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…

I’m currently working on two projects (and blogging of course). An VRE site, ExtensiveInfo.com . You can find information on a large verity of topics at Extensive Info. As you can see if you clicked on the link, I’m still in the building process. I try and upload four new topics each week. I’m testing out a theory, well maybe theory is the wrong word. Some IM’ers say to build a site 50% to 75% of the way before you go live with it. Others say build it slow and steady, posting every day if possible because the search engines love it. The truth is, I don’t know who is right. So I’m building this site slow and steady monetizing this site with adsense, Amazon.com and affiliate links.

My second project is a site for selling affiliate products from several different affiliates, with all on the same theme. This site I’m going to complete at least 50% before I go live with it. I’ve registered the domain name for it over the weekend and now I’m looking for the right WordPress theme for this site. Right now I’m still working out in my head how I want this site to look and function. I’m going out on the road tomorrow by myself, round trip will take me about 13 hours.  So, I’m hoping by the time I return tomorrow night, I’ll have figured out most of those details.

Speaking about WordPress themes, I came across a site to build a WordPress theme without any programing skills on your part. check it out at WordPress Theme Generator , you may find it useful.

Just a quick note about a blog post I ran a cross this morning. I’m off doing a project (I’ll be posting to you about it soon) but I wanted to give you this link from the Entrepreneurs Journey Blog. Yaro did a post on how to simplify the niche selection process and it’s aimed towards newbies.

I found it interesting, people tend to do extensive research and become paralyzed. Yaro approach gets around this and lets you get your feet wet much sooner. So pick a niche/topic and start blogging, once your up and running you can then monetize the site using adsense, affiliate products, amazon, eBay and the list goes on.

Steps to get started after picking your niche/topic:

1.You need a domain name. Pick something based around the topic of your blog. There’s allot that goes into picking a domain name but for now, we just want you to get your feet wet. At the end of this post I’ll give you a link to a web site that will teach you all the ins and outs of Internet Marketing.

2. You need a hosting company for your blog, I would suggest you go over to Host Gator and sign up with them. There are are many reasons I suggest Host Gator but that is a post in itself. For now let just say, they are cheap, extremely flexible, and most importantly, reliable.

3. Set up your WordPress blog and start blogging. There is a site that I subscribe to and suggest you do also. Mark tends to be on the cutting edge of setting up WordPress, BANS, and monetizing a site. You can get all the information you need for setting up WordPress by checking out his blog at The Niche Store Builder.

The site I was referring to earlier in the post for learning Internet Marketing is Wealthy Affiliate. They are a subscription site but well worth the investment. Don’t be overwhelmed (but you will be) by the site, take the 8 week course and go from there at your own pace.

One more thing, above I talked about jumping in and getting your feet wet. This DOES NOT include PPC (pay per click)! You absolutely need to understand PPC BEFORE you do it. It’s a great tool but can cost you a ton of money if you do it wrong!

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.