Anyway Sean has a new package coming out in the next couple of days called Twitter Commando. I have no idea what he is going to be charging for Twitter Commando but I do know that most of his stuff is cheap. The real reason that I am letting you know about this today is so that you can see his three Twitter promotion videos that Sean Donahoe is doing as part of his presell for the Twitter Commando sale.

Twitter Commando

The three videos that I just saw were great and covered lots of got stuff like updating your pages, getting lots of followers and setting up systems to make Twitter work for you instead of pushing all the time to get people and try to keep them coming to your Twitter page so that you can sell them something.

Anyway here is the link to the Twitter Commando Presell Videos.

I tried Woopra, which was pretty good and then settled on Clicky, which at 9.99 a month is pretty cheap.

Right now using Google analytics I track pages views over time and watch trends, and thanks to the built in Adsense integration I can track what pages are performing best on my blogs.

The feature as I said before that really excited me about Clicky was the Real Time website tracking. One of my sites gets 6,000 to 8,000 visitors a a day and using real time tracking I can see exactly which pages get traffic at any time and who is on your site from where. This is a really great feature to me.

Other features that I am really enjoying with Clicky are the traffic comparisons today vs yesterday or 7 days ago by the hour as well as the increase or decrease of a pages traffic compared to the day before. I really get a good feel for site performance and hot or cold pages with these features.

I bet you are looking at this and thinking, “Geez, big deal just a couple features Google analytics does not have” Well you can try it out for a month and see. I of course still use Google analytics and for a small traffic site this may not be to exciting but once you get some traffic there are lots of ways to slice and dice where and how the traffic is coming. Try it out for free here and see what you think.

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.

The real idea is to establish that the buyer or subscriber to your list made a good decision and get them to build more trust in you as well as their decision. I remember listening to an audio from Armand Morin a few years ago where he talked about this and at the time all I could think of is sell sell sell to the people that would eventually join my list.

Now that I have a big list and lots of people signing up I have them go through 10 messages in 20 days learning with a few non pushy affiliate links. Now I make sure that in between pitches for products I always have a few messages that are teaching new principles. I think that I have a good relationship with my list and I have built that through non pitching 20 day process and then adding these pitches later after my opted in new friends have trust in me.

Are you willing to do this? I know a lot of people do not do this at all. Almost every autoresponder message that I get is from people selling me something and I am sure it does not work out well per 1000 emails at all., I bet they get nearly no sales without building any relationships whatsoever. Make sure that you trust your people well and they will buy from you in the future.

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?

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.

I find that most of the time I have been spending on the sites over the last year has been spent sadly on watching traffic patterns and SEO work and there is a law of diminishing returns when I really spend too much time on this work.

What will some in 2010?

I really would rather stop looking at a ton of sites and using my time better so here are the steps that I have already started taking on my sites.

1. Dump any work on crappy sites. I have a bunch of RSSG sites that I created three or four years ago. Some indexed some not and these sites are not going to get a view from me this year unless something turns around on them (I doubt that). So I am going to be able to free up time and space in my head by not having to think about these.

2. Work on a core of sites. I have a core of 5 blogs that are going to be the focus of my year. I have not treated this or most of my other big sites well at all in 2009 and will endevour to post most days on these top 5 priority sites.

3. Stop working on crap work. SEO? Who cares. Building sites only for backlinks? Takes to much time. I have been trying to build a bit of a house of cards to backlink when in fact I have not been building the relationships that I should be. There is a lot of wasted time once you get a decent amount of traffic and I am the best at checking stats hourly and going to all of those affiliate sites daily to track my traffic conversions

4. Creating an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is something that allows you to know a month in advance what you will be doing with your site as far as posting. promotions, autoresponders or more are concerned. I first heard from Problogger Darren Rowse how to set up an editorial calendar and this will really help me get a much better hold on my time and effort.

5. I will start building relationships. Within the communities of my five separate niches I have a lot of options to build relationships for knowing what my customers and fellow bloggers are doing and thinking. This is really the best way to build a blog and that is by building a community.

6. Writing a lot of content. I am focusing this year on writing 1000 articles. I am not sure if it is at all possible but last year was terrible for writing content so this year I will be writing and sharing a lot more of what I know to help others. It is only by helping others that we can really to expect to make any decent money anyway so watch out for a lot of great content I hope.

So this is my plan. I am sure I will be sharing a lot more of it over the next few day and weeks including all of the tools that I use and why and also telling you all the ways thatI jhave learned that I can spin my wheels, probably would be the same for you I bet.

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 »

2. URBANY | Urban culture is the culture. Extreme urbanization, in 2010, 2011, 2012 and far beyond will lead to more sophisticated and demanding consumers around the world. More »

3. REAL-TIME REVIEWS | Whatever it is you’re selling or launching in 2010, it will be reviewed ‘en masse’, live, 24/7. More »

4. (F)LUXURY | Closely tied to what constitutes status, which itself is becoming more fragmented, luxury will be whatever consumers want it to be over the next 12 months. More »

5. MASS MINGLING | Online lifestyles are fueling ‘real world’ meet-ups like there’s no tomorrow, shattering all predictions about a desk-bound, virtual, isolated future. More »

6. ECO-EASY | To really reach some meaningful sustainability goals in 2010, corporates and governments will have to forcefully make it ‘easy’ for consumers to be more green, by restricting the alternatives. More »

7. TRACKING & ALERTING | Tracking and alerting are the new search, and 2010 will see countless new INFOLUST services that will help consumers expand their web of control. More »

8. EMBEDDED GENEROSITY | Next year, generosity as a trend will adapt to the zeitgeist, leading to more pragmatic and collaborative donation services for consumers. More »

9. PROFILE MYNING | With hundreds of millions of consumers now nurturing some sort of online profile, 2010 will be a good year to help them make the most of it (financially), from intention-based models to digital afterlife services. More »

10. MATURIALISM | 2010 will be even more opinionated, risque, outspoken, if not ‘raw’ than 2009; you can thank the anything-goes online world for that. Will your brand be as daring? More »

We’re confident that applying the above to your business will bring you at least one profitable, zeitgeist-compatible innovation in 2010!

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.

Along with the operating system to host your web server you also get other things bundled onto the operating system for your web host. The other applications that sit on the operating system include databases and mail. Mail is great becasue this allows you to have not only your website but alos an email address linked to that website so that you do not need to use hotmail, gmail, or your ISPs mail address, this looks a lot more professional.

The other thing important sitting on your operating system is you databases. Some hosts offer more or less databases but the ones that everyone uses these days is a MySQL database and this database will store any of the data that applications like WordPress or others will use.

Web Hosting Web Servers

For web servers there are really only tow choices. On Unix or Linux hosting you will get apache which these days hosts more than two thrids of all web sites in the world and on Microsoft Hosting you will get IIS, short for Internet Information Services.

All that a web server does is to give people pages when they are requested. lets say that you go to this page. You type in http://www.internetbusinessblogger/how-web-hosting-works (or find it in Google) and the web server serves up the page grabbing anything it needs from the database and any other links to build the page.

Most people I believe go with the Linux and Apache hosting because it is cheaper and in fact it is. For any hosting company there is no cost to server licenses for Linux and apache is a free product so they do not have to charge as much as they do with Microsoft hosting. The argument of course is that the support for Microsoft should be better but since we are end users we do not have to worry about this at all.

Web Hosting Applications

Now that you have an operating system and a web server you just have to put up pages with a .htm, .html or is they are created in another language .php or some other extension. You use a simple FTP program to put the pages up and then anyone can get these pages.

For some people this is not quite enough. There are lots of web scripts out there and lets use WordPress as an example. To create a blog you would install WordPress on your web server and then you will create pages from a simple interface. WordPress saves the posts in a database along with sidebars and pictures or anything else that you add and then whenever someone requests a page the web server will just go and grab the info from the database and display it on the screen so that you can read it.

Do you understand how your hosting works now? I I find that most people are nervous about committing to web hosting because they do not know what to look for and what it all uses.

I have one other post that I would like to do for you and that is regarding features of hosts and what they mean, do you need them or not. I know that all of this is confusing but it does not have to be.

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.

I will try to show how I use Apache and why I like it here. If I want to install WordPress or some other script all that I need to do is open up an FTP program and upload the files, I then go to the install or admin interface in a web browser and do the configuration right from there, one thing that I may need to do is change security on files but I also do that just from the FTP program. Using the FTP and the web browser is all that I need and because of this it is really easy for me to any admin without even having to be a computer genius.

On the other hand with Microsoft and IIS it is a little more difficult, even though a lot of the scripts can be ported to IIS it is never quite as easily as it is in Apache, stuff is just always written for the Apache web server and in PHP or CGI which are nativley supported by Unix / Linux and Apache.

I hope this helps. I have mentioned in the past that I use 1 and 1 for web hosting and if you have any comments on this please post them below so I can answer.

Finding my money Pages

I went through all of my blogs to look at what product reviews that I have as well as other money 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). These affiliate sales are worth $15-$50 each.

Links to Money Pages

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 a link to your money pages into a post or article easily without having to format

Tracking links and sales to money pages

One last thing that I do is to make sure that I know how each of these pages is doing in the Google Serps (Google Search results) I initially use Google analytics and find out what keywords are driving traffic to these pages and then try to improve the rankings to these pages. This though can be covered better in it’s own post about money pages and traffic generation

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.

Creating online business priorities

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 of online business priorities 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 online business priorities 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.

Creating Content

Number one online business priorities has to be creating content, to me this just means that we type out content in some kind of word processor. My favorite is Notepad++ and this is just a notepad type program with no text editing features. Any windows machine has notepad anyway so that is good enough.

Some people are apt to work with Microsoft Word or some other word processor but this post that I ma writing now is just being drafted. I get info from my head onto paper and at the very most I will put the points in the top of the text document and at the least it is just freeform like now.

After I have drafted up my post I simply copy and paste it into WordPress (Microsoft Word copy and pasting adds some crap to the WordPress post so another reason not to use it). In WordPress I use the spellchecking feature from Firefox to spellcheck (I suck) and then I find and add a pic and post it.

Creating Backlinks to my Content

The biggest way to create backlinks to content is to make sure delicious, digg, reddit, stumbleupon and others know about it. Also using WordPress your content automatically pings all the major search engines so it will at least be included in the Google index quickly (usually in less than an hour). As far as this online business priorities is concerned this is important to make sure that we are really getting higher rankings.

To gain backlinks I usually repurpose my content by resubmitting my posts as articles to some of the big article directories as well.

Site Building

This is one place where there are good things to do and bad things that can suck up your valuable time. Creating your blog or site, adding plugins, optimizing your SEO are all good but if you spend all your time making your blog great and have no content to give the world then in is really just wasting time.

The way that I speed up this blog building process up is by having a folder on my computer with all my favorite plugins, theme, and the Latest WordPress install. I can create a new blog in 20 minutes from start to finish but without that magical content it may as well take an hour.

I hope that this post shows the critical way in which I have started to do my online business work. I have wasted hours and hours in the past even just tweaking a blog theme and to write an article like this takes only 20 minutes or so and makes a far bigger difference in my life than aesthetically fixing things. Don’t Waste You Life!!

Out of the 100′s of online business priorities these top three are easily the most important in my business and yours as well.