Posted: July 24th, 2007 | Dewald | Marketing
Before you go and buy yet another over-hyped ebook, buy this book from your local bookstore or Amazon:
Web Copy That Sells by Maria Veloso
It teaches you not only the mechanics, but also the strategy and tactics for writing compelling web copy. There are no magic tricks, no hyped promises, just solid useful information.
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Posted: May 1st, 2007 | Dewald | Marketing
Free IQ, coined as the Marketplace for Ideas, is a service where people with information, education, consulting, advice, and other products and services can offer those services and products for sale to the general public. The sales of those products and services are driven by thousands of very motivated and focused affiliates.
This is never before heard of concept for many people. For instance, let’s say you have a lot of experience with skateboard or snowboard tricks and you know there are other people who will be happy to pay money to acquire the same knowledge you have. But, you’re uncertain how to sell an ebook or a video where you impart your knowledge to others.
This is where Free IQ comes into the picture. They put your product on their site, they collect the payments, and their host of affiliates sell your product.
The same goes for almost any other category of knowledge that can be sold.
Whether you know a lot about fixing cars, quilting, brewing beer, engineering, elderly care, troubled teenagers, legal matters, politics, iPods, video games, fixing motorcycles, interior design, sports massage, dieting, weight loss, etc., you can make money from your knowledge using Free IQ. The list just goes on and on and on. You can even sell consulting services, in addition to physical products that must be sent by mail.
So, what is the process for selling and making money with Free IQ?
Step number one is to register for a free account on Free IQ. This enables you to participate in the interactive parts of the site. For instance, you can rate and review any of the scores of paid and free products that are available on the site.
When you’ve opened your basic free account, you then upgrade the account to a “content provider / affiliate account.” It’s as simple as filling out an online form where you provide more information about yourself and tell Free IQ where they must send the money you make from your paid product. It’s completely free to upgrade your account.
Once you’ve opened the Free IQ Content Provider account, you are all set to upload the products that you want to sell. Once again, it’s a simple web form that you complete to upload your product. If your product is not yet in a format ready for upload, you can send the product by mail to Free IQ and they will convert it to the correct format. Doing this costs you nothing.
There is no limit on the number of products that you can upload and sell.
It’s not only paid products that you can upload. You can also upload free products that you want to give away.
For instance, if you’re selling an ebook on video game tricks or collecting signed books. You may then want to put a free 5 minute video on Free IQ where you give a brief summary of your ebook and demonstrate your knowledge on that particular topic. Free IQ affiliates will make full use of your free video to generate more sales of your paid ebook product, because it is much easier to get people to view something that’s free than it is to get them to fork out money upfront.
So, when you want to sell products on Free IQ, you need to think about two things. The first is your product that you’re selling. The second is one or more free products that build confidence and comfort and take the viewer back to your paid product.
Making money with Free IQ is a simple procedure given that you are not the one doing the actual selling; the actual selling is done by the affiliates. You just need to create a worthwhile product that other people would feel is worth the price.
To see what this is all about, search Free IQ and browse around. There is also a Free IQ Content Provider Community site that is dedicated to helping folks like you with advice and great tips on how to best monetize your knowledge and products with Free IQ. They also have Free IQ Content Provider Forums where you can interact and communicate with other Free IQ content providers.
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Posted: April 19th, 2007 | Dewald | SEO
From the little support and the huge uproar that the post about paid links by Matt Cutts has created, one can only deduce that most paid links are bought for the purpose of manipulating the natural search results.
Matt has stated clearly that paid links are absolutely fine as long as they are nofollowed or done in such a way that they do not count as a SERP backlink:
If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute.
Hence, looking at the response, it is very clear that almost nobody buys links for the purpose of human click traffic.
From some of the examples given by commenters, the gravity of the problem becomes obvious.
Manipulating search results with paid links will always favor those with the deepest pockets. Is that the intention of any organic search result, that the rich will always be first and favored? Absolutely not.
eConsultancy.com found in a recent survey:
Six out of 10 marketers are planning to increase both their paid search and natural search budgets over the next 12 months.
Wait a second… a “natural search budget“? Paid links, of course!
If this initiative by Google means that my sites will be on page #1 if I bust my behind to provide valuable content, then I support this initiative 100%.
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Posted: March 27th, 2007 | Dewald | Marketing
If you want to build a huge e-mail marketing list then I strongly recommend that you look at AWeber. I am not easily impressed but I must tell you I am very impressed with the facilities that they provide to help you build your list.
Sure, I hear you say, AWeber is a tool, how can it help me build my autoresponder list?
Because of the following two words:
Feeder lists.
With AWeber you have the ability to create many separate lists that feed your contacts into one common list. In addition, you can do this automatically.
Let me illustrate this by way of example.
Let’s say you have two different lists. You use list number one to sell an e-book. List number two is used to sell a software product.
You want the people who buy your e-book and your software product to go on to your main e-mail marketing list.
Provided that you tell the people clearly that they will go onto your main contact list, you can do the following.
For your e-book list you will have only one message that will deliver the e-book or that will deliver the link to the download page. This list will have no follow-up messages.
The same goes for your product list, where you will also have only one message that will deliver the product to the buyer.
As soon as somebody signs up on either of these lists an automatic rule within AWeber signs the person up in your main e-mail marketing list.
Imagine having 5, 10, or 20 of these feeder lists that feed and build your main autoresponder list, without you having to do anything extra.
You then set up your autoresponder messages in your main autoresponder list only.
When someone unsubscribes from one list, you can also automatically unsubscribe the person from the other list. This is also done via an automated rule that you set up.
That is some awesome power that AWeber puts into your hands.
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Posted: March 15th, 2007 | Dewald | Marketing
With Internet Marketing:
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