Software Developers Vs Internet Marketers

I remember bringing up this topic recently while having a drink with some Internet marketing friends here in KL. If you feel strongly about this topic, do leave a comment.

Our conversation centered around buying software. We noticed a BIG difference between buying software from Internet marketing gurus, and buying software from developers.

Let’s take membership site software as an example. Depending on what it’s supposed to do, membership site software can be quite complex and intimidating to the non-tech user, especially newbies. So you can either buy the membership site software from an established developer like Amember or you can get a membership site from an Internet marketer, for example the Butterfly Marketing script.

Buying Software from Developers

By “developer” I mean a person or company (usually made of programmers) who develop a particular piece of software and sell it online. One thing I noticed is that their software tends to be very well coded, does what it’s supposed to do perfectly, and seldom crashes. Even if it does crash, there is usually a good deal of online support available.

However, the downside is that these developers seldom understand the complexities of online marketing and therefore do no develop the applications that users want. Amember for example, still does not have a OTO or One-Time-Offer plugin, and their affiliate program interface is pretty sad. Reporting functions are lame too.

But Amember does what it’s supposed to do – which is protect folders and files while accepting membership payments – extremely well. It’s also, in my opinion, pretty easy to use.

Buying Software from Internet Marketers

The Internet marketing group seems to understand online marketing much better, and develop their software with the purpose of making it easier for users to sell more products, get more members, train more affiliates and get more viral traffic.

However, most Internet marketers seem to operate from the hit-and-run business model – let me explain. When Mike Filsaime launched Butterfly Marketing, a vital part of his system was the membership site script. It was not the first to have features such as OTO, but it certainly did OTOs and upsells / downsells better than any other script.

After the initial launch and hype died down, it seems that Mike Filsaime had already moved on to other projects and any new development to the BFM script was abandoned. A great product no doubt, but the fact that it’s no longer being developed would mean that support becomes limited, and as a result it would not make sense trying to use the script in the long term unless you’re a programmer.

Anyone who’s tried to use the Butterfly Marketing script however would notice how disorganized the system is, and the lack or documentation and support. Also, a lack of a parallel community that supports to develop related applications and guides for the software.

The Verdict

Unfortunately as far as buying marketing software is concerned, it seems that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If a developer makes a really good piece of software that has all the features I want plus more in the pipeline, I would prefer to be his customer.

I’ve been using Amember for over a year now and their support is always great. The only reason I may want to move away from them is if they do not have features that I really need.

Internet marketers who develop software do a good job as well, but it seems that their dedication and attention to keep on supporting their creation is simply not there. Although a few exceptions like John Delavera (Fantasos), Jonathan Leger (3 Way Links and Instant Article Wizard) and  Brad Calen (Keyword Elite and SEO Elite) have the best of both worlds, in reality most Internet marketers would eventually abandon their software in search of easier, faster money.

Your opinion?

Top Photography Blogs

When we talk about photography, then it’s more than just having a sound knowledge of the technicalities that involve aperture, shutter and focus. There is a lot more action underneath! The snapshot is actually like a canvas where you develop your imagination with the help of paints, brushes or say the technical arsenal that you’ve. “Every picture has its story”, a story that is developed by the photographer’s thought process or say his own perspective to carve out the virtual world in the real frame of reference.

The lines which aptly describe the intensity of the mere word ‘click’ could be:

The camera doesn’t rape or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate- all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.”

[Sontag Susan ,1977]

Wow! In alternate words, a photography blog is actually created by those who derive fun and share a common interest about photography. They talk about various aspects related with this creative task. Be it sharing information behind the snapshot or surprise posts on innovation. It can be pitched as a web archive and RSS feed for better proficiency.

Enough of my waffle, let us now see few top photography blogs that we’ve on the Internet. But again in no order of ranks! One can compare them between the snapshots for the ranking but not the ideas behind it, as they’re individualistic.

Shuttersisters – Innovation

shuttersisters

Katasakos – A picture a day

katsakos

Gatley – Nature talk

gatley

10Pastmidnight – Contemporary images

10pastmidnight

[Read more...]

WordPress Review Site Plugin And Themes

WP Review Site is a plugin and theme package developed by Dan Grossman that adds Amazon-style user ratings to the WordPress blogging software. Using the plugin and themes, you can convert your WordPress blog into a powerful product review blog and easily make money from affiliate programs, CPA offers and more.

What I love about WP Review Site:

  1. Detailed Reviews – You can specify the criteria for your review, so your users can rate each criteria instead of just giving it a general rating. For example you can allow users to rate by Quality, Performance, Customer Support, Design, or any other criteria that is specific to different type of products.
  2. Automatic Ranking Front Page – Yes, the front page will automatically display products according to ranking, not the date / time it was written. According to the website, they use an advanced “weighted average” formula to calculate the highest rated products.
  3. Assign to Category – You can choose to assign the rating bars and rating displays only to a certain category. This is useful if you only want to use the review function on a category called “Review” or something similar
  4. Plug-n-Play – It comes with two simple but adequate WordPress themes that already have all the required code built in. All you need to do is activate the plugin, set your rating requirements, and you’re ready to go.

Here’s how the comments / review section looks like once you’ve activated the plugin:

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Here are examples of the two WordPress themes included in WP Review Site; one plain white theme and another black “web 2.0” type of theme. Both display rating differently but you can easily edit that if you know what you’re doing.

screenshot screenshot

To make the best out of the WP Review Site system, this is what you need to do:

  1. Do your keyword research first to find niches where people are looking for product reviews
  2. See if there are good affiliate programs you can join in that niche, as this blog will rely mostly on affiliate marketing
  3. Register a new domain name and hosting account specially for this site
  4. Install the WP Review Site plugin and included themes
  5. Get a list of the 20-40 most popular products in that niche, write a short post about each explaining the features of the product – remember that you should not write a review as that’s the job of your readers!
  6. If you find writing too hard, you can use Instant Article Wizard to crank out some decent 200-word articles easily.
  7. Then submit your blog to 3 Way Links for automatic link building – this will get the search engines to index your site.
  8. Submit an article or two using Article Marketing Automation and other good article distribution services
  9. Submit your new blog to a few related web directories – find good ones that seem active, ignore the spammy ones
  10. Leave some related comments (not spam) on other people’s blogs – this will get you some traffic and attention as well
  11. Consider getting some PPC traffic to your blog – bid on related keywords, product names (beware trademarks) and long tail keywords
  12. Do all the above and you should have a highly profitable product review blog

Understand though that you will not be writing the regular “blogging” type of content on these type of review site. Yes you can add related articles for more search engine traffic, but generally speaking once the initial 20-40 posts are done there’s not much you need to add to the content. Just focus on getting traffic.

Get the system here: WP Review Site plugin and WordPress themes

FLV Plugin For WordPress Blogs

When producing and blogging with full-motion videos, the FLV format is probably the best to use. But unlike embedding a YouTube video, embedding a FLV video in your WordPress blogs is a little bit more difficult.

FLV Plugin for WordPress makes it a whole lot easier, plus it gives you 17 great-looking FLV video layers to display your video professionally. Once installed, you should see a link to “FLV Plugin” when writing a new post or page.

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Just enter the exact URL of the FLV video and everything else is done automatically.  You can also upload the video directly but I recommend you use a proper FTP program, especially if your video is large.

Below are the 17 video players included, which you can simply select from the Settings page in your WordPress dashboard.

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This FLV plugin can be used for all FLV-format videos, but in case you’re having trouble converting your videos into FLV you may want to consider getting FLV Producer.

FLV Producer: Converting and Playing FLV Videos

While there are tons of other software you can use, both free and paid, I strongly recommend you get FLV Producer by Tracy Childers to convert your videos from WMV / AVI to FLV.

Although you can easily use Camtasia Studio for screen capture videos, FLV Producer works much better for full-length or motion videos. In other words, if your video involves a human face, a lot of movement, and other non-screen objects, FLV Producer will convert videos faster, smoother with better compression and production levels.

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All you do is select the video on your PC, define the output location and file name. Then edit your video conversion settings ( you can use the predefined ones), as well as the quality of the audio / video. Click on “Start Encoding” and FLV Producer will easily convert your videos to FLV.

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Here’s the difference between videos played using the players provided with FLV Producer:

  • The first frame makes the preview image – You don’t have to display a blank player like you do with a lot of other video players. Neither do you have to create a separate “preview image”. The video just takes the first frame and enhances it to make the preview, therefore when you play the video it transitions smoothly to the rest of the video.
  • You can choose to preload the movie – great for shorter movies but sucks up bandwidth pretty quickly if the video is long – after all not everyone will click the play button so why load the whole movie unless you have a specific objective?
  • URL redirect after movie – Yes, you can bring users to a specified website once the movie ends. A great way to make money from affiliate marketing – just do a video of the product you’re promoting and once the movie is over bring the user to the product page with your affiliate link!

FLV Producer costs $97, so I understand if you need to think twice before getting it. However let me assure you, I’ve searched everywhere for VLF converters and players that are specialized for Internet marketers and affiliate marketers, and most can’t compare to FLV Producer. An investment here is more than worthwhile, especially if you plan to do more video blogging in the future.

You should also take a look at FLV Plugin for WordPress, which makes it even easier for you to display FLV videos on your WordPress blog. It was developed to be used with FLV Producer but you can use it to display any FLV video on your blog.

If it’s not for you – and you don’t mind the technical difficulties and lack of features – there are of course other choices.

Tag and Ping Still Works

Tag and ping is one of the earliest blogging tactics to be exploited to the point of worthlessness. The highpoint of this is when Sean Wu released his Tag and Ping course in June 2006 and claimed that he’s making truckloads of cash with this tiny but powerful tactic. The world was sold.

According to the experts, all you need to do is to write new blog post, and your blogging software (WordPress mostly) will notify "ping sites" like PingOMatic to come and index your blog post. Since ping sites are actively visited by search engine spiders from Google / Yahoo / MSN, the theory is that your content will be found, indexed and ranked highly in search engines in as little as 48 hours.

How much of this is true and how much of it is nothing but marketing BS?

For a lot of marketers, the hype was enough to set them on fire. Soon, people stared dreaming of becoming Internet millionaires with little or no effort. For most of us however, tang and ping was presumed to be "dead" sometime around late 2006 – way before we started our first blogs. So does it even work today?

Since I have a lot of blogs scattered all over the place, I had the opportunity to test just tag and ping alone on a blog and see what happens. Here’s the verdict based on my traffic after 3 months:

  • Tag and ping works – Yes it does, but to expect it to work like how it did almost 3 years ago is pushing it too far. There hundreds of thousands more blogs today than there was in 2006. The concept works, but the competition has increased.
  • Indexed and ranked – Yes you can get indexed and ranked pretty well in Google with no other promotion for your blog, but it only works mostly for 3-word search phrases. My test blog showed over 68 pages indexed in Google with over 500 new visitors the first month from Google alone.
  • Get rich quick – Unfortunately this is all hype. Tag and ping traffic and search engine ranking does not seem to last very long, so you need to put in much more effort to get links to your site if you want long-term search engine traffic.
  • Any niche market? – No it will not work just as well in competitive niche markets where everyone and their grandma has a blog. In less tech-savvy markets where there are less bloggers to compete with, it works like a charm.

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For one of my niche blogs, I got over 500 unique visitors with just tag and ping. That means all I did was write new posts (about 20 the entire month) and WordPress notified all my ping sites. Google indexed my site and started ranking it rather quickly for some long-tail keywords.

(Yeah I know Awstats isn’t entirely reliable, but Google Analytics shows stats above 500 too, so the traffic is real.)

Even if you never consciously did it, you’re already tagging and pinging your blog content. For example, in any WordPress installation (manual or via Cpanel), PingOMatic is already listed as your default ping site. Plus,tag sites like Technorati or Real8r can pick up your tags and link to your blog content without you every having to submit anything to them. All you need is WordPress and a good theme that displays your tags properly.

So you can say "tang and ping" doesn’t work but the truth is you are already benefiting from it. Just check your web stats and you’ll see what I mean.

Free Tell A Friend Script For Your Blog

If you’re looking for a free “Tell a Friend” script for your website or blog, read this post to discover how to use FreeTellAFriend.com to create the buzz / viral effect for your blog. First let me clarify – YES it’s completely free, and YES you can use it for blogs AND static websites.

I came across the FreeTellAFriend.com service when I was looking for a WordPress plugin for social bookmarking, but found something much more useful. Using this service, you can do all the following at the same time:

  1. Put a basic “Tell-a-friend” form on your website where names and email addresses are entered manually
  2. Allow users to import addresses from their email accounts (Gmail / Yahoo etc), which has a more “viral” effect
  3. Allow users to bookmarks your blog / site with social bookmarking services like Delicious (and about 20 others)
  4. Allow users to bookmark directly to their PC using their browser

You can just go to the site and get the script, copy and paste it to your blog. Then when someone clicks on the image or text link, they see a window like this:

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But you may want to consider creating your own account, which is also free. This allows you to change the setting of the form, and the default email subject, and the actual default message sent using the Tell-a-friend system.

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More importantly though, you can then check your stats and see how many users have emailed their friends about your site, saved your pages to social bookmarking services, or bookmarked it on their PC. This is powerful as without this you never know if the Tell-a-friend is working at all on your website.

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Ideally, you would want to create your own images that match your blog or website. This makes it look pretty integrated – you could also do away with images and just use a text link.

To test it out, click on the image at the bottom of this post to start the form and click around to see how it works. Also, while you’re at it maybe you could do us a favor and save this site to your social bookmarks, Facebook, Stumble it, or recommend it to your friends who have a website :)

Website: FreeTellAFriend.com or get the WordPress Plugin

Aweber Integrates Twitter Into Their Service

twitter If you have an Aweber account you would know this by now – you can now send updates on your latest broadcast to your Twitter account.

According to the Aweber blog:

Today, we’re happy to announce that you can now use your Twitter and AWeber accounts together to expand the reach of your email newsletters.

For now, you can only use one Twitter account for all your broadcasts, but there are hints on improving this service is it turns out to be a hit with Internet marketers and bloggers alike.

Our Forum Is Moving To WangCyber.com

image InternetMillionaires.com.my is making some important changes. However instead of trying to do more, we’re actually going to do more of less. What this means is we’re going to focus on just a few things:

  • Conducting seminars and workshops
  • Conducting mastermind events & meetings
  • Adding more interviews and content
  • Helping our affiliates make more sales

The blog and the forum, while useful for members, requires too much effort based on expertise that we do not have. Instead of having members come to a rather empty forum all the time, why not align ourselves with one of the most popular and active forums in Malaysia, WangCyber.com?

There were 2 forums we considered for the move: WangCyber.com and WebmasterMalaysia.com. However, I believe WangCyber.com will be a more mutually beneficial partnership as this a forum more for marketers and idea builders.

At WangCyber you will find Internet marketers who are friendly, knowledgeable and helpful. This “marriage” in the long run will be better for IMC members. Here’s how it will work:

  • Under WangCyber there is a sub-forum called “Internet Millionaires Forum” which is the default forum for all IMC members
  • WangCyber forum is in Bahasa Malaysia, but the sub-forum will be in English – of course you’re free to write in English, BM or the trademark “Manglish”
  • You’re free to participate in any other part of WangCyber, trade with other members, and much more. 

We’re starting the forum from scratch, so you will have to register again here: http://www.wangcyber.com/forum/register.php

Please also read this announcement from me.

Ideally, we would like to have the forum right here as it is. But I’m sure with this move, we can both provide a more conducive environment for members to discuss and learn from other members, as well as help us focus on planning and creating more valuable content and events for members.

I will make a commitment to visit the new forum daily and answer any questions posted in this forum. With all the technical headaches removed, I look forward to learning from each other.

All other areas of InternetMillionaires.com.my will remain unchanged.

Kill The Guru Contest



This is fun. Have fun shooting the gurus, and let me know if you can beat my score of 22.

  • Take a screenshot of your highest score and post it to your blog.
  • Then post a comment here with the URL to your blog post
  • Link back to this post not required, but appreciated..

Its as easy as that. The shooter with the highest score wins $100 cash sent to your Paypal account. Get shooting now!

This contest is from 24th – 30th October (11.59pm EST) only. Winner will be announced here as soon as the contest is over.

NOTE: In your screenshot please include parts of this post, for example the first line of text at the bottom, for verification.

UPDATE: Winner is Gloson Teh with an inhuman score of 44. He sure killed a lot of gurus on his way to the top.