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In just a couple of days the Euro 2008 Soccer tournament starts. What is Euro 2008 and why as an internet marketer should you care?

Well Euro 2008 is this years edition of the European soccer tournament that takes place once every four years so just as the World Cup of soccer takes places every four years, the euro soccer tournament would take place on the next even year. So as you can imagine this soccer tournament is a very big deal to soccer fans around the world not just in Europe.

Now maybe you are starting to care. It is estimated that 7.9 BILLION people watched games during Euro 2004 and this years games in Austria and Switzerland are expected to be even bigger.

No matter what your market is you have to know that many of your visitors or potential visitors anyway are going to be watching games this month during the Euro 2008 tournament.

Think of angles in your marketing that reflect on the tournament, there will be billions of searches during the next month to do with soccer and I am sure that you can find angles to write articles or blog posts about this tournament and how it relates to your product.

I have been meaning to blog about Blog Candy but the post is still sitting there waiting and now I found a great contest where the winner gets the kinds of things that make a blog more popular. Tech Suave is running a contest were linking, favoriting, posting and subscribing could win you one of a few prizes that includes free links on a popular website and free deluxe (for sale-type) themes for Wordpress.

The prizes are worth over a $1000 so this is well worth your while.

This is a great idea to drum up traffic and is a really viral idea as it will bring in more people to the site, get new subscribers. Sign up, check it our and see what you find

One thing the guys were wondering is which prize I would like. Well Darren Hoyt makes great themes and I would love to win one of the themes that he is offering in the contest

I just found a cool ebook on Twitter that you can sign up to a list and recieve free of charge. It is really cool and called the Internet Marketing Cure. The internet marketing cure is a book that turns that whole internet marketing guru thing around.

The book goes into a lot of detail about how we follow around all of these gurus and don’t become dorus, the gurus that actually do the work. It is a real nice way for you to look at what you are doing and what you should be doing instead. I am the worst for this as I spend a lot of time just reading rss feeds, following conversations on Twitter and wasting lots of time surfing for new ideas instad of actually doing what mattered.

Check out the free ebook and see what you think.

Wordpress has released an urgent upgrade with 70 bug fixes and one very important security fix.

Go to the Wordpress site to get the details.

Here is the long list of fixes from the fix page:

!important rule not applied correctly in wp-admin.css
Editing only the minute field of a published post then saving won’t change the published time
wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php very slow
Don’t show a check box for deleting the default link category
Dashboard widget options can get corrupted
get_posts() needs a default argument
Links widget has duplicate ID issue mdawaffe
Some attached files with non-ASCII names are unlinkable
faultString in xmlrpc responses is not properly escaped
Widget titles can be repetitive
wp_handle_upload does not appear to handle file move errors correctly
Deleting comment results in error
Generated Gallery markup is invalid Template Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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

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 »