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I have been recieving emails from Joel Comm for a year or two. The newsletter is daily and it is called Joel’s Tips, and a few days ago I found from hiw daily newsletter that he was selling his new Adsense Secrets book for only $9.97. The price is great because he has previously sold copies of the ebook for $97.

On Saturday I read that Joel had some kind of negative billing option where when you bought the book for 9.97 you would automatically be enrolled in a newsletter for $29.97per month. I haven’t seen this tactic hidden before although I have seen big name gurus try to stick it to guys by saying

“Buy my $2000 DVD training program and you will automatically be enrolled in my membership site” but they forget to tell you that it is an additional 29 or 99 bucks a month.

In this case Joel his the info in the giant salesletter and no one realized they were signing up for it.

This has been apparently changed now but i have seen nothing in his newsletter telling me that he had this problem or the change…

Now today in the newsletter Joel Comm says that you can download for free the latest Ewen Chia ebook on working from home. He just forgets to point out that the book is 9.97 and it is free if you ask for a refund within 60 days. This is not free at all.

I would love to see if Joel is going to be changing his tactics back to something that is a little more authentic and less devious but I will not get the opportunity to find out.

I have unsubscribed from the Joel’s Tips newsletter.

I spent a few hours last night making sure that all of my Wordpress blogs were optimized, SEO was good and that the blogs were in fact running correctly. I went through a lot of steps but I have a bunch of blogs, some running Wordpress 2.3 and some running Wordpress 2.5 and did all of the optimizing for SEO at the same time.

Here are the steps that I took on each of the blogs

1. Getting rid of extra Wordpress plugins - I got rid of all of the extra SEO plugins knowing that I was going to be using the All in one SEO Pack. I had a bunch of other meta tag stuff and URL rewriting stuff but I just wanted to standardize. Another plugin that I upgraded on all blogs was the Sociable plugin that puts little “Share this on social networking sites” buttons under each post. Read the rest of this entry »

So a couple of months ago I went and said that Twitter was more than a distraction than anything. I still find it a distraction but am using it a bit more now and understand some great ways to use Twitter in my business

First of all if you do not know yet what Twitter is, it is a concept known as Microblogging. You can send messages of up to 140 characters and these messages are read by anyone that is following you on Twitter. One of the nice things about Twitter is that there are clients that have cropped up that allow you to recieve messages in realtime as the people that you follow send them out. The top users of Twitter will send 10 or 20 messages out a day so the amount of traffic is substantial to say the least.

Twitter has recently cracked the Alexa top 300, and is one of the top 300 sites on the internet today.

So some tips to use Twitter, Look for people that are popular in your niche and open a Twitter account so that you can recieve and send messages within your niche. To sign up just go to Twitter and create a username and password, nothing more is needed.

Next do a search for keywords in your niche and add yourself as a follower of the people that send a lot of messages about your niche. Often this will allow you to get the lead on others when coming up with article ideas as the “tweets” come faster then the news in a niche often does.

As far as becoming popular yourself, try to send tweets often with interesting insights or links to pages, both yours and other interesting ones. As you get more popular more people will follow you.

One very important thing to do as a Twitterer is to reply to messages sent out by others. To do this you use the @ sign with the name directly after it and post you reply. This creates concentration and will often also get you noticed by the big names on Twitter. Just imagine the power of replying to someone and having them reply back with 5,000 or 10,000 people seeing the reply back, these people will wonder what your first comment was and if they find your posts interesting they will follow you as well.

If you would like to start following me on Twitter, simply signup, go to my profile, and click on the follow button.

Well It finally had to come. Darren Rowse, who is known the internet over as the ProBlogger has released a book. I find it interesting that I have probably over 100 ebooks on my computer but very few internet marketing paper based books on my book shelf, Darren seems to not be to interested in the ebook type of book.

The book itself is a 240 page paperback and is $16.49. This should be a good opportunity to see the whole Problogger formula in one book. Anyone that has followed the blog over the last couple of years knows that Darren Rowse is a very prolific writer and to wade through the 2,000 or so blog posts would be difficult and very time consuming, instead you can just read through the book, get a good overview and then fill in the blanks through the ProBlogger site.

The book covers:

• How Bloggers Make Money
• Direct Income Earning vs. Indirect Income Earning methods
• Why Niches are Important
• Using 20 critical blogging tools
• 20 Ingredients for a successful blog post
• Optimizing advertising
• Which advertising platforms work best
• Expert analysis of Technocrat’s Top Blogs - why they work
• Choose subject matter that works for you
• Handle technical issues
• Examine different ways your blog can earn income
• Evaluate your blog’s success
• Keep content fresh and interesting
• Use your blog to generate income indirectly

Buy it today at Amazon

The New York Times has an article today on the growing number of high end bloggers that are having heart attacks trying to build a multi million business online and working 24 hours a day to do it.

The fact is that these guys are not taking care of themselves and I know at least one guy, Micheal Arrington from Tech Crunch seems to work all day and night. Tech Crunch though is apparently worth 100 million dollars so Micheal could probably hire some extra help if he needs to

OK, I am going through my notebooks of all of my notes from the last year or so and ran across this great way that I really never implemented to make more money online.

1. Find a narrow niche that needs to buy online - eg:people looking to get great abs for summer (10 minutes)

2. Write a presell squeeze page, host free or on your own hosting (15 minutes)

3. write an autoresponder series of 5 articles that will give people people info as well as affiliate links (30 minutes os you better keep them short)

4. Write keyword rich articles based on the way that you found the niche in step 1 and post to ezinearticles.com (15 minutes each)

So if I estimate correctly you can get this up and running with 4 articles on ezinearticles and pushing to your autoresponder in two hours.

this would be two hours of focussed work, this would not be surfing forums or blogs, reading rss readers or gabbing on Instant messenger or Twitter. Two hours and this could change your life.

what would you need to do this? Firefox with a tab open to Google to find a niche, a tab to Clickbank to find ebooks, a tab open to  Get Response for your autoresponder series that you are writing, and finally a tab open ezinearticles.com to write and post your articles.

The problem with this plan for most people is that they will overanalyze each step, make this big process out of a simple idea and then screw it up by realizing that the huge process means that it takes a week to crank out one product in this way and they will never do it.

I know this because I did it for 2 years and see all the stupid notes that I wrote overanalyzing ideas that should be shit simple.

I have no problem writing blog posts. I kind of look at a blog post as a bit of conversation that I m having but just in my own head. Many other people I find though seem to have a lot of trouble getting started. There are all sorts of reasons that people can not write a blog post including the following:

Nervous about what people will think

Not knowing how long to write

Not knowing how to structure the post

The biggest problem though is that people are always having trouble figuring out what to write and how to keep the flow going in writing a blog post.

Chris Brogan has written a pretty detailed post on how he starts and writes a blog post but I will try to also follow up this week with losts of blog post writing tips

Well March is over and the numbers have been crunched.

March stats for my internet business were pretty good with just over $2400 in income from just about 77,000 page views.

My adsense income was up slightly just over $200 which was nice as well as my clickbank being up to almost $1900 which blew me away and still does everyday that I see sales coming through. I started using Linkshare more this month and that was worth just over $200 for just one campaign that I used a banner with. so much for banners being ineffective, throw enough eyeballs at a focussed banner and it is bound to work.

There were some real disappointments for me in March though. I started or at least continued using Copeac and have not done enough work with it so it gave me nothing. also, Commission Junction, the company everyone seems to like does not convert for me, I am sure that it is not Commission Junctions fault I have just got to find a program or more that really talks to the needs of my customers. Lastly I still have not gotten any traction with Amazon, I need to write more reviews I guess and there is a strong market but all of those online Book Stores that you can build with a script are useless as I can see from my stats and the real way to make Amazon money is to write reviews to products and then find a decent way to promote them. Read the rest of this entry »

I am not sure how I missed this yesterday but Wordpress has been updated to version 2.5. The new version of wordpress adds lots of new features but is a real departure from what you are used to.

As an internet marketer you may want to wait until next weekend or a slow night this week sometime so that you can upgrade and get used to the interface. The last thing that you want to do is upgrade and have to take a hit on your productivity or suffer with nonworking plugins.

After you try it out let me know what you think. New streamlined interface, picture galleries within posts…what else do you like.

Sales are still picking up more now and I am not really sure why. I watch my analytics, track my stats and the only thing that has changed is that the affiliate pages seem to be converting better, maybe the cookies are starting to convert? Cookies for clickbank tend to last 30-60 days.

I have now settled into posting new content to my blogs, commenting on other blogs and then reading the forums for 45 minutes or so. I have a list of all of my review pages so that I can add links across the internet to blog comments and to article submissions and this seems to be picking up the number of backlinks that I have fairly quickly.

So now I am looking at further expanding my niches that I am building content to but first I am going to keep up with this adding content to my current stuff and maybe in 2 months or so I will go on a new binge of adding new sites from scratch. Read the rest of this entry »