I don´t know whether it´s just me (a grumpy old sod =O) but, email marketers just seem to to have a real lack of imagination when it comes to there broadcast email titles. I´m just looking through my trash folder, as that´s where most emails end up and I see swathes of emails titled “RE”: , re what for Gods sake. Or the latest sheep trend seems to be “Cancelled”

I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that a large majority of marketers are just plain lazy when it comes to promoting other peoples products. They have access to a vault of pre-written email swipes and as a result they just don´t bother to take the time to re-write anything.

That´s all well and good but, from my point of view when I get the twentieth email of the day banging on about how good a product is and the marketer uses the exact same template that every other poor sap is using, they just become faceless, they do nothing different that stands themselves out from the crowd.

Obviously there are exceptions to the rule and one marketer who stands out for me is Michael Cheney. He always manages to pique my interest with his headlines and as such I always open his mail.

If writing punchy headlines give you a headache, you might want to take a look at the Cosmo Swipefile that was written by Eric Medemar. In the book Eric discusses the ways that Cosmo magazine script their headline for the maximum curiosity factor. Marketing big hitters such as Frank Kern, Eban Pagan and John Carlton To name but a few have given this book their seal of approval, answer me this how many times have you binned a Frank Kern email ??

I know copy writing is a real art but, for heavens sake at least try to rewrite an email template and you never know you may end up staying in my inbox rather than the trash can..

Until next time

Hi All,

I´m on a bit of a roll at the moment 3 posts in 2 days ! I found a brilliant plugin the other day called Rank Tracker. The plugin is being sold by Paul Forcey  (the comment hut guy). Anyway after installation the plugin will begin to tell you what keywords your ranking for and the position within Google. When you configure the plugin you can set an email account were the plugin will send a message with regard to any changes in your keyword ranking. I set the plugin up on all my niche sites on Monday and by the same evening I was getting messages through.

One thing that amazed me was the fact that I was getting messages through about keywords that I am ranking for that I did not even have any content on my site that matched the keyword, obviously a broad match search. One keyword in particular surprised me as I am ranking position three in Google for this keyword without any actual content on my site, whoo hoo !

The thing is though now I´m getting these messages through I can write posts and articles that are laser targeted to the particular keyword search, which will in the long term enable me to rank even higher.

I just love these set and forget type of plugins. At the end of the day we are all so busy chasing our tails trying to find out how to get more traffic to our sites and this Rank Tracker gives us the information on a silver platter.

Until next time my warm wishes.

I found this great piece of software yesterday from a company called Dropbox. If you are anything like me when you need to move for arguments sake a text file from one computer to another you would normally email yourself the file, Dropbox gets around this annoying little problem by dropping and dragging files into a Dropbox folder that you have on each of your computers.

As soon as you have dropped the file into your Dropbox folder it automatically appears on any other computer that have the Dropbox software installed. There is a paid option but, you can get up-to 2gb worth of storage for free, me likey =O)

I made a small video for you just to show you how it works. I love finding little pieces of software that help my day to day work and this certainly will free up quite a bit of time.

Until next time take care and good luck.

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to show you a new version of a product that has been around for a while. The name of this product is Easy Web Video. Now I know from the feedback I get that there are a lot of people who are frightened when it comes to putting video on their sites. This product could quite possibly be the answer to their prayers. As You will see from the video below this little beauty is simplicity itself.  All you have to do to get your videos online is insert one line of code.

As I said in the video the company host all your videos so all you need to bother yourself with is inserting one line of text on your site, now you tell me could that be any more easy !

Until next time my warmest wishes to you.

Make your web videos play on iPhone/iPod/iPad – FREE Download!

If  you´ve been an internet marketer for any length of time you will know all to well how difficult it is to get people to click on your links. Well, only the other day I had an email from a very well respected marketer who seemed to have a product that could put an end to this problem forever and the best thing of all Tony is offering this little beauty for FREE.

Tony Shepherd has developed a wordpress plugin that will drop a cookie in your visitors browser.  As we know people are becoming a lot more savvy when it comes to affiliate links and they can recognise a cloaked link from a thousand yards.

I’ve been using it for the last week on my other niche sites and it work like a charm.

I made a small diagram just to show you how ridiculously easy it is to use this plugin. After loading and activating the plugin you will go to settings where you will see a new sub menu called Cookie Dropper Settings. As you can see from the picture below all you do is place your affiliate link into the first box and in the second box you choose the post that you are talking about the product.

In the pdf that comes with the plugin Tony does place emphasis “on using Cookie Fire in accordance with your affiliate programs terms and conditions”

I would hazard a guess that this little tool could really increase your affiliate earnings quite considerably.To get your hands on this free tool just  follow this Cookie Fire link or on the banner below.

There are article posting programmes available but non of them have properly managed to get over the problems I have just mentioned i.e confirming your account. The other main problem with a lot of these sites it the capcha that normally appears when you post.

Two days ago I purchased a new programme from a guy called Milan Kosanovic. He obviously knows his stuff as the programme he has produced gets around all the hassles I have mentioned above !

The programme is called Automatic article submitter. I used it for the first time yesterday and boy oh boy did it work =O) Out of the list of 300 plus article directories that come with the programme I was able to make a sublist specifically for the niche article I wanted to post. I them pasted the article and made a appealing bio box and then pressed the big red button to start the cogs working. Within 15 minutes 98 out of the 100  article directories I had posted to had received my article, impressive or what. The reason for two of the article directories not receiving my article was because they did not have a section suitable. This aside I think this programme will save me hours of my time by not having to do all the manual submitting that we all had to do before this beauty came along.

There are very few products that I endorse but, this one gets two thumbs up..

My word doesn´t time fly? I cannot believe that it´s been so long since I last posted.

I am sure that after writing this post I may well get a lot of  flack but, in the words of Clark Gable “quite frankly my dear I don´t give a damn”.  Since the end of the Alex Jeffreys training course I have been beavering away at quite a few projects and I´m pleased to say that they are all coming along quite nicely. The thing is only one of these projects is remotely connected to the IM niche. 

The main thing Alex´s course brought out in me was the ability to focus and , as he describes in his own words, not jump on and off the chaos wagon, i.e. stick with one method.

My main reasons for working predominantly outside the IM niche are as follows:

1.  Whilst we all know that the IM niche is a burgeoning market, it is one of the hardest nuts to crack and the percentage of new marketers who are actually able to break through is tiny.  Obviously there are exceptions to the rule and a couple of the students on the course appear to be breaking eggs with big sticks, i.e. Dean Holland and Garry Parkes, and all good luck to them.

2.  My main gripe, and its a very big gripe about the IM niche, is the fact that it is almost solely information based.  Taking into consideration  the plethora of new products which are hitting the market virtually on a daily basis makes one wonder how many more spins you can give to setting up the basics, a hosting pack, your autoresponder, and driving traffic?

 Fair enough each one of these new packages may have a slight twist on a specific point, but if you were to run them all through Copyscape I doubt very much whether more than 10% of them would pass as original content.   A prime example of this was a product which had a huge fanfare launch yesterday, but after reading a few reviews from various forums, the concensus of opinion was that it was 99.99% the same as another well known product with just  an extra traffic module.  

This is what annoys me about the IM niche.  Thankfully I have a bit of experience now and am able to recognise, after myself purchasing a number of different products, what is new and what is re-hashed with a Sunday bonnet, but for the thousands of newbies entering into the bear pit who know no better, will only see a very enticing sales page with funky music and videos and will think it´s the best thing since sliced bread.

 I am not naive enough to think for one moment that these tactics don´t work as it is patently obvious that they do and they are able to produce some fantastic financial returns for the authors of these products.  It just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth seeing the number of people taken in by the promises of quick and easy money, i.e. the promise of $52,000 in 48 hours!!  As anybody who has been in internet marketing for a while and knows the score, will readily know that there is no feasible way that as a newbie this can be atained.  I for one am working on my own non-IM niche sites a huge number of hours each day and all of them bar one are selling visceral products, ranging from kitchen appliances to guitars.

 I know that there are only a few IM products at the moment that I will ever feel comfortable promoting, one of them being Alex´s course because as I said, he really has set the wheels in motion for me, the other couple are Sarah Brown and Tony Shepherd´s  Kickstart course, because this, in my opinion, is probably one of the best internet marketing starter programmes.  No fluff, no flashy sales pages, no wild promises of overnight wealth, just pure content.  The other main starter product is Chris Farrell´s membership site, again, no bloated promises just a very genuine sincere guy who has made the membership site for newbies to learn the basics. There are a couple more, one being Andrew Hanson´s Firepow system, again a  superb programme for niche blogging.  I realise that by writing this post I am probably committing commercial suicide because you would have every right to question me if I ever come up with another product to promote, but I would hope after reading this, you would appreciate that whatever I do promote I believe in wholeheartedly. 

Don´t get the impression that I am sitting here seething because I am not.  As Alex pointed out in the course if you can use the IM niche as a proving ground to hone your skills you can pretty much guarantee success in any other niche.  To prove this point less than a week ago I set up a blog based around a very well searched keyword phrase for a well known brand of kitchen appliances and my blog is on  page 1, out of 1,300,000 pages.  Now this last comment isn´t to brag, its just to prove that if you are able to get the basics in place this kind of ranking is possible.  As a lot of you know my main passion is video marketing and I run in conjunction with the building of the marketing sites, a video campaign, but funnily enough with this example, I didn´t, maybe a lucky strike, I don´t know but I am not complaining.  The point I am making is that after learning the basics, if you put them into practice properly, and when I say put them into practice, I mean take proper action.  You don´t actually need to purchase every conceivable product that hits the market, because as my Mum says, if it aint broke – don´t fix it.

Hi all,

 I just want to talk about giveaways –do they work ?

 I have been doing some split testing as to what piques peoples interest and have offered two different free giveaway packages.

 I took on board what Alex and Linda Carol said about what to offer and what not to offer.

 I have offered on the one hand, a very good package of 30 different quality PLR and MRR products, and on the other hand, a single product of my own.

 The 30 product pack certainly attracted interest, but unfortunately there was a downside.  A significant number of people de-subscribed almost immediately after downloading this attractive and good value package.

 I was able to ascertain from their email addresses that they were more than likely taking the 30 product pack to split up and use themselves.

Quite a number of people seemed to take no notice of the double optin request, even though they must have realized that they would not be able to get the free offer without doing so.

After editing the optin form and making it clear, in huge red text, the necessity for the double optin, there was a slight increase in people doing so, but there was still a large number who didn’t.  Why?  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason, why complete only part of the process if you want the free offer?  Surely you do what you have to do, to get it?

 Then I submitted a single product, and whilst the take up rate was significantly lower, the upside was that the retention and open rate was much higher.  This surely goes to prove that it is not such a good idea to offer such a large number of products at any one time.  You will only attract freebie seekers!

 This proves the point that Alex made that it is far better to offer one quality product of your own than somebody else’s batch of 30 products, albeit quality ones.

I think everybody within the student body will agree with me that these post-course weeks have been extremely hard work, but at the same time extremely exciting times.  Since the end of the course I have been looking at various methods of communicating with members of my list on a different level than the bog standard text e-mail.  I signed up to a fantastic service run by Jive Systems.  Basically Jive Systems have come up with a video e-mailing system that as far as I am concerned is the bees knees.  I have done a lot of research in this particular medium because as a lot of you know I am very interested in  video communication.  In my research I have found that there are lots of companies offering video e-mailing but I discovered the price of these programmes to be quite prohibitive inasmuch as they would set you a figure based on how many e-mails you would send out per month and beyond this you would be charged a tariff based on each extra e-mail sent.  The beauty of Jive Systems  is that there are no extra charges, you have one fixed monthly payment and it doesn´t matter how large your list becomes.  As you can probably tell I am really excited about this product as I am becoming more and more comfortable talking to the camera and I do feel that it is a far nicer way to communicate with the people on my list and one of the other fabulous points about this system is the fact that within each of the 40 templates they have to offer you are able to include live links to wherever you point your customers.  Be that a link to your blog, a video, a pdf or in fact anything.

I have joined virtually every giveaway event that has been advertised at the moment.  I am really pleased to say that they are actually working for me.  My list is growing daily.  It is quite incredible how much work you can actually fit into a 16 hour day! (not every day but nearly. Ha.Ha.)  Inbetween outside commitments and the need to give this business the input that it needs to grow, I find my once burgeoning social calendar has taken a nose dive, but it´s all good.  Apart from producing videos for Clickbank products, I have been beavering away at my own first product launch for the IM niche.  (My Journey So Far – Version 12!!).

I feel really bad for not getting round to see any of my fellow students blogs but even as well as I manage my time, I am just finding at the moment that extra hour to do this is just beyond me at the moment, so my apologies to all but I promise I will be visiting again as soon as everything starts to calm down.

Hi all, 

 I can’t help but notice that people seem to have stopped visiting each other’s blogs and leaving comments. This student area has nearly become a ghost town. I would hazard a guess that this is a knee jerk reaction to the ‘end’ of the course. I confess I am as guilty as the next, time being at such a premium.

Even though we have known that this day would come I think it has crept up on us.  We have been concentrating on doing our homework, trying to build a list, etc. and time has just got away from us.

 Now everyone seems to be head down and beavering away for their dear life to make sure they have everything under their control before they have to fly the next, so to speak.

 I do hope that the students still see value in having a supportive group around them.  I for one do not want to lose touch with the many people who have helped me along the way.

 With there being such a diverse level of expertise among the students, I know that should anybody have a problem, somebody else has had to face that selfsame problem and overcome it.The way they overcame the problem is surely of great interest to others.

Now more than ever we need each other, so don’t lose touch.