evaluating your purchases (and how you vote for what).

Oh yes, you'll save quite a bunch of dough doing this as well...

How to Stop Telemarketers: Where to Complain

2009-03-04T06:17:00.002-06:00

Stop Telemarketers by Complaining

Oddly, this is also the way you can get a refund if you've been scammed.

Just a short post today, though you can expect more in the near future as this personal campaign ramps up.

http://www.elsop.com/wrc/complain.htm - is a long list of internet links on where you can complain.

http://www.fraudbureau.com/midlink/enforcement.html - is a longer list of police and legal authorities you can complain to about a specific firm.

And you can always tell the credit card you've been frauded and request a charge-back - but I'll tell you more about this as I research it (and apply it to my own scene.)

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #8 - How much is enough ecommerce leverage?

2009-02-27T18:06:00.007-06:00

(photocredit: annia316)

How much do you really need? Depends...

Marketing is a numbers scene. Really. Look, I've told you about the Bell Curve and Leverage. They work together.

You're going to need several hundred products offered at a price which will give you, on average, your targetted weekly income. Figure about 300-500 products, selling for $10-$30 or more.

Reason? Bell Curve. About 3-5% of your customers will buy. About 20% of those products will be producing the bulk of your sales.

500 products - 25 (5%) might sell in a given week (although 2% is more common). That will net you $200-$500 per week, @ $20/product.

Seriously. Do the math.

Does this shoot you in the get-rich-quick foot? You bet it does. How long does it take to set up several hundred products? Weeks, if not months. Do most people do this? No.

What are the exceptions to this?

Selling very high-end products to an exclusive clientele. (Radiological measuring devices to researchers.) Only have to sell one every year. But you have to really, really know your customers. Also means your operating budget runs by swings - as do your taxes if you happen to sell more than one in any fiscal year.
Having a loyal clientele which you service very, very closely. Like MAC buyers.

What do those two exceptions have in common? Having all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket very carefully.

But if you are just starting out - the trick is to build up a large inventory and track these to make sure you don't have duds in them.

What you must do at every chance is to get subscribers and take very good care of them as clients - not customers.

The numbers game tells you what the average herd/tribe "customer" reacts. But what you want to do is to get these turned into clients and have them buy on a repeating basis.

Let's look at these numbers again, saying that you have 2% turned into subscribers every week:

First week - 3% buy, 2% are now subscribing regulars.
Second week - 3% buy, plus the 2% from the week before = 5%. Another 2% added as clients.
Third week - 3% buy, plus the 4% = 7%. You now add another 2% as clients.
And so on.

So, your income in week one is, say, $300. Week two - $500. Week three - $700.

Does this work out exactly like that? No. But having recurring customers does make your income go up - and is the only reason that people really get more than 2-5% on any offering, any sales page.

There is the odd "fluke" where a person gets 50% conversion from a single product - but what did that person do? He found a niche of clients who buy anything having to do with a certain product or brand. He tapped into an already converted body of clients - which someone else did all the work to create. Fads are made of this. What kills a fad? Lots of salespeople climbing in and poorly servicing the existing clients.

Too simple? Maybe.

My own research into people who don't make it in Internet Marketing and small business tends to show this simple pattern. Would you shop in a store if it only stocked one type of bread, one brand of cereal and one fruit? Big store - three products. Nope - stores know this, especially the Big-Box boys, like Wal-Mart.

Does the reverse work? Sure - a great bicycle store has what? Lots and lots of different brands of bicycles AND a great bicycle repairman - plus a policy that if you bought it here, repair parts are at cost and labor is free. (And would you like a ringing bell and larger tires to go with that?)

So, starting out, what do you need to do? Get tons of products, great sales pages for each one, everyone tied to their appropriate niche keywords. Make sure that people can subscribe to your site in a dozen ways, especially through email. And then really, really service that client you have and bend over backwards to make sure they are completely satisfied with what they have gotten from you in the past.

But the guys who expect to get rich quick are doing what? Putting up some expensive PPC ads for just a few products and quitting after they don't sell well. You can lose your shirt on eBay just in their fees - if you don't know what you are doing. But the guys who have made it to Power Seller status (which is a measly $1K per month - not enough to live on) are selling hundreds of items - not just a few. They can't sell a hundred of one item every week at any decent price. (But telemarketer scammers know this and sell eBay training to people who can't make that training work - and oh, yes, these scammers tell people to buy a lot of PPC ads...)

To be successful on eBay, you have to offer hundreds of items and expect that, by averages, you will get maybe 30-50% successful auctions every week. After fees and other expenses, you should eventually start to make a living off eBay. But track your other costs - how long does it take to track, return email, package, ship, give feedback on a couple hundred diverse items? That's right - if you're lucky, you'll get them all done in time to start the next week. You'll have to have time to research existing items and always hunt for new ones. Expensive in terms of time and money overheads.

In short, making a living on eBay is just as much hard work as it is anywhere else.

The people who don't want to work hard don't make it. They need the government subsidies and factory jobs - lots of structure. Entrepreneurs are driven to succeed by fulfilling their own burning desires - they are doing what they really want to be doing in life. And so they become their own boss and sell their products to the people who work in factories and get paid for spending their lives there.

Only 3% make it. That's the way its set up. And the way it's always been, no matter what type of government, what party is in charge, dictatorship, democracy, anarchy. The only thing different is that people can make a lot more money in a free-market economy. More people don't become outrageously successful, but the overall standard and quality of living is much higher.

Bell Curve. Leverage.

Use them and win.

And - oh, yes - Follow your Bliss.

- - - -

Disagree? Post your comment, please. I'd love to hear from you.

- - - -
Update - a few minutes later:

Oh - found a hole in this math. If you have one customer - they have to look at all 500 items. Won't happen.

This is figuring that you have 100 customers looking at each of your 500 products.

Obviously, if you only have a handful of viewers, you'll have 3% of a handful of conversions - maybe one a month. 12 sales a year won't pay your bandwidth.

That's why PPC works, somewhat. It can get people to your site - and has a much wider audience than you could find on your own.

But, say you put a video up for each product on YouTube, or a presentation up on slideshare (even better). Means you can get hundreds of people looking at your stuff.

That's why eBay is used by scammers to get people hooked. Millions of potential customers searching for stuff - they are mostly pre-sold already. Easy to get started. However, the people fail when they build their own site and they find that they can't 1) get people to their site in any volume, and 2) get any decent percentage of those few to convert.

The scam training says to a) get your buyers to come to your site to buy there (which ebay really discourages), or b) set up an (expensive) eBay storefront.

The one success I've seen is to sell a CD on eBay which sends the person online and gets their email with a free subscription to a "members only" site - and that follows the above scenario I laid out. Get your customers converted over to subscribers. And use eBay as a lead generation site. The more of these CD's you sell (this was burned on a local machine with a paste-on label and mailed regular first class - all for $14, an overhead of maybe a buck-fifty. And if they had offerered me more than just what-goes-for-average service I might have kept up subscribing to their emails.)

[And note, the scammers don't tell you how to get subscribers to your email autoresponder. Or anything about RSS subscriptions or social media subscribers...]

And that is the crux of Internet Marketing. It's a numbers game - and those who are in the top positions of the search engines get the bulk of the traffic. The other option is to pay high eBay and PPC fees so people will come and buy your stuff. Your choice - spend more time getting top SERPs or pay more money to get their faster.

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #7 - Wordpress, SEO, and technical hocus-pocus

2009-02-25T04:13:00.007-06:00

(photo credit: augustinrouchon)
All things build in Wordpress SEO marketing - especially for small businesses.

(Warning: technical search engine optimization verbiage ahead - not for the faint at heart...)

Your blog has to have good content, but it also reflects your business plan. Like the Russian nested dolls (matryoshka's), everything builds around the earlier one.

This is one thing that has kept me from really building out my own sites, that I kept finding another doll inside the one I was working with. Right now, I think I'm close to the smallest possible one.

Now: follow this chain of thought -

Each product line you have - and we are talking mostly info products, although this is applicable widely - should have it's own mail-list (autoresponder series, or A/R).
These product lines build into your product funnel. Cross-sales and up-sales. "Would you like fries with that?" and "Supersize your order?"
As well, if you can set up mini-sites for each product line, that drives both SEO/linklove and keeps product lines distinct.

However, if you have a single Wordpress-driven site (and this is currently the best and easiest way to build sites), you have a common template for all pages. Means you can only promote a single A/R opt-in - or nothing.

The solution is to do custom templates and set up every category as a subdomain.

This essentially gives you a mini-site, since (for the time being) Google classifies each subdomain as it's own domain. Of course, they are all on the same IP address, so you won't get the real linklove you deserve - but organizationally, this starts to un-nest those dolls... Here's how it works:

Get a plug-in to make your categories into subdomains (there are several out there - I'm still evaluating them).
Set a custom template for each one. Means you can put an opt-in form for that product on that set of pages.
Your category pages then talk about a specific product line - in my case, it's best seller famous authors who have written self-improvement books. (At that link, you may find I haven't implemented this yet - life itself is a work in progress, and this blog is to brief you on the news as I find it - excuses, excuses. )

Now, this doesn't mean you can't have a static landing page. Just write a static page with your sales pitch and then set it to be a daughter page (junior) to another page on the site. (I'm not a big fan of landing pages, since I tell people how they work on my marketing sites. I then have to be far more honest and less hype-driven. Once you know how sales pages work, they are ineffective - but there is always the Collier method...)

Your external articles, remote blogs, other video content - all these can now link to your subdomain - or within that to a specific post. Or they can link to a specific static page, which then links to that subdomain (which might even get you more linklove).

The idea is to make it as simple as possible for your viewers and for the search engines.

Search engines see: keyword-subdomain.memorable-domain.com/keywordphrase.php

Because you set your Wordpress Blog to lay out the category and post title in the permalinks - and your categories become the subdomain.

With me so far? OK, so I need to do a complete write up on this at some point with sequences and everything - and as I re-release the Online Millionaire Plan (under different title, same brand), I'll get this out to you. (And as you subscribe to this blog, you can be the first to know...)

But your categories are your main keywords, right? How do you know that you have the right categories before you make them into subdomains?

Next point: supercharging your keyword lists with RankTracker

(That link above tells you briefly how and why to use RankTracker - and I really probably owe you a video on this.)

I was messing around a couple of days ago and found how to pick your categories when you're looking for keywords.

Simply, I was wanting to see how usable two keywords were. However, they gave me tons of new stuff. And within that new stuff were more categories I could use.

Essentially, you look up your keywords in the Google Adwords KeywordExternalTool, then get these text files and drop them into RankTracker. This program then finds your KEI - you then take anything above 100 and run it through Suggest->WordTracker and find the related high KEI terms. Copy/paste these into a spreadsheet and sort - at least that was the earlier method.

Now: watch closely...

Taking that whole set of keywords once you're finished finding keywords with the WordTracker step - now, take out your low KEI and low traffic keywords. Save your work.
Copy/paste the whole long link into your spreadsheet (I use OpenOffice - your mileage may vary.)
At this point, you can search within OpenOffice for keywords ("find all") and then assign a background color to that series of KW. Makes your spreadsheet look very nice and easy to see relative values of keywords to each other - even if they are disrelated. But hang on there...
Sort by competition and insert a row between everything above 3mil. Color it something distinctive. Now sort everything above that color bar by KEI, first by number of keywords in ascending order and then by KEI in descending order. What you wind up with is high KEI terms which have too much competition. (You have the spreadsheet do both sorts at once, so your 1-word KW's show up in KEI order above you 2-word KW's, etc.)
Now, take each of those terms at it's base ("biblical" and "bible" have "bibl" as a base, "christian" and "christ" have "christ" as a base) and search for these in RankTracker. This gives you all related terms which a search engine will also find.
Copy/paste your search results into a second sheet on the spreadsheet - one after the one you put the entire list on. Rename it with the keyword base you just searched for.
Do this for all the top KEI single-term keywords you found. Each base term gets its own page on the spreadsheet - just add more until you have everything you want.
Then sort out the pages by competition, then by KEI and you'll have what you want. (See the note below on this sequence if this is new to you.)

And you now have your publishing sequence. Work from the top down with articles and blog posts, etc. and you'll then take over that high KEI single term keyword as you take over the smaller niches.

Discussion

Where you find a high KEI search term that has few subordinate long-tail niches, you can skip it. Example: "Spirituality" search gives "healing", which gives "crystals". Related terms also gives you "crystal meth", "Crystal Gunn" (porn star) and "crystal balls". While crystal ranks high, if you take this down to only healing-related keyword phrases, you have little to work with. If you want to talk about crystal balls, there's a lot to talk about. Otherwise, no. "Bible" on the other hand, is massive with ripe keyword phrase niches. (But it's been around some 4,000 years...)

So your base terms (tidied up for your viewers - add the 'e' back to Bible) become your categories. Your long-tail niche keywords are the basis for your post names. As your categories become your subdomains - Google then thinks this particular (subdomain) site is all about Bibles, since every post on it discusses some other aspect about Bibles. And linklove is spread all around, since you will have pagerank just for that subdomain - while your crosslinks then share it with your ecommerce site.

And as you do your keyword searches, you'll find more categories - which can simply be added to your site, and they can be turned into subdomains, etc. etc.

That's a bit thick above, but when you do it for yourself, it becomes very clear. (Yes, I need to do a video on this, don't I? Well, as I can get to it, I will - look for the revamped Online Millionaire Plan coming to an embedded YouTube video near you...)

The point is that now you don't have to guess at what categories to use. You simply go after the top keywords by publishing effective content, properly optimized, which takes over the long-tail niche phrases. These then start ranking you higher for the high-competition, shorter keywords.

And since your subdomain is (currently) given the importance of a site, you are now creating a niche site just for that exact keyword. Google will love you for this one.

With separate templates for each subdomain, you can tweak up these subdomains to actually look like different sites - like mini-sites - and have them all crosslink neatly.

(And if you really wanted to take this right on out, you'd set up WordPress MU for a multi-user environment - and then you'd really have separate mini-sites for each product. But your maintenence costs - in terms of time - really expands with this idea. By having everything on one blog, you can then simply add more content without having to log into each blog, etc. I guess you could do it as an administrator...)

Subdomains with custom templates look to be the most elegant application at this point.

Linklove - Google treats these as separate domains, each cross-linking, so greater trusted authority for each.
Segregated product lines - so you can actually maintain several diverse lines without conflict. Someone who knows all about Dogs isn't expected to know much about Bibles.
Customized user experience, so you can tweak each subdomain template to get better conversions without changing your main template.

But you still have to surf each subdomain as a newby user and see that the way you have your template makes sense for that subject area - "sense" is what the viewer expects to find.

- - - -

Setting up your spreadsheet to make the best of your keywords from RankTracker.

Here's the sequence:

You have your spreadsheet and RankTracker open, with your keywords searched the way you like them.
In RankTracker, delete any keywords less than 2.0 in KEI and less than 20 in traffic. Don't delete anything else.
Now, copy and paste the entire KW list into your spreadsheet (the registered/paid version of RankTracker allows you to do this...)
Sort your whole list on the spreadsheet by competition, ascending (biggest toward the bottom).
Insert a (colored) row between everything above 4 million.
Select and sort only that bottom section by KEI, descending (biggest toward the top).
Sort everything above that bar by traffic, descending.
Insert a row at less than 100, and then color it.
Sort this middle section by KEI, descending.
Now, sort the top section by KEI, descending.

What do these sections mean?

Bottom section gives you your top keywords to take over.
Top section gives you the sequence of content to publish to do that.
Middle section is full of "less profitable niches" as traffic is lower - so you have to write more content to get the same amount of total traffic. But competition is waaaay lower, so...

Why these arbitrary numbers?

About 1 percent of sites are properly/accidentally optimized. By taking 3 million competing , you will wind up (roughly) with 30K pages to compete with (WordTracker says that's a niche). Analyzing the top 10 out of these sites will give you what you need to do to compete with/out-create them effectively.
You want at least 100 per day coming to your site. But the smaller traffic niches also usually have much lower competition - so if you can crank out pages, you'll be able to do five times the pages and have many times greater response. (Some niches actually have no sites optimized for them - easy pickings.)
If it doesn't have KEI above 2.0 or better, it's not worth your time. Some say 3.0 - but I've found that this throws out some hot sub-niches and can really limit your ideas for content.
You can pick any numbers you want, though. Try them out and you'll see what works best for you.

- - - -

OK? Well, I've got to run - a lot of content to produce on top of everything I'd already scoped out.

If you have a better idea or just think this is crock - feel free to comment...

Hot Search Engine Keyword Niche Tip - Getting keywords from news

2009-02-16T18:45:00.004-06:00

Getting hot keyword niches from the news

Just a fast one for you. I outlined a way to get hot keywords from the news before.

But this was limited, since I haven't found a good keyword extraction tool. Most give you gobble-de-gook, which you then have to sort through.

Today, I tried a different approach:

On a top website (I tried US News and World Report), look for their most visited and most emailed stories.
Scrape these and drop into Google's Adword KeywordExternalTool.
Now you have the synonyms which are a gold mine.
Get the text file and drop into RankTracker to find the KEI.
Take off the low KEI (>2.0) and high competition (>3 or 4 million).
What's left is the top niches of the week.

I wound up with about 8 decent keywords (out of 190+ that Google gave me).

However, when you run these through Web1Marketing's Keyword Competition Estimator for exact phrase, intitle, and inanchor - you wind up finding that these terms may or may not be really all that hot.

Exact competition for three of them still wound up with over 120K in competition -and this is real competition.

Next step, if you have a product or a pressing interest, would then be to take those 8 terms and through them through Google's tool again to find the sub niches. And you can do them one at a time, since you only get 200 terms each time you try.

Then, take the sub niches and promote to them - which will eventually get you top standing in these 8 high KEI terms we just found.

Now for my use, this is just fine - since I'll then use these phrases as inspiration for cartoons. But I'd be better off also going that route, because social media can get buried as well. And this digresses.

But really for me, I'd probably do something like log into FriendFeed and take their most popular stories of the week and run those titles through Google/Ranktracker/Web1Marketing - because these are a bit more real than the news. (Propeller or NewsVine look most promising at this point - as some of this other doesn't look to be all that useful. Haven't tested it, though.)

Anyway, it's interesting to see what the Google Adwords Tool can do...

Moving On - Life after Small Business Online Marketing

2009-02-16T15:51:00.002-06:00

(photo credit: mikebaird)

Even small business online marketing can come to an end.

So happy and sad now - it's time to move along.

That last post of mine really struck a cord with me. Like it did the first time.

"What would you be doing in life if you didn't really have to be doing something someone else wanted you to be doing?" is another phrase for it.

If you live life through thinking that you "owe" it to someone to do something or other, then the shoe is on the wrong foot. Sure, you do things always just to be helpful and make sure people are finding the best ways for themselves.

But if the help you're giving doesn't really ring your own gong - who are you doing it for?

Another one: What really winds up your own clock?

What have you always wanted to be, do, or accomplish, or achieve?

What activities do you work at which always cheer you up?

What activities do you do which always cheer others up around you - and keep them that way?

What are your own unique skill-sets which set you apart?

And - is there one reply which fits all of these above questions?

If there is - then how could you do this for the rest of your life? Would you find yourself completely happy doing it from here on out?

Now, if these above questions strike a chord - then refer to that earlier post on finding your own passion/purpose/lifestream and go right out and start taking the steps to do this.

That's what I'm going to do.

So this blog now will start dropping from my priorities - as I've really already said everything you need to get going with - if you just read these 169 posts, along with the 55 post of An Online Millionaire Plan - the blog and the few volumes of An Online Millionaire Plan - the book series.

I've laid out more there than anyone else has in one spot, believe me.

And here's the offer, if you find this stuff useful and want to use this stuff to create your own brand of marketing - contact me via robertworstell.com Things can be worked out. I've done everything I needed to on this and just want to turn it all over. Sure, I thought that I could help a lot of people out by laying out how this could be done and help them find new jobs and so on - but really, my own medicine tastes best.

What am I off to do?

Actually, besides farming, I'm going to draw cartoons and write childrens' stories. My idea of fun.

Sure, I've got a lot of studying to do now, but heck, that's nothing new. The bulk of my work (how people think, plus how to get them to buy your stuff) is behind me. Now it's really down hill.

Wish me luck - I've already done the same for you.

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #6 - The reason you're here and what keeps you going

2009-02-15T17:13:00.002-06:00

(photo credit: piccadillywilson)
What passion or purpose drives you to succeed in your small business?

Whatever keeps you up at night, what you think about every spare moment, what makes you smile at odd hours - this is the "burning desire" (as Napoleon Hill put it) that actually makes your success. Ignoring, combating, or resisting this line of thought actually causes the stress in your life, affects your health, makes your life miserable.

No, it's not your spouse, your in-laws, your current boss, or the government tax bureau that is causing you all the anxiety and lack of sleep.

You just need to get on with what you should have been doing all the time.

And you know what this is. No "down deep" about it. It's what's been nagging you in both good times and bad. Think about it even slightly - and you'll see that there is something you'd really like to be doing.

A cousin of mine once said to me, "If you didn't have to do anything at all for anybody, what would you do for a living?"

Oddly, I wound up doing just that - some 30 years later. But I quit listening to the "now I'm supposed to's" coming from everyone and their brother/sister/uncle/aunt. I started just doing what I wanted to do. It meant quitting my job, relocating half-way across the country, taking up a new life in my home town and a series of entry-level jobs, getting several degrees (at least until I found out it wouldn't get my anything but stuck in another rut-job) - until I finally got the freelance job of my dream, which I'm doing right now. Plenty of time to figure out and implement a plan to make the fortune I've always wanted and deserved - but never took the necessary steps to achieve.

You can, too.

No, you don't have to be as drastic as I was. I tell people to keep their day jobs now. Just figure out where you want to really be and start taking all that extra time you currently spend watching TV - and start your own business, the one you've really wanted. You might even be doing it as a hobby right now.

Whatever it is, work out a simple plan to really operate it as a business.
Draw up a schedule you can stick to - those are your business hours, even if it's only at night or only on the weekend, or a mix of both.
Set up an area which is only used for that business. Basement, garage, den - whatever. Don't do anything else except business there. Don't allow anyone to use it for anything else.
Work up metrics you can keep that will track your progress toward your goal. Just like you have to do at your day job - or if you're retired, like you used to have to keep. These you'll keep for yourself - they'll mean a whole lot more, too.
That means you are going to have to set some annual and quarterly goals for yourself. The metrics will show you if you are getting close to that dream of yours.
Now, get that product you can make or create or sell for someone else - and get busy getting your production created and sold. Even if on eBay. Get some income coming in.
Then work up what you have to do in order to keep this going and expand it so you can actually make a living at it. Be realistic. You'll have to decide what to give up temporarily or altogether in order to create the success you've always wanted.
But ensure you save time out of that schedule for yourself and your family. This isn't another drudgery. It's a new life. So keep your new life livable.
And keep these plans to yourself - unless your spouse is going to help you in the business and you both share the same dream together. Ignore the catcalls at work. Just go on with that great, calm, cheerful expectancy that everything is working out just as it should. (Like the old phrase, "Smile, it makes them wonder what you've been up to.")

OK?

Great. See you at the top...

PS. And if you are already working at that dream job, or have your own business and are a going success - Fantastic. Now, how about helping someone else kick over their traces and start living their own dream?

Small Business Marketing Mix: How to get your startup profitable

2009-02-15T09:09:00.004-06:00

(photo credit: emdot)

Marketing Mix: How to get your startup small business (more) profitable.

I've covered before how to leverage your product income, as well as the real basics to economics. But unfortunately, I can't find these links for you.

Let's recap (quickly):
I. Economics consists of four inter-related functions, not just two as is taught -

Supply
Demand
Information
Service

Defined:

Supply means having a valuable product, but also covers how much competition you have - if you are selling a commodity product (and so have to compete on price as well.)
Demand - is anyone actually looking for your product and how much can they afford to pay for it.
Information - are you actively promoting this product so people can find you?
Service - are you delivering high quality, or schlock?

These inter-relate: More promotion will increase demand. Low-quality will decrease demand - and if you are selling tainted peanut butter, can decrease supply as well. Non- or slow-delivery will decrease demand for your product. Information: An incorrect price (too high or too low) can affect demand.

Lately, I found there are some other terms floating around, which also describe and actually combine economics and leverage - called Marketing Mix. While I have to do another post to actually define this in non-gobbledygook language, you can see that these four economic principles above are actually a very workable description of how to set up your own marketing mix.

II. Income Leverage - Most marketing is based on simple math - and is a numbers game. Some relevant facts:

The bell curve predicts that most of your buying public will be only consumers (until you turn them into subscribing clients).
Additionally, this predicts you will have a base conversion of 2-3% (if you make no hideous errors in your sales copy.)

Your profit (or any retailer) is dependent on a simple formula:

Leveraged Sales - Overhead
- or -

(Products x Sales x Outlets) - Overhead

Definitions:

Products: Number of products you are offering.
Sales: Number of sales you get per week or per day.
Outlets: Do you only have one website?
Overhead: Cost of doing business (payroll, webhosting, taxes).

Examples:

When you are selling one product per week on one site, you have a leverage of 1.
If you increase the volume of that products sales to 100 per week on that website, you have a leverage of 100.
When you routinely sell 20 products 100 times per week - this increases to 2,000.
If you get 100 affiliates selling your product, your leverage is now 200,000.

Now subtract your overhead and you'll see that a brick-and-mortar store selling one product per week will have to sell a very expensive product to cover it's costs. This would be a high-end luxury car, or an expensive dress or suit. If you are selling one product on the web, you only have to cover your item cost, shipping, plus your web host. Online is obviously cheaper.

Sell an info product which is instantly delivered and is created digitally when it is sold - and your overhead is mostly just your web host cost.

However, when you use affiliates to sell your stuff and give away 50% of your sales price as a commission, then you are trading half your profit on those sales - which you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. So if you sell 2,000 info products yourself at $20 each, that's $40,000 profit. If you get 100 affiliates to sell them at half price, you just increased your profit by $200,000. But you didn't have to do anything except set up your affiliate sales to pay their commission after you delivered the product. $160,000 increase in profit over doing it all yourself.

Now, here's the Marketing Mix.

That post on the bell curve above covers why you want to move over to subscribers. Your conversion rate goes up from an average 2-3% upwards to above 50% or more.

This means that every time you add a new product to your shopping cart (and promote it to your list), you aren't just increasing your leverage value by 1 or 1,000 - you are also increasing it by a percentage of the number of people on your list. So the new formula becomes:

([Products x Sales x Outlets] x Subscribed Clients) - Overhead = Profit

And guess what - your affiliate sales outlets also have lists. So if you tell them about your new product (and send them one so they can see how good it is), then this can take your profits into a completely new range.

Assuming 50% of the subscribers buy - and say cumulative you have about 100,000 subscribed clients between you and your affiliates - so take a new $20 product and figure that on release day, you'll have about $20 x 50,000 = $100,000+ profit in about 24-48 hours.

And now you see how Rich Sheflin, Jack Humphrey, and some of these big-name marketing guys can rake in the dough by simply releasing a new product 5 or 6 times per year. All info products and mostly sheer profit. The rest of the time, they sell their "velvet rope" subscriptions so people can have "exclusive" access to their new products (and almost guarantee they will buy them at a "discount" in advance of the sales date). Humphrey used to sell a subscription to over 3,000 people at around $90 per month. A clean $3.24M income - and he worked hard to make sure those people got good value for that money, plus was able to afford a small crew working to provide that value. (A couple of $50,000 yearly salaried programmers wouldn't take too much of a bite out, would it? Or give them a percentage of the profit instead - keeps them looking to see how they could improve things to increase monthly, quarterly, and annual profit...)

Do the numbers on that: $100,000 6 times a year = $600K. Add in the subscriber monthly fees - and you get nearly $4 million in gross income per year. Overhead might run a quarter of that or less, so you have about $3mil profit every year. Not that this happens overnight, but certainly it is possible - as outlined above.

Now, there are a lot more details to this. And I hope to go into these in later posts, time and inspiration permitting...

III. Putting this into use for yourself or your company:

For the small business owner, or someone considering a start up, this means a couple of things to increase your profits:

Keep adding quality products every week (that's 50 or so additional products per year!)
Continue promotions and add to these so more people can find your site.
Get all possible new and existing customers to sign up for your mailing list.
Get your new products up on affiliate sites as quickly as possible.

Good Hunting - and good profits!

Natural SEO Tips - Keyword selection the easy way

2009-02-14T12:51:00.002-06:00

(photo credit: .Bala)
Getting on your Natural SEO highway with easy keyword selection

Natural SEO really means finding what people are looking for/talking about and then putting an offer in front of them that's a real solution or improvement to their situation. Highways go somewhere - but with a map or not, you have to pick where you are going to travel before you get in the car and start driving.

I've covered before about using Ranktracker to find you top keywords cheaply and quickly.

In that method, I tell you to search for your keywords and then dump them into a spreadsheet so you can organize them better.

Just to recap how you organize these in that spreadsheet:

Remove anything with a KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index) less than 2.0 or traffic less than 20.
Sort by competition (low at top to high at bottom)and insert a row at about 3 million.
Now, sort the fields above by traffic (high to low) and then insert a row at about 100.
You now have three sections to your spreadsheet. Sort each of these separately by KEI, high to low.

This refines what I've laid out earlier.

Your first section is your prime search engine marketing niches. Not too much competition (in real terms, about 1 percent of your traffic on average is going to be anywhere near effectively optimized - and with social media promotion, you can quickly rise to the top of a 30K field) and sufficient traffic to make it worth your while.

Second section is the small niches which might add up to decent traffic at some point. You'll see here that the competition for these is much, much smaller. But if you have 20 visitors per keyword, you are going to need to keep up at least 5 niches in order to accumulate 100 visitors weekly. The trade off for lower competition is you have to invest more content.

Third section is the high KEI, high competition terms. Too much traffic to make headway with directly. But you target these by taking the smaller niches on one, by one.

How this works:

Once you've done many, many researches using Google Adwords KeywordExternalTool and RankTracker, you've now saved a lot of various terms for your product. All these keywords are somehow applicable to what you're targeting as a product. Take all these terms from these various spreadsheets and copy just the terms, pasting them back into RankTracker.

Do a new KEI update. Take anything over 100 and run through WordTracker Suggest (inside RankTracker) for any related terms. Now, weed out the obviously inapplicable terms while you still have them in RankTracker (I really have to do a video to show you how easy this is) and then copy the whole data set over into a new spreadsheet (or a new page on that spreadsheet).

Organize them into the three sections above.

Using your "Find" function, go down to the bottom section and start looking for the one- and two-term keywords with high KEI (and too much competition) - put that term into your Find and "Find All" occurances of that term. This will highlight all your niche phrases that contain that keyword. Here you can turn all these cells some light pastel color background to set them apart. (I'm doing this in OpenOffice, your mileage may vary in MSWord.)

Do the same for what you see as base keywords which are showing up in the two sections above. You'll probably have three to five base keywords which repeat several times in the sections above them.

Why you are selecting these is to figure out which niches you are going to write content for first. As you write killer link-bait for each of these long-tail niches and swamp the competition for that niche, you then start rising much higher for that Short Head keyword with all the competition sites.

This of course means that you are keeping in all the other basics of SEO, such as including your keyword phrase in title, headings, alt tags, and links.

Using these tools can actually start laying out how to approach your marketing - and make it easy in the process. Because you can basically ignore the items (at least for now) in that list which are great KEI, but don't add up to taking over a Short Head keyword.

How I found this was because I didn't feel I really had enough descriptive keywords for the product I was about to launch. But I had lots of spreadsheets laying around my hard-drive - so I gathered these up and ran them through the above sequences. By pushing all my keyword lists into one location, I could then talk about the same subject through different viewpoint - each content piece now designed to take over a niche keyword. (When do you quit writing on a specific long tail keyword phrase? When you run out of content, or your articles start taking more than one place in the SERPs, ie. you have achieved the top of that competition slot.)

Now I can lay out my publishing schedule and start creating the link-bait. (Means the next step will be to adjust my feed aggregators in order to get the precise data I need to create that content.)

You only probably have to do this once. But I imagine you will want to run this list through about once per quarter to make sure the KEI is steady - and to take advantage of seasonal swings. If you can find trends (Google Trends, Google Insight) for these long tail keyword phrases, consider yourself lucky. My experience is that they mostly won't show up, except for base keywords.

(And if you wanted to get real fancy, you'd copy these spreadsheets into a database so that you could start checking trends on these long-tail keywords - because they have such low traffic and competition that Google isn't going to show these very clearly, if at all. But databases are real left-brained and we don't need to go there to get started simply.)

Hope this helps you on your Natural SEO keyword highway.

And if you have a better route, or an easier way to find these - comment away...

Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #5 - How to get started at all.

2009-02-14T09:42:00.002-06:00

(photocredit: kapungo)

Starting a Small Business Online:

You have to start by picking out a basket to put your eggs in.

Trite (but true) aphorisms:

One always learns from his mistakes.
And as well, hindsight is 20-20.
Thirdly, what you don't take care of in the beginning can set you back to the beginning.

Or you'll seem to think that. But it's not time to get depressed about things. Take stock of your resources and you'll find that you've been learning all the time. And are now in a much better condition to get really going. This next time will be faster.

I recently found myself back at doing what I should have done to begin with. However, I didn't know it at the time. The reason my sales aren't taking off is that I never set up a proper back end (terminal), followed by a regular runway, and using a definite flight plan.

The steps are simply in this sequence:

A proper back end first consists of having something valuable to offer.
Next, you set up a way to exchange for this - either affiliate sales, or dropshipping, or ecommerce.
Then, you promote this all over the place. So people can find your valuable offer and take you up on it.
And all of this is before you quit your day job.

Nothing new, perhaps. But here is something - and take this to heart:

You settle on one valuable item and
get that really moving before
you expand to another.

Sure, if it doesn't work out, then fine - start researching and picking out another. Now that you know what reasearch you need to do, the second one will be easier.

Practically, pick out your basket - one basket - and then get some eggs into it. And watch those eggs real closely

But the basket comes before the eggs (figuring that the chicken is around there somewhere - but let's not go there...) Basket first.

A. What is something valuable that you can offer to people who will exchange something with you for them?

Now, go and find out all about that item and what people think about it. Find your keywords, find your delivery methods, find out the demographics who will buy or subscribe to it. Get all this nailed down.

B. Next, figure out your delivery system. If this is an info product, figure out how you can offer it online and deliver it at very low cost - usually, this is an ecommerce site of some sort. If someone else already has that product, maybe you promote and sell it as an affiliate. Or you sel it directly and they dropship it for you. Or you buy in bulk, warehouse, and ship it yourself.

C. Third is to figure out how to promote it. Nowadays, this is best done through social media - a blog, usually - and also posted to the winds through bookmarking sites, etc. Some people tell you to use PPC (not me) to get started. And I recently found an article where the author recommended it as a temporary jump-start to get things going. (I don't tell people starting out to advertise as you can lose your budget very quickly with no results - and the best advertisement is by getting word of mouth through excellent products and delivery.)

D. Now, once you have successfully sold and delivered goods which are making you money - then expand into another (niche) line of work, another (niche) product. You use what you learned from the first time and expand. You keep producing and delivering products from the first one, but now you have some more income and probably some more time to invest in ramping up another product. This can be an additional product in the same niche, or a new product line in a new niche area. (Preferably related to the first, either in main subject, or in delivery mode - so you can use the existing shopping cart and blogs to start promoting these new products.)

Make the second line as or more successful than the first, and then start up a third. Research first, always.

As you continue to do this, life becomes simpler and more profitable.

But again: basket first, then eggs - and then to market.

- - - -

Here's the special news for all those stalwart readers who have made it this far:

I'm restarting the Online Millionaire Plan and reworking it from the bottom up. Meaning that I'm going to take all the many volumes of work I've already done so far and verifying the tests and results. And then re-release new versions with new materials. The emphasis will be on practical application for this new economic scene we just inherited. How to start or expand a small business online on a very small (tiny) budget. Step by step. I figure with all the mis-steps I've already taken, and the tons of data I've already poured through, this should be pretty valuable and useful. Emphasis will be on each step, tying it back into the overall.

And now I know how to really give value as we go, so I'll tell you the tips and secrets uncovered during this line of work.

Stay tuned to http://robertworstell.com - as this is where I'll give the core data - a lot of my peripheral blogs will be changing as I do. But I'll also tell you why and how to apply it on your own.

Good Hunting!!

Getting more marketing value from an "old" site.

2009-02-14T06:34:00.002-06:00

(photo credit: flem007_uk)

Keeping an old site isn't a mistake - throwing it away is.

For a few years, I've been blogging about an Online Millionaire Plan. Problem is, very few people are actually searching for this term. So, as a niche - it sucks. People search for "online" and "millionaire" and "plan" - but not "online millionaire", "millionaire plan", or "online plan".

However, I've managed to use this as a depository for all types of stuff which do work as I've continued to research my way out of a hole called the 9-5 job/broke-in-retirement lifestyle. And this stuff plainly works.

There's the domain name and a mini-site built up for it - as well as a series of books on Lulu.
And I was about to re-market it under another name and even give it away to someone else as an incentive for their startup. However, they backed out - and also, I realized I had invested ample link love into that domain name/mini-site. So it would be silly to trash it.

Instead, the solution: make that name a trademark brand (what, actually, is a Pilsbury or a Swanson, or a Kellogg's?) And then re-label every book with a decent niche title. Simple. Sure, redo the packaging, redo the site content - but don't throw it away.

You see, I can drive business to that site, or from that site over to my main blog by using what I've discovered on keywords and social media. And while posting all these notes to Blogger blogs hasn't helped my own set up so much, I can repurpose all of those hundreds of posts - update them and social market through them. Meanwhile, I update the basic sequence of these books and upgrade them.

That example is simply how you take the old sow's ear and make it into a "Sow's Ear(TM)" silk purse.

So - look something over carefully before you decide to ditch it. After all, Monopoly was started in the Depression and has been able to remake itself by licensing the basic trademarks - and produce an incredible new income stream. All some 70 years later....

Marketing Insight Tip #4 - Bell Curve for Small Business

2009-02-11T10:37:00.003-06:00

(photo credit: J. Phil)

How to use the Bell Curve in your small business marketing

Hope the graphic above isn't too overwhelming. It just points out the wide variety of applications for the bell curve. It's that way because this oddball curvey line describes a natural phenomenon which all businesses encounter and only a few really know and use.

Recently, I was reminded of this by some huckster I was still getting email from. He said that "this guy" was the best in writing sales letters and articles. So I checked his "this guy" out. The claim to fame was that his sales letters and landing pages routinely had a 2% conversion rate.

What he was saying was that he could write an average page and get average results consistently. Any sales page is supposed to get that type of result, almost regardless of how it's written. 2% conversion is what spam is based on. Volume contact, volume conversion - but the same percentage.

Let me introduce some numbers here:
96% - general public who are in some other niche market and who somehow found your site.
80% / 20% - attributed to an economist named Pareto, this combination tells you where the bulk (80%) of your sales are coming from and what percentage of your subscribers (20%) are making these purchases. It also tells you that most of your problems in your marketing are coming from a small percentage of areas.
3-5% - the number of people you can expect to have the best results with any line of service - these are the "rave results" you hear about (unless the guy is selling internet marketing, and has a bunch of hypesters on his page giving testimonials).

If you center these numbers along a curve, you'll see the 96%/80% in the center, with the 20% split to both sides, the 3-5% on the extreme edges. That's the Bell Curve. Now, if you set these up all from right to left, you get an exponential drop, 96-80-20-5-3%. This is the curve used to explain the Long Tail. Same numbers, different graphic.

Applications for these are numerous.

Efficiency:
Narrow down to your top 20% of your products and put 80% your marketing emphasis on these. Don't discontinue the others, unless they fall into the category of causing 80% of your problems. Focus on your bread-winning efforts - what is really bringing home the bacon. Pay attention only to the essential core of your business. Clean up the rest as needful, but never spend more than 20% of your week at these. Set those others up on near-automatic and let them run. If your metrics show they suddenly become popular, then elevate them to your 80% area. If they are consistently causing you returns/refunds, ditch them without sorrow.

Big Box:
When you concentrate on a narrow area, you have better success than using a shotgun approach. This is the secret to Long Tail marketing, and the failure of corporate businesses who try to be everything for all customers. Wal-Mart knows this. They don't carry stuff which doesn't sell and sell well. You can't get products which are either high-end (which sell far fewer, but at a higher profit margin) or extremely cheap (no profit margin unless you are a bulk reseller.)

You'll find some representative (20%?) products for most (80%?) of what you want. Sam Walton figured out long ago that you could sell a lot more for slightly less and so improve your profit margins tremendously. If you want a particular type of screw or hinge, go to a hardware store - what Wal-Mart carries are general wood screws and common butt and strap hinges to repair average jobs around the average American house or garage. You won't find fine woodworking hinges here.

Niches:
Where the small business outperforms the big box stores is in the exact niche. By finding and marketing to a specific set of people who want a particular and exact types of products, you will then be able to service these more precisely and will be rewarded with their loyalty. Corporations often confuse this one when they get "big".

I used to work for Brookstone - in their warehouse. I'd see the catalog and note that they no longer had unique tools in it - stuff that you dreamed about getting for your own shop. They only had stuff which was in other catalogs: radio-electronics, special mattresses, massage chairs. When they replaced their CEO, I wrote him a note about this. His reply was that they could no longer compete with Big Boxes and so had themed their products around home improvement. Huh?

Look, they built their brand on having unique tools for guys. And this is why their Father Day sales were great. When they expanded, they decided to go into competition with Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, etc. In other words, they decided to go Big Box. Meanwhile Duluth and other catalogs started servicing their original customers with unique tools and products. Why are they having trouble in this economy? Because they aren't selling anything essential. And any guy can tell you, having the right tool at the right time is essential - and everyone appreciates a gift. Brookstone abandoned it's successful policy and is reaping the whirlwind.

Long Tail Niches: This is where small businesses shine. Gary Vaynerchuk took his family liquor store and expanded it to a dynasty of selling wine to people online. He did it through education - infotainment. Go to his site and you'll see how he does it. (And better yet, he'll tell you how he does it.) Simple concept, brilliantly executed. Lots of people can buy different types of wine if they know which one to get for what use. The trick is that people don't know - and so make some regular videos that inform people about this area and your sales increase.

By concentrating on just wine and education, he was able to expand his family liquor store to an international success. For any small business, this means that suddenly you're not nailed down to only having the local people near your store able to access your products - you can ship these anywhere in the world. For small businesses to sell to niche consumers everywhere on the planet - this is a no-brainer. The Internet is the great equalizer - if you know how to use it.

Conversions:
Back to where we started. Look, it's a statistical phenomenon, proved over and over. Out of 100 pitches, 2-3 people will buy. Spam and telemarketing took off because they were able to lower the overhead (cost of doing business) and increased the volume dramatically. So sales picked up - dramatically. Unless you are doing something really wrong (like links that don't work), then you are going to have this type of percentage.

What you are concerned with is not so much initial conversions, but repeat traffic. These are subscribers. People who know you and your brand and keep coming back for more. When you see people say they have a "7% conversion rate", know that they have some repeat business in there. When you see "17% conversion" you know they are missing some prime "velvet-rope" opportunities - where they should be selling exclusive access to part of their site just for repeat customers.

I know this route - from working for an international corporation which dealt in self-help books, tapes, and counseling. There's been an external analysis of their production (not paid for by that corporation or connected to them) which found that about 70-80% of their initial course completions left after the first service. (That's a 2-3 day course, given for a couple of hours a day when the person can fit it in after work or during the day. Cheap - about $50, plus course materials.) Now, another 10% left in the first year. By year three, they lost about 97% of the people who had walked in their door for one reason or another. But they made their weekly millions off the 3% which was left. Those generally spent between $50K and $100K over the next 5 years. Each. They were put into more and more exclusive areas and paid more and more. By the time they got to the top, they had each personally invested millions (literally) in services and materials to that corporation. All on a "velvet rope" subscriber basis.

That corporation didn't really need the bulk of their prospects that walked in the front door. They just became extremely efficient for the few who had the money that corporation needed. Now, I don't think they've really done this analysis themselves, or they'd see how their marketing (something along the lines of your money is going to saving this planet as we expand internationally) is really false. And they'd also see that they are throwing away more than they're making. But it keeps the few continuing to buy in. And to that corporation, perhaps, marketing (and their millions in weekly income) is all that counts.

How you can put this to use:
OK, I've gone on too long in this area for most readers. What I'm saying here is that

the small guy can do whatever the big guy is doing, with the leverage of the Internet.
Just make sure that you are getting a broad exposure (cast a wide net) while concentrating on a smallish niche which is profitable.
And cherish your repeat clients.

Warren Buffet says (who is actually quoting Andrew Carnegie, who got it from someone else): "You can put all your eggs in one basket - you just have to watch that basket real closely."

Good luck - and good hunting!