RSS Tips

Determine what formats that you want your RSS Feed or Blog content to be readable in. The more formats that you offer the better. I would recommend, RSS 2.0, Atom or FeedBurners “SmartFeed”. If you are using Blogger it automatically creates an Atom Feed Validate your feeds By going to www.feedvalidator.org Display the RSS feed subscribe buttons on your Blog or Website Homepage in a prominent area, either at the top of the page or in the right hand column. Put a link under your feed buttons that explains what a feed is and how to use the feed. There will be readers that don’t know what these buttons do and how to use them. Update your feed frequently with new content when appropriate. Make sure that you “ping” the RSS & Blog directories after every time that you update your RSS feed (any time you make a new post). You can do this at www.pingomatic.com Promote your RSS News feeds in your newsletter, on your website homepage, with press releases, to your email database list, etc. Submit your feeds to the major feed directories. Check that your feeds are valid at least once a month. Also verify that the feed is correct any time it is updated.

Get Found Online Using Blogs

What is a blog? A blog, or weblog, is a website that allows for regularly posted content or articles.

• Blogging is Inbound Marketing
• Blogging helps with SEO
• Blogging helps with social news and networking sites
• Blogging is permission centric

The conversation has already started, it’s time that you’re aware of it and develop a strategy for engaging in it and using it for marketing How To STEP 1: Read • Search for other blogs in your industry using Technorati.com or BlogSearch.Google.com. • Read and subscribe to blogs via RSS or email – RSS allows users to subscribe anonymously and consume content however they want. STEP 2: Comment • Contribute to the conversation via a comment. • Increase the value of the article – share an example, add a point, add a useful link, disagree, ask a question. • Why? • Engage in the community • Get noticed by other bloggers and blog readers • Get links back to your blog STEP 3: Write • Find the right blog software for you. • Blog functionality: Make sure to use your own business URL (blog.mycompany.com), not a sub- domain of someone else’s URL (myblog.typepad.com) – most blog software allows you to do this. Also your blog software should allow for email and RSS subscriptions as well as integration with social media sites. • Analytics functionality: To truly measure the success of your blog, your software should allow you to report on email and RSS subscribers over time, measure visitors and leads generated, and track search engine keyword rank over time and compared to competitors. • Support and expertise: If you are new to blogging, you may want your software provider to provide technical support, education and marketing expertise on how to succeed with your blog. • Draw in readers with your blog article titles.

• Funny: “GoDaddy’s 16-Step Checkout: Brainless Marketing At Its Finest?”
• Enticing: “12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like AnExpert”
• SEO: “Free Advertising on Google”

• On frequency: General rule of thumb is to blog at least weekly to maintain steady readership and continue your SEO efforts. Blog topic ideas:

• List of 5 ideas, trends, or thoughts
• Publish a list of links
• Take a recent experience and share it
• Answer questions you received recently
• Comment on other blog articles
• Turn a press release into a blog article

Promote your blog:

• Email friends and family
• Replace email newsletter with blog
• Trade guest articles with similar blogger
• Promote on social media sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, LinkedIn

STEP 4: Measure & Analyze • Track number of blog visitors and subscribers, SEO rankings, Technorati blog rank. • Measure real business results: number of visitors, leads, and customers generated by your blog.

The Niche Finding Process

This is a huge question that comes up all the time in the affiliate marketing and black hat forums I frequent. “How do I find niches?” Beginners find this particularly difficult and it really doesn’t need to be. For bottom feeding niches, people would like to just have niches handed to them. The problem with that is that if 10 other people jump into your niche and do things correctly, your income just got murdered. Thus the importance of being able to find your own niches to exploit. As you will agree once finished with this sections, nothing could be easier. Brainstorming Niches Once you’ve done this enough times, you’ll probably be able to gather more niches in an hour than you can use in a month. Here is my favorite method for brainstorming niches: Google Adwords Sandbox Tool The first thing I do is head on over to www.Amazon.com or the Yahoo or DMOZ directory. Or I search Google to come up with a directory that is related to a wide niche. If you have a Google Adwords Account, and you should, you will find a ledger called “tools”: Open it up, select “keyword tool” and then select the “site related keyword”. Enter a portal type website in the box and press “find more keywords.” You can also access this tool here.

Twitter for traffic

Branding yourself on Twitter Keep following what is happening within your field and make sure that you become known for twittering on a subject related to your site. By linking to different quality resources, people will look at you as an expert who knows where to find the best information and who shares knowledge with their followers. Your Twitter profile and reputation is just as important as some clicks. If you have a trustworthy profile you will gain more followers as your profile will look very valuable and knowledgeable. The overall effect of you only posting quality and relevant tweets will be cumulative in the long run as branding is a subtle process that occurs over time. You will become branded as an expert who provides regular insight into your topic and this will expose you to other people who are interested in your subject. Code of conduct for your tweets: ● Be helpful, useful and friendly. The more you give, the more you will receive in return. ● Do not promote your site or your product all the time. You might have gotten somebody to follow you, but if you do not provide value to them, they can just as easily unfollow you. ● Try to grab the attention of whomever is reading by thinking of your tweets as your blog article headlines. ● Make sure to make each tweet interesting and worth reading to your target audience. Post the best you can come up with and hopefully your followers will decide to click on, check out your profile and your site. ● Restrain yourself from tweeting too much about a broad range of personal topics, as many tweets might make your followers unfollow you. Use TweetStats and TwitterFriends to learn more and analyze your tweets. How to optimize the exposure of your tweets ● Use TweetBurner to shorten the URL’s you want to include in your tweets. As tweets are based on 140 characters, this will save you some space for your message. ● TweetBurner will also track how many clicks your tweets get. You can analyze which tweet structures attract your followers the most, what headlines work best, and at what time of the day your tweets get most clicks. ● Use analysis from TweetBurner with service of TweetLater to schedule your tweets to be posted at the best possible times to optimize the exposure and number of clicks. ● Experiment with repeating the same tweet twice a day with some 10-12 hours in between and analyze your results. From my experience, people do not notice that you repeat tweets and your repeat will attract attention, as many new people have logged on since your original tweet some 10 hours before. ● You can automate your tweets even more by using TwitterFeed to have your new blog RSS news feed entries automatically posted to your Twitter followers. I do not use it personally but some might find it valuable.

Internet Marketing

If you’re a traditional online marketer and are spending the bulk of your time doing any of the following well-known tactics you might be causing your business to die a slow death:

• Article Writing
• Blogging
• Social Media
• Copy Writing
• Link Building
• Getting Paid Traffic
• ecommerce Store building

If you play the slots, in Vegas or anywhere else, you’ve got a 32% chance of success. But if you’re a business owner, online or onground, you’ve got a 37% change of success, so there – see? We’ve got THAT going for us. Except, if you like horse racing, then close your business now, because playing the ponies will give ya a 41% chance of success. But wait there’s more: if you’re tired of doing a bunch of number crunching and accounting to keep your business alive – good news! You’ve only got to count to 21 in Black Jack and that gives you a 45% chance of success! Things are looking up! And if you’re a complete slacker, just throw that little ball onto the roulette table, and you’re looking at a 47% chance of success. One of the key principles is the concept of the Law Of Compounding. This Law cuts you a major break. In today’s world of Good to Great, and The Pursuit of Excellence, the Law of Compounding allows you to make changes that result in what most people would consider to be mediocre improvements to the performance of your business yet, because you’re making other changes that build upon the first, the mathematics from this law will cause your profits to double. And that’s why the program tag line is, "the system is brilliant, so you don’t have to be". Now, I don’t expect you to believe a word of any of this. I’m a skeptic too, but I run a company that’s built on testing to eliminate guesswork and skepticism by finding out the facts. So, though Paul’s credentials and track record are impressive, I wanted to see a solid test first. So, we ran one – using a couple hundred people in StomperNet, with all kinds of business models, all different sizes of businesses, and all levels of business experience. They tested the program for about 60 days. Here’s what they reported. It took them 5 minutes, 2 or 3 hours, 10 Hours…. To make $12 k a month, $20k in the first month, $100k in the first year, up $200k over last year – and remember, this is all in the midst of the rest of our economy experiencing a major melt-down. BTW, these folks didn’t get any special treatment. If anything, they got short changed because, the program they worked with didn’t have the checklists, manuals, work sheets, or the full mastermind success coaching groups that the commercially-available program contains. But the results and profits that they did get in such a short amount of time were nothing short of amazing. Actually, let me clarify that – I’ve seen big numbers that happen over a short period of time. Those examples become the poster-boy testimonials to launch entireproducts, and I know you’ve seen this kind of thing before. What I have never seen, and I’ve been doing this for 9 years, is SO MANY consistently big improvements toprofits with such a small amount of effort over such a wide range of businesses, in such a short amount of time. And that’s why I think Formula Five might end up becoming as big or even bigger than StomperNet over the next 12 months. Successful Business is NOT about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep. Like, how cool would it be to run a company that does $500,000 in revenue every year and results in $1,600 in profits He says sarcastically… 62.8% of Entrepreneurs think that the money that falls to the top line is a good indicator and validation of the success of their business model. And then, they go bankrupt. Are you judging the success of your business but how much it’s grossing? Well – Don’t do it anymore! It’s what you KEEP that matters. According to a survey from US Bank and the SBA, one of the top reasons that 62.8% of all businesses fail is lack of profits, meaning, poor or declining margins. But this is NOT one of them: Some folks think that cutting costs is the key to improving margins. There’s NOTHING wrong with efficiency and cutting waste. But in the history of earth, no business ever made a fortune by cutting costs alone. And when they slash and burn, they look for the big dollars – and tell me if I’m wrong if you haven’t eyed that adwords budget and said “Hmmm, if I trimmed a little there, and there…” A lot of people FREAK OUT when thinking about it. They go insane and start huffing that their sales will TANK and they’ll go immediately out of business. Not in a few weeks or months – immediately. If you sell a service that requires equipment in order for it to work, make sure it has a dollar value assigned to it, even if you GIVE it to the customer for no charge – like, if you sell Merchant Account Service for point of sale transaction, and the little credit card swipe machine is part of the deal, make sure your customer knows how much that’s worth. It’s the things you throw in that often add a lot of dollars in Valuizing. If you sell software or a service that requires installation on your company servers, and you include installation as part of the price – make sure you assign a dollar value to it. Why? Because SOMEONE has to pay for it. If you can show your customer how quickly their purchase is going to be FREE, then you’ve got a home-run on your hands. And I’m not talking about Free Trials. In Valuizing, you made the customer aware of the DOLLAR VALUE of what your products features are worth. When you Turn on the Total Return Engine, you’re showing the customer how much they will MAKE – just like Put-In-Your-Pocket- Profits. Again, the key concept here is DOING THE MATH for the customer. Remember, the customer is distracted, is afraid of making the wrong decision, and doesn’t have time to talk themselves into a purchase – it’s your JOB to help them find the Implicit Decision Trigger – the moment where THEY decide that this is the right purchase for them. And if you can cause an IDT to happen, you’ve got em. So, don’t skimp on the MATH. According to 20 years of data I analyzed from the U.S. Census Bureau – this is hard to believe but -- within six years, two-thirds, actually 62.8%, close to two-thirds of all businesses will fail. New businesses enter, old businesses leave, but after every six years they have cycled through, two-thirds of them are completely finished. So… That doesn’t give you very good odds. By understanding what the market is telling you and why it behaves the way it does, you can tailor your marketing and be more effective. The info I’m about to show you came from a survey was done by U.S. Bank in conjunction with the Small Business Administration. They asked a group of several hundred failed business owners “Why had they failed?” Here’s what they said – and oh, by the way, these answers are not in order of how often these answers were given, but all these answers were in the top tier of the reasons that people gave for failing in their business. One was a lack of vision and the strategy to implement that vision. So no strategy, no vision, they failed. They lacked a system for marketing and sales. Notice they didn’t say there -- no marketing and sales. They just didn’t have a systematic approach to marketing or sales. They lacked a system to monetize their clients. They might have been good at getting clients but they didn’t do anything to make repeated offers and resell them. They were trying, perhaps you are guilty of this one, to do too many things at once. They didn’t have a plan to invest profits for growth. In other words they didn’t have enough internally to grow and they didn’t have any way to get enough resources to grow. They got caught up in their day to day which means that they didn’t spend their energy building the future of their business. They do or did – because these businesses are toast now – they did everything ad hoc and didn’t follow a system, which means they made it up each time that they were doing it and they didn’t create, or stick to, action plans. These are the reasons that these people failed. I want you to think for a minute about your business and how you run it, and whether or not any of these major reasons for failure apply to you. Because if they do, you are most likely heading for trouble. Now many business owners operate with what I call a rescue fantasy. Their rescue fantasy sounds like this: If I could only just get good at that one part of my business which I don’t really know enough about… which will make the critical difference in my business… then I could get rich” Have you had a thought like that? You think that there’s just one more thing you need to know? Like, if you knew that one thing, it would all work out? But, let me ask you what are the chances that it will all work out? And, really, do you want to risk your success on that one thing? What are the odds of success… So here are the five things. You have to have a strong value proposition, which simply means that you have something that people want and you’re charging the right amount of money for it; a strong value proposition that leads to a strong pricing proposition, which leads to higher margins. Remember this, grab a pen and write it down, “Business is not about how much you sell, it’s about how much you keep.” It’s not about the revenue, it’s about the margin. Keeping that in mind may change everything you think about your business. Next, you need a continual stream of new visitors or leads or business opportunities. What else? You need to cost-effectively and consistently convert those leads into paying customers, cost-effectively and consistently. You need a way to fully monetize those customers instead of selling to them just one time. In other words you have figured out how to provide a steady stream of value to your clients and customers, in exchange for which they will give you a steady stream of money. Who wouldn’t like a steady stream of money from each one of their clients? The fifth one is a little different from the others, which is that you need to run your business in a way that’s efficiently and effectively working so that people get enough of the right things done in the amount of time you have. Working 18 hours a day is not a sustainable business. When I was in my 20’s I had a software company and we sold to international banks and I worked 18 hour days. I worked six and a half days a week. On Sundays I worked about seven hours. I called that a day off and that was okay, but when I sold that company after three and a half years I pretty much collapsed because it’s not sustainable to do that. So you want to make sure that people are able to get things done in an efficient and effective manner. And you have to have all five of these things.

Affiliate Program Directories

www.100best-affiliate-programs.com

www.1st-affiliates-online-programs-directory.com

www.2-tier.com

www.adbility.com

www.activeincome.com

www.affiliateadvisor.com

www.affiliatebase.com

www.affiliatebroadcast.com

www.affiliateknowledge.com

www.affiliatepromoter.com

www.affiliatee.virtualave.net

www.affiliatefirst.com

www.affiliateguide.com

www.affiliate-marketing.co.uk

www.affiliatematch.com

www.affiliateoptions.com

www.affiliate-programs.org

www.affiliate-programs-directory.com

www.affiliate-programs-guide.com

www.affiliate-programs-marketing.com

www.affiliateprogramlist.com

www.affiliates4u.co.uk

www.affiliatesdirectory.com

www.affiliates.searchking.com/

www.affiliate-scheme.co.uk

www.affiliateworld.com

www.associate-it.com

www.AssociatePrograms.com

www.associatecash.com

www.associatesearch.com

www.atlnetwork.com

www.bblmedia.com

www.becomeanaffiliate.com

www.bestcommissions.com

www.cashpile.com

http://www.clamins.com/revenue/

www.click2lead.com

www.clickaffiliate.com

www.clickassociates.com

www.clickquick.com

www.clickslink.com

www.dansquickshopping.com

www.easycashmaker.com

www.esponsors.ws

www.gap-online.co.uk

http://www.globalhighway.com

www.gr1innovations.com

www.hits4me.com

www.home-business-directory.com

www.home-business-search.com

www.incomemax.com

www.i-revenue.net

http://kresch.com/cgi-bin/submit99.cgi

www.LifetimeCommissions.com

www.loadedaffiliate.com

www.makemoneynow.com

www.mdpub.com/associateprograms/

www.netaffiliate.com

www.onlinebusiness.com

www.partner-programme.de

www.partnerprogramme.com

www.profitstogo.com

www.pwdnet.co.uk

www.qango.com

www.quiklinks.com

www.recurring-commissions.com

www.referit.com

www.referralincome.com

www.referralmadness.com

www.refer-me.com

www.revenuemakers.com

www.simplesite.co.uk

www.sitecash.com

www.sponsordirectory.com

www.sponsoretc.com

www.sponsorguide.com

www.startearning.com

http://www.soft-links.com/affiliateprograms/affiliateprograms.htm

www.sponsorplus.net/

www.top10affiliates.com

www.ukaffiliateprogrammes.co.uk

www.webaffiliateprograms.com

www.webimprovement.com

www.webmaster-programs.com

www.webpromotiondepot.com

Social Bookmarking Tools

Social Bookmarking is basically saving a website to your favorites, but posting it to the internet instead. Many of these sites us a “no-follow” attribute for links, but not all of them. It will help with traffic and SEO by using the tools above. Onlywire is an automated social bookmarking tool. It has 18 sites built in to it. You take a bookmarklet and add it to your toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox. You click on the bookmarklet and it takes you to Onlywire. Onlywire takes the URL and the title information from the page. Feel free to modify the title, as that will be the anchor text linking to your site. You then choose tags that describe the page you are bookmarking. Onlywire has you separate tags by a space, so you need to cover all your bases when it comes to phrases. I normally create one word with no spaces (affiliatemarketing) and separate with a hyphen (affiliate-marketing) to ensure proper coverage. Each tag has its own page. That page will contain a link back to your site! I recommend using 10 – 20 tags per bookmark. You need to include a description of the link in the comments box. Your description should include any valid keywords you can include, while continuing to make sense. Click on the submit button and you just created over 100 backlinks! The Socializer is a website that helps you bookmark over 50 sites. Be sure to look at each site individually to make sure you separate your tags properly. Some use commas, while others use spaces. Make sure you don’t double bookmark your sites. I keep a small post-it with the sites on Onlywire to make sure I don’t waste any time double bookmarking sites.