Internet Marketing For Newbies

I know I said the next post would be on PPC but I received an email Saturday that quite frankly, got me so hot I wanted to climb through the screen and throttle the guy. I wanted to tell you about this experience so that you might avoid the same mistakes. I decided to wait a few says before posting so as the post would not be dripping with venom.

SO, what got me so upset?

I WAS on this gentleman email list and he sent me this email:

I’m always in the market for PLR content, especially if it has Master Rights, so when I received this well written and to the point email I clicked on his link.

The first issue I had with him is that after I clicked on his link and his sales page came up I was greeted with a PopOver. A popover is the same thing as a popup except you can’t block it. This popover used Background Shading so that the web page became darken and the popover was front and center. Although there is a healthy debate about popovers in the IM field, I have no problem with them. However, this popover gave the user NO choice. There was no way to close out if the user didn’t want to opt-in, you either filled out your name and email address or you left the site.

Note: If you use popovers ALWAYS give the end user a way to opt-out, most have a close icon in the upper right corner.

Wanting the PLR I filled out the popover using an email address I check once a month or so. This brought back the sales page. I look at the first 5 or so then I proceeded to follow his instruction and scrolled to the bottom, click on his download link then entered the code I was given.

The next thing that happen was I was taken to PayPal. My eyes jumped right to the total and it was $0.00 so I started to enter my PayPal password then STOPPED. Something wasn’t right, why would you go to a PayPal page for $0.00 and not right to the download page? I then started to read the entire page.

The second line of the invoice stated that I would be charged starting next month $147 a month for access to his site.

NO where and I mean NO where was anything said about a membership fee! Maybe in his sales letter, but he said to bypass the sales letter by scrolling down to the bottom.

Let’s be frank… If you put up a site that doesn’t look good or there is allot of typos in your content, that looks bad on  YOU. If you pull a stunt like this guy did to trick the consumer into something, THAT MAKES ALL INTERNET MARKETERS LOOK BAD!

Don’t use your talents as an Internet Marketer to swindle someone. It will come back to bite you in the butt and again, it makes us ALL look bad.

Ok, I’m getting off my soap box now. I promise to talk about PPC in the next post.

Till then…

Recently there was/is a 12 ring bout between Google and BANS. Well, we’re in the 10 round and since the ref is also Google, I think it’s going to be obvious who is going to win.

What am I talking about??

When BANS first came out, it was great! It was a great product and everyone made money. Then allot more people got started using BANS, so to make our sites stand out we modified our templates to look different then everyone else’s and started adding content pages. This worked well for awhile, then…

Google changed the way they looked at web sites and started de-indexing what they considered “thin sites”. A BANS site is considered a thin site to Google and started de-indexing (de-indexing is when your site is REMOVED from Google Search Engine also known as the Google Slap) them.

Then some of us started to change the way we went about it. We started building WordPress blogs, full of original content and linking to our BANS store. Google seems to like the way we are going about it but there are some major pit falls.

1. You can’t put up 100 BANS stores anymore Can you imagine posting to 100 blogs a day?
2. Posting original content to your blog takes time, allot of time
3. Because of the posting time factor you can only put up as many as you can handle in a week 3 - 10 sites.
4. And lets not forget, you need to be working on your other streams of income, affilate marketing, VRE, etc…

UPDATE:

I started to wright this post last week. In that time Google has de-indexed one of my BANS/WP sites. That’s where the blog is in a folder NOT the root directory. I’m pulling the plug on any new BANS sites and will only be posting to the sites that are still indexed once or twice a month. I’m in a wait a see mode, I don’t want to spend any more time on a project that might be de-indexed at any moment.

I’m going to spend my time on my other projects. One is up and running as I build it, www.ExtensiveInfo.com and I’m also building a affiliate site that won’t be accessible online until I get more of it completed.

I’ll be using this area to post on each of these sites as I build them. ExtensiveInfo.com is a VRE/PLR site (Virtual Real Estate / Public Label Rights) and as I said above, the other is an affiliate site. More on this in our next post.

Here is a little worksheet I use to help keep me organized. I’ll put it in the download area but you could probably put it together yourself faster then it would take to download.

What this does is keep track of all my sites, reminds me what type of site it is i.e. blog,affiliate,BANS. It also tell me the last time I worked on the site (added some type of content) and keeps a running count of the number of sites I have.

The labels are in red and from left to right No. is the total running number of domains it also correlates with my index in my 3 ring binder for each domain. Next is My Sites which is the hyper link name for the domain, this way I can jump to the site from the worksheet if I want to check something out. Last Worked On, now this column tells me the last time I worked on the site. What I usually do is print out this sheet and hand write in the dates in this column. And the final column is the type of site. You would think you would remember this but trust me, when you get past 30 sites you have to stop and think about it a little.

You could also add other columns like start date (when you went online with the site) domain expiration date, if you bought a used domain you might want to have an age column. I have all these but I have them in a different worksheet but you could put them here.

I have two different hosting companies. The hosting company that this blog is on, I would NOT recommend to anyone, the other hosting company, Host Gator, I can not save enough good things about, but I’ll try.

Hosting companies are not all equal. This blog is on xxx (if you are on my newsletter list, you’ll know which company it is) and has NO cPanel. Just about everything I want to do I have to submit a request for. Many of my WordPress plugins do not work here.Now when I call they do respond fairly quickly and I can almost always get someone on the support phone.

Contrast this with Host Gator. Host Gator has a cPanel which puts ME in total control of what happens on my site. WordPress goes in seamlessly and all the WP plugins I’ve tried so far have worked. I pay one flat fee ($9.99) and I get UNLIMITED domains on this account.

Now if you only have one domain then you could get away with the $4.95 plan. But if your reading this then your interested in IM so you be looking at 30 to 100 more or less domains per year, all depending on how you focused your business. For $9.95 you can get the baby account which will handle all these domains for this one low price.

I was on the phone with tech support for Host Gator today because I was having problems with two of my domains. When I typed in http://www.MyDomain.com it would change to http://MyDomain.com (no www). This worked fine until I tried to get Google to see my sitemaps. Google wanted to see the www, otherwise it gives error messages (404) because it could not find the page.

Tech support was fast at answering the phone and solved the problem quickly. It turned out the problem was in WordPress. In the setting tab it listed the domain without the www so all I needed to do was type in the www and Google was happy.

Bottom line, Host Gator was designed with Internet Marketers in mind and I highly recommend you use them for your hosting company. Host Gator has several hosting planes, but this is the one I would recommend. Once you get larger you might want to upgrade. Check out Host Gator here for all the details on their plans. I’ll gust list a few things here for Baby account.

1. 300 gb Disk Space
2. 3,000 gb Bandwidth
3. Unlimited Domains Allowed
4. Unlimited Databases
5. PHP5
6. So much more - Just go to their website for complete information

Check it out now. You won’t be sorry.

I mention in the "How To Build A Niche Store " post that I was trying out a new plugin. Smart Ad. Well, it didn’t work. The hosting company that this domain is on has a lot of issues with WordPress plugins. I installed a different plugin called adsense deluxe and it seem to be working here although it doesn’t have a lot of the features smart ad has. (I’ll be posting SOON on Hosting Companies)

In our last post, "Convert Most WordPress Themes To Work With BANS ", I mentioned it was great timing, and it is. As we get ready to build our WP-BANS site, Mark from The Niche Store Builder blog site, is running a week long series on how to convert WP themes to work with our BANS sites. What this means to you is that instead of picking from a few WP-BANS themes, you’ll now will be able to pick any WordPress theme that you like and convert it over for your use. We’ll continue with our posts on How To Build A Niche Store Site after Mark’s series of posts on converting themes are completed.

OK, what I’d like you to do now is go over to Convert Most WordPress Themes To Work With BAN S, and follow along. Bookmark each of the posts/videos so that you can go back to them to refresh your memory as you convert themes. Also, I would urge you to sign up for Marks RRS feed as some most of the information he gives out can not be found anywhere else.