December 18, 2009 By

Last Mastermind Session for 2009

mastermind

Las weekend we had our last mastermind for the year 2009. It was a great session overall and I hope I helped Jackson and Elton get some motivation and inspiration to move forwards in his Internet business.

mastermind

I was also happy to hear that some of our Rahsia ClickBank customers are getting really good results (2 sales) with very, very little traffic in just 2 months. Remember my advice – don’t abandon what is working in search for something new that may or may not work!

Personally, I love the mastermind sessions. It gives me the opportunity to understand the problems that most newbies are facing, which in turn helps me get feedback and develop more useful products and solutions.

Sometimes my customers want to get personal help from us, and want to sit down to “have a cup of coffee”. Yet, when I have the mastermind sessions (which are free for members) they don’t turn up.

Those who do show up, I believe, are the ones who are taking control of their own future and making an effort to move forward with whatever they have. Congrats to those who attended, you deserve a pat on your back!

If you want to join our mastermind session, sign up here and attend our next Workshop or BootCamp.

Filed Under: Seminars & Events Tagged With: , ,
December 17, 2009 By

Hands-On Internet Marketing Coaching Program

internet marketing coaching program

Two weeks ago we conducted our first hands-on 2-day Internet marketing coaching program. Previously, we only did one-day seminars with no hands-on. So this was kind of new and exciting for us.

imc workshop

My main concern was the Internet access. Although we did experience some slow Internet speed intermittently, overall the connection was good and enabled everyone to follow along step-by-step.

Overall, I think participants get more value with this type of interactive sessions. It’s amazing how a lot of people may talk about Internet marketing as if they know almost everything, but when it comes to practical stuff their skills are seriously lacking. (Hey, it rhymes!)

I love to see the delighted look on the faces of our participants when they managed to set-up their own WordPress blog, create an account at Ezine Articles, and also outsource their first writing project.

Perhaps, we’ll adopt this “Workshop” format instead of the more affordable but less intensive “BootCamp” format permanently.

If you’re interested to attend our next session in 2010 (or later), please sign up here.

Filed Under: Seminars & Events Tagged With: , , , , ,
December 16, 2009 By

Testimonial for PLR WordPress Tutorial Videos

If you’re planning to create your own products, coaching program or membership site about WordPress and blogging, then our PLR WordPress Videos offer is probably the best on the Internet. Researching, testing and creating videos for WordPress plugins and themes can be a major headache, and using PLR or Private Label videos can be a perfect alternative.

Here’s what David Cavanagh has to say about our offer:

You have full control over all videos. Sell them and keep 100% of profits. Package them into membership sites, DVDs or live coaching material. We provide full promotional materials, sales pages, website set-up and even assistance in uploading your videos.

More info: PLR WP Videos

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , ,
December 14, 2009 By

Google Sues Information Marketers

Yup, Google is at it again, stepping over work at home entrepreneurs this time and crushing their lives.

On their blog, Google says they are suing Google Money scammers, but some of those products mentioned like Google Cash were so revolutionary it actually helped a lot of people, me included, to start an online business.

It’s safe to say, Google with their almighty eye sees everyone as being cut from the same cloth. In other words, they don’t really understand anything so they just sue everyone.

Technically speaking though, those information marketers are using Google’s trademark and brand, which is wrong. However, in most such cases I’ve seen before (Ebay for example), a Cease-and-Desist letter will be more than enough to get these guys to scrambling to remove their products.

But hey when you have a lot of money and you view home based entrepreneurs as scum, you may as well do more (much more) that what’s required.

Great job by the Google robot. Kill the humans.

The hypocrites also banned my AdWords account although I wasn’t promoting any such product or any affiliate product for that matter. But that is perhaps better kept for another blog post.

If you’re promoting products or selling products with Google’s name in it, stop right now. You don’t stand a chance against the scumbags.

Filed Under: Google AdWords Tagged With: ,
December 14, 2009 By

Tony Fernandes, The Best Marketer in Malaysia

tony fernandes

While attending a press function recently, I had the opportunity to sneak in a photo with Tony Fernandes (middle), CEO of AirAsia. In my opinion, Tony is without doubt the best marketer in Malaysia, and probably one of the best in the world.

I’ve been wanting to get a photo with him for so long. Finally my dream came true, thanks to some random good luck.

In a country where big businesses are politically linked, meticulously regulated and agonizingly boring, Tony pushed through the crap and made an impact in the lives of millions of people. Surely, you’ve flown AirAsia?

For an amazingly successful person, Tony is quite down to earth and in most photos (except this one) you’ll see him wearing an AirAsia cap or jacket, taking every opportunity to promote his airline. And why shouldn’t he? Any marketer like Tony surely understands that you cannot leave marketing to the marketing department.

Marketing does not start once the product is completed. Marketing should influence the product, the pricing, the culture and everything else. Tony is the anti-CEO, getting his hands dirty on all aspects of the business, something most CEOs avoid like a plague.

Don’t be fooled – it takes sheer determination and unusual insight to go against what everyone else is doing to produce something so radically different that people like you and me actually told our friends about it. The “Purple Cow” that Seth Godin popularized, the holy grail of all entrepreneurs. Who can forget the 1 million free AirAsia tickets, or the more recent cheeky AsiaAsia TV ad?

In my opinion, he is the best marketer in Malaysia for the past five years. He’s probably also the best Internet marketer for the last five years.

Second place hopefully goes to me :)

Filed Under: Entrepreneurship Tagged With: , ,
December 14, 2009 By

Blog Advertising – Understand Your Blog’s Real Estate

website real estate

Not all space on your blog is created equal. How much you understand about your blog’s real estate will ultimately influence the results you get.

That being said, which parts of your blog are more valuable? Where should you put your main money-making ad, link or Aweber optin form?

I’ve broken down a typical 3-column blog layout (like the one we use here) into a few profitable areas:

  1. Content Area – No matter which type of layout you use, the content area is by far the more valuable spot. People visit your blog to read content, not to look at your ads or design. Sure, a jaw-dropping design is cool the first time, but it will not get people to stick. Ads, links and optin forms within your content is the most valuable, as it is guaranteed to reach the eyeball of your visitor. It’s even more effective if your ads are tightly related to the content itself.
  2. Left Navigation – If your blog has a left-column navigation (like ours), then this is the second most valuable spot. People in most countries read from left to right, and on the way to your content their eyeballs have to pay at least some attention to the navigation area.
  3. Right Navigation – Unlike the left navigation, your visitors don’t have to pay attention to the anything after the actual content area. Since they don’t have to, they rarely will. People are quite accustomed to grid-based website layouts and they know (almost instinctively) where to look for content, and what to ignore.
  4. Header Area – Although the header area comes before everything else, it’s too detached from the actual content, which makes it the second least valuable spot on your blog. I will almost never pay an advertiser for placing banner ads in the header area. The more frequent someone visits your blog, the most invisible the header area gets.
  5. Footer Area – It’s almost worthless to even consider the footer area as a possible most maker. Detached from content and navigation, and too far from eyeballs, the footer is best left for things than don’t really require attention.

Yeah i know; your results may be different. However, in most cases this simple grid-based logic works well. The real question though, is what should you do with this information?

If you want to squeeze more money from your blog, you need to reorganize certain elements to work for you, instead of against you. Here are a few ideas:

  • In-Content Ads – If you’re selling banner ads on your blog, create a spot in the content area itself. Savvy advertisers are willing to pay much more for an in-content ad, and you can easily increase your advertising dollars overnight.
  • Affiliate Links vs Affiliate Banners – If you’re promoting an affiliate product, forget banner ads. It’s much better to use affiliate links weaved into the content. Plus, having less ads frees up important real estate for other purposes.
  • Reorganize Your Navigation – Are your navigation links eating up valuable advertising space? Move them away to non-profitable areas like the right sidebar, header of footer so you can make more money from the profitable ones.
  • Footer Dump – Anything else that your readers don’t really need, but which is essential for your blog (privacy policy, disclaimers etc), has to be moved to the footer. The footer area is the universal dumping ground for all non-profitable stuff.

The next time you decided to get a new theme for your blog, ask yourself an important question- “What do I want to achieve with my blog?”

Always put function above form. Understand the main objective of your blog.

Is it to communicate your ideas? Then move your content to the left, followed by navigation, and use minimal ads. Is your objective to build a mailing list or get more subscribers? Then put your optin form in the profitable areas instead of hiding it beneath meaningless ads.

No matter how popular your blog is, or how much traffic you get, there is always room for optimization. I hope this guide will help you improve yours, and I’d like to hear your comments.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With:
December 7, 2009 By

Is Duplicate Content Really Bad For Our Websites?

Anand Srinivasan is the founder of KnewThis.com – the World’s FIRST Ask&Answer site where affiliate webmasters can build back links and get targeted traffic. Learn more about KnewThis by clicking here

First and foremost, before I begin this article, I would like to clarify that I am not an SEO expert. I am simply yet another webmaster who recently launched his own website and who has learnt a bit of SEO along the way. Also, this article is not a definitive piece in itself, but is just to instigate a bit of discussion from our individual experiences.

A lot many times, we have been told by Google as well as SEO experts that duplicate content hurts our website. And we have indeed taken efforts to minimize the incidence of duplicated content by writing rehashed articles so that Google does not detect it as something copied from elsewhere.

So, the question is does duplicate content actually affect our website rankings? Though I would personally still believe that duplicate content is good neither for our own website nor for the Internet as a whole, I would like to discuss here about two instances where I have observed that duplicate content does not affect rankings to a great extent. Firstly, from my own blog. When I first started blogging, like most of you, I had it hosted on Blogspot. This blogspot blog was my primary site for more than a year before I thought I should move to a .com domain. At this point, I had no idea about duplicate content affecting SERPS. I had no idea how to use 301 redirect to effect a seamless transfer. All that I did was use the Import tool on WordPress to import the whole content from the blogspot site to my new .com blog. It has been over two years since then. Till date, my blogspot website continues to exist and that has not affected my .com site’s ranking one bit. My site is still growing at 25% month on month (on a lower base though).

The second example is drawing from the success of article directories. Article directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles are among the most heavily trafficked websites in the world. A lot of their content is duplicated elsewhere. And they still they remain the primary source of traffic for a lot of affiliate webmasters amongst us.

So, does that mean duplicate content does not matter at all? Of course, it does. But from what I presume, while duplicate content is accounted for in the search engine rankings, websites are not explicitly penalized. If I copy content from a popular website, I shall not be penalized. Rather, when someone searches Google for a related topic, Google realizes that the site I copied from holds better authority than my own copied content and so decides to display their link.

Do you agree? What has been your experience with duplicate content? Please let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , ,
December 4, 2009 By

WP Affiliate Review – ClickBank Ads Plugin for WordPress

clickbank plugin for wordpress

The “ad” above, which looks like a part of your blog content, was generated using Nikola Jankovic’s WP Affiliate plugin for WordPress.

I found this plugin extremely easy to use, and you’ll never need a manual. Just enter a few keywords and your ClickBank ID, and your “related products” ad is added to every single blog post. All the links are encoded with your ClickBank affiliate ID, which is really convenient.

My only complaint is that the actual content is probably taken from ClickBank’s product feed, which contains product titles and descriptions entered by the merchant. As with most merchants, the description is usually targeted to recruiting affiliates from the Clickbank marketplace instead of attracting potential buyers.

In the ad above, if you look at the ad for “Want great SEO tips” you’ll notice the mention about “75% affiliate payout” instead of useful information about the product itself. This is perhaps the most obvious shortcoming of the plugin, and the only way to overcome it is to have the ads manually reviewed and edited by a human being.

However, to that is a huge undertaking considering that ClickBank list over 10,000 products. So I can’t really see a solution to it, unless of course you just go ahead and create an ad manually.

That being said, it’s certainly a useful tool to include in your marketing chest.

More Info: WP Affiliate Plugin for WordPress

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