INTERNET BUSINESS REVENUE PRO

Developing A Unique And Interesting Brand

2009-06-29T14:09:00.000-07:00

If you really look into brand power the single most important aspect is the power of you, your mind, capabilities, and dreams. People often build on dreams and destiny online often go the farthest.

Some of the hottest sites on the internet include the Fail Blog and LOL cats. These sites may not have been just a persons name and a blog about entrepreneurship but rather were an intregue and major market gap. Few marketers get the attention that these viral content sites get. In a single post on the Fail Blog there can be over a thousand comments!

Imagine if you actually tried one of those crazy ideas or schemes. There is really not solid marketing in somethings but they can develop a mystical brand. I would even encourage you to try to do some of this brand work on a Twitter account.

Finding Twitter Followers For Automated Profits

2009-06-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of discussion about buying twitter followers. Many people are against doing that because as they say buying followers is not real. But let us say that you have a few accounts that you use that automate followers, and tweet advertisements for profits every so often. Would it not be the case that buying followers is a lot like AdWords?

On the other hand most people would argue that the ease at getting a good twitter following would really not make buying followers that important. What is you opinion on buying followers?

A Few Things To Think About Before Starting An Internet Business

2009-06-28T04:07:00.000-07:00

The Internet can be both a major time trap and a success vehicle at the same time. This perplexing paradox has had a major impact on how people view Internet business. On the surface it seems virtually impossible to make a million when the returns diminish rapidly. They diminish when people realize that with their traffic and advertising earnings they will never get to the finish line. Even with promotion unless the ads pay well, are targeted, and have a deep Roi do not expect much.

The first step to removing the trap from your Internet game is to do things that continually have a money impact. This blog post for instance will always after I hit publish pick up a residual income. I can link it to my twitter account and in effect I have just created a funnel for followers on twitter. Then both on twitter and on this blog I can promote products to people who I have been 'gathering' sorta speak.

But this has diminishing returns as well. To overcome the sales funnel fallacy we must look towards weak spots in the market and target them. Maybe it is a sales funnel to some special belts you are trying to sell or whatever. Moving real goods and services in a targeted way is the answer. I could then promote these belts through videos that link to the affiliate page. People would land there wanting belts and nothing else. But just littering the net with affiliate promotion is not enough.

We much then collect our affiliate links and organize them into online stores. For example these belts could be a feature item in your online clothing store. Then you could bring customer direct companies to the consumer on eBay for example and become a stock less seller.

Bring the elements together and you will do well but even that has diminishing returns.

The next step is taking your products to the search advertising field. Most search engines and social networks actually have advertising that you pay for. This is very similar to leveraging online classifieds but paid advertising does especially well because it is placed in targeted locations on Face book or Google for instance.

Defining A Real Purpose For A Successful Home Grown Business System

2009-06-11T15:31:00.001-07:00

There are many false assumptions surrounding business. Many people get caught up in waves of what they are supposed to do and forget what they have to do and what is not necessary. How important is shameless self promotion in relation to creating a good product or service? We do need some cheese on our mouse trap, but just broadcasting that we have a great trap here may actually confuse people to our motives and beliefs.

You can disagree with me as much as you want but I believe that it is imperative to work as much on free digital goods as it is to build a business. Specific videos and pictures can go a long way in bringing people into the trap. Videos seem to do well regardless of age and connect more with people than merely blogging in words why your product is the best.

Capital can be built on a great beverage. There are many high end bottled water companies that do a lot of talking with the quality of their product versus just blasting some annoying TV commercial with some rich people drinking the water and telling us how it turned back the years. Business works like this. The most successful people and businesses start very simple local organic movements and slowly grow their brand on a quality product. For example in the United States there is a decent product from ever state that people can not get anywhere else.

I believe it is important in social media and blogging to consistently reach out to our local circle, and create friends. Even creating a simple local news blog that covers an event a week is a great start. From there if a business is proven it is much easier to win over skeptics.

Things to do locally in social media:

1. Create groups with relevance to local events, issues, and concerns

2. Use your social media capital to leverage the local on an international sphere

3. How is you business going to collect capital today and here rather than tomorrow and elsewhere?

4. Help others locally succeed. If you have an Internet business then teach people locally the tools for success. All major tech companies do this.

5. Regularly contact every local person just to ask them what are they up to. Without meaningful bonds being social is worthless.

6. Create charity foundations and sponsor them with your business. Use your capital and abilities to give back.

7. Take out a pro account on flickr and chronicle your area and business. Link the photo descriptions back to your business.

8. Start a school related to your skills. Many people would be more successful if they used their business skills in a school that they created.

9. Create an event related to your business where you live. The ability to network with real people is more powerful than using social media, and it helps with your social media campaigns as well.

To conclude very few businesses really do well without a significan invenstment in their local economy. The key word is investment here because if you do not contribute to the pot it will be reluctant to give you anything back.

2009-06-11T15:31:00.000-07:00

Using Momentum To The Advantage of Your Business

2009-06-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

Blogging teaches people an extremely important business lesson. That is the power of momentum. Often we are uninspired and unable to find good content to post. Other times we publish an hour long vlog with five hundred thousand words detailing something amazing. Sometimes the news seems like a mundane repetition of things said already. Other times we are surfing the news memes and get every story on the front page of digg.

Momentum highs are actually extremely good times to start side projects whether it be a free standing store, writing a book, or learning a new skill.

Fun is a major momentum driver. If you are having fun on Twitter go with it. The biggest misconception is business is that just because we blog, that we have to stick with it. If blogging is not bringing in a lot of money, why spend significant time on it? It will still be there when we choose to start up again.

Then driving this momentum to even more projects is how the gurus tend to stay ahead of the game. They reproduce products that they know will succeed. Sometimes they are just repeating the same message, doing the same thing, but it helps to tweak this and always make it better.

Once you exhaust the curve you can always go back to a few weeks of just blogging and hanging out. But once you get accustomed to really being on the move, you will be able to repeat it when your momentum increases again.

What Does Your Business Do For Others

2009-06-10T17:44:00.000-07:00

To some degree the definition of service is to help someone do something. In business we see monetary returns and generally people can opt out. OK there are many businesses that force sales on people. For example cable companies do not allow people to switch brands without a fine, banks do not let us take out all of our money and regulate the cash flow, and restaurants dictate how we should look and act. But is this really the best way to run a business? Many marketers on one hand would say absolutely. There is nothing like the smell of free money from forced transactions. On the other hand this can leave a very bitter taste in people's mouths. I am no expert but I suspect many people and companies who cut corners deal with angry people on a day to day basis. Besides creating stress and burning through resources that could be used to produce good products there is a certain price to the company's branding. Do you really want your label to be associated with angry people? But as many argue 'these are the trappings of what is produced by capitalism.' 'It comes with the territory.' 'It can not be changed.' I believe all of these statements to be both fallacies and a tremendous business pitfall. First of all just because you CAN do something in business does not mean you need to do it. Putting people on hold long enough that most people will hang up is one of these black hat tactics. We must realize that we are dealing with people here. And would we ourselves want to really be treated poorly? Secondly do we really need to be number one at the expense of our customer? On one side of the coin being number one equals a major win. But on the other side many ethical businesses do well even if they are not on top.

How Important Is Verbal Communication In Business

2009-06-10T14:03:00.001-07:00

In business what you say and do not say are two extremely important things. But there is a huge element of non verbal communication, and subtle verbal skills that are extremely important.

An example of this is that someone can say objectional things on a vlog but may be sending strong signals that he/she/etc disagrees with the statements. Sarcasm is a slipery slope and the people who actively communicated things through saying one thing and meaning anouther try to avoid sarcasm if at all possible. This is because sarcasm actually undermines the audience. How can they be on the same page if they feel the speaker may be making indirect verbal attacts at them.

There are somethings that we really should not say. I would call these stop phrases. They tend to be negative, based on stereotypes and often turn the listener off. Some subtle stop phrases may be as simple as 'my money making system will make money rain.' The reason this may not work is because it sounds like a scam. As a result many marketers now effectively use rational incentives like 'money saving kit,' 'free trial offer,' 'value buy' and other similar statements. Often subtle language that takes control of situations and attempts to regulate error is the most effective. This is why long landing pages can be problematic. They often contain many fake testamonials, excessive description language for search engines, and many other things that may be hurting conversions. The most effective landing pages use really good stock photo or photoshop backgrounds, are relatively short and are to the point. Language ties into branding perhaps more than how people appear in the page. People communicate with the information rather than your picture which is more for legitmacy and trust.

How To Be More Aware Of Our Twitter Followers

2009-06-10T04:09:00.000-07:00

If you have been keeping it locked to this blog then you now probably get thousands of Twitter followers per hour. If you are trying to build some attraction with your followers it may help to really get to know every follower. It may help to use Tweet Sum to really hand follow back people and really get to know at least a few too.

The Real Reason It Is Important To Connect Socially:

If you want to really connect with people on social media, then in return people will connect back into you. They will generate interest and buzz for your products, websites, and businesses.

Some of the most successful social media gurus on the planet spend more time on social media then they do on their content creation. A not uncommon breakdown is to spend an hour on blog post creation and 6 hours on social media.

People who do not want to know other people on a personal level have a hard time finding the value of social media because it won't work in the same ways. If we do not socialize then people will not reach out to us. Eventually re tweets, and shout outs go down and so does traffic.

Smash Vlog: Big Business, Bigger Technology, and The Biggest Innovation

2009-06-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

2009 is your time to shine. Innovate and use this magic to line your pockets with many pennies! You have many thoughts right? Imagine if someone gave you a dime for each. You would end up with a lot of money. Well your thoughts are worth more than a dime my friends. So figure out how to cash out on your inner genius.

Conveying Meaning Through 3D Business Graphics

2009-06-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

We are quickly running into a 3D web world. Various communities have popped up online that use fantasy 3D images and interactive characters to build a virtual community. This may be an odd future of business but mastering this may be a gold mine branding opportunity. Companies like MiaMedia specialize in this.

Another great place to add 3 dimensionality to images and interactive media is when doing business presentations. Perspector is a company that helps people bring out interest in a PowerPoint presentation. Like the experts say a business presentation is short, usually is self explanatory, uses few words per slide, and exploits easy to understand images. This way communication from speaker to audience, and back is enhanced rather then distracted.

Other images that business use frequently include stock images. For maximum impact be sure that the images were taken today because people seem to know what is new and not new. Countless businesses make the silly mistake of using people from the 1930's in their online literature. I am looking for a powerful dot com brand rather than a history lesson.

If you are looking for amazing communicative 3D images look no further than Elsak. Similar graphics to these are frequently used in blogs as figurative pictures to help people understand and get excited about the blog post. 3D images are directly responsible for retention and focus of the eyes that you want you business to capture.

What Are The Top Business Schools In The World 2009

2009-06-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

The best business school in the United States is North Western. Well that is what people tell me at least. North Western has even opened up an international campus out of state for people who want some warm weather. Sounds like an expensive vacation to me but all to their own. If you have interest in Internet business try learning from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Blackberry, iPhone, etc. We are in a times that all information is free and public. These major companies can teach people a lot about running a business.

The best way to learn business is through experience. The school of hard knocks continues to be the best place to learn how to make money. Most gurus and schools are out to make money. This is why the best teachers are real people just trying to make it in the world. They are candid. They have nothing to sell. A genuine opinion is worth more than a billion reviews and by the way here is the affiliate link.

It is more important to study how people make millions selling hot dogs in a big city then how the fortune 500 companies did it, or some hack sold a billion records. This is a sober truth for people really looking for fast sales systems.

Just close your eyes and tell yourself that you are the CEO of a big company. Open your eyes and I bet you feel much better. I will sell this technique in a book called delusional affirmations! If you can imagine it, work towards it, and do it than you can succeed. Be resourceful. Ask your self 'how can I make a million dollars with what I have.' (rather than what I could potentially have) Ignore people who do not believe you, and do not listen to society telling you that hard work in 9 to 5 slave labor is the only way. Today is your day. The long journey always begins with a step, but also takes awhile. Always keep that in mind.

How To Increase Business Continuity And Improve Profit Margins

2009-06-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

What does business continuity actually mean? In this day and age continuity is a learned knowledge base that drives sales through adaptation. If you are trying to sell something online and do not sell it consider trying something else.

The belief that we need only to drift from failure to failure or that we can just chug out the same thing for years is a mistake. For example an effective implementation of affiliate marketing will bring us immediate results. This is because we did everything right. Usually doing things right is learned in a Business Continuity cycle where we learn what does not work and check it off of the list. The whole concept of Business Continuity online can be blurry. For example social media sites like Twitter may or may not be value able. For many search engines, and the ability of someone else to recognize and cast link votes trumps leveraging. So in this case leveraging can be useless. But the rules of continuity tell us that if we never really drop the affiliate ads in our sites or forums we are guaranteed to make no money.

But many people use the right tools and do the wrong things. Everyone including the gurus can do more to drive sales. Whether it be marketing affiliate deals on Craigslist or creating a sales funnel to a deal we must arouse the desire in the consumer to act. 'Please click this amazing offer below it won't last long' is the typical type of lines that people use.

But sometimes we need more to get people on the hook. According to Business Continuity we need to change a lot until we optimize our pages. Affiliate advertisers do this to drive up the conversions and in turn more people will end up using the affiliate code.

In an online business continuity is important to protect us from something bad happening to our business. The web is fickle and it is important to get money offline, and in ways not related to technology. Reaching out socially is the best way.

In this economy many tech companies help people to increase their continuity and make their business better. One company doing this is Bull.

Become Your Own Keyword Analyzer

2009-06-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

There may be times when just playing the keyword game is guaranteed to get a website or blog banned. But the good news is that if you do not do keyword research you could figure out how to get more traffic and better market your articles. Google has a great Search Based Keyword Tool. Basically we type in a keyword. The tool comes up with suggested combinations. You see a bid price estimate, how much search traffic per month the word gets, and a generally how much competition a keyword gets. This can be an effective way of leveraging an affiliate program especially because you have the ability to target large numbers of people searching for keywords. Some of the best keywords for affiliate programs are exact phrases but if you are pitching off of a more popular keyword you could potentially lure many people in. Blogs have an innate ability to do particularly well in the keyword game. And the beauty of it is that we need little skill besides writing in the word that the thing generates. You would be surprised at how many more comments will pop up, and how much more reader engagement keywords create as well. But on the flip site Google does keep a watchful eye out for keyword spammers. As a result many of the same people who complain endlessly on forums, on their blogs, and around the web that they got sand boxed did so because they create made for keyword sites and do little to add value to the search of Google. As we know a large number of the SEO factors are swayed by human vote so having a site of keywords that do not delve or really make much sense can cause trouble on a web site's Google rank.

What Impacts Do My Tweets Really Have On The Tweetosphere

2009-06-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Marketers tend to get more horizontal leverage on their Tweets. This occurs for a variety of reasons the first that they are really good with the relationship game. Expert marketers approach the Internet like a job rather than a fun place to listen to music and drop an occasional blog post. Marketers are in the game for the long haul and forge deep relationships and great search engine placements. Their sales funnels point to their Twitter accounts as well as their websites, blogs, landing pages, forms, and whatever other concoction they have going.

Attraction marketing is a good place to start if your want maximum penetration of the tweetosphere with your tweets. The 140 words must be good. The content you link to must be good. All of the same rules apply to tweets as they do article marketing. Keywords, subjects, action words, and wise statements all make great Twitter link bait fodder.

I am not sure if the re tweet is the best judgement of the success of a post. For example some of my best memes have been horrible articles. The content will not engage people like it should and accordingly will not lead to any conversions even though the post was in and out of the feature slot for a long time. On the other hand I have marketed a product directly to twitter. The blog post was so obviously a pitch. This post got re tweeted once. And I can directly verify that I got a few twitter app back links and the product ranked a little too well. Basically I got some money. In this case there was not much substance in the post, but it did direct people to a product so in one sense I was reducing the time and space continuum of online commerce and saw a reward. I got a few nice checks from this. This is why people who automate Twitter account make so much money.

One free and easy tool measure the effectiveness of your Twitter use is Tweet Reach. Twitter Reach posts the stats on any search term including user contribution, impressions, and charts these things. Tweet Reach also has a full stat pay service for people interested in that. This blog for instance is not exactly popular but has seen millions of impressions on Twitter which could help the brand via word of mouth because brand recognition need not mean that they hang on the site. An example of this is when I was a Face book noob I used to talk of things I found just to sound cool. In all honesty I was too lazy to even visit the site. I was much happier just browsing, leaving stuff on people's walls, and thinking I had it made. This is why the meme is so powerful because people just pass it and always will. There will always be stuff to pass. This is a hot market that has a long tail in search engines so there is always value in breaking news both immediately and in the long term.

I believe the best strategy is to play good. Build your brand, and your skills over time. Learn the tools and tricks. Evolve into a social media master. It is not that hard if you really want it. Most guru's will tell you otherwise but they usually want people to not take initiative and evolve into a big online money maker.

That would equate competition. And if you were actually honest and liked teaching other people the skills then you would be taking away many conversions from the 'experts' who prey on people who think the answer is just buying something, or slipping an email into a box that is guarantee spam for life. Play your game and you will win. I am not kidding. Step it up because social media is what puts the rat race to bed.

Understanding Economic Chaos

2009-06-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

I do not understand much of what the economy is doing, did or what will do. But I knew we would be here.

Loren Howe has an amazing YouTube channel on this subject. Loren Howe also wrote some good books. Some good points that Loren makes applicable to this site are that when we put money into the market and banks it largely gets ripped. He recommends putting money into stable currencies like precious metals and real estate. I thought this is extremely interesting because many entrepreneurs make this point. Much of being an entrepreneur is working around the money system. Loren Howe makes many other great points that we need to free ourselves from the money system by understanding it. According to him it is best to avoid wage and debt slavery and not fear going broke either. There is a lot of good information check it out. Anthony Weiner has a good response video as well. He makes some good points about the price point of economic entry to New York is in the millions and why this happened.

I then clicked through to watch a great YouTube video about the collapse of the middle class. The speaker is Elizabeth Warren a Harvard professor. The lecture is at the University of California. This video makes some haunting points. Everything points to the fact that most people are in a lot of pain now and why. I make these points a lot with friends and it seems some people are in on it and others do not really believe it. But a Harvard professor can make the point much better than I can.

For a little upbeat inspiration it is a good idea to check out Dattatreya Siva Baba and his great videos.

The Re - Emergence of Online Auctions

2009-06-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

We can safely say that the impact of eBay and Craigslist in the online economy is huge. Allowing people access to some of the best auction tools on earth has led to some people really striking rich fast.

In online auctions reputation is extremely important. The best sellers often have well organized online stores, and malls and can move products quickly like a business does. This means having stock and marketing scarcity as well as speculative prices. Where supply and demand meet is where the auction begins.

Mastering the art and science of the online auction, and online trade sale is as much niche branding as it is setting up a system where you can consistently deliver high quality reasonably priced products to people who honestly want them. World of Good on eBay for example sells products related to the green lifestyle. They left the niche pretty broad so they could bring in cool specialty products and not have them clash with the title.

Swoopo is a great site that sets up both real and false time constraints. Swoopo lists the product with the bid, the real price, and the time remaining. This creates an urgency and the potential for people to make more money. Obviously people could apply this to any storefront or marketing that time constraints do product results. Because often what people save when they shop online is time and money.

Bid or Buy is an auction site with an amazon like sales structure. Bit or Buy also has product affiliates that both hype the business and help sellers unload products. Bid or Buy's products are not fixed so the tags are negotiable. This also drives the economy because many times reluctant buyers are fixated more on the price than the item. Sellers generally want to unload old stock so this is the perfect store for Internet commerce.

Lixtor plays a different game. Lixtor actually helps people through the process. This is a good thing because becoming an eBay power seller is extremely difficult. This is probably the future of online commerce where there are instructions to further lower the barriers of entry so all people can drive home cash.

There is also a tremendous demand world wide for junk. For example when college gets let out people jam the dumpsters full of useful stuff. Or when a car does not work people will often abandon it on the road side. There are entrepreneurs who collect this stuff and salvage it. Much like an under the sea treasure hunter people love to just trash or not use valuable things. Further there are companies who scam people for this stuff. The best way to get around this scam and make a fortune off of your junk is an amazing Texas based site called Salvage Sale. Basically this site specializes in all kinds of broken and unwanted stuff, and people are getting rich buying, selling, refurbishing this stuff every day. This is how an efficient economic system works when both the buyers and sellers profit. For example a person who fixes up old cars would buy some busted up cars, combine the best parts, add some new ones then resell the car for a profit. Car flipping is just a profitable as house flipping (was).

Another new rising trend in commerce online is trading and barter. People realize that money can distort value so there can be a huge profit margin for people who essentially trade stuff for things. This is a lot like trading forex based on the fluctuating value. Sometimes when people ship stuff somewhere the supply and demand curve can completely change.

A good trade example would be that a wicker furniture builder in North Carolina would trade furniture with a Robot maker in Japan. If we switch the products in location there becomes a scarcity and both people can become rich. Taking the dirty money, exchange rates, fees and other none sense out of the equation only makes the economic viability of this type of trade more magnetic.

Online auctions are not without their pitfalls. There is an increased need for honesty, and to deal fairly. This is why many power sellers do their best never to misrepresent what they sell. Because they realize that short term gains can have long term effects like their auction stream dries up. Then what?

How To Incorporate Craigslist Into Twitter

2009-06-04T03:32:00.000-07:00

The real problem with Craigslist is the time constraint put on an entry. Instead of having to re post Craigslist listings it may be easier to just promote your classified ad really hard. The natural best place to do this is Twitter.

Luckily a Twitter tool called Twit List can automatically help you with that. Basically Twit List uses a Craigslist feed to update people's Twitter followers. This way you can just keep posting on Craigslist and drive traffic to the listings.

How To Attract A Few More Twitter Followers For Your Account

2009-06-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

Getting more followers is a genuine focal point of people with little social capital on Twitter. It is good to have more people hear and interact with your conversation. It is also good to hear what other people have to say right from your account.

Recently two similar services have taken the Twitter world by storm. One is called the Twitter Train and the other is called Max Follows.

The way both of these services work is that we enter our Twitter account details. We then follow around 30 people from a list. After we follow them our own avatar is added to the list.

The flaws to this system may be that the only reason people follow is because they want more followers. As a result this is not the best way to drive targeted followers. If you want to do that create a blog in your niche and hyper link to your Twitter account. Then promote your account on your blog, around the web and in social media. (related to your niche)

Also many people I predict will unfollow over the course of a week. But even if these Twitter traffic systems gain us a single follower I guess then it is worth it.

Furthur Proof That The Universe Revolves Around Twitter

2009-06-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

One day Archaeologists are going to uncover our tweets. What do you want your page in the history books to look like? My page would be about the guy who believed Google Wave is going to be big FIRST.

Really I was the first person to watch that video! I hyped the android too and look where it got us! It is almost like I can predict the future. In my crystal ball I do not see Twitter being as hyped as it is. But for now Twitter is the universe. And like any universe there are black holes unto which stuff and energy disappears.

Really it time warps, vaporizes, freezes, gets shot out expands or contracts. Google Wave is like a wave of energy, perhaps a worm cloud on the leading edge of a gigantic storm. Twitter will be a part of the wave, but I wonder how much more powerful a marketing tool a real time wave party could be?

Applying The Twitter Hype Cycle To Business

2009-06-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Twitter is a great web service for the business minded. Our Internet phones plug into the stream and we can obviously move products in our sleep, literally. Unfortunately the wave has been great but I would caution anyone who has all of their marbles in the tweetosphere to start looking elsewhere. To start, opening up accounts and trying new communities would be good. The straw that really broke the camels back in the Twitter hype cycle has to do with the re emergence of Microsoft as an Internet force, Scobleizer hyping Friendfeed, Twitter users now hitting mainstream demographics in a big way, Google's new super projects like the Wave, bloggers disgust with twitter, among other things. Twitter will be a place to be for awhile, but do not be surprised when conversions wane, and the number of active users goes down. The bubble of Twitter is coming undone. Many of the marketers who brought us this era are becoming very similar to the blogs on blogging era, or the make money online era. I am not saying that we can't take decent advice from these people but usually the laws of diminishing returns, and economic principles will limit the scope of what Twitter can do. There is also a growing realization that tried and true social media offer business a much better value than marketing in a hype stream. For example drop an affiliate link into the Twitter stream. You will get a lot of traffic initially then it fades unless you can get the landing page to go viral. If that happens the page is usually out of the Twitter Meme in about a weeks time. The meme aggregators then bump the link and you are down to square A. YouTube videos on the other hand have been proven time and time again to draw an even residual traffic stream, supported by a popular multimedia experience. Talk about your offer in the video and make money for years to come off of your customized landing page. Many marketers are doing this even in the strongest hour of Twitter hype.

Some trends that I have been noticing is the re emergence of online auctions, niche search engines, and mobile intensive web experiences. I am actually going to cover marketing to niche auctions tomorrow.

Who Is Tissa Godavitarne

2009-06-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

I want to on this site shine some light on some of the gurus out there. I am not getting paid for it and honestly do not know if these people make any money. But I am obligated as a reporter of the Internet to talk about these things.

One such person is Tissa Godavitarne that you can watch in this YouTube video. If his credentials are legit then Tissa Godavitarne seems to have achieved a lot of success online. His methods include AdWords arbitrage, niche marketing, site promotion, search feed seo among other things.

According to Tissa Godavitarne you do not need to pay anything at all.

I wish Tissa Godavitarne has a real website out there so I could read about his methods but all the same. I guess he is making money and not spending time on a website.

I actually checked out one of his search engines. The site overall was simply constructed but has money making features built in. Basically it is an engine designed to build leads off of search much like Google targeted search but with affiliate programs. I could see this being profitable.

What are some of the negatives? He claims that his worst students make around 5 dollars a month. Unfortunately any blog with an affiliate banner up top that pays 30 per conversion will walk away with much more in a month. (I make money with no skill level) so I wonder why his methods are better. On the other hand these students may not have a big sales funnel and I am comparing it to blogs that I leverage in social media, search engines. The difference may be that they are on the bottom of the serp, and run little inneffective promotion. I guess even the best program will not make cash if not implemented.

Tissa Godavitarne does claim that he will help promote your site in his program so there is collaboration. I believe that working together is the future of online marketing and it makes sense. We all have skills and combined with promotion exchanges we can all be unstoppable.

I read on Tissa Godavitarne's landing page that he does attend the big time marketing seminars, affiliate seminars, and sales seminars so if you want to connect I am sure you could learn more if his programs are any good from him.

If anyone has ever tried Tissa Godavitarne's programs please leave a comment and tell us if it is legit, how much money you make, how it works, and if you would recommend it.

Vlog: Business Week In Review, Resources Dug Up, And Social Media News

2009-06-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

There is a lot happening this week in online business. I tried to summarize some of the stuff that I covered this week on ibrpro.com in this video log.

How To Use Your Cell Phone To Generate Business Leads

2009-06-03T06:15:00.001-07:00

In business we are often left waiting. Learning to market with phones, cell phones, texting and other related telecommunication mediums including the Internet can give your business a huge boost.

The quickest way to generate a lead is to deliver a known value. If someone knows that your business is legit they are much more likely to act on it. An example of this is when I go to the grocery story I do not think twice about what I buy because I trust that the company will deliver a reasonable product.

Many lead generating marketers run into serious problems gaining trust which will unlock a lot of money even if you are making a lot already. Trust is built through interactions, and recognition. This is where those silly blogs and twitter accounts may come into play. I feel like I can trust people who deliver good free content, are popular, and do not have much online negativity geared towards them.

When you are trusted you can take to your iPhone for instance and generate leads through the mail, with apps, creating videos, web content, twitter, calling people and the list is endless. The best way to generate leads is to offer up hot incentives. Why would I want to buy your product? Do you have any guarantees if I do not like it? What are you really going to do with my email and personal info? Is this just another scam? There are many more questions like this. It is your job to find a way to answer them. Some people take the bull by the horns and have the answers on the landing page, while others will create another sub domain off of the URL to explain this stuff while keeping the landing page clean and simple. The strongest landing pages tend to have deep visuals integrated into the background of the page, a simple product explanation, and have proof of the credibility of the offer.

Many people will feed video into the page as a way of keeping attention. Keeping people on longer has been known to generate more leads. But if there is too much info you need some magnetic incentive, and perhaps a pre poppable offer where people will not feel the need to pay up front. If they do you need to find out how to arrange a discount. In this case the landing page may be billed as a limited time online coupon type of marketing strategy.

Once you page is all set it is time to take to the phones. It may help to pay for a phone system like Voice Shot. Voice shot allow bulk texting, bulk messaging, and other mechanized features that are essential for any business that is interested in telemarketing.

Where do I get my number list? Many marketers just call down the phone book, or use a search engine and use sites with published lists of numbers for a potential subject. There are many issues with marketing to random people including the fact that it is annoying, may be illegal, and will not produce many conversions comparable to opt in marketing. On the other hand if you can leverage an opt in list whether it be real people signing up for it online, in real life or where ever, you can generate many leads because people are targeted.

How can I build a list online? List generation is difficult. One of the simplest ways would be a video about your product with a few fields. You are not asking people to buy anything but rather giving their name and number for a news letter. You can promote the landing page online all over. Other people set up free services and social communities where there is an option to check a box during sign up near the submit button. This box is usually already checked and people have already entered their name a number sometimes many fields back so they do not connect the dots as well. Some numbers can be gotten through general networking, or the fact that you and a group of people have created a small organization to share related leads. When people opt in, they opt in for you brand 'Online Money Systems Network' for instance. When people work together the quality and scope of the leads usually increases substantially. It can then be easier to put the people solely in charge of lead who are really good at that while, using the talent of others to create product landing pages, and others still to create the public service for instance that people opt in generating a lead.

The webs that people spin for a simple sale can be involved and complex, but usually if you want to create an automated income system there is a tremendous need to get things right.

Do You Need A Different Blogger Template

2009-06-03T04:01:00.000-07:00

I change blog templates every 5 minutes but one simple truth seems to remain. Some templates really do feel better, look better and make more money than others. I have no idea why that is or how to master these aesthetics. I have come to one conclusion that web design is really an art with definite parameters. For example there is a million ways to do a blog. Some people may have the posts in little boxes so people can scan the last 100 headlines and the first 200 words of the article, some templates dynamically feed the blog content to the main page, while others just list content with minimal navigational hyper links.

The thing I look for in templates is how well do they engage the reader. A great template should ad minutes to how long people hang out on your website.

Some things to avoid that I am proudly guilty of are clutter, slow pages, lack of flow, underutilized bottom of the page, ads that shock and awe but do not convert, fonts that do not feel good to read, not enough space between the elements, not enough subtlety, overlapping elements, hidden comment forms, among countless other issues.

Any site can always be improved even the best. We must also remember that if a blog is successful it may not actually be the template that made it that way. Many of these sites do have public releases of their template because of the exposure the site gave to the template. But in many cases the template usually feels familiar and dated.

For blogger these challenges are especially prevalent. Blogger looks and feels different than Wordpress which is the common blogging medium of probloggers. Blogger loads differently, behaves differently, and looks differently even if the image we see is exactly the same. I could not tell you why this is but we must keep a few things in mind:

1. Certain widgets from a few sites have been known on occasion to slow the site to a halt. You may want to figure out which widgets, or banners do this and strip them off immediately.

2. Consider customizing the template so people can not immediately recognize it as the template that 500 other people have. This may not matter if you have a unique template or honestly you do not really care. But tweaking the template seems to be part of the process that many of the pros do.

3. If the top of your template is a disaster people will flee immediately. The old saying in the world of advertising is throw ads above the fold for money. Unfortunately this can also drive people away. Some people do other things above the fold that hurt their site like putting 900 page slowing horizontal widgets or having red page error script.

4. It can help to just take a decent temple and focus on your blogging and let the background evolve with the blog. Many people rush to stack a template with too much stuff and do not realize that the template out of box was probably pretty optimal.

5. Incorporating social and content sharing icons into your template are fun and fancy ways to make an impression. After all the only reason to blog these days is for Twitter followers. Just kidding.

6. Weaving your brand into your template can be an especially pronounced tipping point. I guess if you are just article marketing nothing really matters but google. On the other hand if you really want to impress people it never hurts to try.

7. Where is branding headed? Unfortunately the whole look and feel of online branding has changed drastically in the last 6 months. In blogs people have really been pushing content fore ward and in business sites people are trying to take out words to increase conversions. Brand icons have been squeezed, changed shape and moved to different strategic locations.

8. Some templates are timeless. For example the Minima template for blogger has been around forever but people always seem to like it. I consider it one of the most like able blogger templates. One issue is the Nav bar. I am not sure where blogger stands these days in the terms on this. If you remove it from the minima you may need to have a blogger icon in the site to keep promoting their brand.

9. People hate black templates, but I don't. I believe much like many people wear black shirts, black templates are increasingly comming into style. Whenever I click on a link and the site goes black I get immediately impressed and spend a lot of time on it. If it is a blogger blog then I subscribe.

10. The blog incorporation of Friendfeed is the newest trend. To be honest I have a hard time with friend feed. My fingers burned trying to subscribe to people who have subscribed to my feed. Many of the navigational elements are daunting and the community is much like facebook in that it takes longer to get to the bottom of things. On the other hand Friendfeed represents the future. It is the receipt of Twitter especially and also blogs and other social media that can be annotated. Friendfeed has a big following among the professional crowd in ways that would make Linked in jealous. Some people liken Friendfeed to a powerful Twitter app for people who want to connect with people and gain real contacts. One thing is for sure, the avatars on friend feed are much bigger than Twitter or Facebook so I definitely take them more seriously.

11. Incorporating other feeds, syndicated content, feed catchers and other engines into your blog. I am seeing more excellent use of technology on blogs to bring together the best of the web content around the niche. This frees up the author to annotate this content below for example and offer an opinion. If Guy Kawasaki says that great blogs are ones that link to great stuff then why not just get a content catcher and do this automatically in your sleep.

12. Discovering what you are really about. The branding effort is continuous but the best brands online continue to be just regular people on a blog. There are too many fake people online for the purposes of marketing shady deals that just being ourselves does a lot of good for the business brand.

13. There is no template secret. Many pro bloggers for instance only have a bought custom template on their money site. Lately this has been evolving into just using hot premium themes that are widespread but cost money because they have SEO properties. I have seen countless bloggers launch new projects on free templates just to keep costs down until they establish how profitable it is. Another consideration is that if you are creating a network of sites linking into your main site that it may be a waste burning through millions of dollars on the planet templates when your sun site is really where the action happens. I am all for free.

14. It is best practice not to move attribution links. If there really is a page rank penality then that is probably a reasonable payment to the builder of the template. There are plenty of page rank 8 blogs that link out liberally. There may even be legality issues especially on business sites where the template forms a major part of the brand.

15. Many blogger templates have hidden customizations like the page elements can go certain places. You may not know about this until you move it over and the area between the header and the content highlights, or right above the posts highlights. Some pro blogger templates also do this between columns where people can squeeze in extra columns. Always learn the features of your template because in them you can unlock the mystery of blog money. Sounds good right?

16. It is very easy to upload templates onto blogger. If you see squares in the code you have done something wrong. But do not fear if you see the words widgets deleted in red. This scared me so much I destroyed a site. It may help to save your widgets somewhere else because they usually do get destroyed. If you destroyed a widget and want it back try reverting to the theme that the widget was on. It may magically come back.

One blogger template site that has interested me lately is Our Blog Templates.