Skip to content

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:

Social Bookmarking

I must confess to being something of a social bookmarking novice. Let me be completely honest here – I thought social bookmarking sites and social networking sites were one and the same thing. Now I could see the social advantages of Facebook, Myspace etc. for people wanting to meet up with, and make new friends online, but I could never see me joining them (too much to do, preferring “proper” socialising and umpteen other reasons). So until recently, I paid no attention to social bookmarking sites because of my wrongly thinking that they were the same as Facebook etc.

Now, outstanding on my “To Do” list for quite sometime, has been to finish reading ALL of the free e-books that I’ve been giving to my subscribers. (If you’ve not got them yourself yet, just claim them by completing the “floating” opt-in box on the right). Anyway, for the reasons given above, it will not surprise you that one of the unread e-books was: “How to Bookmark for FREE TRAFFIC”. Eventually, the significance of those last two words sank in and I finally read the book.

EUREKA! Now I know the difference – and I wish I’d read it sooner. For those of you already in the know, you’ll already have identified that I’ve started using social bookmarking on my blog. For the rest of you (and I trust that I wasn’t the very last one to cotton on here) I’ll give you a brief introduction in the rest of this article.

Firstly, think of how you bookmark your favourite websites now via your internet browser. Are you like me and have that many favourites that you have to organise them and still can’t always find what you’re looking for straightaway? Perhaps, you use more than one pc so you have more than one list of favourites to maintain. What if you stored your favourites list on a website and you could allocate your own keywords (“tags” in bookmarking jargon) to each site so that you could easily find them again? Now you have just one favourites list and it’s easily searchable.

You might have searched through many sites before you found those favourites. Maybe other people could benefit from your favourite sites and maybe you could benefit from others’ favourites. By searching by “tags” you can find similar sites that those with similar interests have found beneficial. Most social bookmarking sites incorporate a “ranking” system so that the “favourites of the favourites” are easily found.

I trust you’re still with me! Now let’s look at this from a marketing perspective.

Some of these social bookmarking sites are tremendously popular. For example, StumbleUpon has 7,438,039 members at the time of writing; and that is just one social bookmarking site.

What if you were to bookmark your own blog, or website, on one (or even more) of these sites?

What if you were to give visitors to your own site the easy ability to register your own site as being one of their favourites?

Can you see how these tactics could lead to increased traffic for your website with links coming back from the social bookmarking sites?

SO, WHICH BOOKMARKING SITES SHOULD YOU USE?

When you’ve checked out a few, you’ll see that they all have their own identities and for your own personal use, one might stand out. That is likely to be the case for anyone wanting to register for their own personal benefit. And, of course, everyone’s different and will have their own preference. So, from a marketing point of view, you need to register with as many as possible and bookmark your site / blog articles with all of them. That, of course, is a tall order.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

1) Re-visit the e-book I gave you and which I’ve just read. It lists the 30 most popular bookmarking sites.

2) Start by registering with just one bookmarking site and mark your own website as a favourite.

3) Over time, gradually register with more sites and bookmark your own website / blog.

4) Make it easy for visitors to your own site to bookmark it as a favourite of theirs.

HOW TO KEEP IT SIMPLE

You may be wondering how you’re going to cope with all these social bookmarking sites, especially if you’re going to add to your favourites regularly, say when you post a new blog article. Don’t worry, you can automate the process.

Do you see the “Bookmark and Share” icon immediately at the end of this article? This is provided by Onlywire. They offer both a free and a paid service by which you can:

  • register for any or all of 28 social bookmarking sites
  • log in once to your Onlywire account and post a favourite to all of the bookmarking sites you are registered with
  • obtain your own “Bookmark and Share” icon to display on your own site; this allows your visitors to bookmark your site or even send an e-mail recommending it to a friend. 

So go to the “Bookmark and Share” icon and click on the “Create Your Account” button. Everything follows logically from there. FREE TRAFFIC is there for the taking!

David

PS If you’ve found this article useful, why not bookmark it or e-mail a friend, using the “Bookmark and Share” icon. :-)

Posted 08 April 2009 § Useful Tools § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: ,

Camtasia – free alternative

If you’ve ever seen any training, or “how to”, videos of the “screen capture” type (where you appear to be watching someone else’s computer screen) the chances are that it was recorded on Camtasia software, produced by TechSmith - the current version retails at $299. However, for a while now, an earlier version of Camtasia has been made available on their website – for nothing.

A question from Linda, one of my subscribers, has led me to take another look at the Camtasia website today.

Unfortunately, it looks as though they’ve pulled the plug on the free offer – it seems the free download was too popular. I suppose I’m at least partly responsible for that by promoting it! So if you managed to get the free download in time – well done.

If you didn’t, I’m afraid that you can only get a 30 day free trial of Camtasia now.

Making a Camtasia video can be an easy way of producing your own product or an added value bonus for your main product. But you may be put off by Camtasia’s price tag.

If you’re only interested in a free product that does the job, you might want to take a look at:

http://camstudio.org

Look for the red “Download Links” section about half-way down the page.

I can’t say that I’ve used this program extensively, but on a trial run it seemed to have a similar feel and features to the old, free, version of Camtasia. Once you’ve opened up Camstudio, you can access the tutorial by clicking on the help button.

I hope this helps.

Posted 03 April 2009 § Useful Tools § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (8) ° Tagged: ,

How to put a YouTube video on your WordPress blog

Here’s a Camtasia training video, that I’ve made for you, showing just how easy it is to put a  YouTube video on your WordPress blog. This is the exact process that I use when I include videos on my blog for your information or entertainment. To illustrate the point, I am using as an example the YouTube video I used about Google street view in my last blog article.

Although this video is specific to WordPress (the blogging software I use) the principle for other software is exactly the same: just copy and paste the YouTube code.

This training video by me is a first for recommendedby david, and I hope the Yorkshire accent is not too pronounced!. As always, I’d love to know what you think – please leave a comment.

Posted 01 April 2009 § Useful Tools § Videos § Your Web Business ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: ,

Street View – a Google too far?

I know we’re pushing the boundaries of technology all the time, but I’m beginning to wonder whether the “big boys” in the internet industry ought to curb some of their ideas. Unless the industry begins to police its excesses, I can only see that the day is getting nearer when legislation is introduced to govern the web.

Just take a look at the following video:

All these images are taken from Google’s latest offering: Street View, which is an enhancement of Google maps.

Now, my wife will tell you that I’m the world’s worst navigator, and sure enough if I can check out some local landmarks online before I travel then, yes, it increases my chances significantly of getting to my destination. I’m all in favour of that, but in order to have that, am I willing to accept that Google has a right to roam up and down every street with its cameras and allow its users to focus and zoom in where they will?

I don’t think so.

Like it or not, there’s an unsavoury element in our society that you will use this technology for its own ends and to the detriment of the rest of us.

I’ve just been for a trip down my mother-in-law’s street. She lives in a cul-de-sac in a suburb and happens to be 90 years old. Even though her image has not been recorded, I’m not at all happy that Google’s new service allows me to stop right outside her house, and zoom in on her bedroom window.

Has the information age gone too far? Let me have your views please.

Posted 22 March 2009 § General Stuff § Videos ‡ Comments (5) ° Tagged: