Today I received a couple new books I hope will help teach me more about the black art of writing online copy that actually sells. After doing some research, and flipping through some of the scanned pages available at Amazon, I chose “The Wizard of Ads” by Roy H Williams and “Call to Action” by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg. I’ll review them in more depth as I read and apply their techniques.

At the moment, I only have one example of my ad copy available, which is my TaxBrain ad. I don’t mind sharing it, even though I think it is amateurish, because I just can’t compete for AdWords clicks on that page any more. The page converted fairly well for me. 4% of viewers clicked on the purchase button, and 25% of those viewers converted to purchasers. That’s OK, but the tax adwords are now commanding too high a premium to pay off, even at that conversion rate.

At any rate, I know I have a lot to learn. My ads are nowhere near as magnetically effective as these:

• Butterfly Marketing — WOW, I want to spend $997, which I don’t have, even though I know that I am just looking at the page as inspiration and for learning, I still want to buy.
• findhotniches.com — Again, I want to purchase, even though I’ve bookmarked it as a learning site.
• List and Traffic — I may actually join this list, but for now I am using the ad copy for inspiration.

I have a long way to go before I can grab attention like those guys!

Technorati Tags: Ad Copy, copywriting

I am a happy GTD adopter, but sometimes I get “lost in the weeds”.

With all the emphasis on getting the steps done, I can lose track of where I am going and why. I get a lot done, but sometimes it is the low-pri stuff. It all evens out in the end, so long as I take the time to do a weekly project round-up, as suggested by the GTD method. However, with all the excitement surrounding the launch of my new company, and with everyone in my household being ill at the same time, I’ve skipped a couple weeks of this vital step.

Perhaps that’s why this article at 43Folders felt so on-target for me. It has a deceptively simple point, that anything which makes you more self-aware makes you more likely to hit your goals. I particularly liked the summary bullet points:

• action almost always trumps inaction
• planning is crucial; even if you donÇt follow a given plan
• things are easier to do when you understand why you’re doing them
• your brain likes it when you make things as simple as possible

Technorati Tags: motivation, gtd

As an online entrepreneur, I am always eager to learn, and I am nearly always busy. I’ve been trying to follow Steve Pavlina’s advice to read a book a week, but I am having trouble finding the time to sit down and read. I’m wonderful at devouring fiction. I can finish fiction in just a few days, because I am good at picking it up and putting it down again, filling in free moments with a good book. But, the kind of books I’m reading now don’t really lend themselves to that kind of treatment. However, I’m having a lot of success listening to audiobooks on my iPod. Starting and stopping is a snap, and the bookmark is very accurate. I can back up a few missed seconds with ease, too.

One good resource for audio books and interviews is LearnOutLoud. That link is to their free section, which is pretty well stocked with audio files of interest to entrepreneurs. For example:

• Zaadz Notes on Love is the Killer App - condensed “lowdown” on Yahoo!s Chief Solutions Officer’s book “Love is the Killer App”
• Who are These People - Marketing to 18-54 year olds
• The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman’s controversial and relevant book.

In their pay section, there is much more content, of course. For example:

• Cracking the Millionaire Code: Your Key to Enlightened Wealth
• Millionaire MBA NLP techniques applied to building a company.

Technorati Tags: audiobooks, learning, ipod

You should forget any idea of “stealth mode” right now. The concept is foolish and has never worked, except possibly for so-called “submarine patents“. In fact, the idea is counter-productive on numerous fronts. What you want to do is to strip down your functionality and your goals to the minimum point where you might be of value to anyone. Release. Get users, maybe, if you did anything right. Then release some more, with your users’ active input.

It truly doesn’t matter, 9 times out of 10, whether your product is provably “better” than another. What matters is eyeballs, user-base, and momentum. You can’t get any of that without releasing at the earliest reasonable time. Kevin Burton on his Feed Blog says the truth very clearly:

Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you have a viable idea it’s almost certainly on the minds of at least 50 smart geeks in the bay area.

You want an idea for a startup? Buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll give you a dozen in 30 minutes. If your idea was worth money you could auction if off on EBay. Try it. It won’t sell because an idea isn’t worth money.

You don’t have time to execute? You think you’ll have more time in the future? This article says you’ll likely never have more free time than you do now. Think about it.

Technorati Tags: Stealth mode, startup

I find that projects, especially major ones like launching a new income vehicle, tend to go through three phases. Launch happiness where it is all exciting, new and coming together so fast. An agonizing push through the dry spell. Finally, a usually satisfied resolution. Of course, not all project make it to that last phase. Sometimes the agonizing push is really too much, I get discouraged and give up. As I’ve gotten older, however, I find that I am much more able to make it through the dry spells, using a few motivational techniques I’ve picked up over the years.

My top 5 tips to get through the dry spell

1. Have written goals. Nothing makes the water murkier than constantly changing the goals. Pick a time frame, write down some goals, and try to achieve those goals.
2. Focus on the successes. My goal for this quarter is to make $10 per day from one of my new sites. In the last week, I made a grand total of $18, while spending $1.50. That’s not very far along the way to $70, but it is much more than nothing. The first few dollars are the hardest dollars, they are the ones which prove you are on the right track with your product.
3. Overcome your fear of marketing and success. If you think marketing is beneath you, or that it is some shameful thing, you will never be very good at it. Sadly, I have friends and coworkers who think exactly that. No wealthy ones though. You don’t have to lose your ethics to make money, the pie is big enough for us all to have a big sloppy piece.
4. Find supportive people, which is almost certainly not your coworkers. I guarantee you that your coworkers are going to think you are an idiot. Most people do not want to believe that going outside the 9-to-5 cube could possibly work. Ignore them. I think that ksblog put it best when she was writing about her first rejection letter.
   

   There are two camps. One that thinks this single rejection is the end of the world or at least the end of my writing career. They say things like “well, you tried” or “better you find out now that it isn’t going to work.”
   [ … ]
   The other camp is the keep on trying crowd. They say things like “Now you’re a real writer” and “So how many more queries you have out there?” And then they tell the war stories about how many rejections they’ve received in life.
   You’re a smart person so you can probably guess the disparity in net worths between the two groups.

   She then goes on to point out that the “keep going” crowd are the ones she’ll want to talk to when she is seriously thinking about dropping a project.

5. Finally, if despite the above, you are still getting bogged down and bored, why not apply what Steve Pavlina calls “Overwhelming force”?
   

   Ask yourself, “What would it take for me not only to achieve this goal but to absolutely dominate it?” What would you consider overkill? Imagine your goal as if you’re planning a battle that you MUST win, regardless of the cost. Write down what you think it would take to be certain of success.

Technorati Tags: motivation, inspiration

Let the world know that you are actively adding content to your blog. This just takes a moment to set up, and pays off with more timely and accurate search crawls of your site. To do this, you need to choose an “update notification pinger”. Once you’ve chosen one or two, you configure your blogging engine to use them. In Wordpress, this is managed in the admin pages under “Options, Writing, Update services.”

What this does is send a notification to a service that you’ve updated your blog. While you could have your blog send notifications to every service around, I think manually setting up every one is just not worth the aggravation, so I suggest using a “meta-pinging” service. These services will pick up your update notification and relay it to many other blog search and aggregation sites. I like using Pingoat to do this, with Feedburner as a backup.

Refer to Technorati’s nice configuration howto for details on setting up b2, Blogger, Ecto, MarsEdit, Movable Type, Nucleus, Radio UserLand, TypePad, and WordPress to use ping services.

Ping services to choose from

• pingoat - PRO: has a rep for reliability, and a LOT of services, Google sitemap generator is a great tool, free. CON: May tag you as a “splog” if you are overly focused on marketroid speak. Services: 1engine.com, Weblogs.com AudioRPC, a2b.cc, amagle.com, bakeinu.jp, bitacoles.net, bitacoras.com, bitacoras.net, blo.gs, blog-search.net, blogdb.jp, blogdigger.com, bloggers.jp, blogmatcher.com, blogmura.jp, blogoon.net, blogpeople.net, blogrolling.com, blogshares.com, blogstreet.com, blogstyle.jp, bulkfeeds.net, catapings.com, cocolog-nifty.com, coreblog.org, dontpushme.com, effbot.org, feedburner.com, feedster.com, focuslook.com, freshpodcasts.com, geourl.org, gpost.info, icerocket.com, ipodder.org, longrank.com, memigo.com, moreover.com, my.yahoo.com, newsgator.com, newsisfree.com, pubsub.com, rubhub.com, syndic8.com, technorati.com, technorati.jp, topicexchange.com, veneblogs.com, weblogalot.com, weblogs.com, weblogs.se, weblogues.com
  Ping server address: http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• FeedBurner - PRO: nice interface, great services in general, fast, free. CON: not that many services. Services: Blog Buzz Machine, Feedster, Icerocket, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Ping-o-matic, PubSub, RssFwd, Syndic8, TailRank, Technorati, Weblogs.com, blogdigger
• Ping-o-matic - PRO: many many services available as options, free. CON: Seems to be down a lot. Services: A2b GeoLocation, Audio.Weblogs, Blo.gs, BlogRolling, BlogShares, BlogStreet, Blogdigger, Feed Burner, Feedster, GeoURL, Icerocket, Moreover, My Yahoo, News is Free, NewsGator, PubSub, RubHub, Syndic8, Technorati, Topic Exchange, Weblogalot, Weblogs.com
  Ping server: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• Blog Flux - PRO: interesting other services besides just the pinging. CON: ??? (comments welcome) Services: 1740, A2b.cc, Audio.weblogs.com, Bakeinu, Bitacoles.net, Bitacoras.com, Bitacoras.net, Blo.gs, Blogbot.dk, Blogdb, Blogdigger, Blogg.de, Bloggers.jp, Blogmura, Blogoon, Blogrolling, Blogshares, Bulkfeeds, Catapings.com, Feedburner, Feedster, Geourl.org, Goo, Moreover, My Yahoo, Odeo, Rubhub, Sourceforge, Syndic8, Technorati, Weblogs, Weblogues.com
  Ping Server address: http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
• technorati - Not a meta-pinger, but they are very important and they suggest direct pinging.
  Ping Server address: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Technorati Tags: ping services, xml-rpc, pingoat, pingomatic, blogflux, feedburner

Making a storefront is usually a time consuming, fiddly process. I like to roll my own with Zen Cart, but many will find this too much work and too prone to consuming entire days and weekends. If you have an Amazon Associate relationship (very easy to set up), you may find that the associate-o-matic software hits the sweet spot for you.

Use it to set up a niche store

You simply install the software on a site, and then use it to create a full-fledged store in your niche. It pulls all data from Amazon, so you just need to pick your sections and do some look-and-feel customization. You don’t have to enter descriptions and prices at all, which saves loads of time. All sales are fulfilled through Amazon, and you get your affiliate cut of all those transactions. Pretty nice for just a bit of configuration work, and a $99 license fee.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon associate

Most writers want more readership for their sites, yet throw their hands up in despair over the “Google Sandbox”, and assume that no one will find them for a few months. That’s just not true if you put a little effort into your site promotion efforts. Here I present 5 tips which will only cost you a few moments of time, once, but which will pay off over the long term.

#1 Add your site to Opinmind

Opinmind is a unique service that searches sites for opinions, rendering an “opinmind” scale for any topic. For example:


It does this by searching the content of sites, looking for opinions about the topic. You can get your site included in its searches, and linked on detail pane of their opinion search results by manually adding your site to their search engine.

Submit your site from the form at the bottom of any search results page.

#2 Add your site to IceRocket

IceRocket is a dedicated blog search engine. It has a number of interesting features, such as keyword term comparison graphs, where you can see how up to three terms have changed in popularity over time. Adding your blog to their searches will net you readers who are looking for blogs, which is a more valuable class of reader to many of us than the general reader referred from Google.

Submit your site on their Add Your Blog page.

#3 Add your site to TailRank

TailRank is an interesting site I first learned about on TechCrunch. They attempt to be a “newspaper of the blogosphere”, by aggregating hot conversations into groups, and highlighting blogs talking about or initiating hot topics. Most interestingly, they get their blogs to include from members’ subscription lists. You can get yours listed by importing an OPML feed list.

First, make an OPML feed list. The easiest way to do this is to make sure your sites are in your preferred RSS reader. I like Bloglines. Then, export the list as OPML. Most readers will do this for you.

Once you have the list, create an account at TailRank, and then import your feeds to TailRank.

#4 Submit your site to BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another dedicated blog search engine. It has a different focus than the others listed in this article, seemingly more interested in the “top sites” and “top searches”. Getting your site added to its search engine is a snap, though finding where to do it is less easy.

I found their blog submit page here.

#5 Add your sitemap to Google

Google will be able to crawl your site more efficiently if you give them a sitemap. This is especially easy to do if you are using WordPress, which has the excellent Google Sitemap plugin. If you aren’t using Wordpress, you can use Google’s own sitemap generator.

Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google and confirm that you own the site you are attempting to add. This will pay off in better-targeted searching at Google, as well as visibility into your crawl stats, errors and your pagerank. Nice payoff for a small amount of hoop-jumping!

Manage your sites and their sitemaps using the Google sitemap page.

Technorati Tags: SEO, icerocket, opinmind, blogpulse, google, tailrank, sitemap, site promotion

Everyone tells you the key to profits lies in finding a good niche. But with all the competition on the net, how do you analyze a potential niche to see whether it is worth your time? One good guide I’ve found is at Jamdo Blog Marketing.

He suggests the following steps:

1. Use the keyword search tool at overture (go to: resource center, keyword selector tool) to see how popular your main search term is. A good bet is 20,000 searches.
2. Go to Google, type in the search term, and go to the first ten sites. On each one, get the Page Rank using the Google Toolbar. Ideally, you don’t want any competition over PR5.
3. For each of these sites, also go to Yahoo, and type in “link:the.site.url”. This will show the backlink count. You don’t want more than 100 or so.
4. Lastly, go research your keywords on WordTracker (that link will pay Jamdo’s blog for his helpful article).

For a more in-depth discussion, read the original article

Technorati Tags: Niche marketing, affiliate marketing, keywords

Everyone says to focus on a niche, at least at first. But how do you find a niche that isn’t suffocated by well-established companies with legions of affiliates?

You look for niches which are just going by default to the top sites. At least that’s the strategy recommended in this article. The author points out that many sites don’t even really try for good search ranking for some niche products. But no one else is either, so the big guys win by default.

How to use this information

You can take advantage of that, and drive those non-targeted searchers to the site of your choosing. First, identify likely niche.

In my own keyword research I have found many keyword phrases that tens of thousands of Internet users are searching for every month by considering the following question…

Did the top ten websites purposely optimize their pages for this keyword phrase or did they get there simply because no one else is actively COMPETING for search engine placement?

Then, apply these tests from the article:

1. Is the keyword phrase in the title of the listing?
2. Is the keyword phrase used in the Domain Name of the listing?
3. Is the keyword phrase used anywhere in the URL at all?
4. How many backward links are pointing at the URL?
5. Are the backward links pointing at the page mostly internal links or do the come from other quality websites?
6. Is the URL a top level domain or some obscure page buried deep within a larger website.?

Technorati Tags: keywords, adwords, seo, niches