My prediction is that Blog Rush will be just another form of Internet gentrification. It benefits the biggest and best blogs the most. Which means that the more you, the little guy, use it, the poorer you will be.

Since ProBlogger, John Chow and ShoeMoney are all better bloggers than you and I, our traffic will eventually end up with them the more we use Blog Rush.

They write better headlines, offer more actionable and higher quality content, and know how to make more money from their visitors than you do. By participating in any type of traffic sharing program with them, you are only going to lose market share.

The more you use it, the more traffic will be funneled away from smaller blogs and towards larger blogs. Is this bad? No, it will happen eventually anyway, Blog Rush just speeds up the process. Can you see where they got the name from?

Blog Rush, in terms of its affects on the Blogosphere will function similar to AdSense. It becomes a massive Hoover that will go out to all the smaller blogs and dredge traffic up to the better and larger blogs.

The real question isn’t “How can I get more traffic?” but rather, “Do I deserve more traffic?” and the closely related, “Do I know what to do with the traffic I already have?”

For Blog Rush to not function as leverage tool benefiting bigger bloggers, more of the larger bloggers would have to be more generous as ShoeMoney is with his offer to rotate people who sign up under him into the impressions on his site. In the long run, he’ll still steal your traffic, but at least you’ll have a chance to improve while you get a temporary boost in visitors.

Hopefully this explanation will help you understand why all the big guys are SO FAST to jump on board with this (any any other pyramid style) promotional tools. The bigger you are, and closer to the top you get in, the more you are licensed to steal $$$ from the rest of the users.

[LOL...if you just got the a version of this post with BoguS rather than Blog Rush in it; honest it was the spellchecker ]

Careful, This Blog Rush is Going to Hurt is a post from: Art of Money

Here’s a large forum thread with lots and lots of pictures of Guerilla Marketing. Some very cool ideas!

read more.

Great examples of Guerilla Marketing is a post from: Art of Money

I need a new logo for my city blog network, and I was going to use a traditional logo service like My Logo but I thought it would be fun to get the network bloggers involved in the process so I decided to go the SitePoint Marketplace and run a logo contest.

The process has been really interesting so I thought I would share my experience and the tips of what I’ve learned:

1.) Wide Variety of Entries

You’ll get a wide variety of entries, which is mostly a good thing. You can expect a wide range of quality too, but traditional logo companies often charge by the number of concepts that you will receive, so to get 25 or 30 original designs presented to review is a fantastic luxury.

2.) Put Up Enough of A Reward to Attract Good Bids

The base reward for a logo competition on SitePoint is only $100, but My Logo charges $199 minimum so I was afraid that if I went with the minimum that I wouldn’t attract any real pros, so I made my competition $160, which seems to have done the trick, as I have received some great entries.

3.) Review Existing and Past Contests

Check out the other current and past logo contests. While you look at them, take a look at the quality of entries (especially in relationship to the amount of prize money offered).

Look at the summary and detail descriptions of the project…borrow heavily from the ones that are really well done.

Pay attention to the feedback give to the designers, as this is a key area to getting a logo that is a good match to your business.

4.) Give Clear Instructions

Vague or loose instructions will ruin the contest. I could have spent more time defining what I wanted. It’s good to have a basic idea of colors, and even some examples of styles of logos that you are wanting.

The more you can narrow down the focus for the designers at the begriming the more energy they can spend refining design rather than struggling to figure out what you want.

5.) Communicate With the Participants

It seems like the designers are very eager and by providing updates as to your thinking and by quickly answering questions, you will encourage more and better quality entries.

Creating a logo is a process that involves the logo contest sponsor and the designer working together to hone in on a winning concept. The designer can’t do it without your participation.

6.) Get Other Eyeballs Involved In Your Decision

With the large number and wide variety of entries that you’ll get, it’s easy to dismiss a good concept based on your first impression, so get some other people to take a look and give you feedback.

I’ve had the bloggers on my network and my wife take a look at the submissions and I definitely discovered that a fresh perspective helped me see potential new directions that were valuable.

7.) Be Grateful

These people are doing quite a bit of work purely on speculation, so even if some of the entries are really lame, be kind.

It is likely they are students or even young kids involved (alongside seasoned pros) so really attempt to keep this in mind and offer constructive criticism.

Summary

The major thing to realize in comparing having a contest like this versus hiring a traditional logo designer is that you are going to have to be much more involved in the process, which means a lot more of your time.

The advantage of paying the price of more involvement is that you’ll get a much wider variety of concepts and points of view on your ideas than any one designer could ever provide, at a much lower cost.

The ideal I guess would be to use a contest like this to create and build a relationship with someone that works in a way that you can rely on and use over and over. I’m not sure that this method of getting work done is efficient enough to be used consistently, but it is fun and I’m sure that the quality of the final design will be much better than if I had use a traditional service.

You can see my logo contest,which is still in process and I’d love to hear any thoughts that you’d like to share about the logos being presented (which one would you pick?) or the process in general.

- Jon Symons

7 Tips for Running a Logo Competition is a post from: Art of Money

The ultimate in product placement and contextual advertising, although Google would call it spam I’m sure.

In a speech yesterday George W. dropped a little product placement for “Dell” televisions into his talk.

Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Could it be the highest priced contextul ad ever. Apparently Michael Dell donated $250k to George Dubya’s campaign fund.

Dude, You’re Getting a President is a post from: Art of Money

Okay, time to take score from the “Tag Line” vote from last week.

Maybe some things just don’t work well as user generated content

…mmm how to tally up the votes since there were so many ad hoc suggestions in the comments? For now here the current standings from the official pole:

18.18% Stumbling Towards Online Riches

18.18% Tips for Having Success Online and Escaping the Rat Race

18.18% Insider Tips for Building a Business Online and Escaping the Rat Race

45.45% Tips and Tricks for Creating Passive Income Online

I confess that you were all the victim of a minor copywriting experiment, not enough people cast a vote to make it really meaningful, but I thought I’d follow it through anyways, ‘cuz it’s kind of fun.

In the original story, before I set out the choices, I ran them through my favorite statistical copywriting tool [aff]. First I’ll give you the scores from the tool and then I’ll tell you, for those that don’t know about it, what Glyphius [aff] is all about.

The score from the tool is the number on the right:

Insider Tips for Building a Business Online and Escaping the Rat Race 129
Stumbling Towards Online Riches 254
Online Business Tips from a Rich Dad loving Geek 254
Tips for Having Success Online and Escaping the Rat Race 351
Tips and Tricks for Creating Passive Income Online 383 <—THE WINNER***

Ding, ding, ding….way to go Art of Money readers your feedback matched a statistical analysis of successful sales letters!

Or should I say, congratulations Glyphius, you got it right

I thought it would be fun to run the suggestions from the comments left on the initial story through Glyphius and see how they fared:

Paint a Brighter Financial Future 182
One mans attempt to paint a brighter financial future 198
Follow my transformation and become rich too 192
Going from money slavery to money mastery 129
Be the master of money, not its slave -15
Take the plunge to be your own boss 92
How I stopped worrying and started making money 274 <—Highest Rated – way to go Stas

Financial Freedom Illustrated -25
Painting The Picture of Financial Freedom 168
Drawing the Picture of Financial Freedom 93
Exploring the Beauty of Business 87
Framing my future online so you don’t have to 157
Wealth Creation Through On-line Businesses 81
A Paint-By-Numbers Approach to On-line Business 114
Creating On-line Businesses 143
Building Online Businesses the Rich Dad Way 104

I thought is was an interesting experiment. Now I had lots of time to tweak my tag line so it wasn’t really a surprise to see that I came up with one that beat your suggestions.

What you do in Glyphius is put in a sentence or paragraph, score it and then tweak…trying to increase the score with each revision. The application gives you the feedback of the current score and the “high score” that you are trying to beat and it points out any “negative” word scores that you may have used.

Here’s a list of the negative score words that came out from your submissions:

follow: -5
my: -5
too: -1
of: -3
not: -39
your: -15
own: -32
how: -20
freedom: -66
of: -3
business: -25
my: -5
you: -11
don’t: -19
wealth: -2
businesses: -27

Business and Freedom are two that are surprising.

So What is Glyphius Really?

Glyphius is a database of statistical the results of proven ads [I believe from the Clickbank marketplace]. It is a collection of words and phrases that have been proven to sell. Certain words, if found more in higher selling sales letters are given higher weighting or scores. Other words if found on less profitable sales letters, are given negative ratings or lower scores.

My experience is that the application really does work. When I remember to optimize my story titles using Glyphius, they always get more click throughs from RSS readers and more social bookmarks.

My Real Blog Videos sales page, which I ran through Glyphius copywriting tool until I couldn’t squeeze another point out of it, continues to sell well despite very little effort on my part.

That’s my Glyphius commercial. It really is a very cool tool, especially for new copywriters who rely on making sales online. It is a great learning tool as you begin to understand what works and start to achieve higher scores with less attempts.

I think that I’ll stick with my “Tips and Tricks for Creating Passive Income Online” since it was the highest rated in the pole and in Glyphius and also my personal pick for the most accurate description of what I’m trying to accomplish here at Art of Money.

Thanks for all your input, I’m really enjoying the new Art of Money “Now with 147% more user participation!” I haven’t even gotten to the re-design yet, and the site is way better already.

Jon Symons
Learning copywriting from a computer program…so you don’t have to teach me!

Glyphius and the Tag Line Redux is a post from: Art of Money

As my newsletter readers will know, I recently began to offer an online version. All I did was put a very basic plain page up and linked to it as an alternative to reading the text email [it also allowed me to do better links].

Of course being the savvy Internet guy that I am, I also went and grabbed a stats project and stuck it on the template for the newsletter, so I could see if anyone was visiting the online version.

Traffic Spike to my online Newsletter [Passive income Tips #14]

On average about 1 or 2 people a day read the online versions but, a few days ago I had 123 visitors to this one.

What happened?

Someone bookmarked it on StumbleUpon.

Here’s the link where the traffic came from. A guy named Mike Levin bookmarked my newsletter…thanks Mike!

Let’s find out a little bit more about Mike…click on his profile in Stumble Upon. Notice the URL beside his photo…connors.com. It rang a bell to me:

“Hit Tail is brought to you by Connors Communication.” from here. Did you make the connection?

I mentioned Hit Tail in the newsletter [at the very bottom]. Mike looked for links to his cool new Hit Tail service [and it really is worth a look, I'll do a full review in an upcoming post] and then sent traffic from his bookmarks in StumbleUpon and Squido to sites that were linking to his company’s site.

I’m impressed, a very Web 2.0 way to say thanks for the link and it shows that his company is on the ball and really gets how the web works [this is even clearer when you actually start to use Hit Tail].

Takeaways:

• Always track your visitors.
• You can promote your site or service or product by promoting other people’s sites…even indirectly.

Another thing that I was thinking about is that there is something cool about the way my newsletter is online in its very plain form, I wonder if that leads to a sense that one has found something that is not commercial and not really meant for human consumption, like it has a “hidden gem” feeling.

It would be worth testing out that theory with a plain text website

Jon Symons
Obsessing on my web site stats…so you don’t have to.

How to Promote your Web Site is a post from: Art of Money

My first blog was more focused on personal finance topics like budgeting, investing and saving money. Since that site is 18 months old now, even though I’ve pretty much abandoned it, it still gets search
engine traffic for these topics.

Blogging Perks – Marketing With Free Gifts

This leads me to tonight’s topic. A shiny new copy [hardcover] of The Single Best Investment [aff] just arrived at my door today and I realized that it happens fairly often…people sending me free this and that. Here’s a typical email:

Hi,
I’m doing marketing for a great dividend-based investment book by Lowell Miller and judging by your blog I think you’d appreciate his viewpoint and strategies. Can I send you a complimentary copy? If you like it and think it’s worthwhile you can blog about it but there are no strings attached.
Let me know,
<marketing person>

In the past year, I’ve received several books and quite a few pieces of useful software, just for having a site that comes up in a search for certain topics.

Freebies are one of the unexpected and not often talked about perks of blogging.

Marketing Via Blogs

On the flip side, it is clear from these perks the blog marketing is increasing in popularity. This particular email I really liked because they clearly said “no strings attached.” Being pushy, having strings or demanding a review can backfire, so don’t do it…give it as a gift, if you’ve targeted the person properly, they will likely want to write about it.

A couple targeted bloggers writing about your product can be the start of a very effective word of mouth advertising campaign. Watch for ways of leveraging the blogosphere in ways like this to continue to grow [stuff like this too].

Take aways

1.) Start a blog about something you enjoy so you can become important in your niche and get free stuff.

2.) Create relationships and give freebies to strategically placed bloggers to generate buzz and spread the word about your product.

Blogging Perks – Marketing With Free Gifts To Bloggers is a post from: Art of Money

This post is the second in my Business Basics series. Last week I started with Got Business? and so this week I thought I dive right in with a real life business case study called: “How Not to Sell Me Something” that touches on the real secret to being successful in business…giving a shit.

The study is of the various [this is only a small sampling] emails I received pumping [pimping] the recent “Butterfly Marketing Manuscript” and my commentary on the level of caring that went into those emails.

“How Not to Sell Me Something”

From the Earner’s Forum boss – Lee Dodd

As Earners and those who want to Earn more, it is important to keep up with the latest and best strategies for making money online.

Joel Comm has shared with me the news of Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing Manuscript, and I felt it was important enough to share it with you.

Last year, Mike released his Butterfly Marketing course to the tune of $1447. It sold out over 1500 copies the FIRST WEEK!

But now, you can get the CORE of this course, the 100-plus page manuscript, for just $97.

It’s a no-brainer for our members and I highly recommend that you grab a copy right away, as Mike has indicated that the price will go up shortly.

Translation:

I don’t have the time of day for this kind of crap, but it’s got all the right names attached to it and loser’s like you usually buy this kind of drivel hoping you’ll actual earn a couple bucks online so I couldn’t help myself and thought, well if you going to toss away 97 bucks I might as well get my 70%.

-1 Stars -*

From Rich Schefren:

Hey Gang,

I’m VERY busy right now, so I’ll keep this one short.

I’ve interviewed a few coaching club members who were
kind enough to spill the beans, and tell the world
how my coaching program has DRAMATICALLY altered their
business for the better.

Before I tell you how powerful this call is, I want
to give you some special instructions.

I want you to listen to this call through a “filter.”
Since you’ve read the Manifesto and the Missing
Chapter, I want you to keep those concepts at the
top of your mind when you listen to my client discuss
his INCREDIBLE path to a personal fortune.

Tonight’s call is with my client Mike Filsaime. And
before you say, “well all his money was generated
from the launch of Butterfly Marketing,” I want to
make one point.

When Mike started in my coaching program he was doing
$15,000 a month. Fast forward 16 months later, he brought
in over $150,000 with only 8% (about $10,000) coming
from Butterfly Marketing.

Mike is a VERY sharp and VERY gracious guy. You will
learn a TON as Mike walks you through step by step
from working all alone to building a real Interent
based business.

Translation:

I don’t have the time of day to read this but I actually at least know Mike and his stuff is pretty good and loser’s like you usually buy this kind stuff hoping you’ll actual earn a couple bucks online and so I thought, well if you are going to be making a big mistake and not take my coaching and tossing away 97 bucks I might as well get my 70%.

3 Stars ***

From Mike Filsaime:

Well yes I got one from Mike for his own product, but I was so pissed with it that I actually perma deleted it and hit unsubscribe from his list, so I can’t share how tacky it was.

Translation:

-1 Stars -* with a bonus – for seeming so pitchy for his own product.

From Yaro:

…What Is Butterfly Marketing?

Let’s get this question out of the way first. Mike explains things in more detail in the manuscript of course, but essentially to “butterfly market” is all about viral marketing. Viral marketing is when the marketplace itself – as in your customers and the general public – promote your product for you. It spreads “virally” without you having to proactively sell or promote beyond the initial system you set up. If you have success with viral marketing you don’t need to spend money on advertising or ongoing promotion
- it’s set and forget.

Translation:

I read this interesting information product that I actually use on daily basis and I’d like to give you my honest opinion and some real information about what to expect if you were to purchase this product.

5 Stars *****

I got others too, but needless to say they were poop as well. I sure hope that when I am making the kind of money that these guys are making that I can stay awake long enough to care about what I’m sending out to my list.

The winner is Yaro [with a slight honorable mention to Rich Schefren]…the young upstart on the Internet marketing scene.

The ironic thing is that the actual Butterfly Marketing Manuscript [based on the fact that I did read the freebie chapter] looks like it has very good information in it. If it wasn’t for Yaro, I never would have known about it.

So, head over to Entreprenuer’s Journey and download the Leaked Chapter…then if you buy it the commission will go to the right person.

How Not To Sell Me Something is a post from: Art of Money

Joel Comm’s AdSense Game

Joel Comm has released a semi-cool little game that teaches you how to create AdSense sites. It’s called the AdSense Game.

It allows you to go through the steps of choosing an topic, setting up your template, AdSense placement and color optimization and marketing techniques.

Then it runs a simulation to tell you how much money your site made, presumably based on the parameters you chose.

Wait, he must of stolen this game…from my life! Well my past life anyways. And true to real life…each day the earnings go down a little bit. I’m assuming that the purpose of that is to show you that you need to buy Joel’s AdSense book [which I own btw] but in reality it should be a tip off as to the wisdom or lack of wisdom of setting up a business based on AdSense.

After 2 days I had racked up $444.84

Even though it is obviously a marketing tool to sell books, it actually has a decent amount of similarity to the game of creating niche or made for AdSense sites.

Can you beat my score?

Play the AdSense Game is a post from: Art of Money

First I need to tell you about Change This. It’s the kind of site that when you find it, you can’t believe that you didn’t already know about it.

I don’t know if they were bad, or just purposely subversive but they have no page rank at all. Strange for such a high quality website.

Never mind…now you know. Sign up for their announcements…you’ll be astonished at the list of contributing authors.

What is it?

ChangeThis is a new kind of media. It’s calm and thoughtful and direct and transparent. And unlike almost every other form of media, it reaches people through community. If an idea is a good one, it’ll spread, because people like you will send it to their friends. Unlike a broadcaster, we’re not using FCC frequencies to send our ideas to people who don’t want to hear them.

Unlike a book or a newspaper, it’s free. And there are no ads.

Unlike a web site, we’re not a place you go to. You’re more likely to get a manifesto from a friend or find one on a blog. (But if you want them before anyone else, sign up for our once-every-two-weeks newsletter.)

For example in the email that I just received there were 2 very good “manifestos” as they are called.

By Seth Godin

Here’s just a taste of Seth Godin’s latest book, small is the new big, a plentiful well of inspiration for your business and you.

Go to the change this page or get the .pdf directly.

By Debbie Weil

The what, why, and how of business blogging, by business blog expert, Debbie Weil. Originally a limited release, this critical resource guide is available to you once again.

Go to the change this page or get the .pdf directly.

Visit the Change This home page to see the complete list of available manuscripts.

Of course if you feel up to it, you can submit your story idea for review.

Change This With Seth Godin & Debbie Weil is a post from: Art of Money

I came very close to titling this post “Money of Art” but since every post that makes it on to the top of a social bookmarking site starts with “how to” I just couldn’t do it.

In my last post I mentioned that I used to own a woodworking business. I made hand crafted photo frames, but what I didn’t mention was that I actually started as an artist and, tired of starving, turned to making “commercial” products. Yes I was going to be an artist…I even attended the Emily Carr College in Vancouver [while their I donated my 15 minute of fame to this guy].

It was a good school. Learned lots. I read a statistic about art school students a while ago: 5 years after leaving school, 95% were not involved in creating art of any kind. I wonder how much of that has to do with economic reality? Not a word about it in the curriculum when I was there…unless you wimped out and went into graphic design. How long does a person really want to go on living below the poverty line?

This weekend in my city they had the annual “Art Walk.” Artists lined a busy street in front of shop windows and restaurants while streams of people combed the avenue. I can remember what these types of event were like as an artist.

To sum it up: mostly painful.

Even if you had really high quality work 10% will say something positive, 50% will ignore you, 20% will say it’s too expensive and 20% will either be blatantly rude or say they could do better.

As I walked down the Art Walk this year my Internet business training began to leak into my experience. I thought, why are most of these people not selling stuff? In my city there is a ton of disposable income [even though in winter it routinely reaches -30 Celsius , house prices have risen > 20% in each of the last 3 years]. A lot of the work was high enough quality to be sold.

It was clear to me…these people have no business sense. It would have taken about 40 hours of instruction for their schools to give them the fundamentals to know how to sell and market their work.

I walked past over 100 artists and not one was collecting names and addresses of the folks that expressed an interest in their work. The only marketing I saw was some business cards or postcards that the artists gave out.

They should have been list building. It is really tough to expect someone to just buy a $500 painting while they are on their way to lunch with friends in a caf�, but that doesn’t mean that the same person wouldn’t buy if you sent them a personalized invitation to your next showing, or to the one after that.

The takeaway for me was that business is about commitment. Partly what attracts people to becoming artists is a desire for “freedom” which is falsely seen as a lack of restrictions or commitments, so the idea of creating relationships with customers and potential customers is not too attractive to that mindset.

I guess the way to not be a starving artist, or anything else for that matter, is to realize that entering into commitments rather than running away from them is where the treasure [and even the freedom] is.

How To Not Be A Starving Artist is a post from: Art of Money

I’ve figured it out…the biggest oversight online.

Do you know that if you Google “SEO” it returns 151 million results. In a nutshell it is the art of trying to present the exact magic website formula to the search engines to rank highly on the results pages. Many companies charge thousands of dollars a month to “optimize” websites.

SEO is the Magic Pill of making money online right?

Wrong.

Well, according to common wisdom it is. Common wisdom is wrong too. The really magic ingredient to success on the web is the ability to write effectively. Sorry, not nearly as sexy as “Search Engine Optimization” and that’s the reason why writing skills are riding in the trunk on the information superhighway and “SEO” is sitting like a king in the back of the limo.

Which one is more important? Let me give you an example. If you were an effective and persuasive writer you could take a product, become an affiliate, put up a one page sales letter, purchase AdWords to drive traffic to the site, squeeze the visitors for their email address and if you didn’t sell them with your writing the first time, you’d have many more chances but sending them regular emails.

You have an entire business from the skill of being an effective writer. Not only do you not need SEO, you don’t even need a search engine! Try that with SEO.

What Does it Mean to Be An Effective Writer?

That’s a big question. But in a nutshell it means to be able to climb inside the fabric of your reader’s being and to lead them through a story. Just like when your parents read you a story at bedtime, we love stories even if its purpose is to sell you something, or better put, to persuade you to purchase something.

Isn’t Selling Yucky?

No, selling, if done correctly, is a great service. What’s yucky is when someone tries to impose their agendas on to you.

Yucky is trying to get someone to buy something with full knowledge that it isn’t right for them, just so you can make a couple bucks.

Selling is the art of helping a person locate a product or service which serves their need or want at a price that they can afford. A couple weeks ago I purchased an iPod and the salesman suggested that I might want to take a look at the protective cases that they had on sale a the moment. I bought a case too. It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course it was a good idea, that music player goes through hell the way I use it. That’s good selling, he really helped me out…my iPod could have been ruined by now.

Writing Takes Practice

It also takes empathy, intention and clarity. Lately I’ve been seeing an improvement in my writing skills as I have done more and more of it.

The biggest thing is the wonderful whispers that come and tap me on the shoulder and say, “your reader will be wondering about this now.” At which point you can answer their silent query or, when skills are evolved, tickle it a bit, to create suspense and the desire to read on.

There is an old saying, “the first casualty of war is the truth” and it could be that the first casualty of the Internet is the ability to write, which is very ironic given the primarily textual nature of websites.

Really SEO is the one who keeps writing in the trunk of the limo. Writers on the web are trying to tickle the interest of the search engines more than their reader’s imaginations. Sad but true.

No I’m not going to call for a revolt, I’m just going to continue to love my new found delight of writing for people and not writing for search engine spiders.

Learn About Persuasive Writing

I have two places where I have learned the most about persuasion and how to make money on the web through effective writing. You can check out:

Sean D’Souza’s Site PsychoTactics.com

Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg’s GrokDotCom.com

Both sites have excellent newsletters that I subscribe to.

Has the Internet Killed the Art of Writing? is a post from: Art of Money

Wired has an interesting list of the 10 Wackiest E-Commerce sites. There’s some fun stuff in there list including:

• ThinkGeek – selection of geek toys and gadgets.
• Branch, a store that vends recyclable iPod nano cases, a $3,000 table made from recycled paper, and a $12 bonsai tree in an aluminum can.
• Threadless, which accepts design submissions, puts them up for a week of voting, then prints and sells the best ones.
• Dynamism, which has the fastest and lightest laptops you can find outside the gray market…also check out their cherry wood headphones!

One that didn’t make the list is Woot, which is a personal favorite. It’s a bit like the old “Blue Light Specials” at Zellers. A new deal item every day [most are gadgets], a limited supply, amazing deal…and when it’s gone it’s gone.

10 Wackiest E-Commerce sites is a post from: Art of Money

Psychotactics.com = great marketing strategy articles. Be sure and check out the power point tips…brilliant.

Psychotactics.com is a post from: Art of Money

I think I’m finally getting it…that making money online isn’t all about AdSense! Okay I’m a little slow, but I see that the list is where real money is to be made. As my buddy Jscott says Adsense is like crack…easy to get addicted to but it makes you stupid.

Why take a customer and earn .50 cents from them and never see them again, when you can have them sign up for your mailing list and have the opportunity to sell them stuff over and over [the average newsletter signup stays on the list for 6 months!].

So I’m going to try some list building and I thought I’d throw my research online for all to enjoy. It’s not comprehensive by all means, I’m the kind that prefers to let my learning unravell as I do something, so this is all I need to get started, then I’ll post more as I get my own experience…so here goes.

Freebee Wordpress Plugins

Email Notification Plugin: Despite the description I know that people use this email plugin as a newsletter/mailing list application:

This plugin allows people to signup to be notified when a new entry is posted to your blog and once they’re confirmed it sends them an email every time a new entry is posted to your blog. It also allows them to unsubscribe if they wish.

Zookoda:

Creating professional, graphical emails using Zookoda is really easy. Simply enter your feed (RSS/Atom) address, select an email template and you’re done. If you need more control over your email design, Zookoda enables you to create your own templates, include images in your design and rearrange your content.

Buy it once email list software:

Sonic Mailer Pro

SonicMailer Pro is far more affordable than many other solutions. Why? Well, we’re not quite sure why everyone else is charging you so much, but what we do know is we won’t!

No monthly or per e-mail fees, ever!
Don’t get caught up in the others’ offerings! With SonicMailer Pro you will never have to pay any monthly or “per-newsletter” fees! SonicMailer Pro is a one-time fee and includes free updates for an entire 6 months!

Monthly fee model:

Aweber is probably the market leader in mailing list service providers.

Join Thousands of Others Who’ve Discovered AWeber’s
Unlimited Autoresponders, Follow Ups, Newsletters, and
Toll-Free Expert Customer Service with 8+ Years of Experience.

You can sign up for a free test drive from their homepage.

Okay you’ve got the software to create and manage your list…now what?

Brad Cullen has a pretty good free info course that covers all aspects of doing business online. His latest 3 part topic is email marketing. I found it worthwhile.

Now you may have heard the saying “the money is in the list”. Today, I’m going to start off with discussing what email marketing is all about and give you a basic heads-up on the subject. In the next two lessons, I’ll also discuss email marketing strategies and the tools (including a complete walkthrough) for setting up and managing your very own email marketing campaign.

I’m almost certainly going to start out with Zookoda. All things considered it looks like a good first choice. One thing you want to consider is who owns your list…meaning if you are unhappy with the list service or application can you take your customers and move to another list service. I haven’t checked out if any of these guys play like that, but you don’t want that…not at all.

Email List Tools & Notes is a post from: Art of Money

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills back.

With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is why article writing, submissions and publications are also getting popular.

There are already many tools that people can use to make the process of distributing their articles more easily. Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, which is only half of the story.

Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.
In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting them; branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.
But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.
You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better contents.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.
You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?
Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them. Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this.
Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Better search engine results also are great benefits.
But these things do not put much money in your pocket. There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings. Not just increase the number of visitors to your site.
Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers.
Maybe in the process of writing articles, you are thinking that all that is you wanted is links back to your site. And any visitors it can generate are fine.
Guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.
You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight.
Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.
In the end, it is all really a matter of choice on your part. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level. Or enjoy massive exposure from a little extra time making quality contents.
It will be your choice. You may not be aware of the fact that an article submitted on directories is not meant to have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared on a narrow group of people.
Learn the difference between these two and it will surely help you know what kinds of articles to write and to submit.

3 Things To Do Before You Submit To Article Directories is a post from: Art of Money

Flickr image by Patrick Q.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”  Bill Cosby

I’m wonderting if they could get anymore mixed messages on that sign? That Panda doesn’t really seem to be enjoying the idea of eating that burger much either. Maybe he’s hoping the chicken will steal it.

Hamburgers By The Bagfull is a post from: Art of Money

To continue the series of business basics [the fist segment was Business Strategy], this story is about the business value chain.

Once your business has chosen its strategy, the next step is to implement the strategy through its value chain:

A value chain is the way a business adds value for its customers by processing inputs into a product or service.

Maybe you’re thinking, but Jon, I have a blog or a website and what you’re saying sounds like a big manufacturing business.

Well, call it a personal crusade of mine, to try and get micro online businesses to apply the same principles that the big boys use. I honestly believe it is the best way to succeed and grow so bear with me and let’s hope it make sense by the time I’m done.

At its core the value chain is a very simple set of steps that converts inputs or raw materials into that mythical substance…customer value.

Here’s simple illustration:

Inputs » Business Processes » Products or Service » Customer Value

Let’s use a blog as an example, since most bloggers don’t think about traditional business methods.

Inputs: At a high level inputs for your blog would start with life experiences, research, a website, and the internet. Of course these can all be broken down into sub components like blogging tools, sites you visit for news, your day job etc. In a business like blogging the inputs are usually available to almost anyone…that’s one of the reasons that blogging has become so popular: it has a very low barrier to entry.

Business Process: The business process is the key to success for a blog or any other business. There are many important factors but the key ones are:

• efficiency: how quickly can you process inputs and turn them into products [stories].
• quality: can you maintain quality levels above that of your competitors [this depends of course on your business strategy, but most blogs are based on quality differentiation]
• marketing part one: how do you gather information about your customer’s needs and how well you are meeting them?
• marketing part two: how do you attract new visitors to your site and keep the ones you do have coming back?

Products or Services: If you’re a blogger your product is your content and also the general user experience while at your site. That’s why interactive features such as poles and discussions that happen in comments are popular on blogs. They provide engagement and add to all users’ perception of value.

Customer Value: In a traditional business how successfully you are creating customer value is easy to measure. It is simply how much someone is willing to pay for your product. Guess what, in a blog it’s just as easy…no it has nothing to do with your Adsense earnings…it’s the most valuable commodity of all…your visitor’s attention. The measure of your site’s value is basically how much attention do you command from your visitors multiplied by how many visitors that you receive.

From this point how you choose to monetize that visitor attention also comes into play and it should be integrated into your strategy and your value chain.

The primary benefit of taking basic business principles and applying them to your blog is that now you have a framework for the measurement and improvement of your online business.

Which points along the chain are the weakest? Which are the strengths? How can we improve the weaknesses and better leverage the strengths?

For me I recently realized that my blogging platform was the weakest link in my value chain. Even though my site received significant traffic and had many inbound links I made the business decision that in the long run I’d be better off to move to start a new site on Wordpress and abandon the old site. While it’s not easy to turn your back on a year’s worth of work, the wisdom of the decision from a business point of view is clear.

Already, after only 10 days of the new site, I have many features that were only a dream on the old site and my time spent working on the technical side of the site has decreased dramatically and my time spent posting has gone up. It may take 2 years for the decision to pay off fully, but in the long term it will be well worth it [business tip from experience: in general always favor the long run when making decisions - it takes time to get to a place of quality and the more sturdy your foundation the smoother the ride will be].

Conclusion:

Don’t neglect time tested business principles just because your business is small or micro…they still work and they can be applied to any business form.

Always start from the end of the chain and envision what the value take-away or benefit the visitor will receive from trading his or her time for the experience of browsing your site. The clearer you can define this benefit to your customer the easier it will be to create and improve the rest of the value chain.

Ideally you’ll work at least some of this out before you begin your site, but if you haven’t, don’t be afraid to make corrections, even dramatic ones if necessary, to favor the long term results that you are seeking. If you don’t have the results you are wanting then look to the basics of the value chain to deconstruct your site’s business processes and understand where and what you can improve.

Business Value Chain for a Blog is a post from: Art of Money

I just discovered a great online resource for online businesses. Check out Jim Edwards’ low tech website I Gotta Tell You. Despite the low key style the information is solid and the marketing techniques are first rate.

Jim’s current passion is online video and his current video is 5 Bad Words You Should Never Say in your sales copy:

You’ll have to head over to Jim’s site to find out his reasons for not using these bad words…they make a lot of sense. He’s also a funny guy, so you’ll be entertained as you learn discover his secrets.

5 Bad Words You Should Never Say is a post from: Art of Money