Hi
Gang,
Thanks
for being here, I value every one of you and truly
hope that you become successful online!
There's
lots in this issue, I've been a busy guy to say the
least.
Before
I forget, make sure that you go to the Vault, lots of products in
there for you, no cost!
*Go
to the Vault here and get free resale rights!--> Vault
(new browser)
My
apologies...I haven't read through the new eBook called "SUCCESS
ALERT! << Conversations With Successful Internet Entrepreneurs"
just yet. I did look at some of the web sites of the people who are
making loads of money online that are featured in the book, some of
it is almost (ok, well, it is) unbelievable. Once I get all the way
through it, I will let you know in the next edition of "Starting
Smart!".
I finally got around to reading Rosalind's book and
I shouldn't have waited as long as I did to read it. The affiliate
marketing model is lucrative and like all other Internet business
endeavors, it takes work but can be quite fun. I will be starting
to utilize the information in Rosalind's book, particularly the 'keyword
research' portion which is applicable right away if you're ready to
get started.
Here's my synopsis: If you're going
to get started in affiliate marketing or already have but aren't making
the amount of sales that you want, read it.
You can read my 'review' by clicking below.
*Review of Ros's book - easy
online business (new browser)
*You can order the book by clicking below.
Rosalind's
Super Affiliate Handbook
Enjoy the issue!
Once again, thanks for being here,
your membership to this e-zine is what matters most to me as
an Internet marketer.
"The Regular Guy"
Karl Augustine
In this edition of "Starting
Smart!"
*Intro by Karl, 1 topic -
Biting off more than you can chew
*Featured
Article #1: "Best
Affiliate Program For The Newbie: Identifying An Affiliate Program
That Matches Your USP"
by Karl Augustine
*Special
Gift from Mark Hendricks: Amazingly Simple Formula
*Featured
Article #2:
"Do Static IP Sites Rank Higher?"
by
John Ricera
*Welcome new subscribers!
*Copyright and Publisher
Info
Intro by Karl...
1.Biting off more than you
can chew!
We're all guilty of this I imagine,
I know I certainly am! You get rolling on one thing but don't finish
it, then realize that you have something else more pressing and the
project that you're currently working on gets left unfinished. Then
you have to go back and finish but you don't get quite done and you
start something else, and on and on.
So how do you keep this from happening?
Rank what you need to do in order of importance, go with what's going
to improve your product or list size first as long as your customers
are taken care of beforehand. There's only so much time in the day,
especially for the part-time netrepreneuer, so you have to be wise
about recognizing what needs to be done 1st, 2nd and so on.
Enjoy the rest of this edition and thanks again for
reading.
Karl Augustine
"The Regular Guy"
(c) Karl Augustine
*Featured
Article #1:
"Best
Affiliate Program For The Newbie: Identifying An Affiliate Program
That Matches Your USP"
by Karl Augustine
When a newbie begins an online business,
the temptation can be high to join most any affiliate program they
see in the hopes of making extra money. Given the amount of products
and services that newbies get presented with, and since newbies have
a burning desire to make money fast, it is easy to see how the online
newbie can get lured into joining a lot of affiliate programs without
knowing if they should join them or not.
For the newbie, the danger in joining
lots of affiliate programs is multi-faceted. Joining affiliate programs
takes time, time the newbie could be using defining their USP, learning
about getting targeted traffic, or learning other Internet marketing
skills that will actually generate revenue for them. In addition,
the newbie who joins lots of affiliate programs in the hopes of making
instant profits, is at risk of being disappointed when they don't
make money by joining the latest affiliate program and that leads
to yet further "unproductivity" and poor use of time.
So, what steps do newbies take to identify
the best affiliate program(s) that matches their USP?
It will differ based on the goal of
each newbie Internet marketer, but here's a small set of steps that
are useful to start with:
*Define how the affiliate program's
offering complements your USP.
You should be able to clearly map out
what the affiliate program's offering (product or service) will be
useful to patrons or visitors of your web site, list or customer base.
If the product that you will be promoting is something that will be
useful to you and people you sell or try to sell to, it may be a useful
affiliate program to join.
*Make sure that you fully review the
product offered by the affiliate program, use it, and make your own
assessment of it.
Don't promote a product from any affiliate
program unless you own the product yourself and love it. If you own
and love the product that you are promoting, you will be able to sell
it more effectively because your energy and excitement level will
show through in the deliver of your message to would be customer.
In addition, you will be able to list and explain in detail the features
of the product or service that the affiliate program is offering.
*Make certain that the web site that
sells the affiliate program is set up correctly to sell the product,
and sell it well.
The web site that sells the product
of the affiliate program should be professional in its layout, design,
sales copy, and delivery of the product itself. The web site should
have a mechanism to capture the names and emails of the visitors.
The web site should also have a strong auto responder series in place
to follow up with and sell the visitors of that site on the product.
*Check to see if the affiliate program
should be tracked with cookies so that the referring web site will
get credit for each affiliate sale, even the sales that come as a
result of the auto responder series.
If the affiliate program doesn't use
cookies to track referrals, do not sign up.
*Take a look to see if the affiliate
program is two-tier so that you can earn money from recruiting other
affiliates to that affiliate program.
Most of the the noteworthy and professional
affiliate programs will be two-tier although there are some notable
ones that aren't, Clickbank being the most widespread. At the very
minimum, the affiliate program should offer some sort of incentive
to recruit new affiliates. If an affiliate program is not two-tier,
make sure that you determine whether or not the product(s) being sold
are professional and have good conversion rates.
*Ensure that the affiliate program
makes it easy to sign up, complete with welcome email and full contact
information of the point person who can answer any questions.
If the affiliate program isn't run
by a third party like Clickbank, the affiliate program sign up form
should also ask for your EIN # or your Tax ID # for proper reporting.
For the business owner who has established a business identity, this
is key for accurate bookkeeping. Some marketers have gotten away from
welcome emails to their new affiliate partners because the potential
affiliate partners sometimes do not want to give their name and email,
they'd just like to join and make money with no 'marketing' messages
hitting their Inbox.
*A strong affiliate program ideally
should have plenty of help tools including any or all of the following:
real-time tracking, solo email templates (even though I suggest writing
your own), graphics, banners, etc.
For the newbie, the better the help
tools, the easier it will be for them to feel comfortable selling
the product. In addition, the affiliate program should offer follow
up emails to all affiliates offering help to sell more products as
well as relaying success stories of how other affiliates have made
strong sales numbers.
*Ideally, the affiliate program's
affiliate links should be unique to the affiliate but should also
be structured so that the link is distinctly protected from would
be commission thieves.
The affiliate link ID should not be
visible in the URL after the would be customer gets to the sales page
of the product in question.
For the newbie, the abovementioned
steps will help mitigate wasting time and will maximize their time
and efforts. The best affiliate program for the newbie is the one
that satisfies most or all of these criteria and sells a product that
meshes well with the newbie's USP.
Click
here to become an Clickbank affiliate of 9 Mistakes Online.
Be humble, work hard,
work smart.
Karl Augustine
Special Gift from Mark Hendricks
and 9 Mistakes Online!
"Amazingly
Simple Internet Strategy That Makes You Money and Builds Your List"
Free download of this pdf eBook
Click
here to download free pdf eBook now
Featured
Article #2:
"Do Static IP Sites Rank
Higher?" by
John Ricera
This is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim that
sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim
that shared hosting is just fine... that it would be stupid for search
engines to penalize shared
hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites
are currently using name based hosting.
First, let's define what we are talking about when
we say "static IP" vs "name based" hosting. Here
are some synonyms:
For "static hosting", the following all
mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared
hosting. For "dynamic hosting", the following all mean the
same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.
Let's take a brief history of the Internet to put
things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet
had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from
0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There
are billions of such IP addresses possible... however, there is a
finite number. An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses
in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe
and another Asia.
Those organizations noticed several years ago that
we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because
of the proliferation of
web-sites. At the time, every website had it's own dedicated IP address
that was associated with it's domain name.
The solution? A new protocol was developed called
HTTP 1.1 (to replace HTTP 1.0). The new protocol allowed more than
one domain/website to share the same IP address. In fact, hundreds
of websites can now share the same IP address. The new type of hosting
is called "name based", "shared IP", "http
1.1", etc.
Some SEOs theorize that your choice of dedicated hosting
vs. shared hosting might affect your rankings. Some others claim that
is ridiculous because all hosting will eventually be shared in order
to preserve IP addresses.
Which are correct?
I decided to run it through our statistical analysis
engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer
this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed
last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google.
I then pinged each site to get it's IP address. I then tried to visit
the site using the IP address. With shared hosting, this isn't possible.
You get some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you
want. I tallied my results for each of
the first eight rankings.
On the Y-axis, you will see the number of sites found
that use a static IP (do not use shared/name based hosting). On the
X-axis, we have rankings from 1 to 8.
Here is the graph showing Yahoo and Google results:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/de05.gif
(new browser)
First, it is interesting to note that the number of
sites using shared vs. dedicated hosting is just about half and half.
We expect that as time goes on, more and more sites will be using
shared hosting.
The second thing to note is that there is no trend
for either Yahoo or Google that would indicate any preference for
either type of site. Google might show a slight preference for static
IP. Yahoo might show a slight
preference for shared hosting. The net effect is null. The correlations
for both are very close to zero (on a scale of -100 to +100, Google's
correlation was a +35 and Yahoo's was a -21). I generally consider
anything from -35 to +35 to be statistically insignificant.
Do you use dedicated hosting in order to improve your
rankings? Don't bother. There isn't any advantage in this factor.
Often dedicated hosting is more expensive than static IP hosting...
so save your money and invest it in other factors that do affect your
ranking!
Notes:
1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined
for this study.
2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different
keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed
by myself and three associates during the prior month.
Conclusion:
Sites using static hosting do not rank significantly
higher or lower than sites using shared hosting on both Yahoo and
Google.
This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be
determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully
entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these
search
engines do, in fact, rank pages with a "window.open" command
higher on average.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors
of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at
SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF
reports, please visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
*Welcome New Subscribers!
For those of you just joining, welcome!
Your time is valuable and
I'll do my level best to make this "read" time well spent.
I am just a regular guy, just like many of you out there. I stuck
with it, and now am having a blast doing what I love to do. Keep a
positive attitude and you can do just about anything...seems like
old news, but it works and we all can use a little reminding now and
then.
Please forward this e-zine in its entirety to any
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Smart!" newsletter
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