Wise and sensible heads are purveyors of KISS.  Keep It Simple Stupid…

I am not calling you stupid!  It is what KISS means.  You will also learn that these guy’s are apostles of “Don’t make me think” by …  Find out by clicking on this short video.

And if you want to find out about List Building with List Hero, watch out for the next post.  Simply subscribe by RSS feed above or, preferably, use the “Speedy Optin” box under the illustration to the right below the illustration.  Hey and if you click on the illustration, it takes you to a random site that may show you how to earn a few pennies now and then.  Nothing major.  No promises.  No BS.  Just rock solid continual payments to your bank account whether you do anything or not after you authorise yourself to receive them.  In the words of the Monty Python crew, “Nothing will come from nothing so waddayer lost?  Nothing!”

Warmly,

Malcolm

So tell me something: WHY DO PEOPLE CUT BACK ON MARKETING when times get tough?  Have YOU ever wondered that?  It’s a curious question, but the first reaction of most business people facing tough times is “cut the marketing”!!!  It is, after all, a very large expense in most companies. So it’s an easy line-item to cut.  But WHY, when you know that customers are going to be tougher to find, would you PURPOSELY stop looking for them?

If the pool of available prospects were shrinking, why do you add to your own suffering by REFUSING TO ATTRACT them?  You’d think – if business owners were rational people – that they would make the path from “prospect” to “customer” as slippery as possible during tough times. You’d think that people who wanted their businesses to survive would redouble their advertising and marketing efforts during tough times so that THEIR PIECE OF THE PIE at least stayed the same, even as the pie itself became smaller.  BUT THEY DON’T!  It’s as though they’ve decided that they don’t deserve to win – or to even survive.  They give up.

And that is very, very strange.

Don’t you still need to pay your employees?  Feed your family? Protect your own future?  I’ve been thinking about this for the last week or so, as I’ve been avoiding cable news, newspapers and talk radio.  I thought a lot about this. And now I understand.

LET ME ASK YOU this question…

If you knew that when you gave away a dollar, you got back two dollars, how often would you repeat the process?  Over and over again, right?  But what if you gave away a dollar, but didn’t know how much you’d get back? What if you sometimes got back more than a dollar, sometimes less, and sometimes nothing at all?  Put another way, what if you had NO IDEA AT ALL how much you were getting back?  You’d stop, wouldn’t you?  Any rational person would.  I would.

QUESTION: What’s the difference between those two situations?
ANSWER: One is measured, and one is not.

In the first situation, the dollar is an INVESTMENT- you gave it away, but it came back with friends. You know because the results are MEASURED.  In the second situation, the dollar is an EXPENSE – it goes away and you don’t know what happens to it. The results are UNMEASURED.  The gut reflex of most businesses when faced with difficult situations is to CUT THE EXPENSES.

Those business owners who cut their marketing to the bone during tough times do that because they are not measuring their marketing. They can’t tell you, with absolute certainty, that when they spend a dollar, they get two back.  And so, out of fear – and PANIC – they cut their marketing efforts.  When food is scarce, they stop eating on purpose. They give up. They starve. Voluntarily.

In business we call this “out of business”.

So what are YOU going to do?  What is your plan to survive over the next couple of years?  If you choose to survive – and I hope you do – here are six tips to help your business survive.

1) MEASURE EVERYTHING.
Since you run an online business, that means knowing where your traffic comes from, how it gets there, and WHAT IT’S WORTH.  A few weeks ago, I made you a video that shows you exactly How to set up Google Analytics on your website in 6 minutes.  Analytics can tell you which of your marketing is making you money, and which isn’t.  If you haven’t seen the video, and installed analytics on your own site yet, do that first. It’s free, and is one of the best website statistics programs available.

2) KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER.
Niches are far more profitable than large groups of people.  First, you’ll find that it is far less expensive to market and advertise to a small niche than it is to advertise to a large group. But YOU CAN ALSO CHARGE MORE for your specialty item that solves a specific problem than you can for an item “just like everyone else’s” that “everyone can use”.  Knowing your customer is the key to making every marketing dollar more effective.

3) CAPTURE EVERY LEAD.
I hope you’ve heard this before – and acted on it. But if you’re not building a list on your website and starting a relationship with your prospects long before they buy from you, you are truly wasting your marketing dollars.  On average, only 1% of visitors buy from a direct marketing website, but 20% will join a list. Of those 20%, typically a fourth of those – 5% of the total visitors – will buy. That means a list can increase your sales by FIVE TIMES.  And it’s not hard. Learn how to build a list and set up a squeeze page on your site.

4) KNOW YOUR COMPETITION.
The traffic is out there. Even in down times, millions of people still buy what they want, and they buy what they need. If the pie is shrinking, and you are gearing up to get a bigger slice of it, then you’ve got to understand where your traffic will be coming from.  And it will be coming from your competitors.  You are going to be taking TRAFFIC that is currently theirs and MAKING IT YOURS. There are some tools on Google and other search engines to show you exactly what your competitors have done to get their traffic, and what you can do to steal it.  I created a video to show you how to steal your competitor’s traffic. I recommend you watch it.

5) INCREASE YOUR MARKETING FOCUS.
Once you’re measuring, targeting, capturing, and locating, it’s time to re-double your marketing efforts. Like we discussed at the top of this article, the ironic thing is that in down times, most of your competitors are going to be cutting back on their marketing.  Truly stupid, in the conventional sense of the word, if their goal is to survive.  Your opportunity, right now, is to increase your focus on Marketing. You need new customers to survive, and to even THRIVE right now.  Do everything you can to INCREASE THE TRAFFIC coming to your site.  And there are lots of tools available to you: article marketing, web PR, SEO, Web 2.0 tricks, blogs, Adwords – all easy to do – and all CRITICAL to your survival and prosperity over the coming years.

And you don’t have to take my Stupid Easy Traffic course for this – you can do it on your own, over time. You just need to do it, one way or another.  This new fight for business survival is really a FIGHT OVER TRAFFIC. It’s either yours or someone else’s. I’d rather it be yours.  I’ve got one more tip for you. And this may be the most important…

6) STAY POSITIVE.
I was talking with a good friend the other day. She’s recently gone through some very dark times – perhaps the darkest you could imagine. But she’s made it through – with a big smile on her face. And as we were chatting yesterday, she said “Yes, it was tough. But now I’m on the other side of it.”  I thought that what she said was profound.  Even now, there is tremendous opportunity in this world for those who choose to create it, see it, and take advantage of it.  You, too, can get to the other side.  Imagine yourself there, for a moment, through the tough times, and into the happy, prosperous ones.  You deserve to be there.

To Your Success,

-Mark Widawer
P.S. If this article impacted you in some way, please leave a comment.
Also, let me encourage you to watch the video about how I showed one regular guy how to steal $125,000 of traffic from his biggest competitor. (It’s not going to be hard). Plus, you’ll learn some cool Google tricks you can use to figure out if you can steal traffic from your own competitors.  Stupid Easy Traffic begins on October 21. If you need more traffic, you may as well get it the EASY way. The expert faculty and I will show you exactly how to get the traffic you need to your site as quickly and easily as possible.  I’m going to hold your hand through the process, and we’re going to make it fun, too.

http://www.StupidEasyTraffic.com

You know about WordPress, the leading blogging software, right? You are reading a post in a WordPress Blog…  Look at the url in your browser. Well, there is a product out there that shows you how to make your own WordPress plugins… from scratch!

Is it possible to write a simple script that is easier to make than 99% of the PHP scripts you’ll ever create?  For those of you who’s eyes glaze over at the mention of PHP, HTML, AJAX, Perl and any number of other protocols that you believe are best left to people in white coats or who wear gigantic glasses and are best described as spotty…  Hang in here a bit.

WordPress allows you to write PHP scripts in such a way that it “hooks” into the WordPress blogging software to make anything you thought possible.

There are THOUSANDS of amazing WordPress plugins out there. Now you can create your OWN plugin and either sell it to make big bucks or give it away to achieve big popularity.  Puffing out One’s chest.

WordPress plugins are way cooler (Pop lang for you Americans out there) than regular PHP scripts because your users don’t have to worry about editing any files, installing databases, making chmods… or anything!

PHEW!  Thank goodness for that.

Most of the headaches you’d USUALLY deal with when making a PHP script… is handled by WordPress. People upload one folder and they can do the rest in the WordPress dashboard. They click around and edit a few settings… it’s all stored in the existing WordPress database.

You would not believe what’s possible with WordPress plugins. You can create Google sitemaps, perform automatic backups, log and analyze all search queries so you know what to blog about next. There are tons of plugins out there that can save you time and money and make your blog completely different from anyone else’s.

Up until now, many people haven’t been familiar with WordPress plugins, and so many more marketers have been oblivious to the potential of selling a plugin.

In the last year you might have seen some best selling WordPress plugins crop up, ones to add a popup to your blog with one click… dripfeed content to your blog over time… reward visitors for commenting… even turn your blog into a review site.

The market is hungry for some paid WordPress plugins, the question is are you going to provide them or will someone else? Find out all about WordPress plugins at http://flpteam.wordpressoncrack.com

So, there you have it.  This article was penned mainly by our very own PHP Guru who is not long out of short pants, Robert Plank.

And the reason why you might be interested is that if you have a fear of setting up websites or do not have the money to pay for someone else to do it, WordPress Blogs are free.  Yup.  Free.  If you want to know how to install your own, you need just two things.

1. A Web Host that supports Fantastico.

2.  A spare afternoon.

And if you still do not what I am banging on about, get started with a web account from MidPhase.  It is the same webhost that supports my WordPress site so, obviously it works.  Then look on UTube and find a video that shows you how to install a WordPress Blog using Fantastico.

You are in for a great treat!

Warmly,

Malcolm
PS TIP.  ALL your Google AdWord advertising should point to a WP Blog… 
PPS   Don’t know what a “Plugin” is?  Go HERE to Mashable.com
PPPS  If I can install WP, so can you.

Wow!  I am going to follow this one!

1. What percentage of your campaigns are actually successful?

2. How EXACTLY do you research a niche?

3. What about PRODUCTS? How do you find products that CONVERT well?

4. When do you know to QUIT on a niche or campaign?

5. What network do you recommend affiliates start with?

6. What EXACTLY do your landing pages look like?

7. How many KEYWORDS do you use to promote a product?

8. What’s your FAVORITE keyword research tool?

Find out by clicking on the photograph…

And just in: Video 2

http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/PPCClassrom2.0Vid2

EasyPeasy research = MicroNicheFinder

Keywords are the exact word or phrase surfer’s type into search engines to find what they are looking for on the Internet.  They are the essential elements in your website’s profitability and in many cases, keywords will largely determine how much revenue you earn from the web.

Finding profitable keywords is not a difficult task.  Anyone can use popular online sites and tools to find valuable and profitable keywords with a few minutes of work.  Quick, easy and simple.  You just have to know how to find the answers to these three questions:

How Many Searches Are Made Each Month For Your Keyword?
How Much Competition Does Your Keyword Have?
How To Know If Your Keyword Is Profitable?

A keyword that receives no searches is worthless.  A keyword that receives just 10 to 100 searches each month may be very profitable.

Your first task is to find out or discover HOW MANY SEARCHES are made each month for your keyword or keyword phrase.  You can use sites like Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) or WordTracker and they will give you the number of searches made each month and variations of your keyword phrase.  I also use this site: http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

Once you know how many searches are made for your keyword you can determine how much traffic you will receive if your site lands on the first page SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).  The closer you are to the number one spot will determine the percentage of these monthly searches you will receive.  Most of your traffic will come from Google, even if you get Number1 spots in all three major engines, Yahoo and MSN will return less traffic – at least this has been my experience but do not overlook these last two.  They behave more like Google used to before the so called “Google Slap”.

Keep in mind that even keywords with low search numbers may still be profitable.  For example, ‘unique corporate gift ideas’ only has around 400 searches but this may be very profitable for companies or websites that cater to corporate gifts.  Also remember that some keyword searches are seasonal. i.e. The number of searches made for ‘valentine gifts’ in July will greatly differ from those made in February.

2. How Much Competition Does Your Keyword Have?

You must know the level of competition for each keyword phrase you target with your online marketing.  Extremely competitive keywords may or may not be worth your investment because you will have to spend a lot of money per click to get on the first Search Engine Results Page.

If you are relying solely on Search Engine Optimisation rather than Pay Per Click for very competitive keywords, it may require months, usually years of content/link building to get results.  Unless you use a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising system such as Google AdWords or Yahoo Marketing, you will not get any traffic from extremely competitive keywords.  It is best to target keywords with little or no competition.

One of the best sites to use to find your keyword’s competition is Google itself.  If you type your keyword phrase ‘corporate gift ideas’ into Google search you will see there are 7,660,000 pages/listings returned.  To get the number of pages that have your exact keyword phrase, you need to search your phrase within quotation marks “corporate gift ideas” and you will see it has around 275,000 pages featuring your keyword phrase.  As a guide:

keyword = broad match
[keyword] = exact match
“keyword” = phrase match
-keyword = negative match

If you check out the sites on the first three pages of listings, you can determine the level of your competition.  I use the professional keyword research software Keyword Elite to determine my competition.  However, here is a quick way to check the PR (Page Rank) of the listings for your keyword phrase.  Let us run through an example.

First, do a search in Google for ‘corporate gift ideas’ and then highlight and copy the return URL.

Next go to this site:
http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

and paste in your Google keyword return URL:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=corporate+gift+ideas&btnG=Search

This will give you a quick visual page rank of all your chosen keyword’s Top 10 competitors! 

3. How To Know If Your Keyword Is Profitable?

One quick and simple way to tell if your keyword is profitable, i.e. that people are making money from promoting and optimising your chosen keyword phrase, is take your keyword phrase and type it into Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Just count the number of Sponsored Links at the top of the page and at the sides.  If your keyword phrase is profitable, you will see many sponsored links, which means sites/businesses are advertising.  Where there is advertising, there is profit!

You can use Yahoo Search Advertising (Overture) to discover the amount each advertiser is willing to pay for each click or visitor to their keyword phrase – this amount can range from $.10 to $10 to $100 per click!

I use the keyword software mentioned above to monitor the different sites promoting my keywords.  If my competitors are buying PPC advertising month after month, I can reasonably know that this keyword phrase is profitable for them and there is a good chance it can be also profitable for me and you likewise.

Many perceptive Internet Marketers find a niche market and target a whole string of related keywords that have little or no competition.  This Long Tail marketing method can prove very profitable.  How profitable will largely depend on what you do with your keyword traffic, how well you can convert this traffic into a sale or how well you can monetise it with affiliate programs or Google AdSense?

Just follow these three easy steps for finding profitable keywords and you will have a simple system for adding valuable keywords to your site and online marketing effort.  

Good luck!
PS  You can always get Google ads for free!

Amazing logic and common sense, which is not so common, has led a retired doctor to make millions online and he shares his secret with you.

Simply click on the image to find out what it is all about or there is a link below the image.
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/GetGoogleAdsFree

PPS  If you didn’t want to bother with any of the above, and wanted a website to run Search Engine Optimised in automatic mode then there is a real no-brainer in SiteSell…
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/SiteSell

Just In:

Micro Niche Finder
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/MicroNicheFinder

PPCClassroom2.0 ~ Doctor of Physics Shows You How To Make $2.4Million With PPC
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/$2.4MillionWithPPC

Dominating ClickBank 2.0
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/FreeDominatingClickBank2Video

What’s Squidoo All About?             $47 Value – Yours FREE! Name E-Mail Press the button and check Your Inbox for a verification email to download this free product

Briefly, Squidoo is a free service that lets anyone create attractive-looking, single page websites, even if they do not know how to use Hyper-Text Markup Language, commonly known as HTML, to create web pages.

What is more, Squidoo makes it easy to generate money from your “Lens” as they call it.  You automatically get a share of the Google AdSense income generated and in addition, you can add money-making modules from Amazon.com, eBay, and so on.  You just need traffic…

The FREE course above gives examples of how to set up a page from scratch but what it does not do is explain one little trick that will explode your traffic which, very few people know about.  The reason I know this is because I recently invested $5 in a new guide that shows you how to create more effective Squidoo Lenses and Hubpages Hubs.  It’s something I’d not thought of before.  I’ll quote from the sales page for the report:

Step One: Create a Hubpage or Squidoo Lens.

Step Two: Do this trick.

Step Three: Start Getting Traffic Instantly!

Unlike some cheap reports I’ve seen recently, this 10-pager is concise and fluff-free.  It is well written and illustrated with screengrabs.  The ‘trick’ looks like something that anyone who uses Squidoo or Hubpages can greatly benefit from.  I’m going to apply it to my own Lenses and it has prompted me to look at Hubs.

You can pick up your own copy of the report by clicking here:
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/UndergroundTrafficTrick

By the way, this is one of those ‘100% instant commission’ offers. You can sell it yourself if you have a website, blog or Lens/Hub, and keep 100% of the $5. So, all you have to do is sell a single copy and you are even stevens and will have covered the modest cost of your report!

Time to massively win over your competition and profit:
http://www.bestaffiliateatm.com/recommends/UndergroundTrafficTrick

Improved Thesis Theme for WordPress
(Plus a Free Bonus Theme)

by Brian Clark