Here’s an excellent talk about time management from a Randy Pausch. Randy gained fame for his “Last Lecture” but here he shares time management tips from the perspective of someone with less than 3 months left to live.

Below you’ll find the notes that I made while watching the video. And here are the powerpoint and pdfs of the slides from the lecture.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why Am I doing this?

• Does it help me get to my goal?
• Is it fun?

If there isn’t a good reason, then just cross it off of your to-do list.

• Goal setting: it is much more important to do the right things adequately than it is to do thing right. Also, don’t do the wrong things beautifully.

Remember the 80/20 rule and ruthlessly shove the 80% of the things that don’t matter, off of your to-do list.

Inspiration is Important

“If you can dream it, you can do it!” ~Walt Disney.

Entire original Disneyland was completed from first shovel dig to first paid admission was completed in 366 days!

Planning is Essential

• Failing to plan is planning to fail!
• Plan each day, each week, each quarter (semester, whatever makes sense)
• You can always change your plan, but only once you have one!

To Do Lists

• Break things down into small steps
• Child can’t “clean his room” it’s too big, but he can ‘make the bed’, ‘put away the clothes’ ‘vacuum the floor’
• Do the ugliest thing (least comfortable or most impactful) first. [if you have to eat a frog, don't spend a lot of time looking at it first, and if you have to eat three of them, don't start with the smallest!]

– Being a boss is about “growing your people” so it is better to spend twice as much time teaching them how to do something than it would take you to do it yourself.

Four Quadrant To-Do

Most people sort by order received, or by due date, both are WRONG!

Easy part

Which ones to work on first? Upper left!

Which ones to work on last? Lower right!

Where everybody goes wrong

After number 1, they do the “Due soon, but not important” because they are due soon, but to be very productive, you will have an “ah-ha” moment where you realize that you should NEVER do anything that is not important.

A way to do this is to use a spreadsheet with a column and the first column is priority from 0 – 9 then you can add to it at the bottom and then sort by priority.

Paper Work

• It is crucial to keep your desk clear
• Only have one thing on your desk at a time – the thing you are working on.
• “Touch every piece of paper (or email) only once maximum”
• Your inbox is NOT your to do list – either read it and take care of it now, or put an item on your to do list.
• Everyone must have a place to put papers – ideally an alphabetical file system

Misc

Write thank you notes to express gratitude, it will make you rare and remembered and it’s a good thing to do.

How to eliminate to dos

Say NO.

Use gentle “nos”

We all have times where we are most creative – productive

These times are not intuitive; you have to discover them by trial and error

Defend these times ruthlessly

Same goes for “dead time” where we are not productive.

Use these for exercise, meetings, errands etc.

Interruptions

Have a very high cost, since it can take a long time to get back “into” what you were doing.

Tips:

• turn phones calls into email – have a phone message saying to send you an email
• Go to email only when you are ready – don’t let it interrupt you.
• When someone calls you say “I only have 5 minutes” at the beginning of the call.

Time Journals

Time is the commodity, so find out where it is going

Monitor yourself in 15 minute increments for between 3 days and 2 weeks.

Will yield fascinating revelations about where your time is going.

From the time journal data ask Yourself

• What am I doing that doesn’t need to be done?
• What can someone else do?
• What am I doing that I can delegate to someone else?
• What can I do more efficiently?
• How am I wasting other people’s time

The Goal
You become more efficient at work so you can spend more time doing what you love.

When you have all the time in the world, you treat your time like it isn’t precious

Focus your time and energy on the things that matter, and let go of the ones that don’t

Procrastination

We don’t usually procrastinate because we are lazy.

Understand: doing things at the last minute is really expensive.

Deadlines are really important; we are all essentially driven by deadlines. If you don’t have a deadline, make up a fake one.

When you are procrastinating, identify why you are not enthusiastic. There is always a deep psychological reason. Eg. Afraid of being embarrassed, or afraid I will fail, or fear of doing something, fear of asking for what you want.

Delegation

You can accomplish much more, when you have help.

Don’t micromanage – when delegating:

1. Give them responsibility AND authority to get the job done.

2. If you trust someone to do the work, trust them enough to give them the time and resources and authority to get it done – give them the whole package.

3. Delegate but always do the ugliest job yourself.

4. Treat people with dignity and respect.

If you want someone to get something done for you:

• Give them a SPECIFIC thing to do
• A Specific Date & Time when you want it done
• A specific penalty for not completing or a reward for accomplishing on time.

Don’t be afraid to challenge people – most people want more of a challenge.

Don’t tell people how you want it done – tell them what you want and let them do it.

Tell people the relative importance of each task.

Beware of reverse delegation – people who try and give you tasks back.

Reinforce behavior that you want repeated – praise is valued highly.

Meetings

Must have an agenda

Take away all Blackberries – so everyone is all there.

Must have someone take the minutes – so people are held responsible.

Email

Never delete anything – because it is a record and searchable.

If you don’t get a response within 48 hours, then it’s okay to nag them.

Don’t read email on vacation – it’s not a vacation if you are reading email!

Last Tips

Don’t watch television – average American watches 28 hours a week. If you don’t do a time journal, at least track how much time you watch TV in a week.

Pay people to do things like mow your lawn.

Never break a promise, but it’s okay to re-negotiate in advance.

Ask people in confidence for feedback – it can be very valuable.

Time Management Tips by Randy Pausch is a post from: Art of Money

In this article I’m going to show you how to give your Internet business the look of a big professional company for under $300.

As well as looking more professional, my tips are going to protect your privacy and still allow you to be in touch with your clients and website visitors.

There are really five things you need, or five channels of communication to open up and protect.

1. Email, 2. Physical Address, 3. Fax Capabilities, 4. Phone Number & 5. Office Space.

Email, address and phone are required when you register a domain name, for example. And the fax is optional but still used for a lot of other small business tasks. Office space may or may not be needed depending on your business.

1. Email

Get your own domain name and set up a professional email address. Be creative with these email addresses, don’t forget they can be great marketing tools:

• Top10Results@YourSEOcompany.com
• WealthyYou@BusinessCoach.com
• EasyBlogging@RealBlogVideos.com

For your domain names, it is silly easy, go to Hotmail or Gmail and get one. So we’ll assume you can handle this aspect. In short grab an email from these providers and forward it to your main email address. That way if you get too much spam, you can kill it off and get a new one.

2. Physical Address

Probably the most risky aspect of being online is to have to give out your physical address. A possible worst case scenario would be something like this…

I write something on my blog and some crazy takes it personally and shows up at my house and goes postal on me and my family. You’d be amazed at how many website owners don’t know that I can find out their address and phone number in about 20 seconds.

Yes, you can get privacy protection on your domain names, but it gets expensive if you have a lot of domains and I have received some cool correspondence by placing my address on my websites (freebies like magazine subscriptions and invites to events come to mind) so I prefer to keep this channel open.

Getting a post office box is the only option that takes care of the problem, but post office boxes are, well, post office boxes, for a small business they look unprofessional and there are some places that won’t send correspondence to a post office box.

The solution: The UPS Store!

There are probably other places that offer this service too, but up the street from me, my UPS Store rents me a postal box for about $120 a year and here’s the address that they give me:

Jigsaw Online Media Inc.
Suite 240, 10654 82 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6E 2A7

I’ve had local people say they would meet me at my “office”

I had to tell them it would probably be a bit too crowded in a 4×4x12″ box, but I was impressed that they actually thought I had a real office.

The other major advantage is that there is an attendant there during regular office hours. This means if I am expecting a parcel, they will be there to receive it. Have you ever waited around all day for a delivery that was promised at 9am and came at 3:30p? No more!

Now I can actually promote my address online and still be safely anonymous a few blocks away.

3. Faxing

A hugely out dated tool that is unfortunately still used quite a bit. Unless you’re an antique collector I don’t recommend buying one of this machines, but you will likely need one occasionally in your small business.

Luckily, and most people don’t realize it, Windows XP has a built in fax machine application. Used in combination with the scanner that is built into most printers these days and you have everything that you need for a high end fax machine. This article outlines exactly how I use it to send and receive faxes easily without having a fax machine from MS Word.

I use XP, but Windows Vista also has fax and scan capabilities.

4. Phone Number

Now do I want Joe “hates my latest blog post” calling me at 3am to tell me about it? No thanks!

Do I want Joe “deep pockets” to call and offer me big cash for my hidden gem affiliate site? Yes please!

The answer: SkypeIn

With SkypeIn I was able to purchase a dedicated land line phone number for $38 (a year.) They are available in a huge number of locales, unfortunately Canada wasn’t one of them, so I chose Mountain View California, that way when Mr. Google calls with his take over offer they can make a local call.

SkypeIn also allows me to be really flexible. I can log in through the regular Skype application and set incoming calls to be forwarded to my cell if I’m expecting an important call, or just let them go to voice mail. Skype will then put up a little flag to let me know that I’ve got a message. I click a button on my screen to listen to any messages.

Here’s my number: 650.206.2516 …don’t be a stranger!

If you are running some kind of service and want to take it to the next level, you can grab low cost toll free numbers at places like Tollfreemax and for a low monthly cost and further enhance your professional image. For certain products and services offering a toll-free number could dramatically increase sales.

5. The Next Level

If you want to take it up a level from here, you can get entire virtual offices, complete with receptionist, book as you need it boardrooms and temporary, rent it by the hour, office space that looks like you own the whole floor, from companies like Regus.

That’s it, my tips for creating a high end company image for your online business for about $300 bucks a year. Do you have any other to add to my list? Or better ways of doing what I’m trying to accomplish?

5 Tips for Setting up a Virtual Office for Under $300 is a post from: Art of Money

I was doing some market research for another project and I wanted to share an interesting discovery. Part of the purpose of the project is for me to try my first AdWords campaign (a current hole in my online business toolbox) and I was researching existing ads for the topic that I’m after.

Here are the top ten ads for the phrase “no teletrack payday loans”

Don’t Get A Payday Loan
www.MogoMoney.com/Apply Our Zip Loan is half the price. Hassle free loan. Get money now.

No Teletrack Payday Loan
TasefulFindings.com Find No Teletrack Payday Loan. Compare Leading Providers Here!

No Teletrack Payday Loans
loannopaydayteletrack.com Directory of No Teletrack Payday Loan providers. Get $1,500 now.

Payday Loans
Bad Debt, Poor Credit, No Credit.
Apply for your Payday Loan today.
personalloans.com/Payday_Loans

Top Payday Loan Sites
We list Payday Loan sites with the
lowest rates & fastest cash.
www.loanpayday.ws

Cash Loan
We offer Cash Advance Payday Loans.
Cash Loan-Cash Advance-PayDay Loan
acashloan.net

I was scammed 37 times
These websites are absolute scams
I will show you the ones that work
Dannys-Scam-Review.com

No Teletrack Payday Loan
No credit check personal loans
Low rate, no fax, bad credit loans
www.no-teletrack-payday-loans.com

Fast Cash Loans
Online application, fast approval
receive your funds in under 1 hour.
www.4fastcashloans.com

Top 10 Payday Loans
We have ranked the top Payday
Loan providers for you.
www.a-pay-day-loan.org

No teletrack payday loan
Looking for ?
Search wide selection of options.
www.CashAdvanceYour.com

Next I ran them through Glyhpius (my Glyphius review) to score them. For those of you that don’t know about Glyphius it’s a little scanning application that allows you to “score” phrases against a huge database of previously proven profitable terms. In essence it allows you determine the selling potential of a word, term or phrase based on what words, terms and phrases have been found on highly profitable ads from the past year.

I loaded them all into Glyphius (broken into components) and here’s the results (the Glyhpius score is in front of each phrase):

Titles
=====

151 I was scammed 37 times
36 Cash Loan
35 Fast Cash Loans
-35 Payday Loans
-44 Top Payday Loan Sites
-74 No Teletrack Payday Loan
-74 No Teletrack Payday Loan
-76 No Teletrack Payday Loans
-77 Don’t Get A Payday Loan

Middles
=======

269 Online application, fast approval receive your funds in under 1 hour.
189 Looking for ? Search wide selection of options.
184 These websites are absolute scams I will show you the ones that work
140 Find No Teletrack Payday Loan. Compare Leading Providers Here!
124 We list Payday Loan sites with the lowest rates & fastest cash.
108 We offer Cash Advance Payday Loans. Cash Loan-Cash Advance-PayDay Loan
75 Our Zip Loan is half the price. Hassle free loan. Get money now.
39 Directory of No Teletrack Payday Loan providers. Get $1,500
24 Bad Debt, Poor Credit, No Credit. Apply for your Payday Loan today.
10 No credit check personal loans Low rate, no fax, bad credit loans
-45 We have ranked the top Payday Loan providers for you.

URLs
====

229 Dannys-Scam-Review.com
182 TasefulFindings.com
174 www.CashAdvanceYour.com
169 www.4fastcashloans.com
134 www.MogoMoney.com/Apply
121 personalloans.com/Payday_Loans
103 www.a-pay-day-loan.org
99 acashloan.net
53 loannopaydayteletrack.com
50 www.no-teletrack-payday-loans.com
45 www.loanpayday.ws

What is interesting to me about this data, is how high the phrases with the word “scam” in it have ranked. Remember this data is based on known profitable advertising. Which means that the word “scam” is proven to be profitable.

Why Market Research is So Valuable

The purpose of market research is to discover valuable nuggets of information. And my revelation above is a perfect example of one of those types of mini-goldmines. I know that in a lot of niches there is space for taking the angle of scam buster as a unique approach that would build trust with an audience and provide a competitive differentiation.

There is obviously a lot of fear of being ripped off when doing anything online and acknowledging that can be an important factor in a profitable website.

Anyone else make any interesting discoveries in doing market research for your niche?

Is Scambusting an Online Goldmine? is a post from: Art of Money

Here’s my list of highlights from ProBlogger’s latest (and greatest) group writing project.

I’ve selected only the ones that will further us in our goal to make $100 a day in our Internet businesses

• Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO by Solo SEO
• Top 5 Easy Ways to Create Information Products by Gobala Krishnan
• Shut Up And Write by Novelr
• The Top 5 Most Half-Baked Ways I’ve Tried to Earn Money (And What I’ve Learned) by Money Under 30
• 5 Must Have Wordpress Plugins by Workboxers
• The Top 5 Things that Hinder me from Internet Income by Kalibur
• SEO Plugins For Your Wordpress Blog by Pure Blogging
• My Top 5 Successful Bloggers Who Made a Difference by Liz Strauss
• Top 5 Domain Branding Tips For Bloggers by Domain Works
• Top 5 GTD computer tools by Daily Iteration

And a few very noteworthy ones I found linked from posts in the project:

• How a Best Posts Page Will Increase Your Blog Subscribers by Stuntdubl
• 6 FREE Ways To Turbo-Charge Your Blog by Kumiko’s Cash Quest
• Affiliate Marketing – Conversion over Volume by Net Business Blog
• Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network: An Ode to Altruistic Stumbling by Dosh Dosh
• Making A Career Out of Blogging by Dot My Spot

Some great new blogs on here. There are three benefits to Darren’s projects. The first is all the great linkage that happens, the new readers who find your site and then the cool sites that you get to discover.

Money Making Tips from Top 5 Project is a post from: Art of Money

[Update] Alinks seems to have vanished from the web – us Cross Linker to get the same functionality.

aLinks is a great WordPress plug-in that you find on surprising few “top WordPress plug-in” lists.

What aLinks Does

aLinks is a link manager. On the Settings page, you define a “keyword phrase” and then assign it a description and URL.

For example I could set up the following:

Keyword: art of money
Description: great tips for making money online
URL: http://www.artofmoney.org

Then aLinks will scan the content of my posts and I whenever (with some limitations, see below) I use the phrase ‘art of money’ (you define whether you want it case sensitive or not) it will automatically add a hyperlink with the information you entered.

I have one set up for art of money, so the words above should be turned into a hot link, even though I entered them in plain text.

Here’s why I like it…

aLinks Saves Time

Of course, you should hot link your blog’s name every time you enter it into a post (why? so readers who are reading in a feedreader or some other site, can easily link come to your site), but that can take a lot of time. aLinks fully automates it, once you’ve set it up, you never have to worry about making the actual link again.

Keyword Target Your Site

As well as the aLink entry above I could set up the following:

Keyword: make money online
Description: practical tips for making money online
URL: http://www.artofmoney.org/

Now I’ve entered my site’s target keyword phrase (for SEO purposes, I recommend just doing one for your home page, but you can create a different one for your categories.) Whenever I use the phrase “make money online” in any of my posts, aLinks will create a link to my home page.

This will help to educate the search engines to the fact that I consider Art of Money to be the best resource for “make money online.”

Affiliate Link Management

Hot linking to your own domain is all fine, but where aLinks really kicks butt is for affiliate linking. Let’s take an example of a product that I use and mention a lot:

Keyword: Keyword Elite
Description: keyword research tool
URL: http://smdaily.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net/

and then I would set up another one for the keyword phrase that I want to target – this one point to my review:

Keyword: keyword research
Description: keyword research tool
URL: http://artofmoney.org/internet-business/keyword-elite-keyword-tool-review/

Whenever, even in past posts, I have used either of those phrases, aLinks will add a hyperlink and title to my posts. For someone inheritably lazy, as I am, who often just leaves affiliate links out of posts because I’m too lazy to look them up, this plug-in is a god send and could potentially boost income dramatically.

Easily Swap Out Links

Here’s another fantastic benefit that any experienced affiliate marketer will appreciate. Affiliate programs come and go. Just last week I received an email from Commission Junction that one of my advertisers had expired.

Imagine how much work it could be in some cases, if you have manually added deep links to a lot of posts using this advertiser’s affiliate program. With aLinks, rather than having to manually edit all your posts, all you have to do it swap out the URL in the aLinks settings page, and “BLAMO!” all the links in your site are automajically updated.

Other Great Features

aLinks, also has a stats feature that shows you the number of clicks you are getting on each link you have set up.

aLinks has very well done documentation that actually clearly explains how to set up and use the plug-in. One of my pet peeves is WordPress plug-ins that only the developer can figure out how to install and use.

aLinks can turn keywords into Amazon links, if you want to enable that module (read the documentation).

A Couple Complaints

1.) Even though on the setting page, you can say that you’d like to automatically replace up to “x” number of occurrences of a keyword on a page, it doesn’t exactly work.

To replace 8 occurrences of the phrase “art of money” I need to set up 8 separate (but all identical) links in aLink. Strange that they did it that way, annoying but not impossible to work with.

2.) It doesn’t seem to auto link keywords in comments. Which would be a really cool bonus feature.

3.) It would have been soooo simple to include a basic affiliate link cloaking module. aLinks would have been killer if it also cloaked the affiliate links…maybe they’ll add that functionality, but for now I’ve provided a couple ways to cloak your links manually.

A truly timesaving and highly useful plug-in that doesn’t get enough love in the blogsphere. Download aLinks for free and start entering you links once into your link manager rather than 50 times into your posts!

Practical WordPress Link Managing Plug-in is a post from: Art of Money

Sorry all you freeloaders, it’s time this site looked like the rest of the Internet and had an in-your-face money making strategy

I’ll post more of the how’s and why’s in a few days, but for now, I thought I’d just acknowledge that no, Art of Money hasn’t been sold, or hacked by rogue Google engineers.

Currently I’m testing a cool system for delivering the ads. It is actually a system that I will use on Home Turf Media, but it is easier to try it out here first.

In WordPress

Rather than just dropping ad-code directly into your template, define a specific php file for each ad placement on your site. Then use a php “include” statement to suck the code from these files into your template dynamically. This will keep the code in your template more manageable and easy to read.

If you want to change or update your theme you’ll have the ad code already separated out, all you’ll need to do is migrate the include statements.

The Ad Server

The next part of the picture is an ad server. I signed up at AdSpeed, they have a free (no credit card required) 10 day trial and there pricing is affordable for even a single site with decent traffic: $9.95 a month for up to 100,000 ad impressions.

Once you have signed up with an ad server, then you create a “zone” which just means a place where you’ll plunk one or many ads.

Then you need to create at least one ad and put it into the zone you set up. If you’re using AdSense you can grab the regular code that you would use in your template and place it into an “ad” on your ad server control panel.

Next you grab the code for the “zone” and put it into the php ad file that you created in your WordPress theme.

A Quick Recap on How the Ad System Works

1. A reader comes along and visits your site.
2. The server executes the request and activate the WordPress files. The WP theme you are using calls the special ad.php file with your ad server zone code in it.
3. The ad server zone code calls the ad server company’s server and requests one of the ads that you have assigned for display in that zone.
4. If, for example, the ad selected in that zone is from AdSense, then the code in the ad will call Google’s server and request a set of AdSense ads.
5. Finally the page is displayed to the visitor with AdSense ads in place.

8 Big Benefits of Using an Ad Server

While the system may seem complex and confusing there are some very real benefits to setting things up in this fashion.

1. Rotation – with an ad server you can rotate many types of ads into a zone. Meaning I can create an AdSense ad, and any number of banners ads and then allow the server to display them all into the zone according to criteria that I define.

2. Testing – now you can do proper testing. For example when using AdSense you can set up split testing and really know which ad link colors are getting the highest CTR’s. Or which of two banners for a product gets the highest click-through rate.

3. Weighting – this is one of the control factors for selection of ads into a zone. Ads with higher weighting are displayed more often. Advanced ad servers will allow you track clicks or even earnings of an ad and then run algorithms which will maximize your profits for each ad impression based on many factors.

4. Tracking & Statistics – the stats you receive with an ad server are pretty amazing. Clickthrough rates by region, impressions and clicks by the hour of the day, visitor tracking by ads viewed and sequence and on and on.

5. Targeting – you can target an ad geographically, to a certain page on your site, to a certain site only or have an ad that displays only from 9am – 5pm in a certain time zone.

6. Advertiser Control – an ad server also allow you to let advertisers view the statistics on their ads. They can view CTR, geo-region of the visitors seeing their ads, number of impressions etc. Being able to offer these types of stats to potential advertisers is a definite selling feature.

7. Freedom – you can now sell ads in many different ways. For example you can sell CPM (cost per thousand impression) ads directly to advertisers. Or you can target a single page with an text link ad.

8. Be Your Own Client – you can put ads for your other sites or for jobs you may want to have done, into your rotations. For example, if you want to sell a text link ad at the bottom of your posts, you can set up a zone to display in that spot, then create an ad that says, “Would you like your ad to appear here?” with a link to your advertising rate page. Show your sales ad until all the space or inventory is sold.

Drawbacks

The AdSpeed system does not track clicks on AdSense, so you’ll still need to use AdSense channels to track CTR on AdSense.

There is a slight learning curve, mostly just to understand how to set everything up and get the most out of it. It is a lot easier just to put the AdSense into your template.

You are relying on an external server to display ads. If your ad server company is down, you don’t get any ads…one more point of failure in your system.

Conclusions

As with almost any type of computer system, separating out the pieces of your advertising system has very distinct and powerful benefits.

By inserting an ad management tool in between your site and the ads you want to display, you gain a lot of control and increase the profit potential of your site.

If you have multiple sites then the system really starts to pay dividends, since you now can have your ad inventory centralized in one place and display it across many sites. If you realize that the color blue “000080″ is the most profitable, you only need to drop the other colors from your rotation and all your sites are now updated. Much better than carving up your templates in 6 WordPress sites to replace the link color.

If you find a hot new offer and what to insert it to display on your site on 20% of your ad impressions, it can be done in seconds. If you realize that it is profitable, you’ll be able to increase it’s weighting so you can make more money.

Considering the cost of about $10 a month any site getting decent traffic should be able to pay for a system like this many times over just from the increase in earnings off of one AdSense split test on ad color.

This is the way that big sites and networks set up advertising on their sites, but there isn’t anything preventing almost everyone from doing it.

AdSpeed has a live demo if you’d like to have a peak at an ad server back end.

Can Installing an Ad Server Make You More Money? is a post from: Art of Money

When I first started thinking about a city-based blog network I realized that one of my primary revenue sources would likely be link sales, since it would roughly mimic the Yellow Pages ads which were becoming gradually extinct.

What I really wanted was a way to efficiently offer text link ads on specific pages, since I know that they have the most benefit to the advertiser in terms of search engine optimization juice and for direct click-throughs.

To me, with Google discouraging site wide linking and link purchasing in general, it just made sense that to somehow get the links embedded into related content was going to be the future of link sales and search engine marketing.

Sweet Spot Ads

I started writing the specs to the system, click the pic to see my rough notes about how the system would work. I registered the domain name SweetSpotAds.com
and tried to get a couple friends on board to help out.

To make a long story short we all thought the project was a great idea but none of us had the time to get it done.

Text Link Ads To the Rescue 

Today I received an announcement from Text Link Ads that they have implemented a system that is almost identical to my Sweet Spot Ads. It was obvious to me that they are the ones who would stand the best chance of pulling it off since they already had a large inventory of link buyers, which would have been a big struggle for me to build up.

Their system allows you to buy and sell post level ads.

Each Post Level TLA will:

• Be exclusive to one Advertiser.
• Allow Advertisers to have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.
• Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.
• Each ad will be on a single page only.

Despite the fact that I may have missed out a chance to bring a killer idea to market, I’m very excited about this news. I think that this is the future of link buying and selling and I’m sure someone is already working on a WordPress plugin to allow bloggers to sell ads on their own posts without too much maintenance work.

Hit the Sweet Spot by Selling Post Targeted Links is a post from: Art of Money

This is the final installment of my domain naming series. It’s just a bunch of tips and tool that I’ve used for brainstorming and selecting the perfect domain for your projects.

Consider that the domain name is the single most important part of your website and it’s also the most difficult piece to change once your site is live. It’s worth taking care to make a good choice to avoid domain name regrets down the line.

1. Avoid Keyword Ambiguity in Your Domain Names

Humans understand word meaning with a level of sophistication that search engines don’t have. “Art of Money” is clearly about money to a human ear, but to a search engine it’s a site that is equally about “art” and “money.” You can read my full breakdown of choosing keywords in domain names.

2. Use a Domain Naming Service

With good domains getting harder and harder to find, a new professional industry has popped up: the domain namer. In my article on domain pickers, I’ll tell you about a service where you can get a killer domain name (from tons of possibilities) by putting dozens of professional domain pickers to work for you for a only $50.

A poor man’s version of a domain naming service, DomainsBot provides a pretty damn good suggestion software. It is software, so don’t expect subtleties in the suggestions, but it can help. I’ve used it a lot in the brainstorming process.

3. Use Scoring Software

I personally use a piece of software that rates potential domain names (and even URL structures) based on a huge database of statistical analysis of top ranking web sites. You can read my Nemeas review for a complete walk through of how it scores possible domain names.

4. Backorder an Existing Domain Name

Sometimes you’ll find a domain name that has expired but hasn’t become publicly available for repurchase. The public are told that these domains will come available in 30 days but the reality is a little different than that.

If you find a domain that you like that is expired (actually the term is Pending Delete) and that domain has any kind of positive history (meaning it has a Page Rank, any decent Alexa rating or a DMOZ link for example) then it is unlikely it will ever hit the open market. You’ll need to register with a backorder broker. I use Snapnames and you’ll have a chance to grab the domain before it gets released to the general public.

There will be a 2 or 3 day auction and you can expect there to be stiff competition for most keyword rich domains, but if you’re really attached to the perfect domain it may be worth the investment. Many of these domains can come with good inbound links, or traffic already in place.

5. Buy an Existing Unused Domain

Doesn’t it just burn you up when you finally think up the perfect domain name and it has been registered but there is no website there? The last statistic that I heard was something like 70% of all registered domains did not have a website on them!

A whois lookup allows you to find out the contact information for the domain owner. Don’t be afraid to shoot of an email or even phone a domain owner. Many times it will be a professional domain speculator, who wants full value for the domain, but you never know when you might get lucky and someone has just lost interest and will let you have it for the cost of a transfer.

6. Look Out For Skeletons in the Closet

Watch out for domain names that have been trashed and banned from Google or other search engines. What happens to search engine spam sites? Google bans them from their index. So if you purchase a site that has been banned, it can be difficult to get Google to put it back into the index, no matter how great the site is that you build on it.

Make sure you visit the Internet Archive and look up any domain name that you are buying on their “Way Back Machine” to see what kind of sites have been on it. Besides search engine spam watch for other types of sites that may not be harmonious with your brand (porn, drugs, warez etc.)

7. Sleep on Your Domain & Vet It with Friends

Sleep on it and vet it – I have a friend that, two days after he registered it, found out that his latest “killer domain name” actually contained a very unpleasant slang term in it.

Especially when you are working with multi-word domains it is actually easy to miss unintended words if you are focused on the keywords. Take away: get fresh eyeballs on your domain name before you commit to it.

Also, make sure you vet with people you trust and that won’t steal your idea; I wouldn’t post it to a public forum to ask for feedback.

8. Take Your New Domain for A Test Drive

Mostly used by professional domain investors, domain tasting allows you to register a domain and throw up a page and see if the domain gets any traffic. For up to five days you can test drive the domain and then, if it doesn’t suit your taste or you change your mind, you can get a refund.

That’s it for my domain naming series, I hope these tips and resources will help you find the perfect domain name and avoid that unpleasant situation of needing or wanting to rename your site after it is launched.

Any other tips that you have that I haven’t covered? Or other questions?

- Jon Symons

8 Tools & Tips for Picking a Domain Name is a post from: Art of Money

In this, the third part of our domain naming series, I’m going to talk about a cool tool that is used for scoring domain names.

The tool is called Nemeas and it attempts to answer a simple question, “How do you know if a domain name is any good?”

Well it’s a tough question to answer, and in order to answer it you probably need to ask another question, “What is considered to be a successful domain name?”

According to Nemeas a successful domain name is one that appears at the top of the search engine results; which seems like a very reasonable yardstick to me.

Nemeas is based on statistical analysis and reverse engineering of search engine results. Specifically related to the domain name and the URL. The application contains a database of statistics that allows it to “score” your potential domain name (or complete URL) against a keyword.

A Walk Through of Nemeas

When you fire up Nemeas you are greeted with a very humble looking screen:

 From there you need to input a keyword to test against and then fill the input.txt file with a bunch of options for Nemeas to score. Here’s the input that I used for this review:

http://www.realblogvideos.com/

http://www.realblogvideos.net/

http://www.realblogvideos.org/

http://www.realblogvideos.info/

http://www.realblogvideos.us/

http://www.realblogvideos.ca/

http://www.realbloghowto.com/

http://www.createablogvideos.com/

http://www.realblogmovies.com/

http://www.easyblogmovies.com/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123

http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

And here is the Output.txt file which gives the scoring, for the keyword “blog”

443,http://www.realblogvideos.com/
376,http://www.realblogvideos.net/
383,http://www.realblogvideos.org/
382,http://www.realblogvideos.info/
302,http://www.realblogvideos.us/
323,http://www.realblogvideos.ca/
411,http://www.realbloghowto.com/
390,http://www.createablogvideos.com/
443,http://www.realblogmovies.com/
401,http://www.easyblogmovies.com/
237,http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/
372,http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123
237,http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/
379,http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

The scores are at the beginning of the lines. You can go through the data and see which domain name gets the highest score, which permalinks structure and folder structure are most likely to lead to high search engine results, based on Nemeas’ analysis of past search engine results.

Things Learned from Nemeas

URL Structure

The most surprising thing I discovered from Nemeas is that in the following example:

1. http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/
2. http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123

 Number 2 scores MUCH higher than number 1 for the keyword “blog” or the word “money” (put slightly less for “monetize”.)

This goes against a lot of the common wisdom of using a category/post-title in your blog or other website folder structure.

I used this minimal structure on my Step by Step Blog site and of course it is a difficult thing to test, but I certainly wouldn’t say that it hurt the site’s search engine rankings. The site does receive targeted traffic related to the keywords in the articles.

The downside of this URL structure is at when you look in your logs, you can’t tell what stories people are on or coming to…a minor trade-off though, for more search engine traffic.

Shorter Is Better

If I had to boil Nemeas down to one thing it would be that, in general, the shorter the better, when it comes to the domain name and the URL structure.

Nemeas can help with setting up your folder structures as well as just on deciding domain names.

Here’s another surprising example:

1. http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/
2. http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

Number 2 scores significantly higher for both “monetize” and “blog” which goes against almost all SEO wisdom.

Summary

I wouldn’t exactly consider Nemeas to be a “must have” tool, but it certainly is unique. The problem is that it is difficult to prove it’s value, put it’s difficult to discredit it as well. Common wisdom puts domain name as a roughly 20% factor in search engine results ranking factors. If that number is even close to true, the money spend on Nemeas, especially if you are creating many sites or registering many domain names, either for yourself or clients, could be very easily recovered.

If you have any questions about Nemeas, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer…I’ll even run a few tests for you if you post a few options that you’d like to have scored by the application.

- Jon Symons
Finding killer apps so you don’t have to.

P.S. This was the third of a three part series about choosing domain names. We’ve covered keywords in a domain name, domain name brainstorming and the article you’ve just read about a tool that claims to actually score domain name (and complete URLs to tell you which ones are most profitable).

Nemeas Review – How To Choose a Domain Name – Part 3 is a post from: Art of Money

Since there are now so many domain names registered, it becomes harder and harder to find a great top level domain name for a new site. Since most webmasters won’t have the big bucks to purchase an existing high quality domain a new industry has sprung up: professional domain namers.

Usually these folks/services charge pretty big money to find a brandable quality domain for your business/website idea, but Picky Domains has applied the Web 2.0 spirit of collaboration to the concept of domain naming and created a brilliant business where you can get a pile of great domain name suggestions for only $50.

This is how the service works. You deposit 50 dollars and tell us about the site you need a name for. What the site does or will do. How many letters or words in your domain you want max. What keywords absolutely have to be in the domain. Dashes or no dashes. Dot com only or not. If we can use slang or not. Etc.

We dispatch this information to our contributors and you start getting a list of available domain names via e-mail. If you see a name that’s a perfect match for your website, register it and let us know the domain name, so we can pay the person who came up with the name. If you don’t like any of the domain names we suggest, we’ll simply refund your 50 dollars upon your request. Our domain namers get paid ONLY if we can find a domain that you register.

Now that’s a very cool idea and a great way to leverage the power of the connected world to provide a low cost solution to a problem.

If you are at all serious about you project or business, then $50 seems like a very nominal fee for getting a team of domain namers to spit out a bunch of cool ideas.

- Jon Symons
Finding meta services, so you don’t have to.

P.S. This was the second of a three part series about choosing domain names. We’ve covered keywords in a domain name, this article which is about domain name brainstorming and in part three I’ll show you a tool that claims to actually score domain name (and complete URLs to tell you which ones are most profitable).

How To Choose a Domain Name – Part 2 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

I’m writing this post to outline my efforts to find and implement an ad serving solution for my blog network. First I’ll take a look at what an ad server is and when and why you and I might want or need to implement a centralized advertising management system.

Then I’ll try and match up the offerings with my needs by taking a look at some of the common ad server companies and their products.

Hopefully by the end I’ll have chosen a server to install for testing purposes and created a plan for testing and I’ll present the reasons for my choices.

What’s an Ad Server?

In my mind, an ad server is a way of managing the advertising on one or many websites.

2 Types of Ad Servers

1. Ad Serving Service

This is what Google’s AdSense is. A service that supplies ads (and advertisers) to your site. You drop in a piece of code, anywhere you want and AdSense provides an ad every time someone requests your page. Most people think of AdSense as a way to monetize a website, which it is, but it is really an ad server, with built in advertisers.

2. Ad Server Software

Imagine Google’s Adsense system without the advertisers in it. What you’d have left is the code which calls a centralized location everytime a page is loaded. The ad server knows what page is calling it, what size format the adspace is, where in the world the person viewing the page is and much more information that can be used to determine the best advertising to present to the visitor.

The other component of an adserver is the back end which allows you to create and manage advertising inventory. Every conceivable type of ads can be thrown into the mix: pay-per-click, cost-per-impression, localized ads, site targeted ads, private ads and of course your own ads to promote your own sites.

Is an Ad Server Right for You?

If the only form of advertising on your site is AdSense, then you don’t need an ad server. But as soon as your needs get even slightly more complex or your traffic increases past a few hundred visitors a day, you may see advantages to running some type of ad server.

Another great reason to have an ad server is to centralize the advertising across many sites. If you have 10 sites and you’d like to change from AdSense to YPN, you could do it without having to change anything on the 10 sites…you just drop in the YPN code and disable the AdSense campaign on the ad server.

Things you can do with an ad server:

• easily manage advertising on multiple sites from one place
• easily split test on colors or ad formats without having to modify the code on your site
• rotate CPM and CPC ads on the same site without modifying your site’s code
• sell your own private ads
• track your own private ads – impressions, clicks, split tests
• geo-target your ads
• time target your ads
• optimize profitability

Advanced ad servers can really ramp up web site profits as they employ algorithms that match the most profitable ads in your inventory with the specific set of variables being presented by each page request on your site (ad serving):

For example if a web site has 10 different advertisers that have paid for a big square ad, the ad server must decide which one to serve (or display). One advertiser may have only agreed to pay for ads from 9am – 5pm. If it is after 5pm, then the Ad Server must not serve that one. Another advertiser may only have paid to show one ad to each user per day. The ad server must therefore see if a user has seen that ad before, on that day and not serve it again if the user has seen it. Another advertiser may have agreed to a high price, but only if the person watching the page is in the United States. In that case, the Ad Server needs to check the IP address to determine if the user is in the US and then decide which is the highest paying ad for that user, in the US, at that time, given what that user has seen in the past.

My Ad Server Needs

As my network become bigger and larger the needs will become more complex. Currently, with 14 sites it is mostly about having the ability to centrally manage ad code and to be able to easily test on ad color.

One of the long term needs is to be able to offer ad buyers a diverse set of targeting options. With an network of city based blogs I can foresee larger advertisers wanting to upload different ads to target a national audience and other ads for a local readers. Ford Motors when they introduce a new line of car, and also promoting the local neighborhood car dealer. An ad server is necessary to provide this type of flexibility for private ad sales.

Ad Server Offerings

I identified 3 ad server companies to compare for this initial investigation.

1. AdSpeed

• Offers a free 10 day trial.
• Reasonable monthly fees starting @ $9.95 a month for 100,000 impressions, which makes it affordable to try out an adserver, even for a small site.
• combines two solutions, a web analytics and an ad serving platform, into one comprehensive solution. You will be able to see more details about your visitors than just impressions and clicks.

2. Zedo

• ZEDO supports surround sessions where users can see just one advertisers’ ad for a day.
• ZEDO also offers state of the art opt-in targeting that increases the value of your inventory
• Don’t have an mention of pricing on their website – a bad move in my mind…their service looks interesting but with so many other options, I’m always skeptical when someone won’t tell me their prices up front.

3. OpenAds

• Open source software – free, but of course you need to install and maintain it yourself.
• Support for AdSense
• Section Targeting -Display advertising on specific pages of your site.
• Geo Targeting – Viewers from a certain country, region, or city.
• Time targeting – Only display ads at certain times of day, or days of week
• User agent targeting – Just show advertising to viewers with a certain browser or computer operating system
• Referral targeting – Advertise to viewers who have just come from a search engine, or from another site
• IP address targeting – Just show an ad to your computer or your office to see what it looks like on your site
• Frequency capping – Only show ads to a viewer a certain number of times per day or per session

Summary

This is just a preliminary exploration of the rather large topic of ad servers. The 3 presented represent only a small slice of the ad server universe. Primarily, these ones were picked based on simplicity and clarity of their presentation; some of the solutions were costing what would amount to a significant percentage of advertising revenue, so these were dropped straight away.

From this list I am drawn to Open Ads, but I’ve been around software development enough to know the hidden costs of using free software – they do have a forum setup with people who are willing to help out and even people for hire…a good sign. I will investigate further and may run a trial of all three services to get a sense of what they are all like.

It’s a steep learning curve, but for any kind of serious online endeavor an ad server is essential as it accomplishes two major tasks: centralized advertising management and maximization of advertising revenue.

If your business is advertising based you may want to look into this type of set up.

If you know about ad servers, please leave a comment regarding what I should look for and any other servers which may match my needs.

- Jon Symons
Ad Server Surfer

The Fascinating World of Ad Servers is a post from: Art of Money

I recently discovered that there was a free version of The Secret available on You Tube [see below] so I thought I’d do a round up of some resources for the law of attraction.

In short the Law of Attraction is:

The Law of Attraction is an idea that is widespread in New Age and New Thought philosophy. It posits to never dwell on the negative, as the metaphysical principle of life is embodied in a “law of attraction’: “you get what you think about, your thoughts determine your destiny.”

1.) The James Brausch Method

In this post James outlines his method for manifesting anything you want to have in your life.

This is a method that I personally use and I really like it. I especially enjoy that the writing method is done in the present tense; for some reason that really contains some magic for me.

2.) John Reese’s Method

Internet marketer John Reese has a very detailed and comprehensive video of a method he uses, called “How to Reboot Your Brain.”

The ‘method’ you will discover in this video is something that I have created and fine-tuned during the past 10+ years of my life. It took me from a depressed (and nearly suicidal) 23 year old that was in over $108,000 of debt to a self-made multi-millionaire.

My wife went through the entire process and really liked it. It allows you to really get in contact with what is going on in your day to day life. And it is a particularly great way to discover the energy drains in your life and the possible reasons why you may not be achieving your goals.

3.) The Secret

The full length version is available for download [~$5.00] at TheSecret.tv but you can watch the first 20 minutes or so here. That is more than enough to catch the drift of it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do you ever consciously use the law of attraction? Has it worked? I’m especially interested in your thoughts about The Secret, since I find some aspects of it fascinating and some a bit frustrating. I’ll post more after you’ve had a chance to have a look and tell me what you think.

The Law of Attraction – Three Resources is a post from: Art of Money

Have you ever wished you had a team of massively underpaid interns that, every time you posted an article on your site, would go to all the social bookmarking sites and add your story too it.

That would be Spamtastic wouldn’t it?

Wish no further, now there’s Only Wire where you enter your login and password for this list of bookmark sites:

• Backflip
• Blinklist
• Blogmemes
• del.icio.us
• Feedmelinks
• Furl
• Jots
• Linkroll
• Looklater
• ma.gnolia
• Maple
• Markaboo
• Rawsugar
• Shadows
• Simpy
• Spurl
• Wink

Then you add a bookmarklet to your browser, and then with one click you can spam add the page you’re on to all 17 sites at once.

Sounds great…but then check out the terms of service:

You agree to let OnlyWire bookmark the http://www.onlywire.com site AND the OnlyWire Sponsor site on each of the bookmarking services you are participating with. OnlyWire will only bookmark the Sponsor site link one time.

So what this means is that every time you submit a story, Only Wire piggybacks a couple of its own sponsor links into your account. UGLY business model. Lesson: read the Terms of Service before signing up for stuff.

I’d have to say stay away from this one…unless you live on the dark side.

This one [Add This] looks a little more creditable.

TagBlitz allows you to offer your visitors a way to add your articles to just about every possible bookmark site very easily. You only need to place one bit of code on your site, when the user arrives at TagBlitz, it offers the ability to add the page they came from to almost any bookmark site. Try it right here, it’s cool.

Jon Symons
Separating the useful from the spam…so you don’t have to.

Social Bookmarking Uber Tools 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

An Email Filter is a Redirection Tool

This is the second installment in my Tech Tuesdays series where I endeavor to present some technical tips that can save you time or help make your life online a little better.

Last week I started out with How to Choose An Email Address so I’d like to continue on the e-mail theme.

Tonight’s topic is: email filters. This topic was kind of inspired by ProBlogger’s group writing project on “Lists.” At one point Darren was saying that the project was a bit overwhelming because he was receiving so many entries.

Darren had asked people to send in their submissions using his contact form which would then get delivered to him via email. I thought to myself, “how could Darren outsource the task of compiling the 301 entries which arrived over the 4 days?”

He could hire someone and then put their email address in the WordPress contact form so they would receive any submissions to the form, but then they would receive any other, possibly important or personal submissions as well…so forget that plan.

The best solution is the email filter!

In Gmail, which is what I use, there is a simple link that says “create a filter” [for the most part all modern email systems have filtering capabilities] that pops open a window with 5 fields on it that you can filter by.

Set the Preliminary Filter options [click to enlarge]

In ProBlogger Darren’s case we would probably create a filter that uses “From:” of his WordPress contact form sending address or the “Subject:” of the WordPress contact form…mine is “[Art of Money] Contact form” so just put that in the subject box and you will catch all the emails sent from your contact form.

Fill in the criteria for how to deal with the filter messages [click to enlarge]

Then you can add into the “Has the words:” box the keyword you want to filter on. For Darren’s project it is likely, because in the submission he asked them to, they would include the word “List Project” in the body of the contact form…so we could filter on that and then we would just get the contact form results for that project.

The last step is to set the option up for what to do with the emails that are caught by the filter.

1.) Skip the inbox. The whole point is to not have to deal with any of these emails.

2.) Apply the label: ProBlogger. This is the equivalent of what would be moving the email to a special or dedicated folder in any other email system.

3.) Forward a copy. To the person who has been hired to do the compilation work. Now they can receive only the filtered emails from the contact form, log into the blog with a limited credentials account and compile the “LISTS” story for Darren.

All he has to do it wake up in the morning, have a look at the post and push the button for it to go live.

That’s the power of an email filter in a nutshell and of course there are lots of other cool and time saving ways to use email filters.

I personally have them set up to search for the word “receipt” and then auto archive receipts for tax purposes.

If you have Internet marketers that abuse your inbox, but you may want to see one in 20 of their messages, just have them filtered into a special folder and then you can have them out of your face but still venture into the folder once and while to see if by some miracle, one of them sent you something worthwhile.

The last thing they are useful for is if you go on vacation, you can filter important emails and send them to a friend who may be able to deal with them in your absence.

That’s it for this weeks Tech Tuesday. If you have any topics that you’d like me to cover, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best.

Jon

Save Time with an Email Filter is a post from: Art of Money

The launch of my first actual product has finally happened. Many tears, one broken keyboard, 4 re-dos and a ton of lessons learned and it only took me 21 days. Rich dude says it should take a month to launch 6 products…so I’m just a liiiittttllle bit behind schedule.So Jon tell us about your “Real Blog Videos” product?So glad you asked!

The product was inspired by a couple things. The first was seeing people on the Rich Dad forums, where I hang out quite a bit,wanting to make money from blogging but not having the technical skills to create a proper WordPress site, so they would end up on Blogger not realizing the limitations they were putting on themselves.

In essence building a blog on Blogger or any other “free” blog hosting service is the same as spending money or renovations to the house you are renting. Yes you may enjoy it, but the value stays with the owner.

What if you blog got really successful, could you sell it? Nope.

What if you came to your senses and wanted to move to a new “Real Blog”…well you would have to do a ton of work setting up redirects or leave all your traffic behind and basically start over.

It just isn’t wise to start a business venture where the best thing that could happen results in something bad.

The other thing that inspired the product was ProBlogger’s What would I do different if I had to start my blog over? series.

Several of the bloggers, including big time names like Seth Godin, remarked that they would have started on their own domain names. Of course, bad bad bad not to own your primary marketing tool when you’re a big time marketer!

[Seth blogs at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ so all his traffic is essentially owned by typepad.com]

There were 3 reasons I could think of for starting out on a “free” or hosted blog:

1. Ignorance. Not knowing the consequences or ramifications of taking this kind of shortcut.
2. Cost. Wanting to save money and being non-committal towards blogging.
3. Intimidated by the technical aspect of setting up a real site.

Jon to the rescue. Now that I have defined the problem, as I see it the successful product goes about trying to solve the problem on each front.

Issue number 1 will be dealt with on this site, on my new blog [some may find it looks vaguely familiar...aren't I a good student!] that is focused on technical blogging issues and in my other marketing efforts: forums and article writing primarily.

Number 2 will need to be approached in largely the same way as number one…through communication.

There are 2 ways that the cost issue can be confronted: firstly it really isn’t that big of expense, buy almost any standards. In the videos I purchase a domain name for $2.99 for a year and I could of gotten it for less had I been willing to wait for a coupon, and secondly quality hosting can be had for $9.95 a month and it can be shared among many sites, which means that if you found 4 friends you would be in business for $2 each a month.

The second way to approach the cost issue is to break down the potential loss of time and revenue from creating a good site but not really owning it. Compare that possibly huge number, as in Seth’s case, with the small costs of getting started on a proper domainwith ahosted blog and the better choice is pretty obvious.

Also, I’ve kept the price low at $15 to accommodate this concern.

The third issue is solved by the actual product. Over 2 hours of instructional hand-holding films walk even a non technical person through every detail of getting a WordPress blog online and set up properly.

Overall, even though it was trying and I do have a lot of room for improvement on every aspect, it does feel great to have the first product done.

Almost immediately traffic started coming in from the ClickBank marketplace. Then traffic started to come in from affiliates who were recommending the product.

So far it is just a trickle, but I saw the power of being at the top of the productfood chain. All of a sudden there are people in cyberspace doing work to try and help me sell my products!

If you have a site or a list of folks you may like to help kick the Blogger habit, then you can earn a 75% commission by going to ClickBank and grabbing an affiliate link.

I call this new place in business the X^x factor because I see that when I work from this place there is exponential expansion possibilities.

So far 6 sales!

Any tips, feedback or ideas on the product concept, the sales page or my marketing approach would be very welcome.

Real Blog Videos Launched is a post from: Art of Money

If you are into watching movies online or you ever purchase online training videos like these or these [shameless
self promotion and affiliate link stuffing - but good products none the less] then you may have wished, like I did, that you could find a way to download the videos and watch them off line.

For me I love heading out to a local café, laptop in backpack and doing a little work while sipping my grandé Frappuccino. So I went looking for a way to stock up on vids to watch while contributing to Starbucks’ share price.

I found 2.

The first is VideoDownloader Firefox Extension and it is, you may have guessed an extension for the Firefox browser. If you don’t use Firefox, then get it too, because it’s the best.

If you insist on sticking with Internet Exploder, then have no fear I found one for you too.

Flash Saving Plugin works with IE and creates a link so all you have to do is right click and press “Save Flash.” It also includes a player to organize and play back your flash movies.

Happy downloading and be kind to your barista.

Browser Movie Download Tools is a post from: Art of Money

I’ve actually begun to really look forward to speedlinking Fridays, it’s fun to share cool sites that you find. I guess that’s why link bloggers like it so much.

• Into selling links from your blog? Then find out what you should be charging on the Link Ads Calculator.
• A free open source [less featured, like no jump URL on the video ending] alternative to Camtasia.
• Another Camtasia alternative. This one comes in at $199 vs Camtasia’s $299.
• Did you know there was a Blog Stock Market? You buy and sell shares in blogs…valuation is based on linking and market demand for shares.
• Suck at color and design? Upload and image and extract a web site color theme from the picture. Cool stuff.

Okay, so if you’re cheap and you want to get into Info Product creation, you can now go 60 days without having to actually purchase the screen capture software [30 trial of Camtasia + 30 Days of BB Flashback].

Have a great weekend,

Jon

Speedlinking – July 21 2006 is a post from: Art of Money

You may have noticed that one of my “Tools I Use” is Robo Form. It’s my goal to go and do reviews for all of those tools so tonight I thought I’d tackle Robo Form.

By the way, before we begin…you can expect affiliate links on this site to products that I recommend. My promise is that if I link to it that I have actually purchased it myself and used it and found it useful.

The other thing that I wanted to do with this review is to produce my first screen capture video. Like it or not video is the future on the web. It is just a way better form of communication than simple text [for most things anyways].

Without further ado here’s the Robo Form review video. I had a little problem with my audio so you’ll notice the sound isn’t perfect. But if you’re interested in business on the web, as you watch notice two things: the first is how cool Robo Form is and the second is how much more information that is being conveyed by a video than if I had written a review of the application.

You get to hear the presenter’s voice, which in itself gives you a lot of clues about them and I can say a lot in a few minutes of video and show you many pictures. Showing something is many times more effective than telling about it. Even for affiliate marketing this type of presentation could give you a significant advantage over you competition.

Play the Robo Form Review Video 

I’d love to hear your comment on the video or Robo Form.

Robo Form Review Video is a post from: Art of Money