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Unstoppable List Building (Review)

You’re probably quite familiar with products that promise to solve your dilemma about effective list building: many of them just don’t deliver. When you reach the end, you’re either overwhelmed with information, or you’re left wondering what you missed.

Justin Michie’s report “Unstoppable List Building”, which he is offering free for a limited time, finally delivers on a much needed Internet Marketing subject. He provides only the information you need to understand how to make list building effective and lays out a plan in easy to follow steps.

CLICK HERE to grab your free copy of the report.

At 65 pages, it takes you through the basics of opt-ins to monetizing your promotions to viral marketing and the importance of testing to maximize your opt-in rate. I particularly like the section that covers how to avoid fraudulent signups.

Overall, the report will get you on track quickly to building your list properly and effectively.

For seasoned marketers, you might find the opening few chapters to be a bit on the slow side, but when you get to the section on Viral Marketing, the pace picks up dramatically. Before I’d finished this chapter, I was anxious to get started with my own viral project to grow my list.

Justin shares some great tips on where to attract people to your opt-in list and he points out the massive benefits to building your list. Imagine how your sizeable list will enable you to create significant income on demand.

It’s easy to relate to Justin’s story about list building while “not really” building a list. That’s when you plod along building a list of a few hundred people, rather than bursting through the gate adding hundreds of subscribers every day.

Justin shows you exactly how to do that in terms anyone can understand and apply.

Unstoppable List Building provides real solid content and is one of the best reports of its kind that I’ve read.

For a limited time, you can grab a free copy of this valuable report by CLICKING HERE.

PS No surprise, Justin’s added a viral element to this report. But I’ll let you find out about that for yourself when you download it!

Posted 16 July 2009 § Useful Tools § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: ,

The redirect script I use

In my last article, we were discussing the problems with affiliate links. We also looked at one solution to having “overt” affiliate links by using tinyurl to disguise them. We ended up with a disguised link (one offering protection to the link), but one that didn’t look either pretty or natural.

Today I want to discuss a much more satisfactory solution: using a redirect script. Although, initially, a little more complicated, once you’ve used it a few times you’ll find yourself  redirecting links very quickly AND you’ll be much happier with the disguised link itself.

In essence, a redirect script is a piece of code that is uploaded to your website; and the term “code” is very appropriate here (think in terms of “secret code”) because the sole purpose of the script is to disguise your true affiliate link.  The script I use is a “php” script (don’t worry: I can’t write in php either - just stick with me. I only mention it so that when you see “.php” in a little while, you’ll know why).

Let’s assume that you ‘re going to promote a ficticious ClickBank product called “Earn with Adsense” and your affilate link is going to be:

http://yourclickbanknickname.earnwithadsense.hop.clickbank.net

and, for the reasons we’ve discussed, you want to redirect it. Firstly, before we look at the script itself, we need to decide where it is going to fit into the structure of your website.

I would suggest that you use a format along the lines of:

domain name/”generic” sub-directory/(appropriately named) script

e.g if we called our sub-directory “recommends” and we decided an appropriate name for this link is “adsense”, then, instead of sending traffic to our ugly affiliate link we can send it to:

www.yourdomain.com/recommends/adsense.php

- much better, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Here’s the script itself (I suggest you copy it into notepad and save it as a text document called “redirect”):

<?php header(”Location: *put the url you want to redirect to  here*”); ?><html><head><title>redirect</title><meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″></head><body></body></html>

END OF SCRIPT

In our example, you need to replace: *put the url you want to redirect to  here*

with: http://yourclickbanknickname.earnwithadsense.hop.clickbank.net

Then you need to save the document, like this:

choose save as

in “File name”, enter: adsense.php

in “Save as type”, choose “All files” from the drop-down menu.

All we need to do now is to open our FTP client and upload our adsense.php file into our “recommends” sub-directory. And, of course, send our traffic to:

www.yourdomain.com/recommends/adsense.php

the redirect script will do the rest and send it to our TRUE affiliate link.

I hope this helps.

Posted 23 June 2009 § Useful Tools § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: ,

Redirect your Affiliate Links

In an earlier article we discussed the advantages of affiliate marketing; today I’d like to address one of the problems that comes with it - the affiliate link.

A very quick summary: sign up to sell someone else’s product and you’ll be given your own affiliate link. This link is unique to you, so sales resulting from the use of this link will be identified as yours by the product owner and so you will get paid your commission.

That is the theory, anyhow. The problem is this: affiliate links look like, well, like affiliate links! They have a format all of their own; they’re not “proper” English, and don’t look like anything else. This gives rise to two issues:

  • theft of the sale
  • credibility

Call me an idealist, but I happen to believe that most people are essentially honest. Put someone in a bookstore and, I reckon, a good 99% of the people wanting a book will buy it, rather than try to steal it from the bookseller.

Transfer that situation online, however, and the anonymity that comes with it increases the opportunity for theft. Include a very obvious affiliate link and, to some, it becomes “fair game”. The tactics can range from naive (”that’s a long web address - I’m sure we don’t need to enter all that stuff at the end”) to malicious “that’s an affiliate link - I’ll sign up to the affiliate program myself and buy through my own link”. Either way, though, if that affiliate link is yours, you’ve lost your commission.

This is why you need to redirect your affiliate links.

Redirecting cloaks the affiliate links and protects your commission.

Now there are a number of ways of doing this, but here I’m going to show you what I believe is the quickest and easiest of them all. You don’t need any html skills, you don’t even need a web site - and it’s free. As long as you can copy and paste, you can redirect a link in a couple of minutes.

This method uses TinyURL. CLICK HERE to open the site in a new window.

This is all you do:

  • visit the site
  • enter your affiliate link
  • hit the “Make TinyURL!” button
  • copy the resulting TinyURL url, and use it in place of your affiliate link

The resulting url will do the job, but it may not look pretty. You may be able to improve the outcome by using the “Custom alias (optional)” box, but you may have to go with trial and error until you obtain a result you are happy with.

For example, the link for this particular blog article is:

http://recommendedbydavid.com/2009/06/03/redirect-your-affiliate-links/

I tried to convert it to:

http://tinyurl.com/redirect

but it was not available (someone had beaten me to it), so after experimenting I settled for:

http://tinyurl.com/redirect2009

Anyone clicking on that link would be redirected to the original destination at the cloaked URL (using the affiliate link if there had been one).

So there you have it: a quick and easy way to redirect your affiliate links. You’ve protected your link from the theft of the sale, and, especially if you  use the “custom alias” option, you’ve increased the credibility of the URL by preventing it from looking like an affiliate link.

“But, hang on”, you may be thinking, “doesn’t the “tinyurl.com” bit of the address lessen the credibility of the whole?”

(You mean you want: quick, easy, free, and IDEAL?)

You’re right, though, we can improve on this solution - and without making it too complicated - and I’ll show you how in my next article.

Posted 03 June 2009 § Useful Tools § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Smile!

I woke up today expecting my usual working day with a whole list of things to do and more financial gloom in the newspapers. My first smile of the day came when I opened an unexpected e-mail enclosing a link to the following video. I’m sure people don’t have enough to smile about these days - have this smile on me!

Posted 27 April 2009 § Motivation and Mindset § Videos ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: ,

My Biggest Online Mistake

While it can be easier to learn from your OWN mistakes (because you learn your lesson well) it can also be a darn sight more painful and costly! It’s much more sensible to learn from someone else’s - let them have the hassle!

With this in mind, today I’m going to share with you my biggest online mistake. My business has already suffered as a result of this - don’t let yours.

As I’m sure you know by now, you can make money online in many different ways. One of the first big decisions to make is just how YOU are going to make money. I reckon I wasted over 6 months signing up to every online marketer’s list just to get their take on how to make money - yet I don’t count that as my biggest mistake. To be honest, I don’t think it was a mistake at all. I believe I benefited from immersing myself totally in the subject, and from it I decided I would make money by creating and marketing my own product.

The decision to do this wasn’t in itself my biggest mistake, but it led to it.

There’s nothing wrong with creating your own product if there’s a ready demand for it. In fact, most marketers recommend producing your own products - bigger profits when you sell them yourself, and you can make them available to affiliates so that they too can promote them.

However, when you START OUT by creating your own product, there can be just too many challenges and if you make the project too ambititious, as I did, then every challenge can take an age to overcome. Add to the mix that it is YOUR own baby and you can get very proud and possessive over it. Before you know it, ALL your online activity is focussed on just one product.

THAT was my biggest mistake.

No matter how good any product is, selling just one will not give you a realistic online income. And if that first product does not come to market quickly, then more months will pass as you earn ZILCH!

So, what have I learned from this?

  1. create your own products LATER, rather than sooner
  2. start with the aim of getting multiple streams of income up and running as soon as you can
  3. promote affiliate products first
  4. when you’ve found a successful system, replicate it over and over again with other products

Now just as you can learn from others’ mistakes, you can also learn other people’s systems. I’m always investing in new products with the aim of improving my online business; I’m especially interested in new SYSTEMS to make money, but I have to say, not all products live up to expectations and I’ll never promote them to you.

So when I bring a product to your attention, you can be sure that I’ve:

  • bought it
  • used it
  • consider it good value for money

Below, I’m going to give you a link to the latest product I bought some two weeks ago. It contains not one, but two, systems for making money QUICKLY online; furthermore, one of those systems can be easily replicated over and over again with multiple products.

In short, it’s got everything I wish I’d started with; and it might be just what you’re looking for.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE A LOOK.

Posted 14 April 2009 § Useful Tools § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: