Thanks to Garry Conn for finding this, and Google’s recently released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. If you want to learn about SEO, you could do worse than reading what Google themselves have to say!

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I’ve been surveying websites in this niche for my review site. So far, I’ve tested 28 of the sites on my list, favoring the larger companies and the ones I’m most familiar with.

I was struck by how generally awful they are from a marketing perspective. Splash pages and Flash-based navigation are more common than one would expect. Most of the sites are inwardly focused - “So-and-So Productions has been in operation since 1996, when Algernon So-and-So came up with the vision to create the most fabulous production company in the world” - rather than focusing on what the potential client wants. Only a couple have a newsletter of any kind; I found exactly one site with a blog (on Blogger.com, so really not much use for search engine ranking).

Checking the search engine optimization with one of the tools I use (the Domain Tools SEO Score tool) shows 7 sites out of 28 with an SEO score better than 80%, and 8 sites out of 28 with a score of 0% - usually because there’s no text on the home page, because it’s Flash-based.

In South Africa, due to parastatal inefficiencies, Internet access has always been expensive and slow. Only about 11% of the population has Internet access - that’s about 5 million people. Because of this, small businesses don’t take the Internet seriously. The fact that these businesses don’t get many customers from the Internet means that their websites can be ‘vanity sites’ or brochure sites, just the same as all the others.

Still, there’s no excuse for having a website which is, to all intents and purposes, invisible to the search engines. I blame the web designers. Even if the client insists on a site with nothing but crossfading pictures, you can still add at least a meta description and a keyword-optimized page title.

Here’s my favorite “invisible to the search engines” site (to think I worked there 25 years ago… )

To be fair, this site is first on Google for the company name. That doesn’t help if your potential clients have never heard of you…

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As it turns out, eBay still unfortunately could not accept my application at that time. I know they must have been devastated.

Fortunately, that may have been a blessing in disguise. It seems that many people who were relying on eBay Partner Network for an income were suddenly and unceremoniously dropped from the program a month ago.

Judging by the share performance, which has dropped from around $40 in October last year to under $24 today, eBay’s shareholders aren’t too excited about the way the company is being run.

Is the world’s largest online auction site poised at the brink of a precipice? Has the corporate mentality taken over? Are they going to continue to alienate their partners, users and supporters?

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Much of what he does is based on suggestion and the power of subliminal persuasion. In the clip I’ve linked to here, he uses NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques to get a specific result, and in the last minute of the clip he shows what he did.

Copywriters have been using these techniques for many years to get people to buy - it’s interesting to see them in direct action like this.

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If you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing, ClickBank is one of the best affiliate networks to sign up with. Their business model is quite different from that of the big networks like Commission Junction, which means that they can be much more relaxed about who they let in to their network.

The big affiliate networks make their money by charging their advertisers fees for accessing their network. Since most of them have a relatively small number of advertisers, that makes them vulnerable to conditions imposed by the advertisers. For instance, an advertiser can decide that they won’t work with anyone outside the USA, or that they won’t consider advertising on sites with fewer than 50,000 page views a month or whatever. Fair enough, even Google Adwords lets you choose which sites you don’t want your ads to appear on.

ClickBank, on the other hand, doesn’t charge anyone anything until they have the buyer’s cash in hand. At that point, they deduct their fees and share what’s left over between the publisher (the seller) and the affiliate. Since they’re not charging the publisher up front, and since they have well over 10,000 publishers, they don’t need to be picky about who they do business with.

What this boils down to is that you don’t need to prove that you have a website and 5,000 unique visitors a month to get a ClickBank affiliate account. All you need is to fill in a relatively simple form which tells ClickBank where to send your money.

One of the simplest and cheapest ways to get started with affiliate marketing is by setting up a blog on Blogger.com and reviewing a Clickbank product. As with many online strategies, this one depends largely on your being able to drive a stream of traffic to your review site. Without traffic, you’ll make no money.

I’ve found a terrific series of 7 short videos which explain exactly how to set up this kind of review blog, and how to drive traffic to it. There’s 85 minutes of video, and no throat-clearing or time-wasting. The traffic-building techniques you’ll learn from this video course will work for any website, so it’s a great foundation for any online business. If you can’t make money online using these methods, you may as well go home.

You can get the videos at www.CBRevelation.com. I’m selling them for $7.00, which I reckon is way less than they’re worth.

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Take a look - http://plrspecials.com

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Although the Automatic Upgrade plugin makes it really quick and easy to update your installation, it would always de-activate all my plugins and not reactivate them again. Manually reactivating plugins over a slow Internet connection is tedious - I get sidetracked while waiting for the page to refresh, so it takes me 10 times longer than it should.

There are a bunch of other minor issues that have been changed or improved in WordPress 2.6 - you can read about them at Technosailor’s blog

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That’s basically a sales letter aimed at getting people to join his group. Brian uses some startling images in that letter:

“There’s an elusive group of marketing elite secretly pooling their resources to collaborate against you by intentionally devouring all the resources worth untold fortunes that you’ll never see.

Their secrets are so amazingly powerful, they aren’t leaked out and taught anywhere else.”

My friend Ian Chapman has written a detailed analysis of Brian’s copy on his blog. He explains one of the reasons why Brian’s sales copy is so effective - the amplification of pain.

Another reason that springs to mind is what Joe Sugarman calls ‘The Desire to Belong’. Brian carefully constructs the image of a shadowy group of conspirators who influence social networks. He then holds out the possibility of joining that select group, but making it clear that only “a select few people who have what it takes” will be invited. Other psychological triggers which come into play are curiosity, scarcity, exclusivity and sense of urgency.

One of Ian’s readers seemed to think that Ian was being critical of Brian’s marketing techniques - she writes: “Here here! I read Brian’s post and immediately forwarded a copy to the powers that be at Facebook. This is definitely against the guidelines he agreed to when he created an account!”

Knowing Ian, I can assure you that what he writes is not intended to criticize Brian - he’s simply recognizing a master at work, and explaining why Brian’s sales copy is so powerful.

What do you think? Is Brian being too aggressive? Are you also being left out of the “same few”? See what the fuss is all about here: www.socialmediamarketingsystem.com/prism.html

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The intern program concentrates on procedures which generate traffic. You’ll learn how to write and submit articles, how to set up a Squidoo lens, how to set up blogs on Blogger.com and WordPress.com, how to use social bookmarking and other Web 2.0 resources to drive traffic.

It’s a 4-week intern program, and it’s completely free. It will require a time commitment of 1 - 2 hours a day (or you can accumulate a week’s worth of tasks and do them on your day off). If you’re interested in learning by helping me build my business, you’ll find more information at http://onlinebusinessintern.com

If you want to find out more about online business intern programs in general, I’ve created a Squidoo lens which you may find interesting: http://www.squidoo.com/internprogram

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One of the indicators of a thriving market is plenty of competition. If you find a market where others are already making money, you can be sure that there are plenty of buyers. A good indication of this is the number of Adwords ads that appear on the Google search results page for your broad market keyword.

Here’s an example: type ‘comedy’ into Google. When I tried it, I got 304,000,000 results, and no Adwords ads. I tried ‘comedy dvd’ and found 8,280,000 pages, and something like 170 Adwords ads.
For ‘golf’ I got 560,000,000 results, and 8 ads. For ‘golf shoes’ I found 3,940,000 web pages, and over 300 Adwords ads.

Once you’ve chosen a market, you’re going to need to find a way to stand out – to be remarkable. Seth Godin calls this a ‘Purple Cow’. How do you do that? You could offer something no-one else offers, appear on the first page of the Google results, build a fanatical band of followers.

Key #2: Prolific product development
You need to develop ‘multiple streams of income’. It is better to have 10 products with monthly sales of $1000 each than to have one product with $10,000 of sales.

It’s useful to have inexpensive products in the $10 - $20 price range, which allow you to convert visitors to buyers. But you probably won’t get rich selling $10 products. You’ll need to have a range of offers, perhaps including $50 products, $100 products and $500 products. That way people can buy from you when their circumstances allow.

Technology makes it easy and quick to create information products. You don’t need to write a 300-page ebook. People are pushed for time, and a lengthy volume is not what they need. Shorter is almost always better. If you can’t cover the topic in one ebook, that’s good. Split it up into Volume 1, Volume 2 and so on.

You can create a simple video product almost in real time with screen capture software. Just show your viwers what you do, step-by-step, and explain it along the way. You can create software tutorials, Powerpoint presentations and product demos this way.

Other ways to create products quickly and cheaply include using voice recognition software to create ebooks and reports, interviews with people who know more than you, teleseminars and webinars.

If you want to create a product about something that you can’t do on a computer, like fly-fishing or real estate investing, use an inexpensive camcorder and shoot your own videos. As long as the information you present is fresh and different, customers won’t mind the imperfections. In fact they may prefer your less polished, down-to-earth approach.

Key #3: High Conversion Websites
You need to build websites that convert visitors to buyers. The way to do this has always been by creating web copy that sells. Every copywriter will tell you that the ONLY way to make sure that the copy sells is by testing.

But these days you can consider adding video to your page. Video lets you explain things in more detail, while building a relationship with your visitor.

Here are some ways to hone your copywriting skills:

1.Find sales letters that work – the sales letters for the top products in the Clickbank Marketplace, for instance. Or anything by John Carlton, Gary Halbert or Michel Fortin. Write them out long-hand, or type them into your wordprocessor. Or if you’re in a rush, read them aloud. The act of writing the words yourself helps you to understand the nuances and techniques used by top copywriters.

2.Find the hook in your offer. What is it that will grab peoples’ attention and pique their curiosity? Look at the tabloid newspapers and magazines like Cosmopolitan - “QUIZ: Are You Destined For Success?” “167 Ways To Have A Sizzling Summer”. See how the copy uses short, powerful phrases to create images in your mind and trigger your curiosity.

3.Write like you talk. There’s no need to get all high-falutin’ when you’re writing copy. Just explain things as if you were chatting to a friend.

4.The only truly accurate way to find out if your copy works is by testing. Again, technology makes this easy. You can even do multivariate testing, where all the elements of your sales page are tested simultaneously, for free using Google Optimizer.

Key # 4: Generate Targeted Buying Traffic
The number of visitors to your website is not nearly as important as the number of buyers. Here are three ways to get targeted traffic:

• Produce content. Blogging, article submissions and videos are all effective ways to share your original content with your audience.
• Paid advertising, such as Pay Per Click and ezine solo ads.
• Affiliates – You can leverage Clickbank’s huge affiliate network, or build your own network of affiliates. Whichever way you do it, affiliates need to be trained, equipped and motivated.

Key # 5 Create Systems That Do The Work For You
You’ve probably heard the cliché about “working ON your business, not IN your business”. Real businesses are profitable systems that can be run by anyone. You want to stand outside the business, looking in, checking that the processes are running smoothly, making sure that every task is performed consistently.

Big businesses like Macdonalds realize the importance of systems. Every task that needs to be done within the business is documented in such a way that anyone can do it.

Imagine building a team, without ever having to deal with the hassles of employees. Since Tim Ferriss wrote “The 4-Hour Work Week”, outsourcing companies have sprung up all over the place. Your team could be made up of people from all over the world, performing tasks that you define. You may not even have to pay them.

Your team can be trained with written procedures and videos, and their work managed by checklists. You can have team members whose job it is to check up on other team members. You need to end up with a system which runs with virtually no input from you.

Terry Dean has an excellent product which will teach you how to build a successful Internet business. He calls it the Internet Lifestyle Retirement System.

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