And now for a Motivational Monday post on Tuesday!

Last week, I wrote a post about how to create a blog, but I did not really talk about why you might want to create one.  There are obvious "internet marketing" reasons, like affiliate marketing product promotion.  There are also other popular reasons, like carving out a space on the internet to talk about something that you care about.  You could create a blog to promote your business or product.  The uses for a blog and the reasons to create one are limited only by your imagination.

But in the context of Motivational Monday, a great reason to create a blog is "Motivation."

If there is something that you want to achieve, why not blog about your journey?  If you have a goal, you need to keep it in front of you and stay motivated.  One good way to stay motivated and to stay focused on your goals is to create a blog that tracks your progress. And once you do it, invite your friends, family members, and the general public to read it.

This is an excellent example of a type of “commitment device.”   By keeping a public account of your struggles and victories, you can draw in others; and use their commentary, approval, and disapproval to give you the right incentives.

You can also help people that share your goal.   By showing your progress you can motivate others and make the internet a better place.

There is also the added motivation that if you fail horribly, you’ll do so in front of everyone. This is a strong incentive to get things right or to face the consequences.

This blog started like that -- just as a way to track my online journey.   I have also started MarkLostWeight.com recently to track my weight loss journey (trying to get back down to 190 pounds).

Join us! Every Monday morning at 6AM Central Time we publish the motivational tip of the week. Each week we offer a short simple motivational tip to help you in your business. If you like this, you can check out our other Articles On Motivation.

Just a quick update to let you know that my niche site has made it to page one of Google.  As I show in the screen shot below, I am currently ranking number one for the term "learn guitar basics" without the quotes.  (And yes, I am logged out of iGoogle, GMail, etc).  While this result is really cool, we should not declare victory yet.  The most important reason for that is the fact that new WordPress blogs tend to "rank and tank".  What I mean by that is I fully expect rankings to fall again before they settle out on page one (hopefully in position one on page one).

But for now, it's sure fun to see the site in position #9.

Side note:  Now here is the difference between me and Pat Flynn.  I just jammed a screenshot in a post with no formatting.  I wrote the post in 7 minutes.  Pat would have clipped the below graphic with photoshop (using those cool torn edges that he always has), added a 3D shadow and circled the 9th ranking position with a red pen.  Everything Pat produces is very high quality.  You should pay attention to that, because good quality translates directly to your brand and (eventually) money.

Some errors (opportunities)

Note that in my haste to get the site up that I incorrectly specified the most important on-page factor -- the title tag.  The home page should have the title "learn guitar basics."  Instead, the page is titled "learning guitar basics."  Oops.  Looks like there was a typo in what I sent to the VA.

No worries.  Since we are using the All-in-one SEO plugin, this is very easy to change when we are ready.  I am going to leave it as is for the moment.  We'll change it during the "tank" phase.

You'll also note that the site description is defaulting to something goofy that needs to be corrected.  It is important to use the site description to call the searcher to action, compelling them to click through to the site.

More on this and other topics in the next update.

Thanks,
Mark

I hear this all the time when people are talking about old-school static HTML sites versus newer WordPress sites.  They say it loud and proud as if it were a law of nature like gravity or something.

Google Loves WordPress!

The truth is (as far as I know) that there is no real data that says Google prefers static WordPress versus HTML (or vice-versa). There is no reason that they should care -- and I don't think that they do.

People say "Google loves WordPress" because they see WordPress because they see WordPress sites doing well in Google. The question is this: is this correlation, or causation? In other words, are these sites doing well because of WordPress, or for some other reason.

If two sites were COMPLETELY identical, Goggle would not care if a site was WordPress or Static HTML. In fact, if they were truly completely identical, Google could not tell easily which was which.

I don't think Google loves WordPress.

Why WordPress Sites Perform Well

Rather, I think Google loves what most WordPress installations do automatically (and most static HTML sites do NOT do at all).

If you install WordPress with a decent theme and use a few popular plugins, you get some killer stuff that is not present on many plain-jane HTML sites:

• Ping-O-Matic to announce new content
• Blog pinging to encourage back-linking
• User-generated content (comments)
• An RSS feed (promotes traffic)
• Auto SEO optimized titles and URLs (in most cases)
• Good automatic intra-site linking (in most cases)
• et cetera

This is why "Google loves WordPress". It is not because there is some unfair bias in Google or some magic in WordPress itself. All of the above things are possible with an HTML site, but people usually do not do them.

So, while it looks like Google loves WordPress, what they really love are well constructed sites. Constructing site well is something that WordPress does automatically.

Build good site, follow the webmaster guidelines, and you too will live a long healthy and happy web life.

photo credit: AlbertaAndMe

Another thing you need is you need routines. I live in Allen, Texas, there’s a famous Olympic gold medal gymnast that lives here and she grew up in a gym down the street from me and I know these gymnasts they have these crazy routines and they show up at the gym every day.

You need to have similar routines. At the same time every day if you can you need to be working on your business. For me, that’s every night. That’s why my branding is around this idea of late night internet marketing. I’m recording this at 1:46 AM and I got started around 10:00. I got a head of steam, so here I am still going at almost 2:00 in the morning.

I also like to catch a little work on my internet business while I’m getting the kids ready for school between 6:00 and 6:30. That’s an excellent time for me to answer email over breakfast and do a little social media promotion.

The other thing I’ll say to you in terms of routines is you need to establish the routine of balancing your business activities. This is another thing that Jimmy D. Brown taught me. You need to make sure that you’re not only working on the easy things or the thing that you like.

Maybe you really like creating content, but you hate promoting. Maybe you really like social media, but you hate article marketing. Maybe you really like this and you hate that. The thing about internet business is that you need to have a balanced approach.

The thing about part time internet marketers is it’s really easy to fall in this trap of, “I’ve only got an hour, so I’m going to pick the thing that I want to do, not necessarily the thing that I need to do.” So, it’s very important that you have this balanced approach. The example I have here is that you don’t need to just create content or products, but you also need to drive traffic, so that’s kind of an idea of having a balanced approach.

You have to do it even if you don’t want to. One strategy for that is do the thing you don’t want to do first, so you get that out of the way. Then when you’re running out of steam you can turn your attention to the thing you really wanted to do anyway and a lot of times that will have the effect of helping you work a little bit longer.

The other thing I’ve got to tell you, social marketing is a business killer if you don’t manage it correctly. So, limit your social marketing to specific time windows. Do not spend your entire day on forums, reading blogs, and tweeting about what you had for breakfast. Don’t do that. Have a plan for those things, spend a finite amount of time, get it done and get out.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Today I have asked affiliate marketer Jason Acidre, a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, to come and talk about how to promote ClickBank products.  In his post,   Jason describes three ways to go about promoting products successfully.

Remember, when using these promotion techniques, you should keep new FTC rules about disclosure and testimonials in mind.  Promote products that you really believe will help people.  Be honest in your promotions and act with integrity - you will love the results in the long run.

Here is the post from Jason....

Effective Ways to Promote ClickBank Products

Ready to learn the most effective ways to promote ClickBank products? It’s much easier than you think and anyone can get started earning in virtually no time. There’s no better way to earn online than getting started with a good affiliate network like ClickBank so read on to learn more.

When it comes to earning income as an affiliate, using a popular affiliate network like ClickBank is the best way to gain access to top selling products and services. ClickBank has become the gold standard of affiliate networks and is often the first thing newbies to affiliate marketing learn about. There are many sites similar to this network but very few are as reputable or have as many affiliates promoting the available products. That being said, what are the most effective ways to promote ClickBank products for the best results? Read on to find out.

Method #1 – Blog with a pen name and “alter ego.”

In recent years this has become even more popular. While some people argue the ethics behind it the plain and simple fact is that it works. Many people set up free blogs at sites like Blogger or WordPress and blog from the point of view of someone else about how useful a ClickBank product is for solving problem X –whatever that may be. This is quite popular amongst people promoting weight loss related products and male enhancement products. Since the visitors read the blog and assume it’s a real evaluation of the product by someone who’s similar to them and their situation they go through with the purchase through your affiliate link.

Method #2 – Make YouTube videos

Make YouTube videos and make passive commissions.  Depending on how saturated a niche is or how many people are currently doing this with the product you’re trying to promote you can have varying results. The way it works is simple. Make a video (either of yourself on camera or a slide show in Power Point) and talk about the product you’re promoting and why it’s great, how it helped you or could help the viewer and then tell them where to get it. The best way to do this is to purchase a domain name and redirect it to your affiliate link. Throughout the video recommend visitors go there to learn more and purchase the product.

Method #3 – Go Offline.

One of the most effective ways to promote ClickBank products is to go offline altogether. While this requires significantly more work and can be harder to monitor results it can work very well in certain areas. For example if you pick a weight loss product you want to promote you can purchase a domain like “KarensWeightLoss.com” and then print that on flyers along with a short message about how well it worked for you or what the benefits are. Then simply post the flyers in different areas around town like gyms, grocery stores or health food stores.

Depending on which methods you choose try to stick with it until you see results. Don’t immediately skip from one to the other if it doesn’t immediately work. Check to see what you could change and improve next time and try it again. Do this repeatedly until you get something that starts to make sales for you. Once you’ve identified what works simple scale it up and begin outsourcing the majority of work to others.

This guest post was written by Jason Acidre, a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates. 

Welcome back to another weekly edition of Part Time Tips for your internet business. This week I want to talk briefly about what you need to be successful in your part time internet marketing business. Don't panic, I'm not going to list a bunch of stuff for you to buy, this more about you and your mindset when it comes to working your business. We'll keep things really simple

The first thing you need to do is get your head wrapped around your plan.  As we say in Texas, you’ve got "get your head right with ball." You’ve got to really have the proper mindset to be successful in internet business in general, but it’s really true for part time internet business.

There are three fundamental areas that I think are the highest leverage:

You’ve got to own your plan. By that I mean you’ve got to have focus. You’ve got to know exactly what you’re doing and you’ve got to be executing to that plan precisely. You don’t have a lot of room to be smoking and joking around. You’ve got to know exactly what you’re doing and be doing it every day.

You really need to leverage tools and resources. You can’t afford to be inefficient, so you’ve really got to get out there and leverage the things that are available that have been made available by the people who’ve come before you.  This is not just about investing in software or hiring people.  It's more about learning from a mentor, investing in yourself and  and following their example (more on this in the coming weeks).

Finally, and maybe more importantly, you’ve got to foster the right habits. You’ve got to develop habits that are particularly effective for part time internet entrepreneurs. I’m going to share those with you throughout our weekly tips sessions here on the blog.

Now, as far as getting your head right as a part time internet entrepreneur, the very first thing you’ve got to know is why in the world you are trying to start this business. In fact, why do you want to start a business at all, let alone an internet business? Think about that for awhile and we'll be back next week to discuss this a little further.

Understand why you are doing what you are doing will help you stay focused and motivated in difficult situations.

See you next week.

This has been another post in our Part-Time Internet Business Series at MasonWorld.com, where we build successful internet businesses one night at a time.

Today we have a great guest author, Tom Hickman, here to share with us 20 blogs that he reads and enjoys and on the web that are relevant to our recent outsourcing discussions. Outsourcing is something that I do often and encourage you to do as soon as you are able to, it really does make a huge difference in your business and your ability to focus on the things that grow your business. It's always good to have a variety of different sources that you can go to and trust when it comes to outsourcing your projects. With that, I give you over to Tom...

Waiting too long to learn about outsourcing and whether it might be right for your company could cost you big time. If you are looking for some relevant blogs when it comes to outsourcing, here are twenty that might fit your needs.

1. Global Sourcing Specialists Product Development and Sourcing

Brought to you by Global Sourcing Specialists, their blog, hosted by Aston Udall, is geared toward the building of your products, business, and the global economy.

2. IT Outsourcing India

Found at www.it-outsourcing-to-india.blogspot.com, IT Outsourcing India covers a variety of IT outsourcing and industry related news from counties around the world.

3. Pragmatic Outsourcing

Through his blog PragmaticOutsourcing.com, author Nick Krym uses his 25 years of experience in the IT industry to bring you his 'Thoughts, Tools, Tips, Tricks, and Traps of outsourcing.'

4. Outsource Portfolio

From titles like 'Rural Outsourcing Not About Anti-Globalization/Patriotism But Alternative To Offshoring' and 'New challenges and opportunities for the Indian outsourcing' there is plenty to be found regarding outsourcing subject matter at founder Mani Malarvannan's, OutsourcePortfolio.com blog.

5. Infinit-O

Read about outsourcing trends, strategies, and a variety of other industry related subject matter at business process outsourcing provider Infinit-o's blog.

6. Legal Process Outsourcing

For those looking for information, activity, and developments related to what may be referred to as Legal Process Outsourcing or Legal Services Offshoring, Rahul Jindal's blog could be a good blog to check out.

7. Outsourcing Leadership

Supported by Alsbridge, a consulting firm providing advice on 'Outsourcing, Shared Services, and Offshoring', Blog.outsourcingleadership.com's contributors provide subject matter related to 'outsourcing, offshoring, shared services, and benchmarking.'

8. Law Scribe

Lawscribe is a Legal Process Outsourcing company. Their blog, Legal Process Outsourcing, focuses upon the LPO and offshoring industry as well as the legal profession both in the U.S. and U.K. While it was geared toward the U.K. legal industry, the site's title, 'Low Value Personal Injury Claims Ripe for Outsourcing' from September 2009, was a particularly interesting read.

9. Sourcing Mag

From categories on BPO and offshoring to companies and call centers, the Sourcingmag.com blog offers hundreds of articles written by a variety of authors about a number of outsourcing topics and aspects.

10. BPO Blog

Hosted by Manoj Jain, the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Blog, discusses and shares information relating to BPO, as well as BPO in the US and India. Manoj claims over a decade of experience in the infotech industry as well as being founder, managing director, and CEO of several companies.

11. Software Outsourcing

The Software Outsourcing Blog, hosted by Prakash Rajput, updates you with some of the latest software outsourcing news and developments. There's plenty here for audiences from a number of countries around the world who are interested in software outsourcing.

12. Talent Gurus

At the TalentGurusBlog, you can select their 'BPO', 'ITO' or 'Outsourcing' tabs for a variety of industry related posts.

13. TriNet HR Blog

At blog.trinet.com, you can find TriNet's HR Blog. You can select their 'HR Outsourcing' tab from their categories list for industry related posts.

14. Accenture.com/global/accenture_blogs

Accenture offers a number of blogs from which to choose. You might want to check out their 'Accenture Blog for Internal IT'. As a company whose internal IT organization supports a workforce in 52 countries, you might find some relevant industry information here.

15. Outsourcing Buzz

Brought to you by Kathleen Goolsby, the Outsourcing Buzz Blog provides a forum for a variety of voices, opinions and conversations relating to outsourcing. Their BPO, HR Outsourcing or ITO archives may be good places to start.

16. Talking Outsourcing

Join Mark Kobayashi-Hillary as he posts about a variety of outsourcing topics. You can investigate a number of categories including, 'offshore outsourcing', 'outsourcing', 'management', 'innovation' and others.

17. HR Outsourcing

If you're looking for a blog about HR outsourcing, HRoutsourcing.org could be a good blog to try. In their 'HR Outsourcing Blog Categories,' you can find tips, how to posts, and get ideas.

18. Information Week

Information Week provides a variety of pertinent outsourcing posts by various contributors. You might want to check out a post by Michael Healey entitled, 'What's Your Outsourcing Vision?'

19. Horses For Sources

If the name doesn't hook you, maybe the posts will. Founded by Phil Fersht, the Horses For Sources site offers a broad array of posts on topics like avoiding sourcing catastrophes.

20. Inside Outsource

Here you can find Tom Hickman hosting Inside Outsource, his blog where he utilizes his years of experience with software and IT systems to fill you in on outsourcing and outsourcing related topics.

Tom Walker designs graphics and writes blog posts for an online supplier of HP 901 ink cartridges, toner and other supplies to the print industry. He often writes about advertising design and art on their blog, CreativeCloud.

I am writing this post using Windows Live Writer 2009.  Normally, I write WordPress posts in Firefox using the admin interface inside of WordPress.  That is not the best environment sometimes – especially since you have to be online to use it.

I looked at these type of desktop-based web publishing tools a couple of years ago and they were not great.  I’m looking again because I noticed that Microsoft released a version of Live Writer for 2009 (I guess I missed it).

First task will be to insert a picture of this window.    I’ll do a screen capture and jam it into the post right here.

Cool – that worked well (at least here in the editor).  I was able to load a GIF, resize it and place it in the text.  There are image editing choices and the like available.  Looks promising.

Spell checker works as expected.

I am able to insert a hyperlink to the download location for Windows Live Writer without any trouble at all (as expected).  One neat thing is that it will allow me to link to previous posts, which is something that you should always try to do.   It even lets me set the link to nofollow.

Surprising, there is a preview tab – and it knows what the post will look like on my blog.  Check out this screen shot:

Wow – for a 5 minute review I am pretty impressed with the ability to create a draft.  Now I will hit the publish button and see what happens….

TaDa!

That just worked.

One thing that I see in here that I like is the ability to insert a table.  Here is a table of projected revenue for the MasonWorld Empire for 2010.

Neat.  Might have a keeper here.

What do you use to write your posts?  Leave me a comment and let me know.

At the end of last year, I spent a couple of weeks trying to decide whether or not to move MasonWorld.com from a Sole Proprietorship to a Limited Liability Company. So, I thought it was appropriate to make a blog post describing my findings while researching this topic. I thought it might save you some time in the future.

In the end, I did form an LLC and I used LegalZoom to do it -- but I did not do it for the reasons that you might think.

Having said that, I need to let you know that I’m not an attorney, and in fact I don’t even play one on TV. If you need legal advice, you definitely need to consult an attorney. Don’t do anything based on my opinion. You need to seek professional advice for legal matters and for tax accounting, for that matter.  Also, you should know that LLC laws vary from state to state (and from country to country).  So, you really need to talk to your attorney.

Even though I am not an attorney, I do think it’s useful to understand what kind of questions to ask an attorney. After all, attorneys cost $150, $200, or $250 an hour. It pays to know what you need to ask about before you go in to ask advice from an attorney. There’s no reason to get a background education from an attorney. You need to go in with an education and then leverage that education to get your tasks accomplished as quickly as possible for the lowest attorney fees possible .

Why Form An LLC (Myths Revealed)

I was considering moving the Mason World activity to a Limited Liability Company (LLC) for three basic reasons. I think these are the three basic reasons that most people consider using a Limited Liability Company for.

One, limit liability. Very clearly, if I get sued for something that I do on MasonWorld.com or one of my other websites, I’d like to keep someone from taking my life savings, my house, and my car.  I want to limit my personal liability.  As you can see, the general theme of protection" is the major selling proposition in the ad creative from LegalZoom below:

Two, tax protection. Everybody always says that the right thing to do is to form a Limited Liability Company under tax code sub chapter S. One of the things I wanted to determine was whether or not this would give me any tax savings.

Three, appearances. Hey, it looks cool to have a Limited Liability Company moniker behind the name of your company. So, forming an LLC might give you some additional credibility.

Now, I’m not really going to talk about my tax findings and this issue of credibility in this blog post. We’ll save that for a future blog post. But, I will tell you about my findings on the liability side. I had a long discussion with Lynn Terry in her Private Member forum, which as you know I participate in very heavily. I’ve come to some very definite conclusions after talking to a couple of attorneys, and they may surprise you.

An LLC May Not Protect You From Anything

If you are a Solo Entrepreneur, liability protection is not a good reason to form a Limited Liability Company according to my research.  Again, I am no attorney (you should consult one to confirm my research).  However, consider for a second what you want to be protected from. Limited Liability Companies protect you from the liability of debt, among other things. They separate your business activities from your personal activities and give you the opportunity to be protected against business debts that you may incur.

Now, I’m not borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to run MasonWorld.com. As you know, one of the great things about internet business is that it costs very little to run one. In fact, I run MasonWorld.com completely on a cash flow positive basis.

So, what I am really interested in is liability protection. If I write something on my blog that insults someone, and they decide to sue me and they win, then those damages could effect my personal assets. Assets that are not in any way related to assets generated by MasonWorld.com. The question is "can a Limited Liability Company protect those assets?"  Will someone who sues me be able to take my home and my car?

My research suggests that in the case of a Limited Liability Company with a single employee, the answer is absolutely not -- the LLC will not protect you. The reason is very simple.   When someone sues a company, they also sue the people in the company that are responsible for actually doing the thing that has caused the suit.  If the company contains only one employee then that employee will always be named in a lawsuit.  In the case of MasonWorld.com, I am the only employee.  There are many virtual assistants, but I am the only employee.  So, any action taken by MasonWorld.com that harms someone would actually be an action taken by me -- so I would be named in a suit.

Of course, if you have employees or a partner then everything changes.  If your partner goes postal and creates liability for the company, a LLC may very well limit your personal liability.  Again, consult your attorney.

An Example Helps Make This More Clear

Consider the example of Bob123Website.com, which is run by Bob.  Note that Bob is not a real person -- so if your name is Bob, please don't sue me. 

Bob writes a blog post and says that a congressman is sleeping with his secretary. It turns out that defames the congressman, and the congressman sues for liable, slander, or defamation, whichever one applies, in this case defamation. Let’s say the congressman wins, Bob loses, and Bob now owes the congressman $250,000.

But wait -- Bob’s got an LLC.   It won't matter because the congressman sued both the LLC as the company who took the action, and Bob as the individual who took the action.  With Solo Entrepreneurs this is almost always true -- Bob takes every action at his LLC because he is the only employee.

Where a Limited Liability Company would protect Bob would be if Bob had seven employees, and employee number five was the one who wrote the blog post. That would protect Bob’s personal assets, because Bob would argue it was the company that did it, not Bob.

So, if you can’t separate yourself from your company (if you’re really a single person inside a company and you’re taking all the actions on behalf of the company) there’s really no way for you to protect yourself from liability. Again, this is my opinion and I am not an attorney -- but this is pretty clear.

Bottom Line:  You are responsible for your own actions. You cannot hide behind a company name.  After all, shouldn’t it be that way? Shouldn’t you be responsible for your actions? That makes sense to me.

I did go ahead and form MasonWorld Enterprises LLC at LegalZoom -- but not for liability protection.  I did it for several other reasons that I may discuss in detail in a future blog post.  I even had a new logo designed.

By the way -- I loved LegalZoom.  I felt like they did a great job and made things really easy.

I’d love to discuss this matter further. If you’d like, please leave a comment at the end of this blog post and we can talk about this as much as you want, as long as you understand that I’m not an attorney, my advice may not apply to you, and you need to seek qualified legal advice before you take any legal action.

Thanks, and have a fantastic day.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 5.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s great to be back on the microphone. I hope you’ve had a fantastic couple of weeks since I talked to you last. I hope they were very productive for you.

I know I’ve been incredibly productive over the last couple weeks. In fact, in some ways a little too productive. I tend to get too many tasks going all at the same time. I don’t know if you have that problem. That’s a huge problem for a lot of internet marketers.

I was talking to Lynn Terry about this over in her Elite forum the other day. Her theory, she had a post in that forum about this, is that you really need to focus on something, one thing extensively until that thing is finished to really get the maximum productivity. I’m really going to need to look at that a little more carefully.

I’ve really been enjoying Lynn’s forum. I spend a lot of time over there. I’ve been getting to know Lynn, she’s great. Some of you saw the video on my blog of Lynn opening up the Elvis bobble head that I sent her. That was kind of fun.

If you get a chance to check out Lynn, I recommend that you do that. You can check out the information about her Elite Membership Forum at MasonWorld.com/recommends/lynn. If you just want to kind of get a taste of what that’s like, you don’t need to pay any money at all. You can go over to her blog at ClickNewz.com and check it out.

There are links to the forum over there, and she’s got a free side to the forum too and that’s really excellent. I’ve been having fun over there with Lynn. She’s got lots of cool peeps that hang out with her over there in the Elite Forum, it’s really good stuff.

The other thing that I’ve been working on this week is a site with my nephew. We’re going to talk about that a little bit in the interview. My nephew and I have been working on an affiliate marketing site for the last couple of weeks. I’ve actually got him on the podcast today as the featured interview as a new internet marketer.

He’s going to tell us the three things that he learned from me this summer working on an affiliate site. He actually cleared over 100 dollars on that site in the month of August, which was only one month after we really started working on it. So, he’s pretty pleased with that.

We’re using the phpBay plugin to work through eBay to sell some comic books online. We’ll talk about all of that in the feature interview.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at the feature segment and see what we’ve got going on today.

It’s time for the feature segment.

It’s time for the feature segment today, and we’re continuing our discussion about all the different possible internet business models. We’ve talked about affiliate marketing, last week we talked about eBay, we’ve talked about information marketing.

One thing I wanted to talk about today, because it’s timely, is the idea of creating residual recurring income through membership sites. In order to understand why membership sites are important, you really need to sort of understand the idea of a sales funnel. So, we’ll talk a little bit about sales funnels, and we’ll talk about membership sites.

This, again, points to one of the resources that I’ve provided you for this discussion, and that’s Jimmy Brown’s excellent report, which is called 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. In Jimmy Brown’s report, item three in that report is tap into the back end automatically.

Jimmy basically talks about the idea that most marketers really are concerning themselves with the creation of the sales funnel. If you’re not familiar with a sales funnel, I can sort of explain it to you like this. When you have an initial contact with a perspective client, you bring that person in to your range of influence and you essentially get their permission to receive your message.

Now, if you’re a person who’s being effected by TV marketing, sometimes you barely even have permission, you just happen to be watching the channel and you see a commercial and that’s sort of your first contact into the sales funnel for whoever is selling something to you on television. In the context of internet marketing, this sort of thing usually happens when you sign up to an email list.

You’re at the top of someone’s funnel, they’ve gotten your permission to market to you, basically. So, you’re at the top of their funnel. Then you might at some point buy an inexpensive product from them. That moves you a little further down the funnel.

You’ll find that a lot of internet marketers spend a lot of time creating more and more products at higher and higher price points to move you further and further down the funnel. You see, there’s a big difference between someone you’ve never talked to before, at the top of your funnel or just entering your funnel, and someone who’s bought two or three products from you over a period of time, who trusts you and understands the quality of your product.

So, that sales funnel should be architected to move you further and further towards purchasing higher and higher end products. That’s a classic marketing strategy. It’s not unique to internet marketing, but it’s used very well in internet marketing in a variety of product lines.

One sort of special version of that, that can replace the sales funnel to some extent, is the idea of continuity programs. One way to implement a continuity program is through a membership site. Now, a continuity program simply means, you can think of it as monthly billing.

Continuity programs have gotten a bad rap over the years, because of various problems, usually having to do with them being deployed in a sneaky manner. You’ll recall that Joel Comm had a problem where he had a continuity program attached to one of his Adsense books, I believe it was, and it wasn’t clearly indicated on the order form. A lot of people were upset with Joel, because he didn’t make it clear that in addition to buying the ebook for 9.95, you were also signing up for his 27 dollar continuity program.

Now, I happen to know Joel, Joel Comm is a really good guy. I really personally don’t think that was something that he did maliciously, but he upset a lot of people. So, continuity programs in general have gotten a bad rap.

Russell Brunson and others, particularly Jimmy Brown, have been talking about several ideas around continuity that make a lot more sense. One of the things that they talk about is micro-continuity through membership sites. Jimmy has an excellent course on this that he calls Membernaire. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

Membernaire is an opportunity to create what Russell Brunson calls a micro-continuity program. The way Jimmy does it is he creates courses that are finite duration. It’s one thing if you tell somebody that they’re going to need to pay 27 dollars, or 67 dollars a month for their rest of their lives.

But, what Jimmy says is, “Hey, we’re going to have a continuity program with a finite term. It’s going to be 6 months long, or a year long, it’s going to be 27 dollars a month.” You know the cost up front. It’s spread out over time.

Jimmy actually implements all of his stuff completely automatically, which is really neat. So, if you’re the product creator for a Jimmy Brown style membership site. Then what you can do is you can create these sites one time, market them, and then they run on autopilot all by themselves. It’s pretty interesting.

Now, there really are sort of three kinds of membership sites that Jimmy points out. Maybe four, I would say, Jimmy points out three. The first site that Jimmy points out, or sites that offer a service, if there’s something that you need over and over again rather than paying for it piecemeal you can create a membership site that offers that service over and over again or on a monthly basis. Web hosting is a really good example of that, that Jimmy offers.

There are other kinds of membership sites you can imagine. Help with homework would be an excellent example, or tutoring. Those kind of things you can offer in the form of a membership site. Related to that can be a site that offers lessons on a topic.

You could have 6 month, 12 month, or 3 month courses on how to get an online business up and running. That’s the example that Jimmy offers. How to start a restaurant, how to do home repairs, or how to do whatever it is that you know how to do.

That’s one of the exciting things about the idea of a membership site. If you’re an expert in something, and you can break it up into 48 or 50 or 100 easy lessons, then you can easily create a membership site that just drips those lessons out to your customers at a fixed rate. You just tell them up front, “You’re going to get one lesson a week, and here they come. As long as you keep paying, you keep getting lessons.”

The other kind of membership site that you hear about a lot is a site that offers a new product each month. So, each month you get a new PLR product or each month you get a new something that you need, new templates for a website, new content, new something, new cross stitch patterns, whatever it might be. People subscribe because they want that new fix of whatever it is that they need.

The other kind of membership that I think Jimmy didn’t mention, but he certainly knows all about this, because he does these sorts of things, are coaching programs. I think those are a special kind. They’re sort of like offering a service, but basically you’re paying to have some person on retainer to help you with whatever your problem. Usually those are implemented as a forum.

That’s just a few ideas that Jimmy covers in his book. He says, basically, you need to choose a niche, find out what they’re buying, and what they want, and then go build a membership site around that. I think that’s a really good idea.

The reason that I bring that up in this podcast is two fold. One is these are very, very important. In fact, I had a graphics guy tell me today that I was talking to by email, he’s over in Europe and is the guy who does most of my graphics for my sites, he told me there are four weeks out on graphics because of all these micro-continuity sites they’ve been doing based on Russell Brunson and Jimmy Brown’s sort of programs. So, they’re just swamped with work over all these membership sites that are being created. That’s one reason why I bring this up to you.

The second reason that I bring this up to you is if you’re interested at all in this, Jimmy is offering a webinar, and I’m going to give you the details on that at MasonWorld.com/jimmywebinar. That webinar is currently airing this Thursday. If you’re listening to this in a time shifted manner, go ahead and go to the link, it will give you the current next time for the webinar.

Basically, it’s an hour long tutorial from Jimmy on webinars. I’m going to see it for the first time tomorrow. I can tell you that I can recommend it without seeing it, because Jimmy is just a fantastic guy. If you don’t know Jimmy, it’s worth going over to the webinar just so you can get a sense of what he’s all about.

He’s really a fantastic marketer and somebody that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know over the last year or two. His stuff is top notch. He knows what he’s doing. He has personally created, I know for sure of two, but maybe it’s six of these sites, where he has over 1,000 members in each site. You go do the math. If you had 1,000 members in a membership site, each paying you 27 dollars a month. I think you might like that result.

That’s the main segment for today. I just wanted to tell you about that other income model, which is membership sites. The bottom line is if you know how to do something that people want to learn how to do, and you can figure out how to bust that up into courses, kind of like a Dummies Guide to Tennis, or a Dummies Guide to Fitness, or a Dummies Guide to whatever it is that you’re interested in, you can make that into a membership course.

You can recruit people into that course and have a recurring stream of income. You can set the whole thing up automatically, and Jimmy Brown is the guy to teach you how to do that. So, that’s another way you can make money online, and that’s well covered in the 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 Dollars Every Month. That’s Jimmy Brown’s ebook, and that’s available at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

Thanks. That concludes the feature segment.

And now the feature interview.

Okay. Now it’s time for the standing interview segment that we’ve been having for the last couple of weeks. What I’ve been promising you is that I’d interview successful internet marketers and ask them the three most important things that they wished they had known about internet marketing when they first started.

This has been very exciting. But, recently I’ve been working with my nephew on his first website. He has an affiliate marketing site based around comic books, which is something that he is interested in. He’s a sophomore in high school, very intelligent young man, highly motivated, but didn’t really know anything about how money was made on the internet. Kind of like a lot of us when we first started.

So, I thought, “Wow. Here’s a guy who just learned how to make money on the internet.” He’s made his first 100 dollars, I think his site made 136 dollars in the month of August. He’s very excited about that. We’ve got big plans for the site, because we made that 136 dollars and we’re not even ranking on the first page of Google for our search term yet. So, we’re real excited.

I thought the interesting was 2 months ago he didn’t know anything about internet marketing. He’s done all the work himself. I’ve sort of led him through it, and helped him and coached him, but he’s done all the hard work, and he’s got a result to show for it.

So, I wanted to ask him what were the three things that he knows now that he didn’t know 2 months ago. The things that really stuck out for him. I got a very, very interesting answer from him and I wanted to share that with you.

Now, he’s a minor under the age of 18. Like I said, he’s a sophomore in high school. So, I’m not using his real name. we’re calling him Bob here for the purpose of this interview, which is really hilarious, because that’s not his name at all. So, you may hear us giggling a little bit in the interview about that.

The other thing I’ll tell you, I want to apologize in advance, this interview we did in my study. We had to move the microphone around, and I forgot to put the p-pop filer on. So, I’ve edited the interview to try and cut out the pops from articulating the letter P, which is the world’s most annoying sound.

I don’t quite have them all out of the interview, but I did the very best I could. I enjoyed the interview so much, I didn’t want to do another take. Here it is live, raw, and with the pops, my nephew Bob and our discussion about his internet marketing experience.

…

Mark Mason: Hey, this is Mark Mason. I’m actually in studio with my nephew today. A lot of you who have been following me over on Lynn Terry’s forum know that I built with my nephew a website about something that he was interested in, actually the website is about comic books. We built that website and in the first month were able to generate some revenue with eBay’s affiliate program. That was a very interesting process.

So, what I thought I would do is get some insights from my nephew, who is a sophomore in high school about what he’s learned from his experience making money online. I’ve been telling people, “If my nephew who is a sophomore in high school can make money online, you can make money online too.” I think that’s a pretty straight forward kind of way to think about things.

Now, I’ve agreed since my nephew is a minor under the age of 18, I’m not going to use his name. So, I’ve agreed to call him Bob for the purpose of this interview. Hi, Bob, how are you doing today?

Bob: Hi. Good. How are you?

Mark Mason: I’m doing great. Bob came over, he lives nearby. How long have we been working on this website together, Bob?

Bob: We’ve probably been working on it maybe since the beginning of last school year.

Mark Mason: Yeah, something like that. So, we worked on it for a couple of weeks, then we kind of dropped it, but then we hit it really hard this summer. Right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: So, my recollection was we didn’t make any money or really generate much of any content last year at all. We really started working on it about in July.

Bob: That’s right.

Mark Mason: We started making money on the website in August, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: Okay, great. So, the website sat idle for awhile, and after about a month we started seeing a little revenue. That’s been really exciting. I guess it’s been exciting for me, has it been exciting for you?

Bob: Yes. It’s very exciting.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, you’re actually in a very prestigious position. I’ve been interviewing internet marketers from all over the world on this podcast and asking them the three things that they wish they had known when they started internet marketing.

I thought I’d turn things around today and ask you what are the three things that you’ve learned over the summer with your first experience in internet marketing that you just didn’t know before, that you’d want to tell someone about your internet marketing experience?

Can you think of one thing that just occurs to you just right off the top of your head, Bob? That’s not your real name, I know, but it’s kind of funny. Something that you learned over the summer, that you didn’t know before.

Bob: Yes. First, is how easy it is to get a website going. If you use a website like WordPress you just pick a theme you like, get it going, and put it up. It’s just easy to make one.

Mark Mason: That’s right. So, basically, what we did was we just simply found a theme that worked well with our topic of comic books. We actually found sort of a play on Superman theme, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: We just used that on top of WordPress to create our little kind of ecommerce site. That worked out pretty well. It looked pretty cool?

Bob: It looks really cool, yes. A lot of neat features.

Mark Mason: I think, if I remember right, we asked a virtual assistant to make some small modifications to the site.

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: Right. So, we started with a theme that was pretty close to what we wanted, and we had a virtual assistant make some changes. Just a few dollars, literally a few hours work, someone offshore. It’s pretty much exactly the way you want it right now, right?

Bob: It’s perfect. Yes.

Mark Mason: Great. That’s the first thing. So, that point is a really good one. That is that basically anybody without a lot of technical savvy can have a website up and running very quickly by using WordPress. Is that pretty much what you’re saying?

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: Okay, great. That’s thing one. That’s an excellent point. What’s your second thing that you kind of picked up this summer working on your WordPress website?

Bob: Probably number two is if you want to get your website going, something very important to use is keywords through Google. Pick out a keyword phrase, get backlinks to your website to get viewers to come to your site.

Mark Mason: Now, before this summer, did you have any idea, you’ve always used Google, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: But, did you have any idea why pages came up on the first page of Google? Did you understand any of that before this summer?

Bob: I had no clue. I just thought it was random.

Mark Mason: So, we basically spent. I don’t know, about an hour? So, we got you started with the Easy SEO report from Josh Spaulding,that was really cool. Then we picked a keyword with some traffic. Where are we now with that keyword?

Bob: Just by using that one keyword we’re almost to the first page of Google. We’re kind of floating back and forth between page one and page two.

Mark Mason: So, we’re down kind of at the top of page two. We’ve got some tricks up our sleeve, maybe we’ll talk about that at the end of this, where we think that’s going to get us to page one.

Basically, pick a keyword that people are searching for and get backlinks to the website. That’s the offpage SEO part, getting the backlinks, but we also optimized the homepage for the keyword. Right? We’ve got it in there.

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: Kind of in a natural amount of time. So, that’s just kind of common sense SEO, and you were able to pick that up pretty quickly, right?

Bob: Yes, sir, I was.

Mark Mason: Okay. So, the first thing that you learned this summer was that you can easily build a site with Wordpres.

The second thing that you learned is that once you build a site with WordPress, you can optimize it, both on the website and off the website, so that you’ll get listed in Google for a keyword that’s getting some traffic.

What’s a third thing that you learned this summer?

Bob: The third important thing I learned was if you can get traffic to your website, you can send them to other websites and earn commission off their views.

Mark Mason: Yes. We talked about that quite a bit this summer. That’s affiliate marketing. Of course, for our website, because we’re dealing with comic books, that’s just a perfect fit for eBay, right, because that’s where comic books are being sold.

Bob: Yes, sir.

Mark Mason: And you knew that already. You’d already been buying comic books on eBay. That’s in fact, how we got the idea.

Bob: Yes, I had.

Mark Mason: So, Bob is into comic books a little bit, and knew that there were transactions going on at eBay. All it took was for me to explain to you that you could build a website that drove traffic to eBay and get commissions, and we’re off to the races, right?

Bob: Yes.

Mark Mason: What we really want is to be on the first page of Google. So, why don’t you tell everybody what you have planned for, I guess we’re hoping to get the first draft of it done this weekend, you’re doing all the work. What do you have planned for this weekend?

Bob: We’re planning to write a press release to put out there to get our website on the first page.

Mark Mason: Yes. We’re following the Google First Page Formula, that’s the ebook that I’ve shared with Bob. He’s going to write a press release according to the Google First Page Formula, and we’re going to see if we can get the same results.

I’ve actually got a special link for that ebook, where I’ve got a discount available for the listeners in honor of Bob, since he’s going to be doing that this weekend. You can pick that ebook up for a 20 or 30 percent discount. I’ll be sure and put that link in the show notes. In fact, that will be at MasonWorld.com/press.

That’s great. Bob, I really appreciate you being on the show tonight. Tell me what you’re thinking about doing next. Are we going to build some more sites? How many more are we going to build or what are you thinking?

Bob: We’re just going to keep going until there’s nothing left to do. For all those people that are doing websites, don’t give up. It takes time, but it pays off.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent advice. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming over. Have a great day.

Bob: Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 4.

You want to build a business that you can call your own, but you can’t imagine abandoning the security of your day job. You are confident that you can find a few hours a week to pursue your dreams of creating a business on the internet, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a plan.

Congratulations! You just found one. You are listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, with your host Mark Mason, building internet businesses one night at a time.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 4 of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Of course, I’m your host Mark Mason. It’s really great to be back on the mic. I’ve had a couple weeks of vacation with some light duty internet marketing activity, as well as some frenzied activity getting kids ready to go back to school.

It’s that time again in Texas, where we’re getting everybody ready to go back to school. That can be very exciting, because that generates a long list of things to go do. Everything from school clothes shopping to school supplies, physicals, band gear, and all of that. We’ve been pretty busy around the Mason World household the last couple of weeks.

I’ve also been busy, because I’ve been spending some time hanging out with guru affiliate marketer Lynn Terry in her private forum, she calls it the Elite forum. That’s really a fantastic investment that I’ve made. A small investment of money, and an investment of time over the last several weeks getting to know Lynn. I tell you, she is really fantastic. I had always heard great things about Lynn, and what level of integrity and customer focus she brings to her business.

Let me tell you, my time with her has exceeded all my expectations. She’s really fantastic. I encourage you to check her out over at MasonWorld.com/lynn, where I’ve a got a link over to her new Elite Membership forum over there. You can also find her on her blog at Clicknewz.com. I’ll provide both of those links in the show notes, you can check her out. She is really fantastic, and I really enjoyed spending time with her.

One of the best ways to learn about internet marketing is pick people and business models that you really believe in, follow them and watch what they do, ask them questions about what makes them successful and try to duplicate those results.

There’s absolutely no reason for you to reinvent anything in internet marketing. The best way to get started is to find somebody who you like what they’re doing, you believe in what they’re doing, and who will be honest with you and help you succeed.

Having said that, it’s time for the feature segment, where we’ll talk about our next internet monetization model. That’s making money on eBay.

It’s time for the feature segment.

In the feature segment today, we’ll be talking about our next internet business model. You’ll recall that we’ve already talked about affiliate marketing, which is when you essentially get paid for driving traffic to other people’s products, when that traffic converts to sales. Information marketing, where you can create information products, not too unlike this podcast, to be honest with you, and find ways to monetize those, usually by selling them as direct downloads.

Today we’re going to be talking about our third internet monetization method. That’s creating a business on eBay. Now, what we’ve been doing to kind of support this discussion that we’ve been having is following along in two publications.

One is the outstanding book by Yanik Silver, Moonlighting on the Internet. Yanik’s book can be found at MasonWorld.com/silver. We’ve also been following the great report from Jimmy Brown, I love Jimmy D. Brown, he’s really a great guy, his report is called 10 Proven Ways to Make at Least 10,000 a Month. That’s a 30 page free report that Jimmy offers, where he outlines 10 different things you can do to really crank up your internet income.

Those are both excellent texts for people who are getting started online, or trying to expand their online business. I recommend them both highly.

Today we’re going to be talking about eBay businesses and what you need to think about in terms of eBay. Now, most people when they think about eBay, think about going online and buying some used something, or some antique something that they go and buy and get a good deal. So, the two things that you usually have associated with eBay are used items, that’s what people think of when they think of eBay, or items that they can get for really cheap.

That’s kind of problematic if you want to start up a business on eBay, because you’re starting off in a situation where people who are looking for premium products, eBay may not necessarily the first thing that comes to your mind. Let me tell you, that is the wrong mindset to have if you’re an internet marketer.

The right thing to recognize about eBay, if you’re an internet marketer, is that there is a massive and enormous amount of traffic available to you on eBay. Millions of items are sold on eBay every year. It is a giant company that you can leverage to make money on the internet.

Before I go much further, let me tell you, I am not an eBay guru. I do not have a viable eBay business. Sure, I’ve sold stuff on eBay. In fact, I’ve got a couple of eBay auctions right now. But, that’s not my mainline business. I do understand, however, the fundamentals of marketing that are in play on eBay and I’m going to go over them for you a little bit.

The first one is there are a lot of people there. The fundamentals of internet marketing are find traffic, stand in front of it, and convert a certain percentage of that traffic into some monetized stream. So, you find people and you convert those people into something that translates into dollars. eBay meets the first criteria, which is lots of traffic.

Now, you might imagine sort of a fundamental eBay business, and you can setup sort of a traditional business on eBay by finding products and reselling them on eBay. The things that you usually hear about are people that go around to auctions and buy lots of items, and then warehouse them and sell them on eBay. Or people that setup things where they sell items on eBay, then they have them drop shipped so they’re not actually warehousing anything.

Both of those can be made to be viable internet businesses and that can work just fine. I am not super excited about those, because as I mentioned before, there’s a lot of price pressure on things that are for sale in eBay. I know people are making that work, and you can make it work too probably, but that’s not what gets me excited about eBay.

What gets me excited about eBay is the idea that Jimmy Brown mentions when he talks about eBay, and that is that you can use eBay as a lead generator. Now, if you go through the listings, as Jimmy points out, you’ll see a lot of people that seem to be losing money making sales on eBay. What I’ll tell you is that there are a lot of things that are called loss leaders sold on eBay.

It means that someone sells something, not so much really to make profit on the sale, but actually to get the customer. They know that once they get someone to buy something they’ve got a customer contact with a credit card in their hand, that’s actually willing to use it, and they can sell things to that person again. Essentially, they’re prequalifying the prospect and able to sell to them again. That’s the big thing that Jimmy points out is that you can use eBay as a lead generator.

You can also use eBay to get people into your direct sales funnel. If you’ve got multiple products, let’s say you’ve got a 1 dollar widget that you sell for 79 cents on eBay, and you know that people that buy 1 dollar widgets are going to need the 50 dollar widget cleaner. You can also get them directly in your sales funnel by selling your cheap product on eBay, and selling the more expensive back end to them later directly. Once you’ve got their contact information, of course, you’re able to contact them directly.

Those are sort of the business models that you should think about in terms of eBay. There’s the real eBay store, eBay auction, eBay selling physical products sort of eBay that you’ve thought about. But, then there’s this other thing, the marketing side of eBay where you can use eBay for lead generation or to get people into your funnel. Those are the two ways to think about eBay.

The important thing in eBay, just like in all good marketing, is the copy. That’s one of the things that’s really often ignored on eBay. When you go to write a listing on eBay, you really need to pay attention to your headline, you need to make sure your listing is personalized, you need to decide whether or not you’re going to specialize and feature it, and buy it now.

I’m not going to cover all those things, but there are a lot of marketing options, some of which are very sophisticated, that you can test and try to maximize your response on eBay. Particularly when you’re selling things over and over again. eBay is a great environment in which to split test, because there are so many different options, whether to use pictures or not, whether to use video or not, and so forth. That is a the main thing that you need to think about in eBay.

Don’t just do what all of these garage sale minded people are doing and throw up some sales copy in your auction. Actually approach it like a professional copywriter and think about what you’re writing. Hit people’s hot points, offer a unique selling proposition in your auction, offer risk reduction, make sure they know that there’s no risk for them to purchase through you. Use basic sales copy principles and you’ll be a lot more successful on eBay.

The last thing I want to mention about eBay is that you can combine what we talked about last week, that being affiliate marketing, with the things that you can do on eBay, because eBay has an affiliate program. A lot of people have made a lot of money putting up websites that actually don’t do anything but advertise products that are for sale on eBay.

You might be thinking, “That sounds like a lot of work, because something that’s for sale on eBay today won’t be there in 7 days.” That’s absolutely true. So, what these people do is they set up websites that read the eBay auctions, and when a visitor comes to their website it lists the current eBay auctions for very narrow subjects.

So, for example, maybe somebody might have a website selling coffee mugs, maybe antique coffee mugs that are for sale on eBay. They present themselves as an antique coffee mug site, with maybe some information and an antique coffee mug store. But, the links on the store really go to eBay auctions, so they’re able to sell these things that normally you wouldn’t be able to drop ship or otherwise find affiliate programs for on the internet.

You can check that out. My preferred source for the eBay affiliate program is Pepperjam. I’ll have a link to the Pepperjam Network in the show notes there for you so you can find that. That’s about it on eBay. Couple of business models there for you with eBay, a couple of things to think about when you’re listing your auctions, and finally affiliate marketing. You can mix all these things together. That about wraps it up for eBay today.

And now the feature interview.

I have a really special interview for you today. You know, I’ve been interviewing top internet marketers, asking them what are the three things they want to tell new internet marketers that will help them get started. What are the three things they wish they had known when they were getting started.

Today I have for you the guru of Firepow, the Niche Marketing on Crack author, Andrew Hansen. Andrew is an enormously successful marketer over at AndrewHansen.name. He’s a top choice of mine for integrity and paying attention to what people really need, rather than just be out to try and make a quick buck. His products are fantastic.

I’ve got him on the phone. Here’s what Andrew had to say.

Before we get started with Andrew, just one editorial note. I want to let you know that the recording of Andrew’s voice is a little echoed. It looks like we had a little equipment difficulty on my end. I did some work to clean it up, but it’s still not a fantastic audio recording. But, the information is so great, I didn’t want to re-record it with Andrew, because I didn’t want to miss that first pass raw nature of it. So, here it is in it’s entirety and I hope you enjoy it. Thanks.

Mark Mason: Outstanding. We’re on the phone now, and it’s Late Night Internet Marketing. That works for us, because it’s 1:00 in the morning. I am privileged to have on the phone Andrew Hansen. Andrew is famous for a number of outstanding products in the internet marketing space.

Of course, he is probably most famous for his viral ebook, Niche Marketing on Crack, one of the first internet marketing products that I ever purchased. He’s also got an outstanding free ebook that’s been making the rounds lately called Crap Cutter Marketing.

But, the flagship product of Andrew’s, and the one that I really love, is the Firepow product. That’s an outstanding product for affiliate and niche marketers. Maybe we’ll get to talk about that a little bit with Andrew today.

Andrew, how are you this morning at 1:00 AM in the morning?

Andrew Hansen: I’m really well. I think it’s closer to 2:00 AM now actually, where I am anyway. But, really well. Thank you for having me.

Mark Mason: Thank you very much for taking the call. It’s 2:00 in the morning on the east coast, 1:00 in the morning in Texas. This is the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, so I guess that’s appropriate.

Andrew Hansen: It’s all good. It’s fine by me.

Mark Mason: I have been interviewing outstanding internet marketers. I put you very high on that list. I’ve been reading your blog for a long time. I have been asking them the question, what would you tell a new internet marketer if you were going to tell them three things that they needed to know, or of you had it to do all over again, what are the three things that you would want to know?

But, before I ask you that question, Andrew, I’ve got to ask you another really important question that’s been on my mind for a long time. Can you handle one extra question?

Andrew Hansen: Yes, I think so.

Mark Mason: Your from Australia, right?

Andrew Hansen: Right.

Mark Mason: What in the heck is vegemite? Because in Texas we don’t know about vegemite. Can you just tell me what that is exactly?

Andrew Hansen: You don’t have vegemite?

Mark Mason: No. We don’t have vegemite and I don’t know what vegemite is.

Andrew Hansen: You don’t know what vegemite is?

Mark Mason: I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what it is and I figured now is my chance.

Andrew Hansen: Here you go. Are you ready? If I give you this description it will sound disgusting, but in fact it’s delicious. It is yeast extract. Now, how that is obtained, I have no idea. But, it’s like a black paste.

You can imagine like peanut butter, but black. So, it looks disgusting as well. But, it’s mega-salty. It’s a very sharp taste, sharp on your tongue, very salty. But, it’s a spread that you put on bread, toasts, and everything like that. It’s actually really tasty.

I didn’t know until I moved that it was really only in Australia and New Zealand, and a southern world thing. We haven’t had any since we left Australia, and we often regret that. So, that’s what vegemite is.

Mark Mason: Very good. Well, now I can rest easy. I appreciate that. So, you’re in Canada now, is that correct? And you can’t find it there?

Andrew Hansen: Canada, yes. Funny story, actually. My mum had sent me a birthday present earlier in the year, and she somehow had researched some things that we wouldn’t have had for a long time having been over here. She sent me in the mail these little vials of vegemite.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent. Very good. I’m glad to know that. You know, I’m a scuba diver, and I’ve wanted to dive The Great Barrier Reef, so now I can add vegemite and diving to that trip. That will be good.

Andrew Hansen: Just not at the same time. That might be weird.

Mark Mason: That’s true. So, the question for you, sir, is if you were talking to a new internet marketer, which I guess actually you do all the time, or if you had it to do all over again, what are the three things that you think somebody needs to know about internet marketing to be successful, or shorten the amount of time that it takes to be successful, or to avoid traps, or whatever. What are the three things you want to tell new people that are new to internet marketing?

Andrew Hansen: It’s actually a really difficult question, but it’s a good one, a very important. I don’t know whether I’ll have three things, or whether we’ll just kind of talk about a bunch of things in this time, but I can give you some of my thoughts.

The first thing that I think new people really need to know about is before they get into strategies and specific questions about you actually make the money, I think it’s important to just have an understanding of the industry that you’re getting into. I mean if you’re a new person starting out, and I’m sure you started out and I started out this way as well, you start looking into the different ways to make money online.

One of the first things that you realize is that there are so many of them. There’s as many ways to make money online as there is people trying to make money online, or at least people selling how to make money online.

So, that in itself poses, not a problem, but it’s like an initial barrier to people who are trying to get started, because one of the first things that you have to do is try to sift the enormous amount of information and try to find something that makes sense to you and something that seems like you can implement it.

Not only that, not only the amount of information, but the nature of the information that trains people how to make money on the internet is, as I know and you know, of varying levels of quality and varying levels of clarity in terms of how well they lay out the steps that you need to take. It’s so easy to waste your money, and it’s so easy to fail purely for that reason alone.

To have an understanding, like if you could somehow have foresight at that point starting out, the things that you’re looking at, the sales letters that you’re looking at and the products you’re buying are part of such an enormous, for lack of a better word, pile of information, strategies, tools, and offers trying to get you to spend more money and more money.

It’s a crazy world. That may be the first thing that I would talk about.

Mark Mason: It is a crazy world, there are 1,000 or hundreds of thousands of sales letters out there of different things you can buy. You’re right, some of them are just not very good quality. They’re well intentioned, but not good quality.

Andrew Hansen: Some of them aren’t well intentioned.

Mark Mason: Right. They’re not well intentioned, they’re actually kind of scam type things. What do you advise someone to do about this? Do you advise them to pick someone to follow, or focus their efforts, or do you just warn them?

Andrew Hansen: Yes, a bit of all of the above perhaps. I think one thing [inaudible] to the way I got started that was very helpful, and I know you did the same, was to start out when you start the search for information is to rather than jumping from kind of sales letter to sales letter and learning through the things that you read there, is to become involved in a community.

The Warrior Forum is a great one for people getting started, where you see a little more of the content and a little less of the offers, at least slightly. It’s the kind of place where there’s a bunch of people that are on the same mission that you are, and they’re looking at the same products that you are, and they can advise for or against a particular product, depending on your skill level.

They’re a group of people who definitely have been at the game longer than you have, so they will have made some of the mistakes that you are likely to make. So, you can learn from their experience. Learning from other people’s experience in that way is often a lot better than learning from your own experience, because when you have to go out and make every single mistake yourself, it becomes extremely disheartening.

It’s hard, you need a lot of will to carry on if you’re taking that way. Learning from other people’s experience cuts down the amount of time that you have to spend on everything. So, yes, joining a community is one excellent way to kind of fast track the process.

Mark Mason: Very good. That sounds like outstanding advice to me. How about thing two? What’s the second thing that you might advise someone that was new to internet marketing?

Andrew Hansen: The second thing that I had in mind when you first asked me, and some people listening may find it frustrating to hear, but it’s another sort of a mindset issue. Again, this is really difficult to do, and it’s very rare that people just getting started are able, even if they want to, to take on this mindset.

That is to just approach online business in two ways. Both as a long term venture, and something that you are building gradually and slowly, and that you want to have making you money, not just in the next 3 months, but in the next 3 years.

Then starting from that frame of mind, again is difficult, because all of the offers and all of the material that you read is always promising you that you’re going to be able to make X amount of money, “In the next 3 days you’ll have this stream of income coming next week, and then it will skyrocket from there and suddenly you’ll have an ocean front mansion and a Ferrari just like in the picture.”

It doesn’t take long for most people to realize that it doesn’t really work that way. Nor should you want it to work that way, because a general rule that I have is that the faster money comes to you, the faster it can leave you. You might be able to make 1,000 dollars by next week, but whatever may have brought you that money is almost always such that it can disappear just as fast as it came.

So, approaching it from the mindset of wanting to setup a real business is maybe the smartest thing that you can do. Again, it’s difficult, but if you do it you’ll beat many people.

Mark Mason: That’s excellent advice. I sometimes get these heartbreaking emails from readers of my blog, or people that stumble through my blog telling me how their credit cards are maxed out and they’re about to lose their house and they need to make 10,000 dollars tomorrow. There’s just not a lot you can tell those people, really.

Andrew Hansen: I know what you mean. I have the same emails. You’re right, what do you say to them? The truest thing to say to them is that you don’t need internet marketing right now, you need a loan or you need a job or something. If someone was in that situation, would you advise them to start a real business? Would you tell them to start up a Subway franchise and see if you can make money that way? Of course not. They shouldn’t be looking for a business. They should be looking to secure their financial situation first.

Mark Mason: That’s right. Okay. That’s excellent advise, number two. So, do you have a third one for me tonight?

Andrew Hansen: Yes. It’s hard to select a third one actually.

Mark Mason: Well, you’re allowed four. If it’s really coming down to that kind of thing, we’ll give you a fourth one.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. All right. The next thing, and this one is kind of related to your approach also in the pre-strategy stage, I would say. That is because like we’ve been saying, there are so many different methods to being able to make money, the thing is that actually there is also so many working methods.

There’s many ways to skin the cat. There’s a lot of ways that in the midst of all the ones that don’t work, there’s still a lot of ways that do work. What makes one method right for one person doesn’t depend on the method, but it depends on the individual.

For example, if you pick any given person off the street, that person would have preexisting knowledge, and preexisting skills, preexisting likes and dislikes. So, they would be better suited to one business model rather than another.

For example, you might really like writing, like me, I’m someone who really likes to write. So, writing comes easy to me. It’s never a rigorous process, I never begrudgingly start to write an article, because I enjoy it. So, I use that to my advantage by focusing on business models that utilize the skills and the things that I enjoy, and that I already have.

That’s how I got started out. I got started first just writing for other people. That allowed me to be able to make money from home. It wasn’t really a business, but I was able to make money from that. Then slowly as I learned more about actually making money with a proper business online, I was able to use those writing skills to leverage into content for blogs and for mini sites. Then to use the traffic generated from those to promote affiliate programs, and earn commissions and things like that.

The point after that discussion was try to find the method, and firstly, try to stick to one method, because the worst thing that you can do is get started with one method, see another method or offer tomorrow in passing and kind of hop over to that method and do a little bit of work there, and realize that it’s not really for you, so hop onto another method, and then maybe later come back to that first method, because you realized it might be more profitable after all.

That’s the worst thing you can do. That’s opportunity hopping, like I call it, and it’s almost always going to lead to failure. So, the first thing is to stick to one method at least until you get to the point that you realize you can’t do it, because it’s just not fitting with you, you’re not good at doing things that way, you don’t have the resources or the time, or whatever else to perform that particular method.

The second thing is when you are sticking to one method, make it one method that fits with the skills and the things that you like that you already have. So, if you like writing, blogging should be easy for you. You might find it easier to maintain a blog than to sell products. You could blog and to sell advertising on that blog, as opposed to doing all the research and the analytics and tracking and testing that comes with say making money with PPC.

That would be the third thing, stick to one method, and try to stick one method that fits with the things that you already are good at and enjoy doing.

Mark Mason: That’s a great tip. You know, I hear a lot of people, and I’m one of them, tell people to beware of getting distracted by what I call bright shiny objects. Every new email that comes into your inbox is trying to sell you a new method, you need to watch out for that.

But, I think you may be the first person I’ve heard who has really expressed this in this way, where you should take advantage of the skills that you have and try to get a match between what you’re good at and what the method teaches, so that you can leverage the assets you already have. That’s an excellent tip. I appreciate that.

Andrew Hansen: Absolutely. Part of it is that you only, and this is kind of unfortunate, but inevitable, that you will only really start to find what you really enjoy doing online and what you are really good at after a little bit of messing around. So, maybe one of the other side note points of the three is just be willing to kind of experiment a little bit with it, and be willing to lose a little bit of money if you absolutely have to.

Take your time and find out what it is you’re good at, because even if you take that little bit of time at the start and you start focusing on a method that you are really good at and that you do really enjoy, the dividends of that will pay down the track, both in terms of how much time it will save you and how much money it will make you, will be well worth the amount of time that you may waste in the beginning.

Mark Mason: Excellent. Did you have one more that you wanted to throw in here, because I’ve got time for you if you’d like one more?

Andrew Hansen: I think I will, actually, because we didn’t really get to talk much about strategy. So, I thought I might throw one little strategy point in there. It’s really hard to pick one strategy point out of everything that you could possibly say that would cover every kind of method and every kind of person who would be looking to start to make money online.

But, the thing that I thought of, and it’s such a recurring theme, and such a recurring thing that I see as the reason for people not achieving the results that they want to with their online business. That is firstly, whatever method or many methods that you will start to make money online with begin with finding a market. Whether it’s a market being an interest group to which you want to write a blog for, or whether it’s a market that you’re going to sell a product to, or it’s a market that you’re going to sell advertising to, whatever it is, many methods start with a niche or finding a market.

Different people have different definitions of what a market or what a niche on the internet really is. If you’re listening to this call, you probably will have already, or will in the future, come across the methods for locating markets on the internet. Like using the search analytics tools to see how many people are searching for a particular term.

A lot of people think, and it’s easy to fall into this trap of thinking, that things like somebody searching for a term is a market or is a profitable market. But, there’s a big difference between searches and buyers. If you want to make money from your online business, if you’re not just doing it for fun or because you enjoy it, you want to make money from it, you need to be in a niche where people are spending money. You need to be in a niche not just where you think people might spend money, but where people are already spending money.

Seeing the term, I don’t know whatever it is, Dragon Ball Z cards, for example, gets searched for 100,000 times, that doesn’t mean you’ve got 100,000 people who could potentially buy from you in that group, because that’s such a niche of kids and people who aren’t necessarily spending a ton of money. It doesn’t mean you’ve got 100,000 buyers. You might only have 1,000 buyers, if you’re lucky, maybe 100 buyers more likely.

Conversely, there’s markets where if you look at something like weight loss. People are spending money in that market. It’s an enormous market, not just on the internet, but offline as well. It’s a market where you know people are spending money. I’m not necessarily advocating that you get into the weight loss market, it’s extremely competitive, but I’m providing that as an example of a market where you are certain that people are already spending money.

So, your goal then, almost regardless of what method it is that you’re using, is to try to access and try to put yourself between the transactions that are already taking place and put yourself in the midst of the transactions that are already taking place. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a really increased percentage chance of being able to actually claim some of that cash that’s already changing hands.

Starting with a niche of buyers is my fourth, final, and only strategy tip.

Mark Mason: I know it’s amazing to me that people miss this, but I think you cover it pretty well in some of the materials that you’ve published over the years. There’s a lot of really simple things you can think about. One of the things that you teach is just the keyword modifier, “buy.”

There’s a hell of a lot of difference between the keyword “buy dog food recipes” and “dog food recipes.” One person is looking for a free recipe for dog food, and the other person is looking for a dog food recipe cookbook.

Andrew Hansen: Absolutely.

Mark Mason: There’s just a huge difference.

Andrew Hansen: One person has got their wallet in their hand as they type. They’ve got their credit card there and they’re looking to make sure they know all the different numbers so they’re ready to type it in when they find what it is that they want.

Whereas the other group, you can’t tell what they want. Some of them may be looking to buy, but some of them might be looking for a freebie, some of them might be looking for something they can print off and give to their friends. You don’t know. So, the group that’s got their credit card ready, and it’s a no brainer about which one you want to target.

Mark Mason: Very good. This has been incredibly helpful. There are a couple of other questions I wanted to ask you.

Andrew Hansen: Sure.

Mark Mason: I know that you’ve been very gracious and not actually talking about your own products, but they’re so good I want to talk about them. The first thing I want to talk about and want to point people to is one of my favorite ebooks that you’ve released, and it’s free, that’s really great, and I’ve actually sent my readers to it, because I really like it. That’s your Crap Cutter Marketing ebook. Can you give people kind of the 30 second lowdown about what they can expect in that ebook, and let them where to find it, and I’ll also put the URL in the show notes.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. Some of the things that I wrote about in Crap Cutter Marketing is the same as what we’ve talked about on this call. In part it’s about locating niche markets of buyers, locating groups of people that are looking to spend money and talking about strategies for putting yourself, your content, your website, or your offers in front of those people.

It’s talking about how to do that in a way that creates as little work for you as possible. There’s obviously work involved, but it’s try to make that as easy as possible for you. It also tries to do that without you having to spend a ton of money. So, it focuses on free traffic strategies. It looks at then leveraging that free traffic by promoting offers as an affiliate and using advertising revenue and using content, or things that you write, as the platform for selling stuff online.

There’s a ton of stuff in that report. A lot on mindset things, to finding niches, to monetizing your content, to generating traffic. It’s a really good free report, and it’s had a lot of good feedback. You can’t argue with free. There’s no cheesy up sell and you don’t have to spend any money in the process. It’s a good one to check out.

Mark Mason: Tell me the URL again.

Andrew Hansen: That’s CrapCutterMarketing.com.

Mark Mason: Have you gotten any negative feedback from people who are offended by the use of the word crap?

Andrew Hansen: No, I haven’t actually. Not as much as people offended by the use of the word crack in a previous report.

Mark Mason: Niche Marketing on Crack was another great one. I told you, that’s one of the first things I bought, so that’s good stuff.

The other thing I wanted to talk about briefly, because it’s your premiere product and I’ve written a lot about it on my blog, is Firepow. I was wondering if you could just give us the 30 second summary of what the Firepow system is, and give us some look into the future about Firepow and give me some breaking news here? Tell me what you’ve got planned over there.

Andrew Hansen: Sure. Firepow is kind of like a combination of all the intelligent things I’ve learned about making money online in the 5 or 6 years that I’ve been doing this. It’s a piece of software primarily, but it’s also kind of a suite of software tools, as well as a lot of training materials, like PDFs and videos, that focus on how to create blogs and use those blogs for the purposes of making money as an affiliate.

There’s other forms of monetization as well. The blog is for the purpose of generating really high quality, target, buying traffic that then you can push towards affiliate offers to earn commissions or to advertising on your site to earn Adsense clicks, or to your own products if you sell something somewhere else on the internet.

It’s a suite of tools that helps you to automate as much as possible that entire process. It helps you set up a blog in a matter of 10 clicks or something like that. There’s no HTML to write, there’s FTP programs to fiddle around with, there’s no uploading or downloading. You just fill in the forms and follow the instructions and it will spit you out a nice looking blog that’s not just a normal blog, but a blog that’s optimized to generate traffic for you from the search engines. So, it’s targeted to the right keywords that you’re looking to rank for.

It’s got proper permalinks. It’s got all the plugins and all the little settings that normally you have to learn how to set yourself or the add-ons that you have to work out. It’s got them all set in there for you, so you just click the buttons and you spits you out the blog.

It takes you right from that part of the process, creating your blog, to the generation of your content, which is the next thing that’s enormously important for anyone looking to generate free traffic. You need content. You need stuff to attract visitors that you can then monetize.

It helps you generate content both with ideas and with physically finding content for you on the internet that’s already out there that’s not being utilized as well as it might be that’s targeted to the terms that you’re looking to rank for. So, it helps you leverage other people’s content. Not in any illegal way, of course, just by grabbing content from syndicated sources from elsewhere on the internet.

Right through to the process of actually promoting your blog and being able to generate traffic to it, both through search engines and through social bookmarking sites, through directories, through other people’s private blogs, and building backlinks and generating exposure in as many places as possible to your blogs.

It’s kind of the whole enchilada from the creation of your blog to the cashing of your checks is what I always say. It’s automating that process as much as possible.

In terms of future plans, we’re really just trying to add new features or new tools all the time to optimize that and to automate it more for you. For example, we’ve got a feature coming out next week that’s for people who want to make Adsense sites.

We don’t have time to discuss that model, obviously, but it’s just creating content that gets ranked in the search engines that you position Adsense ads in, when people click those ads you make money. With this new tool, it will be in addition to something that we already have, but that lets you basically create a full Adsense blog that gets updated every couple days, however often you select, with content that’s targeted to the right keywords, that’s relevant and unique as much as possible, and automatically monetizing that for you.

So, you can create Adsense within, again, a number of clicks. You could create an Adsense site on any niche that you choose as long as you’ve got a keyword list that you’ve already researched within 5 minutes or so. So, that’s something we’re working on at the moment.

Mark Mason: Now, where can people find out more information about Firepow?

Andrew Hansen: You can checkout GetFirepow.com.

Mark Mason: That is excellent, sir. I appreciate all the tips, and I’m excited to give people an opportunity to hear about your products, because in both cases those two products are products that I’ve personally endorsed and have done so based on just the raw quality of both of them. I’m happy to give you that time to talk about that.

I do have one last question for you. I know you’re an accomplished affiliate marketer, you’ve sold all kinds of crazy things, which we don’t have time to go through them all here today, but now the question I have for you is, are you aware of any affiliate programs for vegemite?

Andrew Hansen: A vegemite affiliate program. You know, I’m sure there probably is one. You might have to sign up to some kind of online store, some Australian grocery store online. I don’t think it will pay out very high, because it’s a physical glass bottle with stuff in it.

After they ship it to you it will cost you 3.75, you might earn a 10 cent commission per jar of vegemite sold. I don’t know too many people that order it in quantities large enough to generate a huge commission. But, if you pioneer it, I’ll stand behind you.

Mark Mason: Okay, very good. Listen, Andrew, I really appreciate your time. The last question I have for you is, if people just want to follow the teachings of Andrew Hansen, where is the best place to follow you online?

Andrew Hansen: Sure. You can check out my blog, that’s at AndrewHansen.name, or you can follow me on Twitter as well, and that’s @AndrewHansen1.

Mark Mason: Very good. I’ll have both of those in the show notes. Andrew, thank you very much. I’m going to get some sleep. It’s creeping up on 2:00 in the morning here in Dallas, and it’s 3:00 in the morning there. I appreciate your time, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Andrew Hansen: My please, sir. Thank you for having me.

Mark Mason: Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. For more information about this program, and to get the show notes, be sure to visit our website at MasonWorld.com/podcast. Follow @MasonWorld on Twitter.

Have you got a question or comment for Mark? Let us know by leaving us a voicemail on our digital recording line at 214-444-8655. We may use your message on a future episode of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Did you like our podcast? Help us out by telling your friends and leaving your review on iTunes by going to MasonWorld.com/iTunes.

Finally, always remember that all business involves risk. Internet business is no exception. Your ability to make money with the concepts discussed in this program and on MasonWorld.com depends on many things, including your effort and capability. Since these factors according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success or income level, and we are not responsible for any of your actions.

Thanks again for listening to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, building internet businesses one night at a time. Have a great day.

In this episode of the MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we continue with our series introducing the different ways that you can make money online. Specifically, we take a look at information products or information marketing.

We have a special interview with Internet Marketing Guru Jon Leger (pronounced Lay-Jay) and he reveals what he considers the three most important things that a new Internet Marketer needs to know.

Information Marketing has made millionaires out of a lot of people.  In fact, my buddy Josh Spaulding has just release an excellent (and very affordable eBook on the topic of Information Products.)

Advantages of an Information Products Business includes:

• Incredibly low overhead -- create content and publish electronically
• Sell it over and over again
• Sell it 24 hours per day, 365 days per year
• Fully automated sales and order delivery product
• Works well with affiliate marketing
• Location independence (work anywhere)
• No employees required

Some links mentioned in the podcast

• Moonlighting On The Internet
• Ten Ways To Make $10K On The Internet
• Information Product Success Formula from Josh Spaulding
• ClickBank.com

Possible information product topics

• How-To guides
• Self-help products
• Financial eBooks
• Make Money On The Internet
• Fitness/Diet/Health
• Skills Improvement Or Training
  • PM PodCast
  • iPhone Programming
• Lifestyle Design

Interview with Jon Leger included in this episode.

• Tip 1:  Look for a mentor running a real business; it takes real work.  Watch out for sharks and false claims.  Cannot get something for nothing.
• Tip 2:  Find a great niche or product that sells well.  Have some passion.
• Tip 3:  Get targeted traffic.  Not all traffic is equal.

Jon has an awesome product for beginners in internet marketing:

GeekFreeProfits.com

Be sure to leave us some feedback and subscribe in iTunes!

Podcast Alley is another option:
My Podcast Alley feed!

Here is the Raw RSS Feed.

I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. Drop me a line here on the blog on on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Ask a question or leave a comment and we may use it on the show.

Well, it's finally here.  The first ever episode of the MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

In this episode, I discuss why I am doing the podcast and what I have planned.  I also reveal what I consider the three most important things that a new Internet Marketer needs to know.

Some links mentioned in the podcast

• Moonlighting On The Internet
• Ten Ways To Make $10K On The Internet

Be sure to leave us some feedback and subscribe in iTunes!

Podcast Alley is another option:
My Podcast Alley feed!

Here is the Raw RSS Feed.

I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast.  Drop me a line here on the blog on on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655.  Ask a question or leave a comment and we may use it on the show.

Thanks!
Mark

Several months ago I posted that I would be working on my sales letter for Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress.  You probably remember that this was one of my very first products, and that I am always learning by doing.  Man, that first product seems like a lifetime ago.

Edit -- See my special guest post invitation to real copy writers in the post comments.

Since I was "learning" on that product I did a "toss" rather than a launch.  What I mean by a "toss" is that I did not do a full court press trying to get anyone and everyone to promote the themes.  Rather, I worked with a few friends to do an initial promotion:

• Josh Spaulding and Garry Conn promoted the themes to their lists and blogs.
• Josh featured the themes in his excellent eBook $5 Formula.
• Caroline Middlebrook featured the themes in her excellent Niche Site Video
• James Jones sent my Micro Niche Finder Video to his list

The Results Of My First Attempt

Well, I learned a lot about having a product.  I thought that you might be able to learn some stuff too.  I actually made lots of sales.  From my perspective, it was a huge success (and continues to sell).

But, as usual, there were lots of opportunities to improve.  Here are some highlights (and opportunities to improve):

• Highly targeted traffic from a list that was expected to convert at 5% or more only converted at 3.5%.  What's worse,  less targeted list traffic converted very poorly.
• Less targeted traffic from blogs in the make money online niche converted at much less than 1%
• Traffic from ClickBank affiliates was converting at a very low rate.

Increasing Sales Page Conversions

So, I decided that based on that information, that I needed to look at the sales page.  Since I am a glutton for punishment, I posted a request for feedback on and criticism of my sales page on both the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forums.  Well, as you can imagine, I got some.  You need flame-retardant undies to withstand the comments I got.

Note to new Internet Marketers out there -- don't get your self-esteem wrapped up in your sales copy if you are going to ask for feedback on a forum.  And, be prepared to hear from people that have no idea what they are talking about.

I also got some very helpful feedback from of my very own readers.  That was awesome, and I really appreciate it when readers take the time to comment.  Here are some feedback highlights:

• Work on the headline and sub-headline. It was described by one guy on the Warrior Forum as a "confusing wreck." The great thing was that he offered me a couple of much better alternative headlines that really illustrated his point.
• Work on the copy -- let it breath. Again, a member of the Warrior Forum supplied new copy to illustrate the point.  I got similar feedback from a reader of the blog.
• Make the site look more professional. The one comment from Digital Point pointed out the fact that a website that was selling wordpress themes needed to be "very professional looking."   I agreed.  Josh actually made fun of my graphics (several times).

Taking Action

So, based on all that feedback, I changed the sales template to something more professional, I changed the headline, and I re-did the copy.  Conversions are up considerably.  You can see the new Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress sales page here and you can compare it to the old sales page.

What do you think?  Did I make it better or worse?  Time and split testing will tell (I will be making a post on how to implement split testing next week).

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards,
Mark

As I have mentioned before, I get my graphics from one of the greatest graphics outfits on the net.  Recently, these guys came out with a product that I was really excited about, PL Secrets.   As is my normal approach, I did not want to promote it without a review.

I liked the product so much that I decided to promote it on my blog, send it to my mailing list, negotiate some special pricing for my readers, and add a bonus if you buy through my affiliate link.   The bottom line is that I love it, and I think you will love it too.

If you just cannot wait, go check it out now (time to take advantage of the deep discount is limited -- for real).  This is not a marketing thing -- I really negotiated a special 48-hour deal for you.   More on this later.

Two Internet Marketing Truths

There are about seven or eight things that I think are fundamentally true in Internet Marketing -- but for now, let me tell you about two of them.

1.  You need your own products. Why?  The reason is simple.  You can multiply your earnings by putting your products up on ClickBank or PayDotCom and leverage the power of affiliates.   Affiliates drive traffic for you, and with a good product, you can have hundreds of affiliates that are thrilled to promote for you.

When I say this, I always hear the same objection:  But Mark, I don't know how to create a product.  I don't have anything to say.  I'm not worthy.  You know the drill.   PL Secrets solves this problem for you by providing you with excellent PLR products each month.

2.  Landing page quality is critical. You need great landing pages with great copy for your products.  Professional graphics are a must.

To this, I usually here the refrain -- but Mark, great graphics are expensive.  That is actually true -- I have paid a lot of money for graphics.  But the results always pay for themselves.  PL Secrets solves this problem for you by providing you the most incredibly excellent PLR landing pages that I have ever seen.  You must see these graphics to believe them.

The Bottom Line

PL Secrets provides you with excellent products each and every month.  You can modify them, put your name on them, sell them, and keep the profits.  All the profits.

I personally reviewed the products from Month 1 and Month 2, and I was blown away. The month one products are already gone (the limited distribution protects their value for members), but there are some killer bonuses in month 2). What you see now on the site are the month 2 products. Those are the products that you get if you sign up today. And then of course, you get the bonus for month two and then products for the following months. Every month, you can deploy new products.

Here is the deal

1. Until about Midnight on Saturday (about 48 hours from now), you can join PL Secrets at the Earlybird Pricing.  As far as I know, this is one of the very few places you can find that price.  I know one other guy that was able to get this deal for his readers, and he is almost sold out of his 25 copies. And, after about midnight EST or so on Saturday, my special price will be gone.
2. There are only 25 slots at the Earlybird Pricing for my readers.  No kidding.  I was lucky to get this deal for you at all, and I was only able to negotiate 25 spots.  Again, they are trying to limit the numbers to protect the value. They are only letting me have 25 (dang it).
3. Two killer bonuses inside. Be sure to check out the bottom of the sale page.  My favorite (especially for new people) is the training center.  This is one of the things that I insisted on on prior to promoting.
4. One killer MRR Bonus direct from me. The 1st month's products are no longer available, but I have gotten special permission to give away Master Resale Rights to AdWords Cash Mountain - complete with everything you need for your website.  This bonus is worth the first month's price alone. Just sign up through my link and email me your receipt and I will send you a link.

That is about it.

On thing that makes me feel good about this sort of promotion is the 100% absolute money back guarantee.  Be sure and check that out at the bottom of the PL Secrets sales letter. There is no risk.

This is one of the best products that I have seen this year.  If you have ever wanted to sell your own products -- this is the way to get started.

Do not hesitate to drop me a line if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Mark

• Hey - read this before you leave another blog comment http://aweber.com/b/WTGx #
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• @GarryConn Excellent question. Basically "how to build an online business while working a day job". Would target newcomers. #
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If you blog, then you know what it can be like to be stuck.  You need to write, but you just cannot find the motivation.

A proven way to succeed in writing when ideas don't come easily is to use quotations.  Finding famous quotes from United States Presidents, Diplomats, Actors, Scientists, Inventors and the like, always makes for good reading and inspiration.

Apply The Genius Of A Genius

For example, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once stated “Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.  Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage.  As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.”

Not a bad quote, but the cool thing is that I actually USED A QUOTE in this tip as PART OF THE CONTENT on how to use quotes in your content.

I'll let you think about that one for a bit.

Consider Someone Else's Point of View.

If you've been able to start an article or book but now you've reached a point of impasse, try obtaining other people’s points of view.  Let’s say you've written about dating.  Although you're married, you remember the dating world.  However, you've now hit a wall and no matter what you do, you just can't seem to get past it.  You have teenagers who are actively dating, so why not ask what they think. They can probably provide a fresh viewpoint, associated with today’s society that you hadn’t thought of.

Do you realize how much society is changing, and has changed?

Twenty-five years ago the biggest problems in schools were:  tardiness, spitballs and chewing tobacco.

Today the biggest problems are:  violence, sexually transmitted diseases / pregnancy and drugs.

But, if you aren't raising a child today, you might not even be aware of the changes that have taken place.

The important thing is to ask questions to get other people's point of view.  And here are the two questions to ask...

What do you KNOW about this situation? (What are the facts?)
What do you THINK about this situation? (What is your opinion?)

And what a way to find more ideas to write about...

An astounding 83% of polled Americans feel like...
Three out of four residents said the mayor was doing a good job...
Among the biggest concerns were...
The top 7 most requested...

Whatever the results -- whether your content is in agreement with, or in disagreement with -- you have something more to comment about.  You can debate the results, emphasize the results, agree with the results, expand on the results, editorialize the results and (or) explain the results.

More content.  More ideas.  More perspective.

Hope that helps....

• @rondavis007 thanks Ron. #
• @gushin bread was fantastic! #
• @rondavis007 TWIT? #
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• @jarret Check this out http://tinyurl.com/2tdkkj in reply to jarret #
• @colligan Right. But twitter is the tech. You are using the tech to some end. The nature of that tech is shaping the end result. in reply to colligan #
• @jasonvo @colligan But you cannot separate tech from the product. eg. Twitter. Before twitter, we would not have a 140 char debate. in reply to jasonvo #
• @aaronabber I am thinking that an IM product might generate more interest for your purpose. Like a copy of some cool course or software. in reply to aaronabber #
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• Yep. Thanks. On my way. #
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I was reading Andrew Hansen's blog last night and he published this:

For those of you who don’t know - Lebron James is the 24 year old, widely accepted as the best basketball player in the world.

Not only that, but if you contemplate the following quote from him, he might even help you make more money online; not to mention dominating life in general.

This is an excerpt from an interview with him I was reading earlier:

Q: Who’s the best defender on the league on you?
Lebron: Myself
Q: No, the best defender against you?
Lebron: I’m the only guy who can stop me.

Here was my reply:

Andrew;

I think this is right on the money (so to speak).

When it come to making money online, most people stop themselves. They get started and they try stuff that will eventually work, but they quit too soon. I’ll bet you see a lot of this with Firepow. People sign up, follow your blueprint, but quit after they don’t see $1M in their PayPal account in the first week.

The thing that most people don’t realize about making money online is that you have to work consistently and follow a good system to get results. Firepow is one such system, and there are other good ones out there.

The bottom line in life and in the make money online business is that you are the only person that decides your own success or failure.

Regards,
Mark

Do you agree?  What is the biggest barrier for you (I am assuming that you have not quit if you are still reading my blog?

Thanks,
Mark

My blog is literally getting to thousands of pages in size.  Now I know that's not the biggest website in the world, but from my point of view it is getting pretty big. Occasionally, I will get an e-mail from a reader, telling me that I have a broken link in one of my posts.

A dead link, also known as a dangling link and a broken link, is defined as a link which leads to an error page or a web page or server which is unavailable.  While the occasional dead link may not seem like too much of a big deal all it takes is a single dead link to lose a customer.

A website visitor's attention span is typically limited to about twenty seconds.  If you can't capture their attention in those first twenty seconds - click, they're gone.  They're onto the next website or gasp - your competition.

Now imagine you've done your job as a webmaster and captured the attention of a visitor.  They're reading your content and liking what they see.  A link or button captures their attention, they click it and oops, there's an error page.  Some patient folks will go back to the page they were on and continue browsing however the majority will simply click away.  You've lost them and any potential profits which may have been gleaned from their wallets.

Unfortunately most webmasters are completely unaware that their links are broken - dead.  What is an unaware webmaster to do?

Fortunately when there's an issue on the internet, there are many people and companies who jump in to help you solve the problem.  Dead links are no exception.

You can, of course, check all your links yourself.  If you have a single page brochure site this is probably the best and most economical decision to make.  You can click on each of your links on a monthly basis simply to make sure they're still working.  Perhaps you link to an order form, a map or even other websites.  A few clicks and you'll know whether your links are breathing or have kicked the bucket and need to be fixed.

However many websites have hundreds of pages, each with their own internal links.  One dead link can break a very important chain.  Checking a site like this manually can take way more time than you have.  You could hire an administrative assistant to weed through page after page of links trusting that they're not going to miss any or you can use one of the many dead link checkers available online.  Most of these tools work by simply typing in your URL and generating a report.  Depending on the size of your website this process can take anywhere from five seconds to five minutes.  The result is a nice list of links to update.

I have not reviewed many of these link checkers, but one free one that I used with some success can be found here:  http://www.dead-links.com/.  There are some paid checkers as well, but I have not checked them out.

Once you have a list of links to update, the sooner you can fix them the better.  Remember, each dead link may be a lost customer.  While it isn't necessary to check for dead links daily or even weekly,  it pays to schedule a monthly dead link check into your calendar.

Do you check your site for dead links?  What tools do you use?

One of these pieces of advice that I constantly hear regarding blogging is that bloggers should post on a regular schedule.  If you've read my blog for any amount of time, then you know I am terrible at this.  The excuse that I use is that I have a day job and sometimes I am just too busy to write a post.

The reality is sometimes I know I need to write a post but I can't decide what to write about. Some people call this writer's block. I call it a lack of inspiration. I think perhaps the best name for this problem in this context is blogger's block. Do you have bloggers block?

Here are a few ideas for beating bloggers block:

1.  Keep a list. The best way to defeat bloggers block is to maintain a list of great blogging ideas. Any time an idea occurs to you, you should add it to the list. This means you need to keep the list with you in the shower. I will leave it to you to figure out how to manage that.

2.  Steal from other bloggers. Very seriously, one of the best ways to create blog posts is to write about other blog posts that you have read that you consider to be valuable or just plain incorrect. The blogs that you are discussing will appreciate the back link, and your readers will appreciate you passing along pointers to other valuable information.

3.  Write in a series. People really like ongoing series where blog posts build on each other. For example if you are working on a major project, and the project is interesting to your readers, discussing how you're getting that done on a day-to-day basis can make for excellent blog posts over time.

4.  Simple How-To. Simple articles describing how you did something interesting are great for your readers and make excellent search engine food. If you just work for an hour to figure out how to get the brand-new XYZ plug-in to work in WordPress 2.7, you can save 1000 other people one hour by writing a post describing your experience.

5.  Completely off-topic personal information. Did you have a terrible day or great day or did something crazy happen to you that makes a great story? Tell your readers.  people love to hear about the personal experiences of people they are following. This is the very phenomenon that makes twitter so popular.

Do you have great ideas for how to get unstuck when you have bloggers block? Be sure to leave a comment and let me know.

Regards,
Mark

Photo:  photo credit: Vince Kusters

As I have mentioned before, I am a forum moderator at Coaching With Josh.  That program is set up to help a wide range of people, including beginners.  Today, I got the below question, and I thought many people might be interested in the answer.

Of course, I have changed the names and some of the details to protect the innocent:

For the last couple of days I've been checking out XYZ product on ClickBank and I think it's a great product to promote as an affiliate, due to the fact that commissions are paid through ClickBank and the sales letter is really good.

I've been considering promoting it on specialized forums and on EZA.

I'm a newbie with no previous marketing experience.

The thing that really makes my head spin is keyword research. I don't know what tool I should use and how to tell which keywords are profitable and which ones are not worth it.

Also, my idea is to start generating not only keywords related to "xxx xxxx xxxx", but also to the "yyy yyyy yyyyy" term.

Since I've never designed a website in my life, I would like to know if starting with a blogger blog is a better option.

So, should I use the wordpress blog or start fresh with a blogger blog?

Now, I should say that entire $2000 courses are built around the above question.  So, it is hard to answer this kind of question in a single blog post.  I am not pretending to give all the answers here.

Additionally, I don't know much about the product that was mentioned.   I did check out the sales letter and  I agree the sales letter looks good.  The problem is that it is hard to judge how they will convert without testing.  I recommend always asking the publisher for conversion stats, and asking them what support they have for tracking your own conversions.

To promote a product like this, you have many options.  I am not a PPC guy.  I like organic traffic.  For organic search traffic, you can put up a site with a URL like http://TheProductURLReview.com using wordpress.

To get organic traffic to that URL, one option is to create pages that rank for keywords that are related to the product that you are trying to sell.  For each keyword that you want to target, you can write a short article talking about the product and linking to it with an affiliate link.

You can see one new site that I have like this here:

http://www.1waylinksreview.com

It's so new that I have not done much with that site, but you get the idea.

You can also take this approach with article marketing or a blogger blog.  But, I always think it is better to have a specific domain that you own.

Fundamentally, it boils down to conversions.  Get visitors to your site, presell them, get them to click through to the sales page, and a certain percentage will convert to sales.

Photo: photo credit: Dina Middin

Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie #13

The Importance Of Backlinks and NoFollow

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.

This week's Internet Business Fortune Cookie caused me to write about a SEO question that I get a lot. When I cracked open the cookie this week, I knew right away what it meant.

Hear the cookie speak:

"Your Friends Speak Kindly Of You"

Obviously, the cookie was refering to the importance of off-page SEO and backlinks.

I have talked about SEO before.  In this article, I'll talk mostly about Google, and I'll comment on what people believe to be true.  No one actually knows exactly what Google is doing in their search algorithms except Google.  If you have a contrary opinion, I would love to hear from you in the comments.

Getting On Google's First Page

When you do a search in Google for a keyword phrase, results are returned to you in order. Google tries to put the "best" results on the first page so that you get the most useful result from their engine. The better the results are, the more people use Google. So it is very important to Google to give users great search results.

To decide which pages to put on the first page of the results, Google considers at least two things what text is on the page and how "important" the page is for your phrase. The first thing is usually called "on-page SEO", and the second thing is usually called "off-page SEO." This last part (off-page SEO or "authority") is determined in part by how many incoming links (links from other pages) a particular page has and what the quality of those links are.

Back Links Make The Difference

Let's say there are 2 pages in the internet that are very similar about "sheep dog training" and you search for "sheep dog training". Which page will you see? All things being equal (similar on-page SEO), you will see the "sheep dog training" page that has more quality pages linking to it ranked above the one with fewer incoming links.

Google figures that if someone took the time to link to a page, it must have good stuff in it. If lots of people linked to that page, it must be really good (better than a page that no one is linking to).

See, the quality of the incoming links is determined (in part) by the authority of the page linking to it. So, if the dog training page has incoming links from CNN and Yahoo News, those links will carry more weight than a link from Bob's brand new blog.

Share The SEO Love

This means that once a page has some "authority" (like the CNN home page in the example above), it can pass that authority to other pages. It is thought that the authority you pass from a page is "split" between the pages that you pass to. So, if you have a page that links out to 5 other pages, you sort of send 1/5 of the authority of that page to each of the pages that you link to.

But, what if you don't want to do that?  What if you only want to send authority to 2 of the pages (maybe they are pages that you own) and send no authority to the other three?

You can do that by putting the rel = "nofollow" attribute in the link text.

This nofollow attribute "theoretically" makes the link pass no (or less) authority.  I say theoretically, because there are lots of good examples and studies that prove the nofollow links actually do impact your rankings in some cases.

So, I hope that helps clear things up on backlinks.  I'd love to hear your questions in the comments below.

As the cookie says, Your Friends Speak Kindly Of You.

Have a great day.
Mark

P.S.  For more on backlinks and SEO, be sure to check out The Ultimate Link Building Report.

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

Web hosting is to an Internet Marketing business what water and electricity are to a restaurant business. You cannot make money when your site is down.   Yesterday, I mentioned that MasonWorld.com was going down for a few minutes, but I did not say why.  It turns out that my blog was going down because of excellent customer service.

Huh?

You heard me.  Excellent customer service was taking my blog down.  It turns out that over the last couple of weeks I had been noticing some "performance issues" on MasonWorld.com and some of the other 50-some-odd sites that I host on this server.

Running A Business Using A Virtual Private Host

Unlike a lot of web host accounts that you can get for just a few dollars a month, the server that hosts MasonWorld.com is a Virtual Private Server (VPS).  If you are not familiar with that term, a VPS is like a dedicated server, only there are "several" truly isolated and private environments running at the same time. Each customer maintains root access, their own software and they can depend on guaranteed resources.

A good VPS provides enterprise-class features such as off-server backups, redundant power supplies and hot-swap components.  For example, my VPS (server) at ServInt has the following cool features: 1 GB Burst RAM, 384 MB Guaranteed RAM,15 GB Storage, Unlimited Domains, Unlimited User Accounts, CentOS 5 Operating System, cPanel, Dual Xeon 3 GHz or Better, 8 GB Registered ECC RAM, U320 SCSI HD in Hardware RAID 10, etc.  You get the idea.

But My Server Was Sick - I needed Help

I am not sure why, but my server was sick.  I was seeing slow page load times and other weird behavior.  I am a tech geek guy, but I could not diagnose the problem.  So, I put in a ticket with the ServInt (Network Operations Center) NOC.  I explained my situation.

Within minuted the service team assigned the ticket to a tech and got to work.  I could tell that they were working on the system almost immediately because I got notices about services restarting and other stuff.

So here is the cool thing -- they apparently could not quickly identify the specific problem.  Now, at this point other web hosts that I have been with in the past would have blamed me or claimed the problem was not on their end.  In these cases you get a ticket response like "reinstall WordPress" or "it's working fine here."   Not these guys.  They just simply moved me to another server.  It took a few minutes of down time, and BINGO!  Problem Solved.

That was way better service than I expected.

Demand First Rate Customer Service From Your Hosting Company

I have heard so many horror stories about bad hosting companies.  To that, I say -- don't settle for it.  If your hosting company has poor customer service, find another one.  Ask the new company to help you move your account and all your files (most will do this happily).

I love the service I am getting from ServInt.  You should expect the same from your hosting company.

Regards,
Mark

Photo: photo credit: schoschie

This is a little off topic for this blog, but I love cool tech stuff, and this is really cool.  I know a lot of you out there are geeks a heart, and we all love to get the best price when we shop.

If this describes you too, you gotta check this out.

Some graduates from my Alma Mater (Texas A&M University) are up for a neat award, and I was hoping some of you would take a minute to vote.

This guy (Rylan Barnes) started up a company that makes software for your mobile phone (think iPhone, Android/G1 etc).  Their first application is out, and it is a killer app!  Totally practical and useful (and really cool).

The app is called ShopSavvy and it uses the camera in your phone to scan the barcode of any product and finds the best prices online and at nearby, local stores!

Check out the company here: biggu.com

Anyway, they've been nominated for the 2008 Crunchies! This is a big deal. It's like winning an Oscar but for a tech startup company. This is only a nomination, though, so they need your vote!

Vote here: http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/votes/?nominee_id=85&category_id=16

They are up against some big Silicon Valley competition (like Google) so please spread the word. Blog it, twitter it, tell your facebook friends! Vote every day! They'll take all the help they can get.

Thanks!

Regards,

Mark