I’m Just Sharing

You know, for years I’ve belonged to JV-Network.com, and I’ve never done anything with it. Over the last week, since I set my one week goal, I’ve been thinking about looking into some joint venture ideas, and suddenly remembered that I was a part of this thing.

Basically, joint ventures are relationships you make with other people to either sell their products or have them help you sell theirs. On this site, you can set up relationships with people going either direction, and based on the level of buy-in from you, you have certain flexibilities on what you can do from either side of this fence.

For instance, I went to the site and clicked on “member listings”, and that’s where you can see all the different things people are selling and hoping you’ll hook up with them on. As a test, I’ve just signed up for my first joint venture product, something called Tweet My Blog, which is a product that helps people make money off their blogs by using Twitter, which of course I do use. You click in and read about the product you wish to promote, then you can click on this link that will take you to where you sign up to help market the product. Once you’ve done that, you go to a signin page, where you put in your username and password, and after they pitch a couple other things to you (I didn’t buy, because it’s the first time and I wanted to get through the process, you come to a page where they give you an affiliate link, which I added above if you decide to click on the Tweet My Blog link (why post the link twice, I figure), which you can use, or you can use one of their banner links like the one below:

Not only that, but because I’m a member of the group, they’re actually allowing me to try out the product, which I’m going to take a serious look at because one thing I’m not big on is pushing products that I haven’t at least taken some kind of look at. In this case, the product will allow me to write my blog post, and after it’s completed it will automatically post to Twitter that I’ve written something new. I’ve been reading that some other people have been using this product and others like it, so I’ll give it a serious look; automation is never a bad thing, especially with my new mantra of upgrading technology.

And there are some big name people who are a part of this, like Michael Rasmussen of
Free Advertising Directory fame, and Mike Filsaime, one of the top internet marketers in the country. And, as I looked around, there’s over 1,500 other folks who are looking for joint venture partners; wow!

So, it would seem that there are indeed many opportunities out there to market products without having to create them. It’s another option, y’all; check it out if you’re predisposed to do so. And, of course, another affiliate banner below that can take you there.

So, what do you think of Stripe Ads? Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s an example, though I hope it’s not too small to see, from Barbara Ling’s blog:

Anyway, the top bar above her image is a stripe ad. It goes all the way across the page and has some kind of rotating advertisement in it. It’s only one line, and to some it’s obtrusive, and to others it’s hardly noticeable. I have no idea what the click through rates on something like this is, but I know that I’m one of those folks who routinely clicks the red X to kill it, probably because it just irritates me seeing it. I kill it on every blog I come to, so obviously we all know I’m not about to load it here, because I don’t do to people what I don’t really want done to me.

Still, it may be of value to some marketers, especially if it does have a high click through rate. I read about it on Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Marketing Blog, and he also includes a direct link to the page, which you can access here. I guess they have both a free and paid version.

Anyway, if some of you are already trying this, or decide to load it then try it, come back and let us all know how it’s working for you.

Okay, here’s the beginning of how I hope to achieve my goal for this week, and possibly longer. I’d like to introduce a book called 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online.

I actually bought this book last year, read the whole thing, and put some of it into action. I didn’t end up making $100 a day, but I did make some money, which was pretty neat, and if I’d had more time to only work on things in the book, I probably could be making my $100 a day with no problem. I probably need to go back and get into it again.

A few of the ways it talks about making money are: selling items on eBay; ghostwriting; article writing; membership sites; and affiliate marketing. Of course it goes deeper into each of the 20 ideas it gives you, which I’m not going to go into here. One special thing about this book is that each chapter is written by a different person, someone who’s specialty is the topic they’re talking about, which means you don’t have one guy trying to tell you everything about, well, everything.

The price of the book is $27, but I’ll tell you it’s worth it. Not only that, but you’ll then qualify to become an affiliate for the product; nothing wrong with that, if you ask me. Take a look at the site by clicking here and start on your way towards that $100 a day.

While needing to write a post to test whether I’m going to have a gravatar show up or not, I came upon this post on a blog called Traffikd titled 23 Affiliate Networks For Monetizing Your Website.

It’s a pretty good list, I have to say. I belong to the first two mentioned, Commission Junction and Clickbank, and I’d also signed up with Clickbooth a very long time ago, but have never been back; guess I should see if I still have the password for them.

Anyway, the name of the game is selling product, and these folks have stuff ready to go, whether it’s just banner ads or actual products. I exhibit some of both on this blog, especially something at the end of each post. But I share the above for your perusal.

One of those things I believe is that if one doesn’t have a goal, then one has no idea what it is they’re trying to do. So, this week I have two goals, one for my main business, and the other for my internet business. I’m only going to talk about my internet business here, since it’s what this blog is supposed to be about.

My goal for this week is so simple that I’m surprised I haven’t set it before. It’s simple, yet it’s going to be hard, at least for me, because it’s something I’ve never done. My goal,… I want to make $100 on the internet this week. Yup, that’s it, make $100 measly dollars.

The best week I’ve ever had was around $65. That was the week I sold one of my business products and made some Adsense cash. That one product of mine sold for $60, so just the fact that I made $6 on Adsense was good and bad at the same time. It was good because it’s always good to make money, but bad because, well, I’m hoping to make more than that on a weekly basis, though I’ve been averaging under that; isn’t that a shame? I need to get better at affiliate marketing, for sure.

I’m lucky to have some money put away so that my livelihood doesn’t depend on this $100 I’m trying to make, but the way I see it, if I can figure out how to make $100 in a week, then it’ll be a nice step towards figuring out how to make even more with some regularity. But I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not writing any sponsored posts, or pay per post. I probably will write a couple of posts about some products I market and recommend, which is different because I only get paid for that stuff if someone buys. One of my friends says we have to find things people want and sell them that. Well heck, if I could figure that one out I’d be swimming in money. Maybe that’s one of the tricks I need to do, ask people what it is they want and what they’re hoping it might cost to get it online, then I can go through all the affiliate information I have to see if I have what they want at the price they’re hoping for, or at least something close. Any of y’all want to play along with that one?

Anyway, it’s my goal; let’s see what I can do to get there.

Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool by Mitch Mitchell

I have previously talked about my short ebooks Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, and I’m just mentioning it again here because that’s what marketers are supposed to do. Well, that, plus I have something else to say on the general subject.

One of the things I wrote in the book was that having a website is a great way to promote your business. At the same time, since your website is going to give people an impression of what you’re about, your professionalism as well as what you do, you don’t want to present something that shows your business in a bad light. This is especially true if your business is supposed to be about making someone else look good.

Without mentioning names, I present this site for review. I pick this site because it’s a marketing firm that wants to promote itself to very large companies to handle all their advertising needs. I don’t know how the quality of what they do ends up being, but their own website is going to kill them if they use it as an example to their potential clients.

So, what’s wrong with this site? Let’s do some deconstructing.

The first page says very little about the company. If you’re into marketing, you want to say something more than “I’m a marketing site; contact me”. Unless people know your name to begin with, this won’t get it done. You’re certainly not going to be found on any search engines. The design is flawed also. First, it’s too compressed; designing websites for 13″ monitors in today’s world just isn’t getting it done. Second, there’s too many colors, and for a site this minimal that’s a problem. Just how many different colors of yellow are there anyway? How many different font colors are there? At least the menu looks like, and though I’m not crazy about the colors, at least they’re somewhat peaceful.

Next is the About page, and it’s not all that bad. You can tell there’s some creativity with the company, and it’s still kind of laid back. And yet, there is a gripe. On the first page, everything was left justified. Suddenly, on the second page, it’s right justified, and the image size has changed. Frankly, it messes with the eyes initially; I’m not sure if that’s a marketing trick or just bad web design; you let me know.

Next is the Services page. Notice now that you have two columns of information; that’s three pages for the same site, and the design has changed for the third time, assaulting the visual senses. Continuity has a big place in making people feel comfortable while they’re looking at your site. The list of services is interesting and basic enough, but the blurb on pricing isn’t needed. Sometimes you don’t have to answer questions no one has really asked.

Th next page is the Examples page. Once again, a change in what the page looks like, but at least this time the format fits more of what one might expect. There are 8 examples of websites they’ve done. However, there are problems with these. Some of the sites are horribly done; one of the sites on this page you can’t even get to by clicking on it; one of the sites is actually a purchased template, which means it wasn’t created by this company; one of the sites looks really good, but what you see now isn’t what it originally looked like (I know this because I’m the one who did the website review and told the owner what needed to be corrected). Out of the 8 sites here, only one actually looks very good, and that’s the first site, and based on the review of all the other sites, one can’t guarantee that they did the work on this site themselves (outsourcing sites is fine, but then don’t represent it as your work). And even the first site isn’t properly optimized (no meta information; no H1 tags; no keyword phrases, etc); who’s going to find this site?

The next page is called Word Soup; catchy in its own way, but it’s a two-column page that we’ve actually seen before giving some definitions of terminology used in the marketing business. On the previous page we finally didn’t see an image, but now we’re back to the same image we saw on the Services page. The Word Soup, then “island Patrols”, makes no sense as two separate entities, and neither did putting it in two columns. The message is skewed to be confusing; is this the type of marketing you’d like to see for your business?

Next is the Web Design page; oh my! There’s, well, nothing there except the menus. Is this a work in progress? Now you’re not sure overall, but since I know (yes, I know this person; very nice guy, very creative, but, well, the visual work speaks for itself) I can tell you that this is NOT a work in progress. If the Examples page didn’t drive you away, this page would. I don’t have to tell you why it looks horrible; it should be here at all without something to look at.

Next is the Contact page, and now I’m going to deviate a little bit before giving my gripe of what I see here. I don’t typically believe in contact pages. Sure, on the blog there’s a tab above that gives some information and a way to contact me, but this is a blog. On my main business site you see my contact information on the first page. Almost every single page of mine has contact information on it. The only pages that don’t are a couple of my product pages. I want people to easily be able to reach me, and they can either click on the link and send me an email, or pick up the phone and call me. But that’s not all. On my SEO website, on each page I have the same time. You can click on the name and send me an emali or you can call the phone number to reach me. I don’t make people go to one specific page to figure out how to find me; be out front and make it easy for people.

Now, for this site I’m talking about, the template for the information is fine, but notice in the little box where you’ve given information on how to contact them if you decide to go a different route that the email address is incomplete, and the beginning doesn’t make any sense either. It’s not the name of the person or it’s not “info”, which is pretty common, or it’s not defined in any other way such that it makes sense. If you’re not from this area, it makes absolutely no sense, and even being from this area it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense because it doesn’t say anything. Remember, this is a marketing company whose job it is to put you in the best light possible; if they can’t do for themselves, how makes you think they’ll do something better for you? Oh, and by the way, though I hate Contact pages themselves, when is the last time you saw a link to one and then saw other links still following it?

The next page is the Testimonials page; do you see any?

The final page is the Links page, and I always love having a links page that stands out. Some people don’t believe in links pages because they say you’re sending people away from you, but I tend to believe that if you can set something up where you can tell people who might be interested in you where they can find other information along the same lines as your business, share links to services you yourself have used, or showcase other business partners or associations that you have some affiliation with, that it’s a good thing, especially if they link back to you. However, on this site, the links are truncated, and you’re left with a lot of open space to the right; what’s up with that? I know what they were trying to do, which is to fill out the length of the page so that the menu on the left didn’t look so forlorn, but a big part of this, which encapsulates the entire site, is that the content in the middle continually starts way too high. You never want the content of your site sitting next to your logo; if that’s the case, why have a logo to begin with? What business correspondence have you ever received or sent out where the text of the message is sitting at the very top next to the logo? If, on all the pages, the context was dropped down to the level of the menu, it would start looking a lot better. Then again, a lot better still wouldn’t improve this site all that much, I hate to say.

Okay, I’ve just done a total deconstruction of a website. This, by the way, is the second website; the original website was much worse, to as bad and with as many mistakes this one has, it is an improvement. Still, for the business you purport to be in, it’s a terrible representation. It’s these types of things people need to look at when they’re designing their websites, and one of the reasons why I’ve actually been spending some of my time over the last couple of days trying to figure out why the template of this blog seems to sometimes show itself oddly in some people’s IE browsers. It’s not an across the board thing, but it’s bothersome to me that it doesn’t look proper in all browsers (it looks great in Firefox, but since they’re only the number two browser in the world I need to figure out number one). I didn’t create this template, though, so it’s taking me much longer to figure out, but I’ll get there.

In the meantime, I’d like you to take a look at your own site to see if it’s representing you the way you’d like it to. Now, if you’d like a website reviewed by me I offer you two options. One, if you allow me to write about it here, I’ll review three pages for you for a super discounted price, but of course you’ll have to write me first. To do that, you still have to go to this page and see the rates I charge to do website reviews, or any other work, and then either click on “Contact SEO Xcellence” to send me an email or pick up the phone and call that number and ask me how much I’d charge for a review and allowing me to put it on this site.

Unfolding Universe DVD Price: $9.95

This morning I woke up early to take my wife to the train station, as she’s going on a little jaunt for a few days. When I got home, unable to go to sleep, I turned on the TV. There was this infomercial on, and it was touting this guy named Jeff Paul and his Shortcut To Internet Millions program (this is NOT a link to the program). In the commercial were numerous people telling their stories of how they got rich off the program, and all but one of them was purported to make more than $50,000 a month on the internet. Oh yeah, two of the sales people were young, “healthy” women, so of course eye candy was a big part of these commercials.

Of course my skeptic meter went up drastically, as this guy’s course was selling for only $39.99, plus supposedly they gave you 10 “money making” websites off the bat, and if you joined his monthly program (they didn’t say for how much) you could earn as many as 120 free websites within the first year.

I thought about this commercial in relation to a seminar I got talked into twice, of all things, the first time by my wife, then the second time by another friend of mine, and that second one was my fault because I hadn’t remembered the name of the company the first time around (and don’t remember the name now; isn’t that a shame?). Both times the room was literally packed, as in way over 200 people, and the sales went through the roof as they offered immediate financing for everyone, no questions asked (at 18%, no wonder), at a very high price for 6 websites, monthly maintenance, and of course a support group (but no guarantees; everyone is sure to state that up front). As someone who’s purchased domain names and has a hosting package, plus someone who builds websites for other businesses on the side, I can easily say that these folks were literally being robbed because none of them, well, maybe one or two, were going to ever come close to recouping their investment.

It’s one reason I get very skeptical with all the products that are out on the internet purporting that they’re going to teach me how to make millions. Not to name drop, but on Lynn Terry’s blog last week, and then through email conversations afterwards, I told her that it seems all of these things have some good ideas, but not a single one of them actually ever answers the big questions that most of us have, and thus it leaves us wanting in still not understanding how to get it done. Luckily, for most of us, it costs relatively little for us to give it a shot, only our time.

Just today, for instance, I was inundated by at least 7 websites offering to help me get wealthy on the internet; 3 of those came through Twitter, so I guess it was my choice to read them, but only one of them even mentioned getting rich on the internet, so they were sort of deceptive. And all of them have that same “scammy” looking template of big letters, seemingly “fast talk” language, standard testimonials, and the trick crossing out of one price so that, if I bought today, I’d be getting it for the low price of $_____, as long as I acted pretty fast since, after XX number sold, they were taking it off the market. Yeah, right; even StomperNet, which costs bucko bucks, came back on the market after saying they weren’t going to anymore.

You never really know who to believe anymore, which is why, for the most part, I don’t purchase any of these things. There are a few I have purchased that I’ve found pretty good, in that at least I learned something. One is on the right side there, from Rich Jerk. Another one some time back was Brad Callen’s Search Engine Optimization Made Easy. And one more was Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets 4.0. By the way, the last one is the only one I’ve actually made money from, as my Adsense earnings have more than tripled, if that makes sense, since I put some of his ideas into place. Oh yeah, I also purchased 20 Ways To Make $100 A Day, which was a very good read, and I got some pretty good ideas from there.

I’ve obviously got a couple of sales pages of products I’ve created myself, which I’m not going to pitch here (I’ll save that for another day), but I don’t promise riches, or anything above and beyond exactly what the products are specifically for. I don’t over-promise, and there’s nothing on any of my sales page that someone is going to call me on later and say “hey, this didn’t do what you said it was going to do”. Sure, my products aren’t that type, but even if they were, I don’t know that I’d want anyone claiming as many thousands as these people do, without any proof of it. It just feels and sounds icky.

How do the rest of you view these types of things? Am I the only one who not only senses scam, but has their skeptic level as high as I have mine?

I’m not really an internet marketer, but I’m working on it. Some people call this passive income, but the reality is that I spend about as much time working on this website and my other websites as I do marketing for my main business, which right now puts most of the money in my pocket, and probably will for another bunch of years or so.

The biggest issue, of course, comes down to traffic, and figuring out ways of driving traffic to one’s site. I haven’t totally gotten that one down, but I have achieved some fairly significant things I suppose.

Google ranks my site as 2 out of 10. I must have taken a hit somewhere along the line because it used to be 3; I must need to throw in more links or something, but this one makes little sense. Alexa ranks me around 371,000, and though I know we all love throwing stones at Alexa, it’s a better ranking than not having one at all, and that’s without the toolbar. The same goes for Compete Rank, which I also pretty much totally dismiss, but it’s got a ranking around 656,000 (and now that I’m mentioning it again, let’s see if it drives up the Russian spam once more).

Throwing out more numbers, Technorati ranks it around 293,000 and gives me an authority rank of 24; I’m not quite sure what that authority figure means, but it’s much higher than my business blog so I’ll take it, though I’m also somewhat insulted at the same time. Then again, the business blog is much more serious than this one is at times; I’d never throw in something like this on my business blog:

Moving on, I haven’t quite figured out how to check rankings on either Feedburner or Delicious, and I’m not even sure if they have rankings, per se, but Feedburner is showing that I have some people subscribing to my feed (once I added the Feedburner Feed Smith Wordpress plugin, anyway), and that’s a good thing; here, my business blog is crushing this one.

And the average number of visitors per week is growing as well, though not anything drastic enough for me to start proclaiming I’m the new John Chow. Still, it’s moving forward, and that’s always a good thing. I’m not sure how popular the little links I put at the end of every post are, but some of them are pretty good items, including the one at the end of this one; enjoy the day!

Back in April, I launched my latest ebook, a short little thing called Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool. The target audience for the book is mainly people who have their own business websites but have no idea how to use them to help market their businesses. It’s not a deep book, but it’s not supposed to be. Most people don’t need deep; they just need a little bit of information.

Friday night, my wife and I went to Barnes & Noble after dinner, and going in, I ran into one of the few people who actually bought the book on launch day. Scott, of Agile’ Marketing Services, helps businesses with all of their marketing issues, including helping them come up with creative names for their advertising purposes. So I asked him what he thought of the book, and he said that he thought it was written well and was perfect for the target audience I was shooting for. I thanked him for that, because one doesn’t always get feedback from things they create, let alone actually get to talk to someone in person.

Anyway, I could talk more about the book, but why not just click on the link above to read more about it, or click on the book itself and just buy it; I won’t be mad.

Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool by Mitch Mitchell

Back in May I talked about Commission Junction and how I wasn’t doing all that well in making money from it.

Well, I’ve decided to partake in what’s known as Commission Junction University. Actually, it’s not a full university at all, just some training and tips from the CJ folks themselves on ways to market what they have to offer. It’s the first time I’ve ever noticed it, which shows that I, and probably a lot of other people, haven’t really been paying as close attention to the site as we probably should.

In general, it has six initial sections that help to give you ideas. Then they have a few interactive tutorials to help you even further. And they also give you links to other topics to help you learn about each of those areas, along with case studies from others who have gone before us. And, it seems they actually have in person training a couple of times a year that you can go to; don’t see me doing that for a long time, if ever, I must admit.

So, at least they’re trying to help us make money, which of course helps them make money. This is a good thing, so I’ll be trying to learn a few things, and who knows in the long run, right?