Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Here’s what I sent to my subscribers about the new Speed PPC system…

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Do you ever wish you were in at the *beginning* of something, when the real pioneers make fortunes?

… like owning the domain name business.com… so you could sell it for $7.5 million?

… or building YouTube and selling it to Google for $1.65 billion?

… or the start of “Pay Per Click” when bids were really cheap?

Hmmm, did I mention Pay Per Click… there’s a reason for that!

A tool is being released today which turns the PPC market upside down. Instead of bidding for competitive searches, this tool lets you bid for hundreds or thousands of low-competition phrases.

Not only that, it helps you build targeted Adwords Ads *automatically*, it helps you build hundreds of Adgroups *automatically* AND it uses a truly elegant solution to build highly targeted landing pages *automatically*.

With all that automation, you can go for thousands of keywords that are low-search volume… and therefore low cost per click.

I’ve been testing the tool, and I’m scared at how powerful it is!

People who get this tool will be in at the very beginning of the “Long Tail Pay Per Click” revolution.

It simply hasn’t been possible to make relevant ads for low-volume searches *and* make relevant landing pages. In the past, you’d bid on low-competition phrases and send the traffic to a non-optimized landing page… then Google would SLAP you for non-relevance and say you needed to bid $5 per click.

Now, with highly relevant ads, Adgroups and landing pages made *automatically*, the whole system works. A new horizon opens up in front of you… a new goldrush.

The tool is by Jay Stockwell, who works with Allan Gardyne of AssociatePrograms.com. This is the first product Allan’s released in the eight or nine years I’ve known him… and it’s total quality.

Oh, and the tool has NO monthly fees… so you get it and keep it… which really appeals to me.

If you’re serious about building an online business, this is a truly great opportunity to start with a level playing field.

Even before the launch I saw these quotes…

Phil Wiley said, “It’s exceptional.” in his newsletter.
Gauher Chaudrhy said, “I love Speed PPC”

Oh, and just to get you a little bit more motivated, there’s an “early bird” $100 discount right now…

Here’s the link to get your copy of Speed PPC. I highly recommend it. How many chances do you get to be “in at the beginning” of something?

Click here for Speed PPC.
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Blog notes… Jason Katzenback rated Speed PPC quite low, 3.5 out of 5, which surprised me. Jay responded to his comments at the blog post. Woody said, “If you buy just ONE thing this year (other than ANYTHING I come out with), this is it.” Andy Williams gave it 10/10. Michael Nicholas calls it “a dream machine PPC tool“. Sid Hale calls it an “exciting system“. Heather Paulson also gives Speed PPC a mention here and a positive review at her personal blog here.

Is anyone else getting hundreds of pieces of totally nonsensical spam?

An example would be, “amethystine deluxe, dividend bethesda astrology, butyrate approbation“.

There’s no link to click on… nothing’s being sold, so what’s the point of “Nonsense Spam”? Why would someone send junk email like that?

Well, if nothing’s being sold, there must be a value in actually sending the emails. Presumably, some mega-computer is analyzing the bounce messages from their mailout… the spammers can then work out which “Nonsense spam” emails were delivered and sell the email addresses.

It’s actually quite clever because it also hurts the Bayesian spam filters. If users label these “Nonsense spam” emails as junk to a third party such as Cloudmark, the filter will consider the words and context of the email when building its algorithm. So if actual users feed the filter random junk, the algorithm will, presumably, become less effective.

So the spammers get a list of deliverable email addresses as well as hurting the spam filters.

I got “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” Saturday morning and finished it Sunday evening. Yup, it was a real “page turner”.

Don’t worry, I won’t give away any plot details. I just wanted to say that it was a truly awesome read, and JK Rowling writes exceptional novels.

And now to the marketing.

On the Deathly Hallows jacket it quotes JK Rowling saying that Harry Potter “just strolled into my head fully formed”. It also says “during the next five years she outlined the plots for each book”. So, over a period of five years she wrote the plots for all the novels? What if the first book hadn’t been published? Wasn’t that an enormous risk to take? Why not just write one book containing the full Harry Potter story?

In retrospect, writing seven books over several years was marketing genius because each published book generated more hype and marketing power for the next in the series… until you get the situation where the Deathly Hallows sells 8.3 million copies in the USA in its first 24 hours according to Scholastic, the US publisher!

But was that worth the gamble that the first book wouldn’t get published? How many other authors would take five years to plan a whole series of books in the hopes that they would all get published? I find that quite amazing. Perhaps she had a book deal for one or more books early on. Apparently, she signed with Bloomsbury Childrens Books in 1996 for “just a couple of thousand pounds“.

Barry Cunningham, who signed Rowling, said, “I bought the first two books in a deal that was negotiated in five minutes. The first thing she said was: ‘How do you feel about sequels?’. So then she told me and I was amazed she had it all worked in her mind. To have him grow up was really radical because in those days in most children’s sequels the same thing happened again, then again and then again. But to have him grow up and change and deal with threats from dark forces, that’s something different and Jo has really taken the audience with her. The success is mostly down to the quality of the imagination.”

Luckily for Harry Potter fans, the series was published and I thoroughly enjoyed every one of the books.

update, found at the Bloomsbury.com site… “A few months after ‘Harry’ was accepted for publication in Britain, an American publisher bought the rights for enough money to enable Jo to give up teaching and write full time - her life’s ambition!”… which helps to explain how the two books became seven.

… do any seminars, conferences, workshops etc?

Good question.

The answer is simple.. I have a wife and two small children. I find it hard to attend seminars and leave them behind, so I prefer to stay at home instead. After all, that was why I started an Internet business from home ten years ago.

I was also very “put off” when I found out about the sales practices that go on at a lot of these seminars. In my naivete, I had though that the people who paid to get in covered the costs of paying the speakers and left some over for the conference host. But a lot of seminars seem to NOT pay the speakers, who then have to SELL stuff at the “back of the room” in order to make any money… which means their time on stage is devoted to selling their back of the room stuff and not to educating the audience. On top of that, the conference host takes a slice of their sales… as well as the ticket sales, presumably.

Call me old fashioned, but if I ever go to any seminars, they will be structured in such a way that the audience gets 100% info from the speakers and no sales pitches.

I was intrigued by this story. Apparently some X-box owners have had problems with their machines… something about “three red lights” indicating some sort of hardware failure. My take on this story is that Microsoft have actually done a good thing in acknowledging the problem, taking steps to solve it, reimbursing customers who had to get their X-box’s repaired themselves and extending their X-box warranty to three years to cover such failures.

Here’s a quote from the open-letter to X-box customers…

“As of today, all Xbox 360 consoles are covered by an enhanced warranty program to address specifically the general hardware failures indicated by the three flashing red lights on the console. This applies to new and previously-sold consoles. While we will still have a general one year console warranty (two years in some countries), we are announcing today a three-year warranty that covers any console that displays a three flashing red lights error message. If a customer has an issue indicated by the three flashing red lights, Microsoft will repair the console free of charge—including shipping—for three years from the console’s purchase date. We will also retroactively reimburse any of you who paid for repairs related to problems indicated by this error message in the past. In doing so, Microsoft stands behind its products and takes responsibility to ensure that every Xbox 360 console owner continues to have a fantastic gaming experience.” (source)

According to Yahoo Video Game News, that change will cost Microsoft a billion dollars. (The new warranty will represent a $1 billion pre-tax charge on Microsoft’s earnings for the year’s final quarter). (source)

In my opinion, that’s pretty good customer support… something which may companies, not least in the Internet marketing arena, could learn from. The warranty was originally 90 days, then 1 year, now 3 years. That indicates good company support for the product. There’s more info in a Q+A here.

Duncan Carver set up a new website about a niche subject.

Normally, you’d submit articles, press releases and whatnot to get to PageRank 4 or 5 by the time the next Pagerank update comes along, right?

But not Duncan.

He got his niche site to PageRank 7… meaning it’s an authority site… in just nine weeks!

How did he do that?

Good question!

Click here for the answer.

Do you own a forum or a web-board?

Would you like to monetize it by selling advertising?

Would you like some FREE scripts to do all the organization for you?

My friend Adrian Ling and his partner Harvey Segal have developed a set of scripts called Forum Admanager. Basically, you install them on your server and they give you the ability to sell advertising space at your forum/web-board. When you sell advertising space, the revenue is split between you (the board-owner) and the scripts developers.

If you have a high traffic forum but are struggling to monetize it, this could be just what you’re looking for. Of course, seeing as it’s free, you can test it and see how you like it without spending a penny.

Check it out here… you could earn 100 times more than using Adsense.

Affiliate Video Rebrander allows you to “rip” movie content from a webpage and wrap your own links above and below it… and even use your own auto-redirect link to end the movie!

In a test I just did, I downloaded one of my own movies. I took this movie… and rebranded it to this. You can see that I added links to the top and bottom of the movie.

AVB even has the ability to end the movie prematurely and jump to a URL of your choice. In doing so, you can bypass the redirect link which may already be embedded in the movie. Say, for example, the movie was 5 mins 22 seconds long and had an embedded redirect at the end. Using AVB you could just set your redirect link for 5 mins 20 seconds and the viewer would redirect through your link, not the embedded one.

As with most powerful tools, this one can be used for both good purposes and bad. I can see how it’s a boon to affiliates who could use merchant-generated movies (with permission) to promote products. I can also see how it could be a possible bane to merchants who want to sell access to products consisting of movie-related instructions. In fact, within the application you’re required to check a box saying you have permission to download the movie you want before it will happen.

Let’s focus on the positive side. The software comes with the ability to put your links above and below movies from YouTube and Google Video (so-called “streaming videos” that are actually hosted on YouTube and Google’s servers) as well as “embedded” movies such as the one I used as an example above.

You can easily find movies in any niche and use Affiliate Video Brander to “wrap” your affiliate link around them. Your links could be to a “how to” ebook related to the movie, or an affiliate link to the a DVD at your favorite retailer wrapped around a clip from a music video. The possibilites are endless.

Pamela Heywood notes my earlier post and adds her views, as an ex-Clickbank merchant. Interesting stuff, Pamela.

Anik Singal has run the successful Affiliate Classroom for well over two years and has built up a great reputation for the site. There are success stories and case studies galore from members of Affiliate Classroom.

I took a look inside the members area and was very impressed. There’s a vibrant forum, step-by-step guides, monthly interviews with affiliate experts, case studies for different marketing methods, a monthly PDF magazine, an affiliate program directory and tons more. In fact, according to the information I saw, 75% of members agreed that they didn’t need anything else to succeed as an affiliate beyond their Affiliate Classroom membership.

So, if you’re looking to earn money as an affiliate, you should consider signing up for the $1 trial… it lasts for a very generous 14 days so you can check out the members area and everything inside it.

Every level of affiliate marketer is covered… from beginner to intermediate to expert. I should also mention that I read the latest case study and learned something new that I can use immediately to gain traffic to this blog! How cool is that?

I’ve just reviewed Blogging to the Bank by Rob Benwell. Actually, it’s version 2.0 of the original ebook.

I have to be honest… I don’t directly make money from this blog. It’s basically a “branding” exercise for me. It’s a place where I put my thoughts, opinions and ideas about things that people may find interesting. After reading Blogging to the Bank, I’m thinking I should re-consider my use of the blog.

Rob has some great ideas and tips for making money from blogging, and I may well use some of his strategies at this blog. I really liked the “step by step” layout of the ebook. It’s how I like to see things explained… perhaps because of my science background. Rob gets to the “meat” of how to blog, how to generate traffic, how to pick the “right” keywords and how to monetize your efforts.

The original Blogging to the Bank used some blackhat strategies, but version 2.0 is aimed more towards white-hat bloggers. If you’re a blogging beginner, I suggest picking up a copy of Blogging to the Bank to make sure you earn the most from your blogging efforts.

Happy Independence Day to my wife and all other Americans.

Of course, being British, I happen to believe that Americans would’ve been better off sticking with us.

There’s an interesting point being raised by some marketers at the moment… equating personal independence with Independence Day. I guess it’s a natural comparison. Rosalind Gardner makes some excellent points at her blog, and I got an email from Jim Edwards yesterday saying pretty much the same thing.

Ros said…

“I feel MORE financially secure as an entrepeneur than I ever did with a full-time government job and a large pension waiting for me at retirement.

At this point, I would NEVER trade the freedom to call my own shots and create my future for ANY job, because NOTHING is more satisfying than being your own boss - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

Jim said…

“To me, “Independence” means:

- You don’t punch a clock for someone else…

- Your time is your own and you spend it how you want…”

And my thoughts, which I left at Ros’ blog…

“Nothing beats the feeling of being your own boss. You have to *want* that so badly the desire for it overcomes all the other hurdles. If people want it badly enough, they’ll take action and achive their goals.”

I’ve never sold anything through Clickbank, so I don’t know the drawbacks to using their system as well as Clickbank merchants do. In his most recent newsletter, Dr Andy Williams has a bit of a rant about the ease with which people can steal the affiliate commissions for a product. Andy says that he sees (from the merchant’s point of view) people buying a product, then asking for a refund, then buying again through their own affiliate link and getting, effectively, a 50% rebate.

I’ve long suspected that some people circumvent my affiliate link when buying a Clickbank product I recommend, but it’s almost impossible to prove without the merchant’s data. This is the first time I’ve heard about it from a merchant’s point of view.

Andy says the situation is so bad, he’s going to run his own affiliate program using his own scripts. Read the full details here… EzSEO Newsletter # 169

Perhaps both merchants and affiliates should petition Clickbank to have a system less prone to “abuse”…?