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.

It’s a common problem that when people talk about something they know, they tend to forget to cover the basics. I’m no different…

Knowing this, I didn’t hesitate for a sec when my friend Amar Mehta showed me his new site.
You see, Quick Profit Videos really takes care of the little man.

Inside the member area, there are 70 videos that cover topics like
* How to add a meta description tag to your html code
* How to get and register a Google email account
* How to embed a YouTube video into your web page
* Turning your headline into a cool image
* Creating a Download/Thank You page
and much more…

Next to this amazing set, they will be adding 10(!) new videos to the vault each month. It goes without saying this is a collection like no other, and extremely valuable.

Like the enourmous amount of info isn’t enough, Amar has set up a system that allows you to RESELL access to the site, and put 100% of the profits into your own pocket. At the same time, you will also brand yourself as an authority, and your subscribers will stand in line, begging you to let them pay you to join the membership site…

As of now the site is in pre-launch, so Reseller Licenses are offered at a VERY low price. This is open only till 15-Nov, so if you want your piece of the pie, you gotta act fast. (After November 15th, the price for the Reseller License will be doubled.)

When you’re ready to transform yourself into what your subscribers see as a superhero and to start building a monthly income with very little effort, take my advice and join Quick Profit Videos now!

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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!

What’s so great about Michael’s course is that he hands you 10 practical strategies for attracting eager buyers. Actually, he’s showing you the way he built his own list, which is pretty much legendary as a JV profit powerhouse.

He starts with a brief introduction to the common list-building mistakes people make when they’re just starting out online. This certainly explained some of my own struggles—it’s not just "fluff" material. For example, he tells you how to create your own profit-pulling marketing "funnel", even if you’re starting from scratch. He also tells you the root cause of the two major challenges most people face…but then he goes one better. He tells you specifically how to crush those challenges…

List-building books and courses are a dime a dozen, but Michael’s course is one of the best I’ve ever seen. There’s no tired old advice that doesn’t work today. He’s giving you real strategies that he uses himself, and that helped him create a list that
routinely brings in five and six figures when he sends an email.

If you want results like that for yourself (and who DOESN’T, right?) then you check out Michael’s "Get More Buyers" course.

Check Out The Course Yourself Here

Your business profits will be very happy you did!

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.
   
• Give them everything they need!
  Giving your affiliates nothing but their affiliate link isn’t exactly the best way to motivate them. Make it easy for them and provide a wide variation of promo tools: pre-written email ads, reviews, banners of different shapes and sizes,  and anything else that you can think of.

• Interact!
  The key to motivation is interaction. Remind your affiliates of their usernames and passwords, and tell them where to log in to the affiliate center to grab their link and promo tools.
   
• Rewards and bonuses
  Offer bonuses or extra commissions to the top affiliates every month, or attach a bonus to a certain number of referred sales.
   
• Offer multiple payout options and pay out fast
  Don’t limit yourself and your affiliates to just 1 payment processor. A tool like SmartButtonPro allows your affiliates to choose how they want to be paid their commissions…
  And I assume it goes without saying that the sooner your affiliates can enjoy the results of their efforts, the more motivated they will be.

Basically, it all comes down to this:
If you want your affiliates to succeed, you need to make sure you do everything you can to help them make money from promoting your product. If they make money - you make money!
In reality - their success is your success.

Question:
How do you keep your affiliates motivated?
Leave a comment to share your trick(s)!
(Comment = get free backlink)

Suggested tools:

• PromoPageGenerator - Create professional promo tools pages fast and easy
   
• AdFactoryPro- Create professional ads with ease
   
• Clickbank Affiliate Reward System - Reward your Clickbank affiliates with extra bonuses
   
• SmartButtonPro - Offer multiple payment processors & while securing affiliate commissions

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. 

From this moment forward, my feed footer lookes like this:

Here’s how to do it:

First, llog in at the Feedburner site and click ‘Optimize’ - ‘FeedFlares’.

The Feedburner Feedflare feature allows you to places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item to give your subscribers and easy way to email, tag or share your feed. There’s a list of predefined links, which you can add or remove easily.

At the bottom of that list, you can add new flares.

That’s exactly what you need to do.

For your flare to be found, you first need to create the XML-file and upload it to your server somewhere.

To create an XML-file: copy the piece of code below, edit it to fit your needs and paste it into an empty (text )file.

Save that file as somename.xml (you can name the file anything, but you must make sure you save it with the .xml extension. If you’re using notepad, click ’save’ and select ‘All Files’ instead of ‘txt files’ at the bottom of the saving window).

Code:

Upload it to your server (Don’t forget to change the values).

Then, go back to the Feedburner site and enter the URL to your .xml-file in the ‘Add New Flare’ box. When you click the button, your flare should appear at the bottom of the ‘Personal Feed Flare’ list. Check the box in the ‘Feed’ column, and you’re all set.

Take a look at your feed to see if it actually worked and nothing went wrong.

I told you it was easy

(By the way, if you didn’t subscribe to my blog yet, you can do so here)

More:

- Feedflare Developer Guide

- Feedflare Scratchpad: create and test your .xml

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.

Here we go…

MaxBlogPress
At MaxBlogPress, you can get some great free and easy to use plugins for your blog. I adore their Favicon plugin,Psychic Search and the brand new Max Banner Ads (allows you to add & rotate banner ads in your blog - anywhere), but my absolute favorite is the ‘Stripe Ad‘ plugin, which adds a non annoying, text-ad rotating bar at the top of your blog.

More cool plugins can be found at the site!

FCKEditor For Wordpress
I can’t understand why this plugin never shows up in the lists of must-have plugins. Basically, it replaces your standard WP editor with a fully equiped WYSIWYG editor. This makes formatting your posts piece of cake. This little tool has really fired up my blogging!

What Would Seth Godin Do
By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

TweetMyBlog
A brand new Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog.

I didn’t install the following plugins yet, but I fell for their features:

Faster IM Opt-Ins
Add an attention grabbing opt-in form to your Wordpress blog in 5 minutes!

Wordpress Magnet (not free)
An easy to use Wordpress Plugin designed to get people to leave comments on your blog by giving them an incentive.

Easy Ad Block Generator (not free)
This widget lets you easily add a variety of ads to a block, and position it ANYWHERE on your WordPress sidebar on ANY WordPress theme.

This list will grow longer as I continue to design my new homebase/blog!

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…

I can’t even remember how many times I changed webhosts and re-created my sites…
–

I’ve closed my account with the webhosting company and decided to stick with the two webhosting servide providers I trust.

• Hostgator - HostGator is one of the most recommended web site hosting companies. Since I have signed up with them 3 or 4 months ago, they have delivered everything they promised. I especially like their 24/7 live chat - I like to get an answer when I need it, instead of having to wait 24 hours because the helpdesk operator lives in a different time zone… up until now, I’m very please with their service (and their pricing, of course)
   
• CheapWebHosting - Two years ago, i signed up for  a couple of months of free webhosting through a JV giveaway event, and I am a happy customer ever since. Currently, I have two paid accounts, of which I recently turned one into an unmeterd account. In two years time, I have never experienced any trouble with the sites hosted on this server, and helpdesk tickets are always answered, fast and friendly. While all my other hosting accounts were being created and closed again,  CheapWebHosting was there to rely on.

I’m in the process of re-installing my sites.. It’ll probably take a while to get everything back into place, mostly because - and I am ashamed to admit - I only have partial backups. 

- You’d think I would have learned by now, wouldn’t you?!  -

When it comes to backing up databases, however, I have already learned my lesson. I’ve installed Auto MySQL Backup - a free script to take daily, weekly and/or monthly backups of your MySQL databases on autopilot.

You can download the script for free here.

Get a video to help you with the installation here.
 

My advice:

• go for a reliable webhost - not for the cheapest. Losing your site will cost you way more than a reliable account at Hostgator or CheapWebHosting….

• make sure you backup your data regularly. If you are using cPanel, you can easily backup your entire cPanel at once. You can grab a free tutorial on how to do this here.

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!

You simply enter the URL of the page you want to build a feed for, define some extraction rules* and your output settings and you’re done. I’m a complete RSS-dumbo, and it required a little effort to figure out how it worked, but in the end it took me less than an hour to create 2 feed URL’s (one for members and one for JV Partners).

To end with, I burned both feed URL’s with Feedburner, Googled to find some nice feed-icons (which I definitely found! - You can see one in this blog’s sidebar) and added the subscription links to the JV Giveaways Directory-page.

And guess what…?! Unlike everything else I did these last few weeks, it worked!

. .LINKS:

Feed43

FeedBurner

The JV Giveaways Directory

* Defining the extraction rules was a little tricky at first. Luckily the site provides a full explanation of the actions to take. After some trial and error, I managed to make it work, and now I got the hang of it, it’s as simple as ABC.