This is a bit of a rant but I believe that most people that are building and using autoresponders are copying bad practices and are not doing the right things to build a real business with their autoresponders.

I have a few autoresponders going and one of the great things about an autoresponder is that it is truly a set it and forget it type of internet marketing work. You set up your autoresponder and then let here run for a few years.

If you have been on any of the internet marketing gurus lists you have probably seen that all you get is a bunch of pitches for products but that is not the real way to run an autoresponder, instead you are supposed to build on the reason why people subscribed in the first place. I remembered that this week when I bought a simple report and got placed on a list. I got a pitch but not before I got 4 or 5 personalized and really short messages asking me how I had used the report that I had bought and a couple of testimonial from past users. Read the rest of this entry »

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I have a 9 year old daughter and I thought that she was to old now to play with dolls until this past Christmas when she fell in love with American Girl dolls.

You are probably wondering what American Girl has to do with marketing but if that is the case then you probably have not seen this in action before.

American Girl sells high end dolls. These are not the kind of dolls that you buy at the store but instead you order them online for over $100, not your average barbie that’s for sure. Anyway there is a whole lot around these dolls to keep kids interested and do grow revenues. We can look at the integration of this and maybe you can see ways that you can wrap this into your business.

First the dolls. The dolls are about a food tall and are shaped like a real little girl. The dolls eyes open when you stand them up and close when you lie them down. There are a few choices for dolls. Either you can buy a American Girl labeled doll or you can get one that matches your girl that has the same hair and eye color. Finally there are different dolls for girls of different ages

So that seems simple enough but it is the tie-ins to the marketing that makes things interesting. First of all as I will see next month there is a tea room/restaurant in just a few cities that you can go for a formal meal with mother, daughter, and doll. At the store you can of course buy clothes for the doll and apparently match them with the girl, you can get the dolls ears pierced, you can by accessories for the American Girl doll and finally there are DVDs. More on that in a moment.

One of the great marketing/income methods that American Girl has setup is a collection of movies. Each movie features a starring girl character that girls fall in love with and this character is set in a certain time and place in American history. This makes the movies interesting to kids and parents and of course each of these characters is in fact another doll that you can buy.

Buy the movie, buy the doll, buy the clothes, and go for lunch.

I have of course been immersed in many different kids trends and fads and they are all very interesting but as a marketing system I do not think that there is any better market integration than American Girl. Even with a 50 year headstart I do not think that the people at Mattel have been even close to putting all the pieces together so tightly as this company has.

So the questions that you have to ask yourself is:

1. How do you integrate seemingly unrelated part of your complete sales process?

2. How smooth is the backend process of getting more sales from existing customers?

3. How many avenues and revenue streams do you have that are not competing with each other?

Well new years has come and gone. Have you made plans? I certainly have.

Over the last few years I have built up a large number of websites, although I do not track all of my sites I am a bit compulsive at times and will spend a day or do working on a site that has a lot of content but has not really built up any traffic. I believe I have about 90 sites in total and this is actually a big problem as set it and forget it does not work for many of these sites.

Looking back at 2009

Just to be clear. If I look at the just over two million pageviews that I got to all of my sites last year. about 70% comes from one site and after the top 7 sites the traffic drops off really quickly. I have one site that is a real set it and forget it type site and the rest of the sites will only get real traffic if I add content to them. So realistically I need to worry about adding content where it is desireable. Read the rest of this entry »

The guys over at Trend Watching have sent me this list fo trends to watch for in 2010. Some of them are obvious but as the market changes every year I am sure some of these will be interesting to many of us marketing online.

2010 is rapidly approaching; we hope the December edition of our Trend Briefing, detailing 10 trends for 2010, will assist you in getting things going (again). Go straight to the Briefing, or quickly scan the 10 trends below:

1. BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL | Forget the recession: the societal changes that will dominate 2010 were set in motion way before we temporarily stared into the abyss. More » Read the rest of this entry »

Web hosting is something that any business or internet marketer needs but of course may not know how to use.

So I would like to explain exactly what you need and how you will use web hosting. Web hosting services that you get are all different from each other and becasue of this it is important to know the basics first.

Here are the layers that you need to know for your website in regards to web hosting. First you have an operating system, then you have a web server, then you have your applications.

Web Hosting Operating Systems

Just like how you use Windows XP or Vista to run the applications on your computer you need a operating system for the web server hosting your web site. There are two options these days for an operating system, Unix or Linux (Linux is an operating system that is much like Unix) and Microsoft Windows Server. Read the rest of this entry »

I made a decision years ago that I am not sure people really understand the ramifications of so I thought I would right about it today.

All of my websites are hosted on Linux with an Apache web server. I would have gone with IIS on Windows but Apache really gives me a lot of control over my web hosting.

Why does all of this matter? Am I somehow biased towards free software or agains Microsoft? No, Actually I run nothing but Microsoft Windows XP and Vista at home and have not a lot of experience with Linux or Unix, in fact I am a Microsoft IT Support guy (not at Microsoft, just supporting Microsoft Windows servers and computers).

So why go with Linux for Web Hosting? Or Apache Web Hosting? To me this is not really an issue, in fact even with all of my tinkering with scripts and stuff I never have to go to the Linux level what I really want is Apache as a web server. The other option for web hosting is IIS otherwise known as internet information server that is bundled with Windows Server products. Read the rest of this entry »

We all work on lots of pages and offers. I have a spreadsheet which keeps all of this toegether. I have a spreadsheet and one of the tabs of this spreasheet is “Links to Build”. Often we get excited about the next shiny thing and the pages and reviews that we were promoting before just get left by the wayside. I can tell you this is a really big deal.

I went through all of my blogs to look at what reviews that I have as well as other landing pages and I found about 40 different offers that I have not bothered building at all. This is not Amazon book reviews or anything but instead are higher paying affiliate links to CJ, Linkshare, Clickbank, and Health Buy (Joe Bucks).

Having links in one place was very useful to me. When I get itching to build some content and write some articles I would be looking through the computer or blogs for the link I wanted to promote and often this would take longer than the actual writing of the article. Not Good.

You can just put the links to your money pages either in a spreadsheet or in just a text document with the link text that you would like to use as one string. You know how to set this up <a href=”http://pagename”>link text</a>. Once you have this you can drop it into a page easily without having to format

One of the terrible ways in which I make myself crazy is by scrambling around all day and then in the end only seeing a few things done in the day that make the difference.

In order to change things up and become more profitable I have made a few changes lately that have made me more productive and working a lot better.

I talked about this in my last post but wanted to find a way to get myself productive and lately have been very singleminded about getting things to work better. To this end I have decided only to look at work as those critical pieces that will make a difference to my business. So what are the keys to my business?

Creating content
Creating backlinks to my content
Site Building

Everything else, and I really mean everything else is not really working but is instead not critical business stuff but is just secondary. Now we all know that we have to keep up to speed with our industry, research new topics, read news. But lets look at those critical three parts of building your income online. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an important bit of info and a caution that you may not be doing what you should be doing to try and “convince” your buyers to buy.

Do you know anything about the Know, Like and Trust method of getting closer to your clients and ultimately selling them?

We are always told that hate best way to get people to buy is to talk about them. This may often be true but in this day of text, podcast, and video marketing you have an opportunity to get everyone to see you as the source of the best information

Start a Relationship

Well there are three steps in your relationship with your buyers. The first step is to let them know you. You have to open up and let the people know that you are just like them, you came from the same humble beginnings and the show them snippets of what you did to become more successful. Whether you are in the fitness niche with the weight loss or muscle gain or the internet marketing niche coming from nothing and eventually striking it rich you are the same as them before and at the place that your buyer wants to be now. Read the rest of this entry »

I am always seeing on forums where people are looking for a free script to use for an autoresponder. If you are looking for a free autoresponder you are definitly not alone.

A few years back I was trying to do everything myself. I had my sites hosted for free on IIS and Apache at home and I used a free script for an autoresponder. Everything seemed to be working quite well but one of the many problems that I was running into was a crapload of work to try to understand the script, trying to make autporesponder messages work, testing messages and of course learning the copywriting that would get my messages read and sell the products that I was promoting.

In the end I realized that the two parts that were really taking up the most time in my business were the autoresponder learning curve and figuring out how to port scripts to my Windows install of apache and IIS.

I gave it up.

When I started telling my wife about wanting to get hosting and that is would cost us $10 per month and all the work I was doing getting my basement “free hosting” to work she thought I was crazy and we moved onto a real hosting company first I tried Your Site and then when I hit limitations I moved to 1 and 1 Internet to host my sites. I can now install wordpress, forums, subdomains, and I know that I have great uptime and linux server guys committed to keeping my sites as optimized as possible.

A few months later I used the same argument, or my wife used the same argument to me, that I should move to a proper paid autoresponder instead of a free autoresponder. In researching I found that the two most popular autoresponder systems were Aweber and Get Response. I opted for Get Response.

So what did I get with a paid autoresponder that I did not get with a free service? I didn’t have to deal with message formatting, I had guaranteed deliverability, I stopped needing to manually unsubscribe people, and best of all I now have a dozen autoresponders and all I need to do is decide what I want to send out and everything is taken care of by the pros that know how to make the service work. All for under $20 per month, that is not much of an investment considering how much you get.