Every so often, I receive a message with a question like

- How do I add a PayPal button to my site?
- How do I create a PDF- or a zip-file?
- How do I use Facebook?
- How do I register for a Clickbank account?
- …

These messages remind me of the fact that some things that I take for granted, are not obvious to those who are new to the Internet Marketing game.

After all, it hasn’t been that long since I was a so called ‘newbie’ too. When I just started online, I didn’t know about things like PayPal, or databases, or how to register a domain name… To learn the ropes, I kept my eyes open, and taught myself new stuff with every new action I took.

Michael Rasmussen’s ‘Get More Buyers’-ecourse has just gone live.
I was one of the fortunate few  who has been able to check out the entire video course while it was in pre-launch, and I must say: I was impressed.

While I generally skip anything video-like (personally I think most videos are boring and take up too much of my precious time), I took some time off to watch M.R.’s video course - mostly because I’ve only just started to build a list buyers myself, and I can use all the tips I can get to make this list profitable.

I must admit I was pleasantly surprised

The videos are extremely easy-to-follow, even  if you are new to the listbuilding game, and - maybe even more important - they’re fun to watch. No guru telling you why he (or she) is so important and warning you that if you don’t follow the guidelines in the video, you’ll never be successful, but straight to the point info, spiced up with cool graphics and text effects. Nice one, Michael!

Nowadays, almost every marketer has his own affiliate program. That’s no surprise; after all it is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business.

If you are one of those marketers, you’re probably aware of the fact that the major part of the people who signed up for your affiliate program, will never refer any sales… To keep this group of non-productive affiliates as small as possible, it is important to motivate them any way you can.

Here are some tips:

• Lead the way
  Many affiliates never bring in any sales, simply because they don’t have the knowledge to set up a successful promo campaign. Tell them what to do and show them where to go to maximize their results. You could write ashort,  easy-to-follow marketing ecourse, and allow your affiliates to download this at no cost.
   

It’s common knowledge that the best way to build your list is by offering an incentive. Just recently, I connected my blog feed to my Aweber account (I’ll tell you more about that later) and now people can download my new ebook  if they subscribe … by email.

Knowing there are many people who don’t want to give out their email address, I started looking for a way to give away the ebook in return for reader subscriptions.  I thought it would be best to add some sort of a footer message to every outgoing feed, but when I turned to the Feedburner site, I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

However, a Google search learned me that it was actually possible, and although Feedburner makes it sound so complicated, it’s quite easy, really. And now I’m glad to be able to announce that now EVERY subscriber can receive a free copy of my ebook. 

Just a short post to let you know about a free video I just bumped into.

It was created by fellow marketer Albert Hallado to explain how you can track your blog traffic using Google Analytics.

I won’t go into the importance of tracking your traffic here and now, ‘cos loads has been written about it already. I just wanted to show you the video.

(I couldn’t add it to my post, so you’ll need to head over to Albert Hallado’s blog to watch it)

I hope you will be able benefit from this info!

Blogging is hot again! No wonder, since your blog can be vital to your success online! In this post, I won’t go into the importance of having a blog, ‘cos many have done that before me.
I’d rather give you some  free tools & resources that will help you to make your blogging experience fun and easy.

In between all my other projects, I’m working on a new concept for my homebase and blog. I started from scratch, which allowed me to go out and look for the best and most interesting tips, tools and addons. And I found loads!

Don’t worry,  this isn’t just another list with the same old ‘must-have WP plugins’. Not even a top 10 of some sort. You can find thousands of those all around, like here and here. I just want to share with you those sites and tools that have really enriched my blogging, but are almost never mentioned by others. In my opinion, the sites and tools below deserve way more credit than they actually get.

I just bumped into a great post from Aurelius Tjin, titled ‘Are You Making These Seven Common Grammatical Errors?‘.

This post instantly caught my attention, because I’m fully aware of the fact that grammatical errors on a (sales)site give a bad impression, and with English not being my native language, grammatica is something I need to pay attention to.

Here’s a short extract: 

Here are seven critical mistakes that we should avoid in our web prints:

1. There, Their, They’re

Playing with contractions is risky if you quickly type what you think. “There” is a multi-functional word that denotes a point, place or space. Since “there” is used as an adverb, noun, pronoun, or adjective, we woefully abuse the usage of the word making it a possessive pronoun (their) or as a contraction of “they are” (they’re).

… [Read More]

After one of my webhosting companies decided to change its plans (and raise its price), and the fact that they didn’t respond to my messages, I had purchased a hosting account from another company, recommended to me by a fellow marketer.  The transfer itself happened smoother than ever - I should have known it was too good to be true…

24 hours later, my pages were gone… This morning -  after 3 days of not knowing what had happened - there was a message in my mailbox telling me that the server had crashed and that everything was gone (including their own data).

–
If you search this blog, you will find I’ve had my share of hosting trouble. In three years time, I’ve experienced 4 or 5 server crashes, I’ve had 2 hosting accounts that simply disappeared (???), my account has been unrightfully suspended at least 5 times and at one time, my IP got blocked by the server firewall (or something like that) and it took my webhost 2 months to figure out what the problem was…

After re-designing The JV Giveaways Directory, I was looking for a way to add an RSS feed to the page. Mostly because this would help me avoid having to log in to Aweber to send out a message every time I added a new event. Google to the rescue. ;o) A short search taught me there are many step-by-step tutorials on how to create a feed for your page online. Going through the list, I found out I had to edit the code for every single link on the page. Wow, that would take ages… But then I bumped into

Feed43 is a free service that allows you to build a feed for ANY page on the web, without having to make any changes to the source code. Just what I was looking for!