This is the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, Episode 7.

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, and welcome back to the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Mark Mason. It’s really great to talk to you again. I hope you’ve had a fantastic couple of weeks since the last time we spoke.

As usual, I’ve been crazy busy running my day job and playing with internet marketing late at night. That’s why we call it late night internet marketing, because I do it late at night and I really enjoy it.

This is the seventh episode, and in the first six episodes we’ve talked about the various methods for making money online. What we’re trying to do is set the foundation for building an internet business by first understanding the different ways that you can start an internet business. Of course, we don’t cover them all, but basically what we’re doing is we’re going through Yanik Silver’s outstanding book called Moonlighting on the Internet, and we’re talking about Jimmy Brown’s outstanding ebook, which is called 10 Ways to Make 10,000 Dollars a Month Online. Both of those are available on MasonWorld.com. The Silver book is available at MasonWorld.com/silver and the Jimmy Brown white paper is available at MasonWorld.com/10ways.

So, I’ve been working on a number of things over the last couple weeks. I’ve been getting some sites ready for Christmas, I’ve been participating in Lynn Terry’s outstanding forum, and doing some live case studies over there in the private area of her forum. You can find that over at MasonWorld.com/lynn. I’ve been reading up on all the stuff going on with the FTC.

The FTC has come down with some new regulations that have a significant impact, or could have a significant impact on affiliate marketers and bloggers. So, what I thought I’d do today is we’ll go ahead and we’ll cover as planned the next internet business model, and the topic for today of course will be blogging.

We’ll talk about how people make money online blogging, talk about that works into the other models. Instead of doing our normal interview with a guru, I wanted to spend some time in the second segment of the show talking about my opinions on this FTC thing, what it means, what it should mean to you, whether or not you need to worry about it based on my opinion.

I say that because it is my opinion. I’m not an attorney, I don’t work for the FTC, I’m not a government official, I’m not any kind of expert. I have spent some time reading the relatively plain language that the FTC has put out, and I think we can talk about it. I can tell you what I’m going to do on my various affiliate blogs over the next couple of months trying to bring them up to the standard that the FTC has set.

With that, if you’re ready let’s get into the feature segment and talk about making money blogging.

It’s time for the feature segment.

The interesting thing about blogging is that you can be famous without needing to have an agent or any other kind of traditional media support. That’s the really amazing thing. You can see examples of how blogging is starting to equalize the playing field. Once upon a time, media was in control of information and that’s just simply no longer the case.

Everybody is a reporter, everyone can start up a blog, and everyone can start writing about whatever they want to write about. The fact of the matter is if you are popular as a blogger, you can actually make money doing it. A lot of people wonder about this. How can you do that?

We’ll talk about it. A lot of it will involved things that we’ve talked about before, ways to monetize traffic, because after all in internet marketing what we’re trying to do is get traffic however we can get it, however we choose to get it, make that traffic take some action that we want them to take, and have that action be monetizable.

In the case of blogging, we want to create great content on a blog that people care about, get them to read it, and in general take some action that is profitable for us. There are lots of actions that they could possibly take. They could make a donation to support the ongoing maintenance of your blog, they could see an ad that someone paid for, they could click on an affiliate link. We talked about affiliate marketing a couple episodes ago.

The bottom line is we want to get traffic, we want to convert that traffic into some kind of monetizable return. What better way to create traffic than to get a loyal base of readers that care about what you have to say and turn to you to keep up with things.

Of course, the most famous of all the bloggers probably is Perez Hilton, everybody knows about Perez. I don’t actually read that blog, but I know about it because I’m in internet marketing. The most famous blog that I know about that I actually read would be blogs like Yaro Starak, who runs a fantastic blogging course, or Problogger, or Copyblogger.

These blogs have enormous numbers of readers. You can look at them and see how they’re monetized. They’re monetized by advertisements, they’re monetized by affiliate sales, and if you look at the latter two blogs, Problogger and Copyblogger, and Yaro’s blog as well, they’re also monetized by the sale of their own products, by referring people into their own products.

I actually think this is the best use for a blog. When we get to talking about how to use a blog in your business in future episodes, we’re going to be talking about a blog as a way to identify prospects for your other products. We really won’t talk too much about a blog in and of itself.

But, if you’re a prolific writer and you love to write, there’s a topic that you’re very passionate about, it is certainly possible for you to create a blog, start an online business around that blog, get traffic, and monetize that traffic with current monetization methods that are out there available to you.

Before we start with too much information about how to build a blog, I guess we first ought to touch on what a blog is. That’s a question I get a lot of times from people who aren’t familiar with the internet, particularly people like my mom. I’ll talk about a blog and she’ll ask a question, “I’ve heard of these blogs. What are they exactly?”

You probably already know blog is short for web log, which implies this is sort of a journal, an online journal. I’d say the most interesting part of a blog, or the thing that makes a blog a blog is the fact that the content in the blog is organized primarily in chronological order.

Posts come in one at a time, articles are called posts in the blogging world. They come in one at a time and the newest one is always on top. They can be organized in other ways as well, you can usually search these blogs and a lot of times the posts are tagged so that common themes are put together. You can have categories for posts and so forth.

The primary thing that you’ll notice about most blogs is that when you arrive on the first page of a blog, what you’re going to see on the home page is what the author has written first. Now, there are lots of other formats for blogs. You can have magazine style blogs where multiple stories are on the home page.

You can go to MasonWorld.com, that’s an example of a blog that was designed by Garry Conn over at GarryConn.com. You can see my latest post right there on the blog. In fact, if you go to the blog immediately after the release of this podcast, you’ll see that the release of this podcast is the latest story on the front of the blog. That’s what makes a blog a blog.

The question is, if you want to blog, what do you need? First thing you need is you need to decide exactly what it is that you’re going to write about. I recommend personally that you write about something that you care about.

If you’re going to be a blogger and you’re going to make money blogging, and you’re not using this blog for niche marketing or some of the other things affiliate marketing that we’ve talked about, but you really want to become a well known author on a subject, you really need to think about whether it’s in your personality to blog about something day in and day out that you don’t care about.

I know I personally can’t do that. I’ve tried to do some blogging on topics that I don’t care about, and quite frankly I can’t get it done. That’s my first piece of advice to you.

My second piece of advice to you is to write about something that at least some people are going to care about. Maybe you care about one particular kind of koala bear that’s only found in some jungle in Southeast Asia, and you are some kind of biologist and you’re the world’s leading expert in that.

That might just be fine for you to write about that, but I’m going to tell you as cute as koala bears are, there’s just not going to be that many people that care about your koala bear blog. Especially if it’s specific to one variety of koala bear in Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, if what you really care about is the Dallas Cowboys or some other kind of broad topic like cars, racing, weight loss, how to have a happy life, how to fix relationships, how to manage debt, one of these topics that’s very important and big in the news, you have a real opportunity to get a lot of readers.

The flip side of that is some of those areas are very competitive and like choosing any niche in internet marketing you’re going to want to narrow that done. But, the fundamental thing is that you need to write about something that you care about and some number of other people are going to care about as well.

Then once you’ve decided that you’ve got a topic and you are going to have a blog that people are going to care about, you need to register a domain name. My recommendation on the registration of domain names for blogs, where blogging is your ideal target market, that’s really what you’re going after you’re trying to be a blogger is to register a name that people can remember.

You want a name that rolls off of people’s tongue, like Problogger, Copyblogger, or something that people can remember and just type in at the command line, because you want that word of mouth opportunity. Do you want search engine traffic? Absolutely. But, the domain name doesn’t weigh that heavily on the search engine traffic. I know we haven’t talked about search engines a lot, but we will in future episodes. For now, if you’re going to be a blogger, I definitely recommend that you register a catchy domain name to call your blog.

The next thing you’re going to need is some blogging software. Of course, there isn’t any option here that I would recommend over WordPress. There are two versions of WordPress. There’s WordPress.org and WordPress.com. There’s actually a third thing called WordPress MU, we’re not going to worry about that today. That’s multiuser version of WordPress.

WordPress.com is software that allows you to host a blog on the WordPress site itself. So, you might end up with something like redsocks.wordpress.com for your blog on red socks. WordPress.org is the same software, very similar software, that you host on your own domain. I’m strongly recommending that option.

You definitely want to host the blog on your own domain. You need to be in control of your own destiny. WordPress.com is going to limit some of the things that they’re going to allow you to do some of the kinds of advertising that you can have on your blog and so forth. So, you definitely want to focus on a WordPress.org installed on your own domain.

Now, if you need hosting currently I am recommend a special host that has a one penny first month and easy set up of WordPress. You can find that recommendation at MasonWorld.com/host. But, the bottom line is your website needs a place to live, that’s going to cost you a few dollars a month. I recommend that you check that host out at MasonWorld.com/host. That’s my latest and best current recommendation for where to host your website.

Once you’ve got your blog up and running really what you need to do is write. We can talk in some more detail at a later date about how to choose things to write about, how to pick posts that will capture your reader’s attention, how to write pillar content that you can rank for in the search engines that people will come back to and link to, and drive traffic to your site. But, the bottom line is you need to write and you need to write a lot.

You need to create a posting schedule, you need to write regularly. One of the things, just like with this podcast that your readers are going to want to see is the regular creation of content on a predictable schedule. So, you need to write early, write often, but most importantly you want to write on the same schedule all the time. Maybe for you that’s once a week, maybe it’s once a day. Whatever your schedule is you need to kind of fall into it and stick with it.

One thing that you’ll find is that a lot of people start a blog, they find out that it’s not for them, then they fade out and the blog just dies because they never spend time on it. So, really get committed to your schedule in the beginning and get your blog going.

Once you’ve got your blog up and going, you have several options for monetizing that blog. You’ve got what could be described as direct monetization options and indirect monetization options. Now, direct options are the kind of things that you might think of automatically, like advertising.

You can put contextual ads on your blog, like Adsense, where the words that you write on the page effect which ads actually show up. You can put on different kinds of blogging ads and textual ads. There are all kinds of ad systems, and a lot of these are covered in the Silver book. That chapter on blogging is actually written by Darren Rowse, he’s a very famous blogger with lots of good things to say about blogging. Definitely recommend you check out that section in the Silver book.

You can also get your blog sponsored. Let’s say that you have a BMW fan blog where you talk about BMWs and all the things that are great about them. Maybe BMW wants to sponsor your blog.

You can also make money on your blog just by having a donation button. Maybe you’re providing helpful information to people. There aren’t really products to sell, but you’re helping people with relationships, or helping them fix their computer, or whatever it might be. They’re so thrilled that they might want to leave you a buck or two, the sort of “buy me a beer” click button that you can have with Paypal or other service to leave a donation.

There’s other direct methods. You can have merchandise, like CafePress t-shirts. You can even sell subscriptions to premium content on your blog. If you’ve got a blog where you talk in general about most stuff, but then you’ve got a premium side to the blog where people can get even more content if they pay you a monthly fee, that can work as well.

Now, one thing that you can use your blog for is for indirect methods of monetization. Let’s say that you’re blogging, but really your goal is to drive traffic to your consulting business or to get other types of indirect monetization, like other writing gigs or photography gigs if you have a photography blog. That’s an indirect way you can monetize your blog.

That’s kind of interesting, because if you’re already doing something, like you have some sort of business, a real brick and mortar business and you want to enhance that business, you can start a blog in your area of expertise, become an expert, drive traffic to your business and also leverage the information and knowledge that you already have in your online business against your offline business and vice versa.

Nothing says that just because you’re an expert offline in a local market that you can’t become an expert online in a national market, or maybe even in a world market. In fact, the fact that you are already an expert offline can make you a very good blogger online.

That should give you an idea about blogging. If you’re interested in blogging, I recommend that you go to get some hosting. One place is MasonWorld.com/host. You can find out all about that and be up and running with a blog this afternoon. That takes care of bloggings, that’s our next method for making money on the internet. Now, let’s talk a little bit about the FTC.

Let’s talk about the FTC . So, the FTC on the 5^th of October released some final guides governing endorsements and testimonials. You can find a link to this on FTC.gov. I’ll put the link in the show notes. Basically, the guidance is pretty short.

Before we talk about it, let me reiterate the disclaimer just so we’re really clear. I am just a regular person reading the output from the FTC. I am not an FTC expert, I am not an attorney, I do not play an attorney on TV. So, I am not qualified expert to advise you on what you need to do.

If you can’t deal with that, you need to turn off your iPod right now, because I’m not responsible for what impact my advice has on your business, you are. as long as you understand that, we’re cool. I’m going to tell what I think and what I’m going to do. You need to make your own decisions about what you’re going to do. Enough of the disclaimer.

Basically, this guideline really it only had about seven or eight paragraphs. I think eight paragraphs. The first paragraph really just deals with the fact that they indicate that they’re making an announcement. Now, what they’re announcing is guidance to advertisers. This isn’t law that they’ve put out, basically it’s the FTC’s guidance on how to deal with existing FTC regulations.

What they say in the second paragraph is that there are several changes incorporated into the guides for advertisers. Those guides were last updated in 1980. So, that’s a pretty striking thing right there. The amount of stuff that’s happened on the internet since 1980 is enormous, so it’s no surprise that it’s time to update some of this stuff.

Really they only cover three things that impact advertising in this announcement, and only two of them impact internet marketers, in my opinion. One thing that they’ve said is that any time there’s an endorsement by a consumer, an expert, an organization, or a celebrity that indicates that they’re a consumer of a product, any kind of endorsement, “I used this product and I got a result.”

We all use testimonials in our internet marketing products. Any time you use a testimonial that claims a result you are required to clearly state what the user can actually expect. So, let’s say I use a weight loss product and I give a testimonial that I lost 105 pounds. But, my results are not typical. It used to be good enough to say, “These results are not typical.” Your mileage may vary, that’s what the car people say.

Well, that’s no longer acceptable according to this FTC guidance. What must be done now is that you must state what the average user would expect. To me that means that very simply if 1,000 people take a weight loss pill, and one of them loses 80 pounds, but most of them don’t lose any weight, you’ve got to report the average of what those other people are doing.

In some cases it’s not even clear to me how you’re going to ever know that. How are you going to know the average results of what your customers are doing? But, that’s what the FTC is claiming.

Now the question is what is Mark Mason going to do? Well, I’ll give you a concrete example that I’m concerned about. I have a product called Niche Adsense Themes, it’s over at NicheAdsenseThemes.com. I am aware of the fact recently that someone using my themes, they’re themes for Adsense, someone using my themes was able to use those themes to generate some ridiculous amount of money per month. I think 1,000 dollars per month using article marketing and my themes in a mortgage site they were able to generate a site relatively quickly that made them something on the order of 1,000 dollars per month.

This is well documented over at Site Point. You can go look over at Site Point and find this thing. I was going to get that guy to offer me a testimonial that says, “Using your themes I was able to make 1,000 dollars a month.” Well, guess what folks? Those results aren’t typical. I’ve never had a customer come to me, besides this guy and say that they were able to make 1,000 dollars a month using my themes.

So, that’s not a typical result. For me to use that testimonial like I was planning to, I’m going to have to now say, “These results are not typical. The average user that uses my themes never makes any money at all.” Why? Because like with most internet products people don’t use them. They download them, throw them on their hard drive.

You might be able to say the average user who actually does what is recommended in the product and follows the program has a certain results. Quite frankly, I don’t know that result. So, my plan is to not mess with using testimonials that guarantee results or that talk about results at all. I will use testimonials like I have typically used where people talk about how they liked the product, they think it’s wonderful, but I won’t use any testimonials that talk about specific results.

That just opens me up to too much uncertainty. I don’t know other people’s results, I don’t have any way to verify, so I’m not going to use those. That’s my simple answer to that.

The second thing that’s covered in the FTC bulletin has to do with disclosing material relationships. That’s the next paragraph. Basically, what they say is something that should make sense to you. If you’re recommending a product to someone and you make money if they buy it, you need to tell people that, because if you have a financial incentive to recommend a product that can bias your recommendation and people deserve to know that.

Guess what folks? I know a lot of people aren’t doing this and I am not rigorous about doing it on my own blog, although I do have a very clear disclosure page. I’m not sure that’s enough in this case, but we need to be doing this. If I recommend to you, XYZ product, like I have even earlier in this podcast and you buy that product based on my recommendation I make money and you deserve to know that.

So, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to do a couple of things. One thing that I’m going to do is make sure that every blog that I have that recommends a product has a disclosure page prominently displayed for the users to look at that says something along the lines of products recommended on this blog result in the generation of commissions. If you buy a recommended product, it’s likely that I’m going to get a commission.

You can see something like that on the MasonWorld.com blog, I have a disclosure page. I’ll also link to it in the notes. It’s not great. I plan to update it. it was my previous attempt of being transparent, and I plan to put that on all my blogs.

My personal opinion is that that’s not really going to be enough. Just having that disclosure page buried somewhere on your site is not going to be enough. We’re going to have to be more up front. I plan on actually adding something in my signature at the bottom of every post, or something that discloses the fact that I am using affiliate links when I recommend products.

I plan to be completely transparent. I’m going to take any chances on this one, because not only do I think that’s what the FTC is trying to get at, I also believe that they’re on the right track. I think it’s really important for some person who doesn’t really understand internet marketing, doesn’t understand the idea of affiliate links to know that when I recommend a product like FirePow, for example, which I’ve recommend many times, that I get a commission if you buy FirePow. That’s really what I think the right thing to do is.

The next paragraph in the FTC statement talks about celebrity endorsements. I don’t have that problem. Of course, I did have Lynn Terry on here a couple weeks ago, so she’s kind of a celebrity. But, seriously, I think celebrity endorsements are not a problem that most of us are going to face, but it’s covered in there as well.

That’s pretty much, from my perspective at least, all that’s covered in that announcement. You will see some gibberish at the bottom about how this is not actual law, about how this is the FTC’s guidelines on how to comply with existing law. There’s a burden for the FTC to prove that you’re breaking the law.

But, the bottom line is that thing really talks about three issues and those are celebrity endorsements, material connections between authors and the products that they recommend, and the first thing that we talked about, which was the fact that if you have testimonials you need to disclose average results.

Now, let me reiterate that I am not an attorney and I am not giving you advice here. I’ve just told you what I’m going to do. You need to do whatever you’re going to do.

Here’s another thing that I think is true. If you are trying to deceive people or you doing something that is going to cause people to be upset, if you misrepresent a product or you do something that causes people to be dissatisfied with the product that they bought, what are they going to do? Well, they are going to potentially file a complaint with the FTC.

What’s the FTC going to do? One thing that they can do is they’re going to look at your websites and see whether or not you’re in compliance. So, what’s the best way to keep the FTC out of your business? The best way to keep the FTC out of your business is not to do things on your websites that mislead or take advantage of your customers. Who are your customers? Even if you’re an affiliate marketer your customers are the people who come by your websites.

So, that’s the right way to think about this stuff. If you do things that respect the value of your readers or the people that are clicking around your blog you’re a lot less likely to have trouble with the FTC. That’s really the bottom line on this whole mess. You need to look out for the customers of the products that you’re recommending and endorsing.

That wraps it up for today. I am actually getting on a plane and heading out to Asia in a few hours. I’ll be going to Taiwan and to Korea on this trip. I’m glad to have this in the can and out on the website prior to take off on that long trip. I’ll be back in two weeks with another episode. Until then, I hope you have a fantastic day and a great week. Take care.

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.

Greetings -- I am on the road -- hanging out in Starbucks drinking an iced Mocha. It's hot in Texas, and coffee just does not work for me after noon on hot days.

The Buzz In My Inbox

So, I thought it was worth noting that I have gotten several emails today about this voting contest being run by Dean Hunt to identify the best "Make Money Online Blog." I was pretty surprised to see MasonWorld.com there.

At the time of this writing, MasonWorld.com is near the top of the list.  I'm sure things will move around, and I might end up last.  As Brad Pitt would say, "it's an honor just to be nominated."

After thinking about it, I immediately wondered "why am I even on the list"?  After all, there are lots of Make Money Online Blogs out there with more followers, more content, more controversy.   To be honest, I know why I would want to be on there.  What I mean by that, is while I have no idea why people would like my blog, I know exactly what I am trying to make this blog.  Here is my short list.

• I put transparency and honesty above everything.  When  I started this blog, I wanted it to known as a place where people could believe what they read.  I hope people get that.  I'm not perfect, but I always try to tell it like it is.
• I wanted this to be a "no hype" thing.  That's what I mean by the "Down To Earth Internet Marketing" tag line.  I try to keep the hype to a minimum (although sometimes I do get excited).
• MasonWorld.com is about Internet Marketing.  Making Money Online is just a small part of Internet Marketing.  So, I would like to think this this blog is more than just another list of ways to make $10 on the internet.
• Professionalism -- I am a real business person in the offline world, and I try to keep it professional on line.  If you want name calling and profanify, you have to look elsewhere.
• The Zig Ziglar factor. I really do believe that you can get everything you want in life by getting other people what they want.  That is what this blog is about, really.  Telling people what I have learned so they don't have to learn it by themselves.   I help people get what they want -- and I get what I want.  Warm fuzzies and an occasional affiliate commision from real products that I really believe in.  What could be better?

So Many Great Blogs, So Little Time

But before you vote for me (or not) -- let's talk about the other blogs on there.   Man, there are some great ones. Here are just a few:

Caroline Middlebrook and Garry Conn -- now, I must admit that I do not read them much lately. Both Caroline and Garry have dramatically decreased their blogging as they work on other business models, but there is a ton of great content in their archives.  I don't agree with everything that they say all the time, but you can learn a ton from their blogs about blogging (Caroline) and AdSense (Garry).

Jennifer's Pot Pie Girl Blog.  You probably remember me promoting her One Week Marketing Course.  I did that because it is a great course (I still recommend it), and she is a great gal.  Check out her blog if you have not already.

IM With Joe.  Do you know Joe?  You should.  'Nuff said.  Peace out.

There are some other great blogs in that list (sorry if I did not list you, e.g. Yaro), and some that I absolutely cannot stand and would never recommend (I would never list you, but you know who you are).

Several Missing Blogs

I was really surprised to see several missing great blogs -- most notably Josh Spaulding's Internet Marketing Blog.  Not sure what is up with that -- I actually think Josh's blog is a lot better than my blog.  I read every word he writes -- twice.  Oh well, you can never have a perfect top list of anything, I guess.  (Hansen's Blog is missing too).

Vote For Me!

So, go vote for me if you like this blog.  I am probably not the best blog on that list -- but I guess it might depend on how you measure it.  I still want your vote.

It's certainly good for business (note the transparency).  LOL

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

Last week I concluded that my blog was not a good as Garry Conn's blog.  For those of you that missed the joke, Garry helped me get this blog off the ground back when I had 25 RSS subs and no clue.  I am still looking for a clue, but the RSS numbers are up.

Anyway, here is some further evidence that Garry has me beat --there is a cool interview of Garry on  Success Circuit.  So, if you missed it, it is definately worth a look.

In the interview, Garry reveals that he is nearing the "500 blog mark."  Yikes.

I have a great problem today.  I had four or five things that I wanted to blog about, but I only have time for one blog post.

For example, some of you may have heard that my good friend Josh Spaulding, who teaches people how to make money online, has recently released an update to his incredibly popular free five dollar formula e-book.  I'd love to do a review of that, but since it's completely free, I encourage you to get over there and read it yourself.   You'll learn everything you need to know to drive traffic to niche websites and monetize them with Google AdSense.

My second choice for a blog post today (that I decided to pass on) was the topic of  income taxes.  Yuck.   This is the first full year since I started making money online that I have had to do with deal with thousands of transactions.  I am a little frustrated with myself that I didn't keep better records during the year, and I'm trying to do much better for 2009.  I am very interested in understanding the best way to handle tracking all of the different transactions that I complete during a year, and will reserve this topic fora future series of posts.

A Bunch Of Garbage Blog Comments

This morning I woke up and logged on to my blog and found that I had seven comments from new commenters. I'm always pleased to see new comments, because that means people are reading my blog and have something to add.   I try to answer each and every comment on my blog,  because I value both the comment and the time commenters invest contributing to my content.

Imagine my disappointment this morning when I found four of the seven comments were totally garbage just cluttering up my comment inbox.  I get these all the time. They waste my time, your time, and server bandwidth.  I thought you would enjoy seeing them so I've posted them here.

My absolute favorite is the guy who called me a guru using two different names pointing back to two different URLs.

Now I'm sure that at some point some Black Hat Internet Marketer sold some one some very expensive software to go out and find blogs corresponding to particular keywords and then automatically leave comments on this blog. I am sure that this was very appealing to some Internet business person who was looking for something for nothing.

My problem with this is that a completely misses the larger opportunity that comes from making helpful comments on blogs.

Good Comment Outcomes

When you make really thoughtful blog comments that add value to a post,  number of good things can happen to you.  The one that is most often talked about is the situation where you are one of the first commenters on a high-traffic post, and you make a great comment. People will tell you that readers of the post will see your comment, and click through to your blog. This is absolutely true and can provide you some temporary traffic.

Occasionally, you may find yourself commenting on a do-follow blog, that provides do-follow links back to your blog .  (In fact, this blog does this for commenters with more than 9 coments).

This can certainly help you with search engine ranking, but you'll usually find that these posts (the actual permalink where the post appears) have low page rank, at least initially. This means that you should not expect to get a massive amount of link juice from these types of comments.

The Real Value Of Excellent Comments

Both of the outcomes above are absolutely correct.   The problem is people who are focused on these sorts of outcomes miss the real opportunity.  In my opinion the real opportunity of leaving excellent blog comments lies in the relationships that you develop with excellent bloggers.  Once you've developed relationships with other bloggers, what you really have are opportunities for growing your business the through the conversations, friendships, business ideas, joint ventures, and product opportunities that come out of such interactions.

It's an old saying: it's not what you know it's who you know.

I'll give you a couple of examples.  When I first started my blog,I had no clue what I was doing. I searched around Google and started finding examples of bloggers who are successful and reading their work.   Basically I found three that I decided to follow long-term.

Garry Conn is the first eample.   Gary is a top-notch Blogger and one of the busiest guys I know.  When I was first getting started, I commented on Garry's blog asking for advice via a phone call system that he had set up at the time.  Not only did Gary use my phone call as part of his content, but Garry also called me back and we have been working together and trading ideas ever since.  He even designed this very blog theme.  Now, I consider Garry a friend.

Josh Spaulding is another example.  I was so impressed with Josh's e-book Article Marketing Domination eBook and his ethical approach to Internet marketing that I started commenting on his blog.  Now, I am a moderator in Josh's coaching form, and we have worked together on several joint venture projects.  I also consider Josh a friend.

The bottom line is relationships

Really when you get down to it, Internet marketing is not any different than my off-line business of semiconductor microelectronics. Getting things done and being successful is all about relationships.  Relationships with customers, relationships with coworkers, relationships with business partners, and relationships with suppliers.

If you want to be successful Internet marketing, focus on building relationships with people you respect and with customers you value and you can't go wrong.

Have a great day,

Mark

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie. Last night I had Jalapeno Chicken and fried rice. Basically, I call this "Texas Chinese Food." It was really spicy hot, and that explains this week's cookie that talks about a hot new blog from Garry Conn.

The Cookie Speaks The Truth

As you know, everything you need to know about running an internet business can be learned from fortune cookies. This week The Cookie has obviously been surfing the Internet.

Hear The Cookie:
"Big things come in small packages."

Of course, the fortune cookie is obviously referring to the fact that I got a small little email from Niche Blog and AdSense Guru Garry Conn last weekend announcing his Next Big Thing -- a new blog!

Garry has launched BloggingQuestions.com, a blog where you can go to get your questions about blogging answered by the blogging community.  Here's how it works (in Garrys' words):

How the blog works is very simple:

People can follow or subscribe to the blog and read newly asked questions or even archived ones. Because these questions have been asked by readers such as yourself, it is very likely that you will have a personal interest in the questions being asked and the answers that go with them.

The part that makes BloggingQuestions.com "one of a kind" and totally unique is the fact your questions are welcomed! There is no such thing as a stupid question on BloggingQuestions.com. You are invited to ask your own questions! Simply create a free account and post your question LIVE on the blog. From there people who read the blog (including myself) can provide you with answers by using the comment form.

Besides being the coolest domain name that I have seen in a long time, this promises to be a great resource for bloggers.  Truly, a big thing in a small package.

The Cookie Speaks About Value -- Follow The Cookie

One of the things that I like about Garry is that he really tries to help people.  Sometimes, he does this to a fault, and people take advantage of him (you know who you are).

When I was just starting out working on MasonWorld.com, Garry took tons of his own time to help me.  This new BloggingQuestions.com blog is another great example of Garry's willingness to lend a hand.  Pay attention -- Garry builds trust and gives people something in exchange for their participation in his business.

As a side note -- I think Garry has a cousin or someone like that who works at GoDaddy.  That is the only way I can explain how he gets these killer domain names.

So, listen to the cookie.   Watch out for the small packages.  There may be something big in there.  Check out BloggingQuestions.com today.

Have a great day.
Mark

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

Just wanted to drop a quick note and let you know that Garry Conn has indicated that time is running out on his "free wordpress blog offer." If you need a blog, this is a great deal.  I actually took him up on the offer and plan to use the blog for "an experiment."  So, if you always wanted to move off of Blogger or start a fresh blog or whatever, now is your chance.  Check it out.  (Note that I do not get paid if you get a free blog from Garry -- I just think it is cool).

I'm writing this in the United Airlines Red Carpet lounge in Narita airport near Tokyo.  It's 2AM Dallas time, but it is the middle of the day here in Japan.  I am waiting on my connection to another Asian country.  That will be my third airplane today and I have a bus ride to follow that.  I left my house in Dallas 20 hours ago and I have another 8 to go before I reach my hotel.  I am officially declaring that a long day (phew).

It's A Small, Small World

All is not lost, however.  I am chatting with Garry Conn via GTalk as I write this.  He is still up in the middle of the night generating content about how to make money online as usual.  It's funny, because with the internet, he has no reason to suspect that I am in Tokyo aside from the fact that I told him.  The technology is simply amazing.  The first thing I did when I got off the plane was to check on Michael Phelps.  Looks like he won his eighth Olympic Gold Medal while I was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.  Well, on this day, swimming meant something very good for him -- for me, not so much.  Needing to swim during a scheduled international flight over the pacific is never a good thing.  Luckily, no swimming for me today.

Working On The Road

I did spend time on the plane catching up on course material from the Internet Business Mastery Academy (check out my review of the Internet Business Mastery Academy if you missed it).  The courses in the Academy are targeted at designing an "Internet Lifestyle."  Many people in the Internet Academy have left or wish to leave their day jobs to pursue a career on the Internet.  As I have stated many times, I love my day job and have no intention of leaving it.  Still, it would be cool to have a low maintenance part-time Internet business that generated enough cash to pay off the house and support early retirement on my terms.

So, this has gotten me to thinking about my own goals for MasonWorld.com specifically, and my internet business in general.  I know I want to continue to grow this blog, and I want to develop multiple streams of passive internet income (not necessarily from this blog).  In the very beginning, I thought my passive income was going to come from building armies of AdSense and eBay sites.  Sure, I have a few of those, but they are not very fulfilling.  The thing that I love is helping people be successful.  For example, I was happy the other day because someone was able to implement my free link cloaking solution successfully on their blog with my help.  It was not a big deal, really -- but I was glad I was able to help someone (even just a little).

Time To Update The Roadmap

What all this really means is that I need to update the MasonWorld RoadMap with an eye toward 2009.  I will have accomplished everything I set out to accomplish in 2008 by December.  I will have some AdSense sites, a blog I like, some eBay sites, a my first product.  So, what is next?  What do I really want from all of this?  That is what I am working through using some of the methods taught over at the Internet Business Mastery Academy.  When I figure it all out, you will be the first to know.

What Do You Want (Leave a comment below)?

One thing I would like to know is who are you, why do you read my blog, and what would you like to hear about?  That will help me set the direction.  I will also use your feedback to put together a reader survey.  So, let me know what you are thinking.  Leave a comment below, send me email, or drop me a note on the MasonWorld contact form.

Best regards,
Mark

Hey;

As many of you know, I am traveling to Asia this week. No, I am not going to the Olympics to compete in Diving, as has been rumored.  So, I will be posting from there and trying to add in a few pictures as well this week.

Before I get on the plane, I wanted to tell you about a phone call I got from a reader.  The reader was asking me about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.  He was frustrated becuase he had a WordPress.com blog and could not monetize it the way he wanted to.  He was not aware of WordPress.org.

The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

What's the difference?  Well, WordPress.com is a hosted platform that allows you to have a free blog.  You can register and WordPress.com and they will host your blog on their servers and you have to follow their rules.  Your blog is hosted on the wordpress.com domain, and will have a name like momsblog.wordpress.com.   This is great for a lot of people that just want to try blogging for the first time to see what all the buzz is about.  It is not great for people who want to make money blogging.  It is very hard to take a business seriously that is hosted on a free platform.

WordPress.org, by contrast, refers to the site that hosts the free WordPress platform software (note that free software is not like free beer -- there is a license, but you do not pay a penny for WordPress).  You can take WordPress and modify it however you want.  You can even package it as a product and sell it (with certain restrictions).  You can certainly do things like add AdSense ads and other monetization strategies (thing that are restricted on WordPress.com).

What's The Catch?

The catch (if you want to call it that) is that you need to provide your own domain and hosting for your WordPress.org blog.  WordPress.com takes care of that for you (and hands you some restrictions in exchange).  With WordPress.org, you are on your own.  This is overwhelming for a lot of people that "just want to blog."

The Solution -- Free Professional WordPress Installation

For a limited time, my buddy Garry Conn is running a special deal.  If you sign up for your hosting through Garry's special relationship with HostGator, Garry will personally help you install your blog and get up and running.  How cool is that.  HostGator is already really inexpensive, but Garry has even arranged for a special coupon code that will get you your first month hosting for a penny.

So, head on over to Garry's blog an read all about it.  I gotta catch a plane.

Regards,
Mark

Man, Time Flies....

Well, it has been almost a month since I did a trial launch of my first product, Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress.  Two weeks ago, I started a post series talking about the lessons learned in doing my first digital project launch.   A few days later, I offered a free copy of the product to anyone who asked the best question that I could use for a future post.

The Big Winners Revealed

I am happy to announce that i really liked two of the responses, so I have named two winners.

• Kent made a comment that reminded me that I was thinking about doing a step-by-step explanation of how to create an AdSense mini-site.  I had actually started something like that a long time ago.  Some of you may remember my series of posts on my mini-site the History of Elvis.  Anyway, I never finished that post series or that site.  I need to do that, and I would like to do a post series for beginners on starting an AdSense mini-site.  So, Kent, thanks for that.
• Alex commented that he likes lists and checklists.   That was a great comment.  It applies to the current task of posts about my digital product as well as the coming posts on AdSense sites and Elvis.

So, both Alex and Kent will get free copies of Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress.

Lesson Learned 2:  Good Sales Letters Are Hard

OK -- so here is the next lesson that I learned regarding my digital product.  Of course to sell a digital product properly, you need a mini-site.  The setup of that mini-site is a big deal.  If you want a great free tutorial on that topic, you can take a look at Michael Rasmuessen's free Mini-Site video tutorial.  It is outstanding.

Anyway, inside this mini-site, you need a sales letter.  That sales letter is this only thing (besides possibly a pre-sales endorsement from an affiliate) that a customer will see before they decide to buy your product.  This is important to understand.

A customer is not making a decision to buy based on your actual product.  They have not seen the actual product.  And, they will not see the product until they buy.  Rather, they are handing you their credit card based on the claims in the sales letter.

So what about the product?  Well, the quality of the product (specifically, whether or not you live up to the claims of the sales letter) impacts returns, repeat purchases, and referrals (I call these the three Rs).

Good Sales Letter Need Basic Things

Now, I am not a sales letter expert (yet), but I can tell you that sales letters need basic things to be successful.

• A killer headline.  You have about 10-30 seconds to capture someone after the page loads.  If they do not see something that captures their attention, they will hit that stumble button and never return.  So, you must grab them.
• A USP -- Ultimate Selling Proposition.  Why do they need what you have?  What is the value of it to them?  Why are the benefits that you are describing obviously worth ten or 100 times the price you are asking?
• Risk Reduction/Reversal. Why is a decision to trust you (buy the product) completely risk free?  Or better yet, is there negative risk (If you are not completely satisfied, keep the free knives as our gift just for trying the product).
• Urgency. Be careful with this.  Act Now! can be a real turn off if not real.  Digital products do not run out of stock, so artificial urgency can be dangerous as it feels sleasy.  Instead, consider offering your product at a discount for a limited time. (Be sure to raise the price as promised later).
• Call to action. It is an old truth in sales.  You have to ask for the sale.  Ask them to buy your product.

My Sales Letter Sucks

OK, so my first attempt at a sales was not so great.  Here are my stats:

• 3.5% conversion for highly targeted email list promotions from an expert in the field with an "email list that converts well."  This is OK, but not great.  A %10 conversion rate (or higher) should be possible.
• Very low conversion rate (less than 0.5%) for somewhat targeted email list traffic from an MMO blogger.  I expected 3-5% conversions.
• Almost zero conversions from random ClickBank affiliates.

What does all that tell me?  It tells me that my sale letter needs work.  So, I am working on it.  I am in the process of gathering input on how to make it better.

• I posted to 5 forums asking for comments and help on the current sales letter (including the Warrior Forum and DigitalPoint Forums.)  Man, you want some criticism, just ask for help over there.  It helps to have high self esteem.  All the comments I got were quite helpful.
• Phone consultation from Aaron Abber at FullTiltBlogging.com (I belong to his mentoring program and to his membership site).
• Private consultations from Garry Conn and Josh Spaulding via email.  I am also a member of Josh's coaching program.
• Reading lots of sales stuff by guys like Dan Kennedy.

So, in the next post, we can look at the old sales page and the new sales page, and I will summarize the changes.  We can also talk about split testing.

Regards,

Mark

P.S.  What do you think of my first sales page?  Be honest.  I can take it.  Leave your comments here.

photo credit: TheTruthAboutMortgage.com

A few days ago, Garry Conn lost his mind and pulled all the ads from his blog. I am not sure what he was thinking, but apparently he got some survey feedback that led him to think that his readers would be better served without the ads.

Never forget what Mark Twain said:  "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics."

I actually like Garry's ads because he screens them so heavily. In fact, he has pulled several "sleazy" ads in the past and actually refused to take people's money. That's right, people have actually sent Garry money and he has returned it because he thought the products being advertised would be harmful to his readers. To put it in Garry speak: "My Blog, My Rules."

So, now after rethinking his rash move to pull ads off his blog, Garry is reversing himself and planning on adding the ads back. He is worried about "Whoring out his blog," but adding the ads back is a smart move in my opinion. According to Garry:

GCDC scores over 50,000 unique visits per month, generates over 100,000 page views per month, has over 50% search engine traffic and over 75% of the people that visit his site daily are first time readers.

So, ads should be very high value with all that traffic. Here is the thing -- he is giving up premium space and they are pretty cheap. He is offering banners and links starting at $25 per month. Details are here: Advertise on Garry Conn Dot Comm. No, there is not an affiliate program.

Is Garry Conn an Internet Marketing Whore? What do you think?
photo credit: Daquella manera

Just a quick recap on the week to let you know what I have been working on. Man, has it been a crazy week.

• Attended Aaron Abber's mentoring class. Still getting a lot out of that at very low cost. This is a great value if you want to learn about list building and lead blogging from a pro.
• Logged some time at the Member site over at Coaching With Josh.
• Published a guest post over at Garry Conn's Make Money Online blog on Article Marketing.
• Started work on a super-secret link building experiment (don't tell anyone). I am really not sure about this one. More on this later if it works.
• Worked on integrating Yahoo Pipes, WordPress and phpBay. No luck yet.
• Worked on www.historyofelvis.com. That project needs to be restarted, and I am trying to get it going again.
• Attended the killer Jason Van Orden Podcasting Teleseminar. Will definitely be blogging about that. It was great.
• Started working on an updated MasonWorld Roadmap.  Man, I have be doing this Internet Marketing thing for over six months now, and I am really starting to get an idea about what I want to be when I grow up.  More on that in another post.

There is more to tell, but I am out of time (still doing that day job thing).

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Regards,
Mark

Internet marketing is certainly an interesting part of the internet, but it is clearly only one tiny part. One of the things that I like about Garry Conn is that he is willing to divert his attention away from internet marketing for a moment and try to help someone. He does this even when he is locked in a death match with the Cow. See, the cool thing about internet is that you can do amazing stuff with it to help people.

So, I am reprinting this post at Garry's request. For the record, I also sent a donation (although I had never heard of Brennan before Garry's post).

Regards,
Mark

A Blogger We All Know And Adore Has Fallen Sick

Written by, Garry Conn on May 30th, 2008.

On April 16th, 2008 my good online friend, Brennan Kingsland, feel ill with acute kidney failure due to chronic kidney disease. This really isn't a very good thing. For those that might have forgotten, the main function of the kidneys is to remove waste products and excess water from the blood. Kidney failure occurs when the kidneys partly or completely lose their ability to carry out normal functions. This is dangerous because water, waste, and toxic substances build up that normally are removed from the body by the kidneys.

Chronic kidney disease is when one suffers from gradual and usually permanent loss of kidney function over time. This happens gradually over time, usually months to years. Chronic kidney disease is divided into five stages of increasing severity:

I am unsure where Brennan is at with her battle for recovery, I know that she has been visiting her doctor very often as they have been attempting to treat her with medication. She has been updating me via email with progress updates and overall this has been a very touch and go situation for her. Unfortunately, just this morning, Brennan sent me a very brief email stating that things have started to go in the wrong direction again.

Brennan Kingsland is a determined woman who wants to improve education for our children. She loves animals and has owned and maintained a volunteer animal shelter for many years. She is a very free spirited, gifted and intelligent writer and publisher.

Brennan Kindsland is an amazing individual who values life. In fact, a little over 20 years ago when her best friend and loving husband suffered from a major heart attack, she immediately made a career change to be come a Critical Care Registered Nurse just so that she could make sure that her loving husband was going to be receiving the best care over the years. Quite a few years later and after things were going much better for her husband, she decided it was safe to go back to her career in publishing.

After witnessing how Brennan was willing to make major changes in her life just to help someone that she cared dearly about, today it is your turn. While I am not asking you to become a nurse or a doctor, I am asking that you provide a donation of money that will greatly support and help Brennan in a time of need.

For everyone who reads this announcement, please understand that any amount you are willing to donate will help and her in her journey towards having the best quality of life while enabling her to build strength to fight her illness. With your help, I have no doubt in my mind that Brennan Kingland will push through this challenging time in her life.

Please send a direct money donation safely and securely using www.paypal.com. Simply visit www.paypal.com, log into your account and send your money donation to: healthnet@wctel.net.

To help Brennann Kingland even further, please download a copy of this article and publish it on your blog or web site. Simply download and extract the zip file and copy the html code found on the text file and paste it on your blog.

I think most of you are probably aware of the contest that Garry Conn is running against John Cow. Basically, the two of them are in a death match to build and sell the best blog in one month. The winner is the site that sells for the most on SitePoint.com.  Participation in this contest is a great way to learn about internet marketing strategy.

As it turns out, some heavy hitters are in Garry's corner.  Joel Comm has contributed a copy of his highly acclaimed Secret Classroom course.  You can win a copy of the course (so read on below).

And now, a message from the Cow Slayer, Garry Conn

Hey everyone, this is Garry Conn here and you have probably heard the news that John Cow and I are going head to head in a make money online competition to see who can build a blog and sell it for the most money in SitePoint after 30 days. I just unveiled my niche blog titled, Debt Consolidation Book and I want to briefly tell you about the blog and how you can win some really amazing prizes by contributing and telling people about it.

Debt Consolidation Book is a web site where you can read articles written by people who provide their opinions and tips on how to get out of debt. Additionally, you can get 13 high quality debt consolidation books for free. These 13 free debt consolidation books will teach you some amazing debt consolidation, debt elimination and debt reduction strategies. Many people have all kinds of debts and one of the most common is credit card debt. Debt Consolidation Book is geared towards helping people who have credit card debt as well as most all forms of debt.

In this competition against John Cow, you have a huge opportunity to win the Secret Classroom DVD Box Set from Joel Comm. This is an educational make money online study course worth over $520 dollars.

How Do I Win Secret Classroom

Winning Joel Comm's Secret Classroom worth over $520 dollars is very simple. As you probably already know, I am not a very complicated individual. When I run contests, participating in them are very easy to do and take very little amount of your time. Your time is one of many things I respect and I don't want to take up a lot of it. It will literally take you all of five minutes to participate in the contest. Simple, quick and easy.

If you would like to have a chance to win the Secret Classroom DVD Box Set from Joel Comm here is what you need to do. It's very simple.

1. Download a copy of this article that you are reading here and then publish it on your blog. This is a Zip File. Simply extract it and copy and paste the HTML code into your blog post.
2. Join the Debt Consolidation Book mailing list and score your free copies of the 13 free eBooks! You will get over 275 pages of high quality material for free!
3. Subscribe to the Debt Consolidation Book RSS Feed by Email.
4. Drop a comment on this post to let me know that you have entered the contest by doing the above three steps.

Optionally, I would really appreciate it if I could get some votes:

1. Click Here to vote on Digg.com.
2. Click Here to add to StumbleUpon.
3. Click Here to add to your Google Bookmarks.
4. Click Here to add to your Technorati Faves.
5. Click Here to add to FaceBook.
6. Click Here to add to Del.icio.us.
7. Click Here to add to your Yahoo Bookmarks.
8. Click Here to add to Propeller.
9. Click Here to add to Mixx.

Remember the first four steps above are not optional and you have to complete step four by dropping a comment on my post which will let me know that you have officially entered the contest to win Secret Classroom. The second steps 1 thru 9 are totally optional but will literally take you less than a minute to complete.

Join My Make Money Online Newsletter

I invite you to join my make money online mailing list and you'll receive a free copy of the AFFAdMax WordPress theme. This is the same high quality and professionally designed WordPress theme I designed from scratch that I am using on Debt Consolidation Book! You'll be the first to score a copy as soon as I release it in the next week or two.

Good Luck Winning Joel Comm's Secret Classroom

Good luck with winning Secret Classroom. I will be assigning each participant in the contest a number and on Monday June 2nd, I will use Randomizer to generate the winning number. It's a very simple random draw contest that could potentially win you a prize worth over $520 dollars. Also be sure to join my free make money online classroom so that you can learn more about how to make money online and stay in the loop with future events in the competition against John Cow.

I hear a lot of the Internet Marketing gurus brag about how they cannot even write their own landing pages. They argue that most (or all) of the technical stuff should be outsourced so you can spend time on marketing instead of hacking. There is no money in hacking, they proclaim. I see their point, and who am I to argue? After all, the number of "million dollar launches" that I have been involved in is exactly zero.

I do wonder sometimes how you know if outsourced technical jobs are being done correctly if you don't understand the underlying technology, but that is a subject for another blog post. This post is about code. And one thing you can say about internet marketing specifically, and the internet in general -- there is a lot of code out there. Code makes things work, and the quality of code can make or break a project (or an application).

WordPress is a great example of a situation where coding quality is absolutely critical. Apart from the core engine, there are hundreds upon hundreds of plugins that depend on the quality of the core code. Those plugins, if improperly written, can crash other plugins or even crash WordPress itself. In addition to that, there are themes which are really just code. If your theme is not written well, it can break too.

Last week, I was working with an excellent WordPress theme developer on a new theme. We were doing all of our testing on a site that was recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and were using some stock WordPress 2.5 template files. During our testing we found that some of the stock WordPress 2.5 theme files did not run on a WordPress 2.3 install. Now this is understandable -- after all, why would anybody expect something designed specifically for WordPress 2.3 to run in WordPress 2.5. (Note that he was doing all the work -- I was just along for the ride).

As it happens, the theme test we were working on crashed in WordPress 2.3 because it depended on the new gravatars function called in comments.php. Gravatars is the cool function now native to WordPress 2.5 that puts the author's picture next to their comment. The code in the them looks like this:

echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 );

See the problem? The theme called get_avatar without checking the return status (if available) or at least whether or not the function existed. Luckily, php provides for situations like this. The "function_exists" function lets you test to make sure that a function is there before you call it. So, a better way to call a function like this is:

if( function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 );

This tests to make sure that there is a function called get_avatar available to be called. It does not say anything about whether or not the call is successful. Now, you can reasonably make the argument that there is no need to test for get_avatar in a WordPress 2.5 theme since only a knuckle head would run WordPress 2.5 code under WordPress 2.3. I get that. But I also believe that it is always good practice to design code so that it is robust against unexpected circumstances.

Always use protection.

Regards,
Mark

P.S. The theme that I was working on is called SEOAdMax by Garry Conn. It is available for free.

On Monday, I said that today (Wednesday), I would report on my progress in my article marketing experiment. Actually, I am making some really good progress with Article Post Robot, and I have been working with Garry Conn on a new Adsense-optimized theme for WordPress. I'm waiting on some articles to be approved in the article directories, so I decided to move that post on article marketing to Friday.

While I was making that decision, I got back to thinking how weird it was to be off line over the weekend due to the storms and the kidnapping, and how cool it is that you can make money online from your home. What really makes this possible?

Answer: Semiconductors (and the electrons they manage).

Then I wondered, how many Internet Marketing geeks (or general web surfers) really understand the technology that allows them to read my blog? I mean, we all hear the marketing buzz about Intel and AMD microprocessors, and quad core technology and all that. But what does it mean? How can you put it into human terms?

How Small is Small?

Well, one way to get at this question is to consider how small the guts of a computer chip are. Here is a picture I pulled off of my hard drive out of a presentation that I made in 2000.

The image is from a friend of mine at Siemens in 1997. It shows a human hair magnified 1000 times with some "stuff" on it. The black box marks the "stuff." The "stuff" is the size of several transistors (transistors are the building blocks of computer chips). You can think about a transistor as a way to store a one or a zero. If the transistor is off, it is a zero; if it is on, it is a one. If you want to store that result for any lenght of time, you need to get several transistors together to make a "memory cell." The transistors work together to help each other remember if they are storing a one or a zero. Once you have ones and zeros, you can hook transistors together to count, add, subtract, multiply, etc.

If you zoom in on the picture above you see this:

The above image is the same hair magnified 10,000 times. On the hair, you can see that the "stuff" is seven things that are the same size as a transistor was in 1997. Since 1997, the semiconductor industry has been able to shrink the size of stuff like this about a factor of 5 or so (depends on how you measure it). So, things are much smaller today.

Putting it in Perspective

The above picture is from another presentation that I gave in 2000 (and I cannot remember the origonal source for the drawing). This drawing shows that same human hair on the right and a bacteria on the left. On the far left, you can see the size of a the same set of typical transistor lines from above. Of course, the message is that semiconductor circuits are much smaller than bacteria. In this picture the circuit patterns are depcited about the size they were in 2000. They are about half that size today (or smaller in many cases), and getting smaller as we speak.

So, what does it look like inside the chip.

The final picture I'll leave you with is a tear-down of an integrated circuit where you can see these small features hooked together to form circuits.

In this picture, I am only showing the wires that connect transistors together. A single wire is the size of one of the lines on the hairs above.  So, when you go to Best Buy to grab that next computer -- now you know what's inside the box.  Tiny structures that control the flow of electrons.  It is the meaning of life in modern times.

As a semiconductor engineer (my day job), I am in the business of making these things. Often, I am asked -- "Yo, Mark, How do you make stuff that small." Every time the answer is the same -- very carefully.

Last week was an exciting week. My neighborhood was hit by a tornado that knocked out power and satellite, I celebrated a birthday (I feel old) and I was kidnapped by my wife and taken to an exotic hotel location without my laptop. Working on Internet Marketing without electricity, an internet connection or a laptop is really challenging. Luckily, my BlackBerry was not impacted by this weekends events, so I was able to stay connected.

Over the weekend, I was able to get started in Josh Spaulding's coaching program. Josh is an article marketing and SEO expert (currently ranking on page 1 in Google for make money online), and a really nice guy. When I first got started in Internet Marketing, I became interested in Adsense, and quickly learned that there were guys like Garry Conn that had as many as 100 blogs -- many of which were making money from Adsense. In my research on this topic, I ran across Josh's eBook called Article Marketing Domination and his free eBook Easy SEO. Recently, Josh published another free eBook: $5 Mini-Site Formula. This book was about exactly what I wanted (needed) to know when I started last November.

The MasonWorld Roadmap

Reviewing that eBook has made me rethink the 2008 Roadmap for the MasonWorld Internet Empire. Basically, I have been thinking about what I want to get out of my Internet Marketing hobby. I started this effort in Nov 2007 with some similar goals, but I am continuing to refine them (December seems like an internet lifetime ago).

On this pass of goal setting, I came up with several key overriding concepts:

• Have fun. This is easy, since I am facinated with the internet and technology
• Learn something. This easy. I knew nothing about internet marketing when I started.
• Add some value. Whatever I do, I am not really interested in just "taking" and leaving nothing behind. A good example is this website. At the end of 2008, I would like to be able to point to this site as a valuable resource that people can use.
• Generate revenue. I actually struggled with this. I am not really in this for the money since I have a great day job (as I have mentioned a thousand times). Still, it seems like the measure of success in Internet Marketing is revenue. So, I am making this the lowest priority goal

Of course, there are some constraints:

• Limited time. I am only allowing myself a coupleof hours a day (max) to work at this hobby. My family and my real job come first (in that order).
• Limited funds. I could choose to spend $4700 on an eCourse or something like that. I am sure I could get great results that way. But, I am determined to do this the "hard" way on a limited budget.
• White Hat. I am still not interested in Black Hat techniques. However, I do see that sometimes it is a little hard to tell the Gray stuff from the White stuff.

With this as a framework, that left me with the question of what to try to accomplish in 2008.

Approaches and Goals for 2008

I am currently planning to have the following completed by the end of 2008. Of course, I plan to blog about everything that I learn in the mean time.

• Grow the MasonWorld.com Internet-Based Marketing blog
  • Post 3 times per week about my Internet Marketing experience
  • Grow RSS readership through great content generation
  • Grow email opt-ins through bonus content
  • Add a modest monthly podcast
  • Build a valuable brand with great content that people want to read
• Build three niche information sites
  • Launch 3 new sites with the $5 per day formula
  • Use article marketing to promote the sites
  • Use the Coaching With Josh resources to achieve $5/day in Adsense revenue
  • Work with a great developer to build a killer niche site WP template
  • Consider a plan to grow those sites to something more in 2009
• Build 3 Affiliate Product sites
  • Launch 3 new/existing sites (Elvis will be one of them)
  • Use article marketing to promote the sites
  • Consider a plan to grow those sites to something more in 2009
• Create my very own information product
  • Identify a niche (IM may be the first one)
  • Create an information product (Niche site case study how-to maybe?)
  • Promote and sell the product (or give it away)
• Create and release one report for Butterfly Reports

That's already way too much for 2008, given that I am working on this part time.

So, tonight I am planning on working on article marketing for my new niche sites using Article Post Robot. I bought this tool several weeks ago. I will post about my progress on Wednesday (my next scheduled post).

Best regards,
Mark

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problem of being a "Jack of All Trades and a Master of None." In that post, I talked about how challenging I found it to work on Internet Marketing (IM) part time. IM can be all-consuming. I complained in that post that I had not actually "finished" anything. That post was written at 32,000 feet over the pacific ocean on the way to Hong Kong and eventually to Singapore. I guess the air in the passenger cabin must have been thin, because in the same post where I was complaing about how busy I was, I also argued that I should buckle down and increase my post frequency. Go figure.

Garry Conn Warns of Blogger's Demise

Last night, Garry Conn brought all of this back into focus for me with his outstanding post entitled "Is Making Money Blogging Killing You?" In his post, Garry argues that blogging for dollars is a cut-throat competiton, and that it can totally consume you. He compares the blogging mindset to six-man chess, and argues that this 24-hour-a-day competitive lifestyle can impact your relationships, your health, and your mental state. I often say "Blogging Ate My Brain." I think that is what Garry is talking about. To make matters worse, I am not making money blogging. I am not trying to build a blogging empire. I have other plans, and the blog (which I love) is just a small part of the revenue strategy. So, why in the world do I want to redouble my blogging efforts? Answer -- I don't.

Really, Garry makes the strongest of two arguments for a reduced post frequency on MasonWorld.com. Garry's argument is that when you are building readership, you need to allow enough time for people to find your post. Based on my experience on this blog, that is at least two days. The other strong argument has to do with my long term business plan for my internet marketing hobby. Long term, I am interested in getting onto the information marketing end of the internet marketing business. Josh Spaulding warned in a post about information products last November that you need to be careful not to spend too much time blogging when your business plan tell you to work on other things.

MasonWorld Business Plan

So, what is my "business plan?" Well, I plan to have this blog as a resource for people coming after me. It is a journal of my experience. It is not intended to be a big profit center. I am experimenting with four "niche super-sites." The public example of these is the "Elvis Site." These niche super-sites are sites that are more than just MFA (made-for-adsense) sites. They are inteded to contain valuable information, market affiliate products, have user formus, etc. I intend to create and market information products (although I have not identified my ultimate niche yet). I can say that I find viral reports interesting, and I have been checking out Butterfly Reports. I am not sure where that will lead. What I really want is a solid product like Article Marketing Domination -- but not necessarily in the IM niche.

Ultimately, Garry Conn is right on the money -- If you are not careful, blogging will kill you and your business plan.

New Post Frequency

So, effective immediately I am changing my post frequency to Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I will try to post in the morning on those days. In the mean time, I am planning on increasing my efforts on other core businesses. That will give me even more to write about -- which will be great. Look for those musings here in the coming weeks.

Best regards,
Mark

On April Fool's Day, I was reminded about the power and magic of social networking. Of course, there has been a lot of discussion over the last few years about "Web 2.0." Now a media buzzword, "Web 2.0" is usually taken to mean anything that promotes social networking and collaboration. This can include social networking sites, wikis and, of course, blogs. Even in the brick and mortar business world, companies are starting to wake up to the marketing power of Web 2.0. The question that these companies are asking is "how can we use Web 2.0 to gain mind share and drive traffic?"

In the cyber world, using social networking sites like Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon to drive traffic is old news. However, yesterday I was reminded just how powerful this can be. About 11:30 PM, I got an IM from Garry Conn calling my attention to the new "time shifting feature" that Google had just added to GMail. He suggested that I do a quick blog post on it. I did that post, and the story up and stumbled only a few minutes before midnight (literally minutes after Google turned on their prank).

The Impact of April Fool's Day on My Stats

And then, the traffic started coming. Being a new blog, my traffic typically looks like this:

Now, I have been pretty happy with this. For the month of March, I was enjoying upwards of 30 uniques per day, with 2 pages per visit. Then the April Fools post was stumbled, dugg, sphunn, tweeted, etc, and this happened:

The y-axis on the plot has changed from 100 visits maximum to 6000 visits maximum. On April 1, in the 24 hours just after the post, I had 5302 new visitors (220 per hour). This represents a jump from 30 uniques per day in March to 5300 -- a 176-fold increase! This is really cool for a new blogger. Any time you can hit a button and get traffic like that, it makes you feel great (even if you get there with help and luck). Of course, it is not repeatable. This post (for example) probably will not enjoy 5300 views. LOL.

Where Did the Traffic Come From?

As I mentioned before, the post was stumbled, dugg (and shouted), sphunn, and tweeted. But where did all the traffic come from? It came from StumbleUpon (82%). Notably, almost %10 of the traffic was direct (people typing the main page into the browser -- suggests the the valuable of having a name that is easy to remember). Also notable is the 5% traffic from Google. Suggests that MasonWorld may not be in Google's sandbox since I was able to rank so quickly.

Is Social Media Traffic Valuable?

One of the things that you constantly hear about StumbleUpon (SU) is that the traffic that it generated is not valuable. Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to tell what specific clicks came from SU traffic, what came from Digg, etc. Also, while I can track all affiliate link clicks on my blog, but I cannot easily tell which clicks are on the 125x125 adds and which are on text links inside blog posts.

I run 4 adds on my blog sidebar. Prior to April 1, I was enjoying an average of 22 affiliate link or ad clicks per day. Based on an average number of page views for March of 78 page views per day, my normal click through rate (CTR) is 22/78 -- a monster CTR = 28%. By contrast, I had 176 clicks on April 1 against 6148 page views for a more reasonable (low) CTR of 2.86%. Note that the 28% CTR is not a strictly fair comparison since many of those clicks come from people who reached my blog searching for the affiliate product. So that is the point. People that come from SU are not generally looking to buy.

I did a similar analysis on my feed statistics. On March 1, I had about 20 subscribers. On March 30, I had 44 (I doubled my subscribers in March!). I had about 1100 unique visits in March. This means that the conversion rate from uniques to RSS subscriptions was about 2%. For every 100 unique visitors in March, 2% of them signed up for the RSS feed. On April 1, as you can see below, my subscriptions increased to 65. This means that 21 of the 5300 unique visitors on April 1 signed up (a conversion rate of 0.4 percent). Significantly lower than the baseline conversion rate, but I am thrilled to have them.

The Bottom Line

Well, I literally and figuratively stumbled into this traffic and this post. Welcome to the new RSS subscribers. I would be interested to hear comments from RSS subscribers that signed up yesterday about how they arrived at the site, and why they signed up. So, my conclusion is the SU and other Social Media Traffic is not "worthless" as some have suggested. It is wholesale traffic, and it is different than other kinds of traffic, but it is not worthless.

Thanks,
Mark

Big fun from Google on April Fools Day. Imagine my surprise when I went to read my mail just around midnight, only to find that Google had just released a new feature for GMail called GMail Custom Time.

With GMail Custom Time, you can date your email in the past. Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view and Bingo! -- any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

This new application feature could save my marriage. "But honey, I already took care of it -- they must not have gotten my email." Honey, I told you about that business trip to the Bahamas. Didn't you get my email?"

The best part is the social proof offered in the testimonial section:

"I used to be an honest person; but now I don't have to be. It's just so much easier this way. I've gained a lot of productivity by not having to think about doing the 'right' thing."

Todd J., Investment Banker

You just gotta love Google.

Very cool

Regards,

Mark

P.S. -- Thanks to Garry Conn for pointing this out to me.  He was busy working on his own April Fool's Prank at the time, so I wrote it up.

Almost completely hype-free, the book covers five methods for making money on-line:

• Information Marketing -- Selling digitally delivered information. In this section, Yanik describes why selling digital information is the ultimate way to go. I happen to agree with him, as this is part of my long term plan. He covers the basics about how to get started registering a domain and setting up a shopping cart. The section is only about 100 pages long, and is not a complete guide. However, looking at it from the perspective of a brand-new-to-the-internet person, it is a great beginners guide.
• Selling on eBay. I don't know the first thing about running a real business on eBay, so it was hard for me to evaluate this section. Sydney Johnson covers how to select products, how to do listings, and what makes a successful seller.
• Affiliate Marketing. This sections is nicely done by super-affiliate Rosalind Gardner. I like this section too as it is also part of my longer term strategy. When I started looking at making money on line, I did not even know what affiliate marketing was. It would have been really nice to have seen this section of the Silver book at that early stage. Gardner talks about how to find and work affiliate programs. The advice she gives is very similar to the advice in a recent post about how to make money online by Garry Conn. Good, solid fundamental information about how to get started.
• Yahoo stores and E-Commerce stores. Again, not something that I am highly interested in. The section covers the history of Yahoo stores and how to select a niche, drop-ship, take payments, etc.
• Blogging. I liked this section. It was written by Darren Rowse - lending instant credibility. It covers what a blog is, how to set up a blog, and how to monetize. Again, since it is only 50 pages long, it is just a start and covers the basics. However, if you are just starting out, it is a great overview.

So, why write a real book? At $21.95, this 300 page book sells for less than most eBooks. The answer is that this book (which provides useful information and is a great value for the beginner) is actually a loss leader for the associated website. The book comes with free videos. When you go to the web page, you hit a squeeze page that collects your email. According to the book, they have plans for a membership site.

No matter. If you are a beginner and you are having trouble telling whether or not guys like Jeffrey Lant are on the up and up, this is a great book for you. If you are not brand new, take a pass on this book.

Regards,
Mark

RSS feeds are cool, but to be honest with you, there are times when I get so busy it is hard for me to get to my reader. This, coupled with the fact that I am often mobile and don't have a great RSS reader for my BlackBerry means that I am never completely up to date with my RSS feeds. So, for blogs that I really care about, I subscribe by email. Email is great because I get it wherever I am -- in Outlook, on my BlackBerry, in GMail, etc. I "live in my email," so an email subscription is just the ticket for me for important things.

Now, one of the things that you always hear about email lists is that they are the most important cornerstone of an internet marketing business. Guys that are famous for information marketing will tell you that their lists are the real asset in their business. They document cases where businesses have fallen apart (due to partnership or other troubles), but were rebuilt later based on the strength of the surviving email list.

These ideas -- that email lists are part of the core of a legitimate and successful internet marketing effort and that they provide a convenience service to readers -- are why I started my own list. I have not done much with it yet, and I have no intent to monetize it any time soon. Still, I am convinced that lists are an important part of my long term strategy to provide value to my readers.

Now, you can imagine that as I am learning about internet marketing, I am paying attention to people that I have come to respect who are also successful. Note that there are many people who are sucessful that I do not respect. I have mentioned some of my favorites here before. When people I respect do things that make sense to me, I try to learn from them.

So, when Garry Conn decided to (finally) add an email list to his GCDC blog, I really paid close attention. I was one of the first people to sign up. Why? First, I am sure that the content in Garry's list will be great. Second, I expect Garry to be successful with his list, and I want to learn how to be successful with my own. Since Garry announced his list a few weeks back, I have been waiting patiently to see what he would do.

Yesterday, the wait was over. Garry published his first email to the list, entitled Blog Tips During Softball Practice. As a special treat for his blog readers, he made the first post public. The great thing was that it exceeded my expections. The bad thing is that I can already see that using Garry as a mentor for emails lists is going to be setting the bar really high for me. Maybe that's a good thing.

Anyway, I recommend that you check out Garry's post, and if you like it, I recommend that you Digg it.

Thanks,
Mark

So, I was crusing around on Spyfu.com today, and I saw lots of listings involving mesothelioma. Now, to be completely honest with you, I did not know that mesothelioma was the disease that you get from asbestos. Go figure. It is a high cost keyword (from an Adwords point of view) - no doubt because some well-meaning and some slimy lawyers are building huge lists of class action lawsuit clients. In fact, spyfu.com say it can pay as much as $50 per click.

So, I said to myself -- "Self, what would Micro Niche Finder say about this?" As it turns out, it says that there are some long tail keywords out there with very low competition. Now, I remember what happened with HistoryOfElvis - I was able to rank easily for a silly long tail keyword -- Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie because there was zero competition. So, I said to myself -- "Self, let's put up a long tail page about mesothelioma just to see what happens." I agreed with myself, so my next post will be a long tail keyword targeted post about mesothelioma.

I'll see what happens over the next week and blog about the results.

Now, if my millions of readers go out and do the same thing, it will goof up my experiment. Instead, I recommend you run your own experiment with Micro Niche Finder in a non-mesothelioma area and comment here with your results.

Thanks,
Mark

Update on Micro Niche Finder Experiment

I threw this initial post up rather quickly. Then I threw up a post about mesothelioma just as fast. It was a completely worthless 300 word article targeted at the keyword phrase that I had selected. So, I go to thinking -- here I am, adding worthless content to the internet so I can capture a click from some pour soul whose husband or wife has this terrible disease. After reviewing the search results pages in Google, I quickly discovered that this particular keyword and groups of similar keywords are very abused. In fact, the mesothelioma group of keywords initially appeared on a list of high CPC that has been floating around the Internet for almost 4 years!

So, I called my friend Garry Conn. I have really not known him all that long, but I respect his opinion a great deal already. In fact, he designed this WordPress Theme for me, and has given me advice on several occasions. (By the way, you can actually call him directly yourself -- the number is on his blog). Anyway, I asked Garry -- what's my blog about? He had a really strong reaction that confirmed my gut feeling. This blog is not about MFA pages and other trickery designed to game the system (and neither am I).

At this moment, I am very interested in using Micro Niche Finder; however, I am quickly learning that some keywords can be detrimental to the health of my conscience an my blog

So, I am out of the mesothelioma business after about 3 or 4 hours. Sorry for the distraction.

As always, your comments are appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

One of the biggest challenges for me personally working on Internet Marketing part time is focus. As a part time Internet Marketer, I have a very limited amount of time to spend on tasks related to my new hobby. In fact, I try not to spend more than a couple of hours a day on Internet Marketing related activities. When I started out, my goal was to demonstrate that I could make some money on the Internet -- inspired by a segment I saw on the Today Show.

Since that time, I have started several blogs, a link directory, a couple of niche sites, some forums, switched blogging platforms, switched hosting companies, done some business/administrative tasks, read books, listened to podcasts, read and commented on blogs, studied marketing, joined countless affiliate programs, hired writers, won contests, built a mailing list, made friends, hired programmers, purchased software, written php code, changed blog themes many times, chatted on GTalk, and hung out on forums. The one thing that I have not done much of is make money. Go figure.

Speaking of distractions, I am writing this post on a plane bound for Hong Kong using ecto, which I mentioned earlier this week. I think this software is a keeper -- but I have not quite made up my mind. (Too bad they don't have an affiliate program). It does have some limitations that are annoying, however, For example, you cannot add a category or contol the post slug.  My friend Garry Conn likes Blogdesk.  I need to check that out.

Back to my story.  Don't get me wrong. I am having a blast, and I have learned a ton. The problems are that I haven't really finished anything - and the learning is not well documented. As it happens, my wife will tell you that this "unfinished project thing" also happens around the house. Great at starting projects; less great at finishing them. So, I thought it would be interesting to list all the current projects that I have underway or in my mind and see if I could prioritize them. Once again taking a page out of Caroline Middlebrook's book, I going to create a Projects page to document all of this so I can keep it straight in my own mind.

Another thing that I plan to do is increase my post frequency on this blog by making sure that I document what I did that day. After all, the value that I am trying to provide is an account of my experience. I am not trying to claim that I can teach people how to make $4B on the Internet this week. I'll categorize the posts by project. So watch for the post count to go up in the coming weeks.

So, what are all these current projects about? I'll work on a list tonight and post it tomorrow.

Best regards,

Mark

So much has been going on in the last few weeks. Most obviously, I was able to convince Garry Conn to redesign my blog and create this killer custom theme just form me. Garry is a great guy, and he knows a heck of a lot about niche IM. On top of that, he is pretty handy at php, CSS and graphics. If you need someone you can trust to work on your blog for a fair price, I can honestly recommend him unconditionally. I am still turning some knobs and adjusting some dials (most notably, Aweber), but I could not be happier with the new look (and the amazing service from Garry).

Turning my attention back to Elvis Presley

Now that the new theme is up, I simply cannot believe that my plan to document my creation of a Niche Super-Site started on February 4th. Man, time flies when you are having fun with part-time Internet Marketing. In case you missed the press frenzy in early February (LOL), I am quite literally taking a page out of Caroline Middlebrook's free eBook and documenting my experience of trying to create a niche site. I picked a random topic (Elvis Presley), and so far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

• Definition of the Niche Super-Site case study
• List of Niche Super-Site design goals
• How to select your niche
• Choosing your keywords
• Choosing a domain name
• Setting up your niche site
• Making things look nice
• Installing Plugins
• Getting listed in Google
• Making Money with phpBay
• Adding PopShops to your site
• Adding Adsense
• Adding Amazon Omakase Widget
• Adding a favicon
• Testing the Long Tail Keyword (1) (2) and (3)

At the end of the long-tail keyword test, we were able to declare victory because I now rank on page one of Google for the killer MMO phrase "Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie.” This shows that on-page SEO works to get listed for a search term. The problem is that where you rank for that term depends on your off-page SEO. For more on this, I recommend the free EasySEO eBook from Josh Spaulding. As I mentioned in my previous post, with “Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie” under our belt, it is now time to attack higher competition phrases -- “elvis presley collectibles" (74 searches per day), the "life of elvis presley" (226 searches per day) and "elvis presley history of" (4383 searches per day).

Simple plan for niche market SEO

Simply put, my strategy is to create a landing page for Elvis Presley collectibles and another for Life of Elvis Presley. I'll write good SEO copy and pay attention to details like making sure the keywords appear in the title tag, headers, beginning of the article, exerpt, etc. Basically, I will simply do all of the things that are documented in the free EasySEO eBook. Once those pages are complete, I plan to use the variation on Bum (article) Marketing taught in Josh's Article Marketing Domination (AMD). If you are not familiar with article marketing, the basic idea is to write articles about your niche containing your keywords. At the end of the article, you include links back to your site for your keywords. You submit the article to article directories. These directories are well indexed, and they allow you people to copy your article, propagating your links. (Note that you do not put these articles on your own site).

In Article Marketing Domination, Josh outlines some key steps for article marketing, including

• Creating effective articles
• Creating an effective signature block
• Submission strategies

So, I plan to put this to the test starting in a few days. The problem is, I need some articles. I am not sure I have lots of Elvis Articles in me (this is why it is useful to choose a niche you really care about).

Buying Articles

Article marketing is the perfect place to use a writer for hire (ghost writer). I was able to hire a lady on ScriptLance to write 20 300 word articles about Elvis for $70 ($3.50 per article). ScriptLance is neat because your job goes out for bids, and you can select from the people that respond. This writer has a BA liberal arts and is US based. The $70 is held in escrow until I am happy. Now, I might not always want to spend $70 on a marketing -- but this is an experiment...

So, we'll see how it goes. The traffic data for HistoryOfElvis.com is contaminated by this case study, so it may be hard to judge. Again, we'll see.

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

• eZineArticles Content
• Write your own content
• Set up AA404 plugin
• Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
• Remember to back up your data.
• Comment Kahuna
• Secure WordPress
• Other marketing ideas
• The 50 site checklist
• Others…

Best regards,

Mark

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