Friday, June 29, 2007

1and1 Hosting now offering mailing lists and accepting Paypal!

You might know that I'm a big fan of 1and1 hosting for several reasons. They're not only incredibly cheap, but they offer more features and bonuses than any other host I've ever seen. Perhaps that's why they're the largest web host in the world (that also reassures me that they're not going to disappear overnight).

If you've read my past reviews of them, you'd know that they offer hundreds of dollars in pay-per-click advertising credits for free, free domain names, hundreds of dollars worth of software (and good software, like GoLive for website editing, which normally costs a few hundred alone -- believe me, I paid a few hundred for it before knowing about this!), etc..

Whether you're going for shared hosting or a dedicated server, I've never seen their offers beat by any host out there (and their support rocks too -- other hosts don't even offer support for VPS or dedicated servers).

Now that I'm done bragging about them, I just wanted to announce that 1and1 is now accepting Paypal payments, which is big news for a lot of people who either only use Paypal or just prefer paying everything with their Paypal accounts.

On top of that, 1and1 hosting also announced that they've added a mailing list feature to their packages (for free). You can now have up to five separate mailing lists where you can put pre-made sign up forms on your websites, import e-mail addresses if you wish, and mail out your list as many times as you wish.

This is great news for those who don't want to drop a small fortune on autoresponders just yet, but who still want to take advantage of mailing lists. I still recommend GetResponse for marketers who are more serious about getting into autoresponders and mailing lists (it's really the best bet you can do), but I know that not everyone wants to spend that much right away or jump into it that much right off the bat.

So if you don't have a web host yet, or if you want to upgrade to a better one, I highly suggest checking out 1and1 Hosting right now (some of their plans are under $5 a month and still include a couple of free domain names, PPC credits, software, etc.). But if you want to have a killer combination of a host and an autoresponder, check out 1and1 and GetResponse together.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Article Marketing -- Conspiracy or Legit?

I should warn you that what you're about to read might be very controversial for some of you. Afterall, many of you have been taught the opposite, and many big name internet marketers are more than happy to convince you that what you know is indeed a fact. I want to encourage you to read what I have to say here with an open mind and a little bit of logic and reasoning.

If you've been doing online marketing for more than a day, you've probably heard about article marketing (writing articles to submit to article directories in hopes of getting some traffic, links, and the article itself ranked well in the search engines). There are tons of guides out there on it, as well as several gurus swearing by their success.

Some entire internet marketing techniques (even some very popular ones) are based solely on article marketing.

There are TONS of PLR membership sites that hand out articles, thousands of writers willing to ghost write articles for you, etc.. Clearly article marketing is here to stay, and there are a lot of people who might not like what I'm about to say due to them making money on what's widely believed.

If you ask a real SEO expert about article marketing, you'll find that many of them don't like it too much. Sure, you CAN get some links, even some traffic from it, but you're always trying to get readers of that article to go to your site (so you can make a sale, get a subscriber to your mailing list, or do whatever you want to do with the visitors to your site).

Here's a thought -- instead of focusing so much on article marketing and submitting those articles to tons of article directories, why not ONLY write those articles for your own website?

Instead of being happy with 5% of your article readers visiting your site, you can get 100% of them.

Oh but wait! You might say that submitting your articles to directories gets them ranked better. This is sometimes true, but it's almost always a short term gain. This is because the search engines visit such directories a lot more and are able to crawl them faster. If you're a bit patient, you can still get ranked very well (if not the same or better) if you target the right keywords and can be a bit patient. The long term gain can be quite substantial -- it's not even funny how big of a difference you might see.

If you bring this up in any forum, a lot of people will lash out at you for even suggesting this, as too many people have their hands deeped in profits by selling guides or services that revolve around article marketing. Go ahead, try it and see what happens. :)

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that article marketing has no benefits or that you should never do it. If you want to get a site indexed fast, submitting one or two articles with a link can surely help speed things up. With some short term marketing strategies, it can even be beneficial to take advantage of the temporary search engine hike.

Putting up articles on directories is also far easier for some people who don't even have a website or blog (although seriously -- if that's you, you need to learn to make one -- it's really quite easy once you get the hang of it), so it might be a good solution for you.

If you need to, sure, you can rewrite your own site's articles for directories, but why not spend that time providing more content for your own site.

Here are a few advantages of writing articles mainly just for your own site:

  • You add more and more content exclusive to your site.
  • 100% of the readers end up at your site, instead of 5% to 10% clicking through to it.
  • You can advertise whatever you want on it -- have affiliate links, banner ads, etc..
  • Over time, you'll be able to hold search engine rankings better.
  • You have complete control over it!
If you really are set on article marketing, I'll suggest you do something VERY easy that can often bring in far more traffic (and better links) than article directories: Submit one or two exclusive articles to targeted sites and tell them that they can use it anyway they want, as long as you get a simple link back. About.com is a good place to look for relevant niches that might want to show your articles. This works better than most people might think. I've gotten thousands of visitors in the past (and even to this day) from ten to fifteen minutes of work I put into writing one article.

And if you still want to do article marketing, I'm NOT suggesting that you completely stop. There are still some nice benefits to doing it. I'm merely suggesting that you focus more on your own sites/blogs with those articles.

If you don't believe me, look at many of the big name internet marketers out or big name websites out there and see how often they distribute articles to directories. If some of them promote it so much, surely they should have hundreds to thousands of articles in the directories by now, right?!?!

Any comments are always welcome!

Friday, June 22, 2007

Differences between making a little extra money, a full time income, and BIG money

There are tons of people making money online. That's a fact. The difference is that most people are only making a little money here and there. Surely there are still those making a full-time income online, but they're only a few in the big pond of internet marketing. Even more rare is the marketer making HUGE money online.

Well, I'm a strong believer that if you can make a few bucks online, you can make the big money in time if you follow the right steps. Unfortunately, most people don't do these easy steps to turn their little extra online income to a full-time income and then to the big money.

I've helped tons of customers of my guide, The Big Secret, and I've seen several success stories (check out this thread to see reviews for The Big Secret from IWantPennies.com). However, even there, I see several people being content with their new side income and not even bothering to turn that into even more.

I've seen people making $500 or even $1,000 extra a month and being VERY happy with that. Sadly, many of those people are making that money with implementing this with just one out of hundreds to thousands of possibilities.

You might say "Why is that sad, Brian? That's great!" Well, it's great that they had that success, but they stop and don't try duplicating or expanding after that! That's the big key!

People start making money with something, get happy with the results, and move onto a new project. The key not only is to repeat what works, but to also expand what works as well.

Here are the differences between four types of people trying to make money online.


People making little to no money online -- these types of people often do one of two things. They stick with what doesn't work and keep beating a dead horse using the same methods that never worked for them before without analyzing how they could improve about it, or they start doing one thing and give up on it to move to the next without investing enough time and research into it.

People making a nice little side income -- often times, people who make just a little get content with what they make and never bother to improve upon their methods and don't bother with repeating the same results over and over ... let alone trying to expand into other areas.

Full time online marketers -- many full time marketers do one of two things. They either take what worked for them and keep improving upon it (to make more and more), or they repeat the same thing that worked for them over and over again. Most full time marketers also learn to take action, do some outsourcing, and at least establish some business relationships.

People making BIG money online -- these are a rare breed, but the success isn't anything complicated. They not only always improve upon their existing income streams (analyzing what works, what doesn't, etc.) and repeat what works for them, but they're also always looking to expand into other areas of online marketing. They aren't content with just making a good full-time income online and sticking to their profit streams -- they always look into investing their earnings back into the business and exploring several other streams of income. They don't just repeat what works for them, but they take it to a new level by exploring several more income sources at once. On top of that, they are masters of outsourcing, establishing friendships with other marketers (this is HUGE), etc..

The best news is that it doesn't matter where you stand currently. It might take some time and practice, but by establishing these steps, you can literally be wherever you want to be. So take action, analyze what works and what doesn't, improve upon your existing income streams (once you get them if you don't have any already), repeat what works, expand upon what works, explore new income streams, establish friendships with other marketers, and then eventually look into outsourcing when you can afford it.

Imagine what those people making $500 or $1,000 a month could do if they just repeated what worked and expanding upon that even more.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Some good news and some bad news

I know I promised a launch any day almost a week ago. However, it has been temporarily delayed (we're aiming for the end of this month for the first one). My wife recently got into an accident with our car, so we've been dealing with a range of things from getting it fixed, talking to insurance, seeing a doctor for her, etc.. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt (just some whiplash and bruises), but it definitely wasn't a good time to do a big launch.

However, here's the good news! There are huge updates for two of my upcoming launches. I've been talking to another big marketer about teaming up and combining two of our upcoming projects into one to give you an all-inclusive super deal. It won't add too much more time, but the end result will be amazing -- more news on that later.

And in regards to my launch that is right around the corner (this one truly is a first of its kind), I decided since the launch was delayed a bit, that I'd take the time to add a few more bonuses and features to it, as well as to reduce the price even more so virtually everyone should be able to afford it. In fact, I might even be losing money on people right off the bat, but you'll see why I'm doing it soon.

Monday, June 11, 2007

If you run a membership site, don't do this

Some people say that the latest craze is membership sites. Sure, there are tons of advantages to them for the owners -- reoccurring monthly payments (more steady cash flow), active lists of customers, easy way to have a great connection with them, easy access to affiliates, plenty of opportunities to sell other related products or upsell, etc..

As a customer, there can also be several advantages to joining a membership site as well -- usually monthly downloads or services, active support (usually), tightly knit communities to participate together on common goals, usually cheaper monthly prices compared to a high one-time charge, etc..

A lot of internet marketers are coming out with new membership sites. Heck, even I have a few in the works! However, one thing that many people need to realize is that membership sites take work, and you need to encourage your members to stay, as they can cancel whenever they want.

I've seen one too many marketers create a good initial package, but they then slack on the membership part. It almost seems as though instead of creating a simple one time product, they try to throw on a membership to it as well just for the heck of it. It doesn't work like that, and they are losing even more sales by being stupid about it.

Sure, their initial greed might get them some extra money to start with for the first few months, but most customers are smart and will unsubscribe later and run away from any other site or product that person might ever sell.

Recently, I joined a subscription based membership for a few reasons -- it was run by some well known internet marketers, it had some good products, the bonuses were actually useful (unlike other worthless bonuses that many sites give out), and it promised new products on an ongoing basis.

This site also got a ton of publicity at first. Well, to be honest, I thought two of its main products were okay at best. Other competition out there had done a far better job. However, I stayed on because they had several other smaller tools that I found useful, as it would save me time in my own efforts.

So although the start of it was a bit disappointing, I thought I'd hang in there to give them a chance. First month -- nothing new. Second month -- still no more promised products. Third month -- nada. And this whole time, I've been receiving e-mails from them about their new launches. The funny thing is that this membership was suppose to include most new product launches?!?! I haven't seen one yet.

Fourth month -- still nothing, and I called it quits and was quite disappointed. If I was a normal customer, I would have been long since gone after the first or second month, but I stayed on just for kicks to put them to the test. Sure, the membership wasn't all too expensive, but the point is that they were practically stealing money from me without giving me anything in return but broken promises.

Now they not only lost me as a customer, but I won't be even looking at any of their future launches. There were one too many broken promises in their one here. On top of that, they have a zero chance of ever getting me to promote their products or give them a favorable review. If they just followed through on their promises, I would have put in a good word on at least some of their products (because some of the smaller ones really were useful, despite the two main ones being mostly useless compared to other products out there).

So, if you plan on creating a membership site, follow through on your promises, give them a reason to stay a member, and make them feel that they're getting far more than their money's worth. You can't just view them as money bags, or your site will die faster than a fish out of water.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Simple trick to easy money ... with some patience (and an update on upcoming launches)

Most people looking to make money online want quick, easy money. Although such a thing does exist, it's not easy for everybody to get. A much easier approach is to be a little patient and do things that will pay off in the long run.

One easy thing to do is as follows:

1. Sign up for any affiliate program (Clickbank is perhaps one of the easiest with lots of options, but there are tons out there) that interests you.

2. Set up a basic webpage or a single blog post (note that I said webpage or blog post -- not an entire website or blog) targeting one specific affiliate product.

3. Target extremely easy, non-competitive keywords. Most people say to target things that are under 100,000. I say to make it even easier! Target things that are less than a few thousand (without using quotes in the search engine search) results, with only a small handful (less than ten or so) with quotes. You can do this research the normal way by going to the search engine and thinking of search terms that people might use. Don't rely on all the keyword tools out there, as none of them will report all of the keyword terms used ... especially the less popular ones.

If you want to save some time (like me), you can also enter in a bunch of keywords by hand (and also search for new keywords) using a tool like Niche Inspector to look up the results of multiple keywords at the same time. Although I encourage you to use it to find new keywords as well, you also want to come up with several keywords yourself (especially long tailed keywords) as no keyword tool can give you everything, but Niche Inspector will still show you the results with and without quotes.

4. Now just sit back and wait. If you made a blog post on a blog, be sure to ping it to let the search engine crawlers know about your update. Pingoat.com is one of my favorites (and yes, pinging is free for those new to this). If you choose to do a webpage instead, be sure to either link from it from your main page, or have a link some place else that the search engines can follow (a link in a forum signature, on other blogs, at the end of an article submitted to an article directory, etc.).

5. Okay, now you can really sit back and wait! You won't get hundreds overnight, but for the five to ten minutes it will take you to do this (once you get the hang of it), you can literally take in hundreds of dollars in the long run.

I've used this exact same technique and have gotten hundreds to thousands of dollars from only a few minutes of work. When you do this several times over, it really adds up fast. Best of all, this is an extremely EASY technique that anyone can use, and it doesn't have to cost you a dime to do it.

Now, I know several of you are anxious about my two upcoming launches. I can leak out this -- one will be launched any day now ... and by any day, I literally mean within the next few days tops. Nothing has been done like this before, and I'm very excited to launch the first of its kind.

The second launch we're pessimistically dating at mid-July, although it could be much sooner if things go well. This second launch will be featuring a ton of never-before-seen affiliate marketing tools that can literally skyrocket your earnings if you use them well. There's a lot more to it, but you'll have to wait and see.

But wait, some of you are probably saying "but Brian, why tell us what the second launch is about without telling us more about the first one due any day now???" The reason is because it's such a new idea that it would be hard to explain it all without showing it to you. Oh, and to add to the mystery, it's priced so low that I could very well be losing money initially on it. But then again, the goal isn't to make money off of it initially ... the goal is to build the first and the biggest ..... ..... of ....... and .......

Let's just say that the major advantage that many big marketers have will be taken away, trampled on, beaten with an ugly stick, set on fire, and given a new home court advantage ... to you.

And if you think that's exciting, just wait until the second launch when the ninjas with flaming swords and laser-shooting eyes jump into the chaos as well to give you an even larger advantage than ... well ... ninjas with flaming swords and laser-shooting eyes would have against a 90-year-old lady in a fight to the death. Yeah, that's what it will be like ... well, sort of. :)