Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Can you get to Vegas for September 8th-9th, 2007?

If so, you could learn a huge amount about Web 2.0 Marketing Strategies and Authority Site Building Tactics at the Authority Summit.

Now, if you asked me, I’d say that knowing all about taking advantage of Web 2.0 marketing tactics and building authority sites were two of the most important things you could learn about Internet marketing in 2007. Have you see what MySpace, Facebook, Beboo etc have been doing to attract enormous numbers of visitors?

Are you aware that their visitors actually build the site content by adding their thoughts, photos, pet’s name, ambitions etc to the site?

Did you know that those three sites are Pagerank 8, 8 and 7 respectively?

Building “Authority Sites” is hugely important. Using Web2.0 strategies can help you achive the visitors necessary to becoming an Auhority Site.

I know very little in this field of Internet marketing, but I know enough to see how important it is.

If you really want to learn from experts, go to the Authority Summit in Vegas on September 8th-9th, 2007 and learn directly from the Content Desk guys… they know this stuff inside out.

Oh, and they say on the sales letter, “All content, no pitch rules will be adhered to by all presenters!”.

Yay for that!

Article Underground has 113 blogs in its network… both member-run blogs and blogs run by Mike Liebner. As a member, you can post to these blogs and link back to your sites. It’s a great way to get your sites noticed and indexed by the search engines… and also get the “right” link text pointing to your site.

[[[ An interesting aside: yesterday I searched for “poppycock” because I wanted to know where the word originated. I found a Wikipedia page near the top of the search results and went to their site. Guess what? The Wikipedia page didn’t mention “poppycock” once! I even clicked on the Google “cache” to see if the indexed page mentioned “poppycock”… but it didn’t. However, Google said, at the top of their “cache” info…

“These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: poppycock”

So, the Wikipedia page ranked high for the word poppycock, without it actually appearing on the page, because of the words in the links pointing to the page! ]]]

See how important the words on other people’s pages can be to your search engine results?

See how important the 113 blogs you are free to post on, and get the “right” link text pointing to your page can be?

Here’s the list of blogs…

> General Blogs - 55
> Cars, Automotive & Mechanical - 2
> Credit, Debt, Finances, Mortgages, Investments, Jobs - 7
> Food & Drink; Cooking - 2
> Health and Wellness - 9
> Internet, Marketing and Computing; Business - 7
> Math and Sciences - 1
> Music and Entertainment; Recreation; Games - 8
> News, Society, Politics and Opinion - 1
> Pets & Animals - 3
> Real Estate; Home Improvement - 2
> Sports and Athletics - 4
> Travel & Lifestyles - 7
> Specific, Tight Niches - 5

So, by posting to an “on topic” blog, you can match the blog topic to your site’s topic, get the “title” text of the blog post to say what you want, and decide on the “right” link text to point at your site. Bingo!

Just become an Article Underground member and the blog network is yours to post to!

Paul Smithson has raised more than the £2,000 ($4,000) he set as his fundraising goal for his upcoming charity run. Congratulations, Paul!

This blog is proudly supporting Paul Smithson (creator of the excellent XSitePro software) on his 10Km charity run in September.

As someone who has worked for the charity Cancer Research UK as a Ph.D. student, I feel able to thank Paul on behalf of the scientists researching cancer and trying to find cures for the various forms of cancer. Without fundraising, I wouldn’t have been able to do my Ph.D. and make my small contribution to the body of work on breast cancer.

Here’s what Paul sent to his lists a few hours ago…

—
It’s Paul Smithson here from XSitePro.

I’m writing to you today about something that’s completely unrelated to internet marketing or computer software, but it’s something I’d REALLY appreciate your support with.

Let me tell you why …

Three years ago I had a massive wake up call.

I’d had a small spot on my stomach for several months. I went to see the doctor about it and he said it was just an ingrowing mosquito bite and was nothing to worry about.

A few months later I went back to see the same doctor and he agreed to perform the minor operation to remove it. When I say minor operation I mean really minor. A quick local anesthetic and then whoosh, he sliced it off with a scalpel.

As far as I was concerned that was the end of that, but unfortunately it wasn’t.

Five weeks later I was preparing to fly to Memphis when I received a phone call from the doctor. I was asked to go to see them IMMEDIATELY. Normally you’re lucky if you can get an appointment for the following day, but they wanted me in there and then - no messing around.

On arriving at the surgery I was ushered into the Doctors office where he sat me down. I knew something was wrong by the look on his face.

“Paul, I’m sorry to tell you but you’ve got cancer”

Silence.

“And it’s serious. Really serious”.

You can imagine what was going through my mind.

I told him about my business trip to Memphis and that I was flying in two days. He told me there was no way I could go as I needed an operation as soon as possible.

I drove home in a trance and spent the rest of the day trying to find out everything I could about skin cancer. Trust me, if you’ve ever had anything like this happen to you, the last thing you want to do is look it up on the Internet.

A few days later I went into hospital where they performed two operations and then spent the next few weeks on tenterhooks waiting for the biopsy to be completed.

Finally, I got the phone call I had been waiting for and dreading at the same time.

I’m pleased to say it was GREAT news.

They’d caught the cancer early enough and the prognosis was excellent.

You can imagine how relieved I was.

One minute you’re thinking you’ve got a death sentence hanging over you and the next you’ve been given a clean bill of health.

So, I’m pleased to say that you’ll have to put up with me for many many more years to come (I hope).

Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky as I was and that’s what prompted me to do this 10km run next month. Cancer research is so important that I wanted to do anything I could to help.

And that’s where you come in.

On September 16 I’m doing a run to raise money for cancer research. It’s a 10km run, which for me is the furthest I’ve run for twenty odd years. I’ve been in training for the past couple of months and don’t have a clue how I’m going to make it round (it’s rather a hilly course), but I’m absolutely determined to do it.

I’m e-mailing all the XSitePro users, and anyone else I can think of, and asking if you’d be kind enough to sponsor me on this run. It doesn’t matter whether it’s $5 or $1000, £1 or £100, or 10 euros or 10,000 euros, whatever you can give will be very much appreciated.

Rather than you giving the money to me and then me handing it over to the Cancer Research charity, they’ve set me up a special page, so that the money goes straight into their bank account.

Here’s the link.

http://www.10ksponsorme.org/paulsmithson

You’ll notice that the amounts are listed as pounds rather than dollars. That’s because it’s Cancer Research UK, but to give you a quick idea of the dollar/pound conversion rate all you need to do is double it. Here’s a quick ready reckoner for US$.

£5 = $10
£10 = $20
£50 = $100
£250 = $500
£500 = $1000

The charge on your credit card will go through as your normal currency.

And remember, it doesn’t matter what the amount is, absolutely anything will be very much appreciated.

I really do hope you can help me with this.

Thanks so much,

Paul
—

Good luck with the 10K run Paul!

According to “Inside Adsense“, adding Adsense ads to Blogger.com blogs is now quick and easy. They say…

—
We’ve heard your feedback about wanting to insert Google ads between your blog posts, and we’re happy to let you know that Blogger now supports this implementation through the AdSense widget.

Here’s all you need to do:

Log into your Blogger account.

Visit your blog’s Template tab and click on the Page Elements link.

Click Edit in the Blog Posts section.

Check the box next to Show Ads Between Posts. You can then select how often you’d like your ads to appear, such as once after every post or once after every other post.

Customize the ads and click on Save Changes when you’re done.

Please note that right now, it’s only possible to insert Google ads using this widget, and not AdSense for search boxes or referral units.
—

Sounds like a nice, easy way to get Google Adsense ads into, erm, Google Blogger Blogs.

How about 294,013?

(click to enlarge)

That’s how many were in my Gmail account this morning.

Not bad, eh?

I may turn into a full-time spam collector. I think I’d be good at it.

What do you think? Have you ever seen a higher spam-count for one email account?

Rod Beckwith, a veteran Internet marketer and seller of many quality digital products, has just launched Lock-It-Now, a smart system which protects your digital products.

I know, from firsthand experience, how difficult it can be to prevent people hoping to make a fast buck from ripping you off and reselling your product without permission. The only way to stop them is to lock the digital product… but then you also have to make is easy for your customers to unlock or face potential customer frustrations.

It’s a tricky balance to achieve. Fortunately, Lock-It-Now does a very good job of locking your products but also making it simple for your customers to unlock them. It also integrates with your payment processor (such as Clickbank), so the customer gets to download the product at the same time as they get the unlock code. You can also log in to the admin side of Lock-It-Now and see activation logs and customer details, disable or enable keys, check the useful help tutorials and much more. It can even integrate with a third party autoresponder provider so your customer details get dropped into your customer mailing list automatically.

It’s a great product that solves the need to lock digital products. It’s also selling at a very reasonable price. Check it out here.

Remember Beanz?

Nope, of course you don’t… it was many years ago… practically stone-age by the Internet timescale.

Beanz was a digital currency… a way for people to buy and sell things online without reverting to credit cards.

Beanz died… along with most other digital currencies. (the Beanz.com website now promotes coffee. lol. But you can still see their splashscreen from May 2000)

Why?

Because they didn’t achieve critical mass. Not enough people used the competing digital currencies to make them viable.

So how do you accept money?

Well, at the moment, you either take credit card payments via a third party or your own merchant account. PayPal is probably the most famous third party credit card processor who also lets you send money direct from one PayPal account to another. Clickbank is another famous third party processor.

Now other big players are muscling in on PayPal’s credit-card processing territory. It’s good news for merchants as they have more companies vying for their credit card processing business.

Recently Google launched Google Checkout with free sales processing through Google Checkout until the end of 2007… and they incentivized their Adwords advertisers to use the system by offsetting ten times the money advertisers spend on Adwords against their Google Checkout sales. Spend a dollar on Adwords? You can process $10 in sales via Google Checkout the next month for free. Very smart.

Now Amazon has a “Amazon Flexible Payments Service” in beta and says it’s “the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure”.

Sounds like a potential contender.

Who’s next into this arena? Yahoo’s PayDirect died off and Microsoft’s Passport didn’t seem to catch many people’s imagination. Perhaps they’re still working on some secret plans.

As you may know, PLR Pro is one of just two private label article membership sites I endorse. The other is Article Underground by Mike Liebner.

PLR Pro, run by Marc and Daniel, produces top-notch articles in a variety of themed niches each month. If I went into what they offer with a membership, I’d be writing for hours, so just click here, on this link, and grab one of the new free memberships.

Naturally, it doesn’t offer you as much as the paid memberships, but it will give you a taster for what’s included and allow you to sample the professional attitude Marc and Daniel have towards their product. The free membership offers…

- 2 niches each month with 20 articles each niche (total of 40 articles)
- Graphics
- Affiliate Research
- Keyword Research
- Language Conversion

But, the membership isn’t restricted… so, unlike the paid memberships, anyone can sign up for a free membership and access the articles. I suggest you sign up, check out the PLRPro system, then upgrade to the full membership when you’ve sampled the quality of what PLRPro offers.

I’ve been making money online for over a decade.

I know that sales and traffic slow down in August. In fact, I remember mentioning the topic many, many years ago… and then just a few years ago… and now I’m doing it again. Did I mention I’ve been online forever?

By all means, go on holiday now if you want… the kids are out of school (for about 36 weeks it feels like!), the politicians all took a huge break, as did the teachers. People are outside gardening, at the beach, playing cricket… not glued to their computer monitors and inboxes. So, if you want a holiday, now is a good time.

But, you don’t have to let the summer slow you down if you don’t want it to. Three years ago, John Reese had his “million dollar day“. It was actually August 17, 2004, right in the middle of the “silly season“.

So, it’s up to you really, isn’t it?

I found this nifty plugin which allows me to check the blog comments for spams that managed to get past my filters.

It’s called Paged Comment Plugin.

It allows me to see *all* the comments at the blog, not just the last 20 (which is the Wordpress default).

With the amount of spam comments this blog gets (most of which are caught and not displayed), the last 20 comments page fills up really quickly. Now, thanks to this plugin, I can go back through previous pages of comments.

I’ve checked the last 300 comments. If anyone spots any spams elsewhere, please let me know.

They said…

“NEW Congratulations, your account has been upgraded to include the all new Referrals 2.0 - click here to get started”

So, I did. And it said…

“Google Referrals allow you to choose specific products or groups of products to advertise on your site, allowing you to match ads to your content”

Huh?

Isn’t the WHOLE POINT of Adsense to allow the publisher to concentrate on publishing, while Google matches their Adsense ads to the page content?

/boggle