What I Didn’t Learn At School

It’s Friday and it’s time to give away some real cool products. And we’re not talking about just a few products.. we’re talking about almost 1000 products that you can choose from and download free today. It’s time for the 100 Percent Giveaway Event and this year you can download online business software and resources from over
1500 contributors.. including some special products from myself.

It’s the first year I’m entering this JV Giveaway Event and I must say I never thought it would be this big. The two guys behind the event have done a great job promoting it.

The door is now open for you so that you can start downloading products.

The best part is that even though you’re not an contributor in this years Giveaway event, you can still make some money from this. You make 100% instant commissions on upgraded referrals in the members area that your referrals buy. INCLUDING an irresistible OTO (an ACTUAL One Time Only Offer) that you can review for yourself, when you login now.

I was visiting Gary Simpson’s blog today as I often do. Mostly I visit the TheGazzMan’s blog to get motivated and to see that I’m on the right track. Gary is one of the top students of the first Alex Jeffreys course at least in my mind he is a true leader.

Anyhow, this time when I was visiting his blog I find him giving Internet Marketing tips naked in a spa at his luxury apartment suite at the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas. He was really kicking some ass in Vegas with his many small but good Marketing Tips videos. Take a look at the crazy tub video here…

The crazy thing was not finding Gary Simpson in the tub. The crazy thing was to know that I did something similar just a couple of months ago in a video that I shared with my own mailing list. (See the picture under)

So What is it With Marketers Being Naked in The Tub?
I needed to ask myself that question. Gary is enjoying his bubbles when sipping Jack Daniel’s, I have less bubbles but I’m enjoying my local beer Hansa. We both talk about important stuff and sharing some good knowledge about success. And then I realize it! It is representing the new way of living. A super cool lifestyle where you are free to do what ever you want and where ever you want. (Just follow the local laws)

When you have a business that you can run from your computer anywhere in the world, you can have a lifestyle like this. – So the lifestyle of an Internet Marketer is to always be naked in a tub somewhere?  It is if you want it to. I can’t speak for Gary, but I know I love to do other things as well like rock climbing and exclusive wine tasting.

Are you ready to get started?
Well this weekend, starting 24th of October, I’ll give away a special gift so that you can get started yourself. All I can say is that it’s going to be FREE and filled with High Valued content! (And I will not be naked in a tub) Look out for more spoilers in the following days..

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures of me and Gary, and visit Gary’s Blog so that he doesn’t get mad at me for using his naked pictures on my blog… hehe..

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. But I wanted to let everyone know about it incase you still haven’t heard about the new game rules that are shaking the Internet Marketing world as we know it today. I’m talking about Government Organization and how you should be focusing on the three little letters F. T. C.
The FTC, Federal Trade Commission in USA has made some major changes and you better pay close attention to them!

So what’s this all about?
Well the FTC have created some new regulations that affect all marketers. Online or ofline and yes, they affect you even if you don’t live in the USA.

If this is totally new for you I’ll recommend that you start reading it here:
FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

Let’s break it down
The two biggest changes or new guidelines has to do with Endorsements and disclosure, and Testimonials. This will change the Affiliate Marketing industry a lot.

If you promote an affiliate product, even if it’s something you give away for free and is not getting paid for, you mus be fully disclosed or you will get hit in the face for misleading adverting. That means you can no longer hide an affiliate link on your site or on an email without telling your visitors that if they signup you will get paid when they buy the product. Even if you are just promoting a free download of an e-book, if the marketer is offering something on the back end that you will earn money on you still need to tell your visitor. If not, it’s misleading advertising.

Even more important is the guideline for using testimonials.  And I’m very sure that this one will totally change the game. It’s not enough to write on your product page that “results are not typical”. You know, the normal disclaimer. If you are selling a product now you need to let your buyers know what the average buyer will achieve!

I’m very sorry for my language here but.. WTF?

This will destroy many niches and markets. It’s nearly impossible to tell. Training, diet and making money online. It all depends on people taking action or not. If you just control your “inner whiner” that always tell you that you can’t do it and listen to your “inner winner” you will succeed.  But you see, I cant write that as an average on any product.

Looking forward to some smart marketer that comes up with a “creative” way to get around this new guidelines.

So what to do?
Follow the new guidelines! Be honest with people. Tell them if they find the product interesting you will earn a commission. I’m very sure that you will still be able to sell infoproducts without testimonials.

Finalwords
You should really read the FTC brief yourself. I’ll link it up here again. I’m not an attorney you need to seek your own legal counsel on what to do. This is just information on what’s happening in the marketing world and I thought you should know.

If it’s good or bad for the Internet Marketing industry, I guess time will show. Let me know what you think in the comments.

There is a slowdown in the economy now and if you are in any niche of Internet Marketing you are probably seeing lower numbers and a slow business. If you are totally new in Internet Marketing you may feel that it is very hard to get your first sales coming in.

You are not alone, but what can be done about this? Should we only wait and see where the recession will lead us or should we try to do something about it? I vote for some work and here is 5 steps to boost your internet marketing business.

1. Lower your cost
   I know this sounds like a crazy idea when you want to earn a lot of money. But the fact is that a lower cost for your product will probably be the thing that gets your customers to consider your offer one more time. Many people out there is turning around every dollar at the moment, and if your product or service was just a few dollars less it might fit their new tight budget for this month.
2. One Time Offer (OTO)
   This might sound silly, but not many internet marketers are using this sales method when they know they should. After your customers have bought something they are probably looking for a great deal on a similar product or a product that fits with the product they already bought.  There is a lot of money to be made on the back end of your marketing funnel, so why wait to set it up?
3. Spend Less Money
   Hopefully you are threating your business like a business. If you are you are like me you are always on top of what’s new in your niche. You educate yourself and buy a lot of eBooks and audio books and some of your mentors newest products. This is the place to save money. Before buying a new audio book or an eBook, I always look for Coupons or codes. This goes for domains and hosting too. There is lot’s of money to save here. I also buy into less products then I did before and try to find the information within the community instead.
4. Partner Up With Somebody
   Becoming a JV partner with someone that is more successful then you will help you out big time. They probably have a larger list with better converting rate then yours, sales through this list will mean some money in your pocket and a new customer on your list. You do have to pay your partner a commission, but with out him giving you the sales your business could be dead.
5. Offline Marketing For The Win
   This would be my best tips at the moment. If you know how to market, you know a little SEO and you know Social Media you are up for a treat. There is lots of lots of companies that need help with getting traffic for their website. Many of them don’t know how to set up Adwords campaigns, they don’t know about getting free traffic from Twitter and Facebook and they definitely don’t know about setting up a blog for their company to build more backlinks and get more business in that way. You could help them out and earn some money for that at the same time you are monitoring your own business. You can also outsource it and still be holding most of the money for the job.

There you go. 5 super steps to boost your internet marketing business. Hopefully the economy will also get a boost soon so that we can go back to normal.

Right now I’m working on a super cool product for my subscribers in the Internet Marketing Niche. And one of the questions that always comes up is how to generate more traffic to your blog. There is of course many different way to attract visitors to your blog, but this is the way we did it before everyone went looking for free traffic on social media sites.

Trade Your Traffic
In the old days when I first started out, the Internet seamed like a peaceful place. Everyone shared traffic with each other and when you sent traffic to a blog you will be linked up the next day and receive traffic back. For open minded bloggers this strategy can still work today. But for it to work perfectly you need to find blogs that are in the same size as your blog so that the trade of traffic is fear. It’s also important to find blogs that are in the same niche as your blog. That way you will get better quality on the traffic you receive and send.

Find Good Traffic Partners
When finding good traffic partners I look for 3 things. The first two things are the Google Page Rank (PR) and the Alexa Rank. The need to be around the same level as me or higher. Not to much higher because then the trade will not be fear. The PR and Alexa rank tells me something about the blogs SEO and traffic. If a blogger tells you that the site is doing 20.000 visits a day but have a very high number on the Alexe rank the blogger is probably lying and you don’t want to do business with them. The third thing I’m looking at is the quality of the potential partners blog. I divide quality in blog design, the way the blog is written and also how often it’s updated. I don’t want to send my visitors to an ugly looking blog with a lot of bad written post that doesn’t give my readers some kind of value. If I do that I’ll probably lose my visitors since they will not believe that I will send them to good content. So do some searches in google or look around on other blogs  in your niche and look also at who they are linking to. That way you will find blogs in the same size that yours that you can partner with.

Different ways of trading traffic
There is a lot of ways bloggers can trade traffic. You can do hard links trading, something that will give you more backlinks that again gives you a better PR over time. You can do quest posts on each other blogs once every week or 14 day depending on how often you blog. You can swap bannar ads. Those 125 x 125 pixel banners are on almost every blog now days and many of them are not earning any money from them. So why not putting that ad space in to good use? You can also do a weekly roundup blogpost where you link to a couple of blogposts that you read during the week and some of them could easily be from your traffic partners. Start networking on various social media sites, together you can build backlinks for each other with twittering and ReTweeting each others blog posts. You can also Digg and Stumble each others post to bring backlinks to the next level.

Contact potential partners
I would recommend that you do some research and find 20-50 potential blogging partners and start contacting the first 10 that you really want to trade traffic with. If your blog meets the criteria many blog owners would love to trade traffic with you to get some traffic boost on their blog.

Own a Marketing blog?
Well you may be in luck. Half of the reason for writing this blog post was to connect with bloggers in the same niche as me to work together on getting more traffic to our blogs. So I’m currently open for business with a few good sites out there. If you are interested please contact me and let’s see what we can do.

If you like the content on my blog, please subscribe to my RSS Feed here and don’t forget to click the ReTweet button and leave a comment..

Here is a new weekly post I will try to do every Friday. My recomendations for #FollowFriday on Twitter and why I follow them. Many people just list the people they are following on twitter without even giving a reason on why they follow that person. Is he or she a fun person? Doe’s he or she post valuable tweets? Do you got some kind of connection or did they do anything special for you? That what I will use this new and weekly blog post for. To give the people I follow some extra cred.

Week 37: The people you should follow on twitter and why.

@PeterParks is a top Internet Marketer that is trained by the legend Frank Kern And Super Affiliate Ewen Chia. This week Peter Parks was launching his new super coaching program called Aggressive Affiliates. Where he opened up for 300 students that where highly motivated to join in. I must admit I did not sign up for his class, but I received a from a black hat marketer that wanted to sell me Peter Parks coaching program for $50. I claimed he had downloaded everything and I could download it from him. That’s just crazy stuff. So I contacted Peter on Twitter, got his email addresses and forwarded the mail to him. This proves two things, Peter Parks care about the people following him and he helps other that helps him. All over great guy.

@SeanDonahoe is a highly successful entrepreneur, author and innovative marketer. I started to follow Sean Donahoe some time ago and mostly because he tweets a lot of good SEO tips. I look at myself an Marketer with very good SEO skills so every tips that Sean Donahoe provides are alway well appreciated. Sean Danahoe’s blog is also very informative. He covers everything from SEO, Social Media and other marketing techniques. Sean also introduced me to Odiogo, that is a service that makes mp3 files of all your blog posts.

@AndrewWarner is  the the man behind one of my favourite websites at the moment mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where the ambitious learn from a mix of experienced mentors as Andrew put’s it. And it’s absolutly true. Andrew Warner has put himself out there and interviewed I guess over 100 startup entrepreneurs, and counting, about their story of success. Now I haven’t really connected that good with Andrew at the moment, but in many of his live interviews he uses twitter to pick questions fro his guests, and he have always brought my questions up on every show. Thanks Andrew, and this is why I follow you.

Last I want to thank my ReTweeters this week.
They are all developers and designers of the website 44tips.com and did a real good job of picking up my Review of their website yesterday. And I guess they liked it too since they ReTweeted my blog post and got my blog even more visitors yesterday. Thank you for the ReTweets and thanks for a great website

Eric Visser – @ericv	Michael Kattenbeld – @kattenbeld
Teun Roodvoets – @redfeet

That’s my #FollowFriday of week 37. Be active on twitter and contact me at @skavhellen or ReTweet my blogposts to get mentioned on next week’s #FollowFriday.

For a long time I have been using Google reader for all my RSS Feed’s and later turned more and more over to LazyFeed to get more inspiration for new sites in the topics that I’m interested in. Now I’m looking at 44tips.com, something completely fresh and cool that in the end of the day might be my new startup page.

One of my marketing strategies to get more traffic and build backlinks is to comment on other blogs. I want to be one of the first to comment on a blog for 2 reasons:

1. I get more traffic that way since there is a bigger chance that other comment readers are reading the first comments then the 48th comment.
2. I have a bigger chance of getting noticed by the blogs owner for the same reason as described above.

Here is my 44tips.com Review
To keep track of all the latest blog posts on the blogs that I follow I use Google Reader, but after trying out 44tips.com I now see that login in to Google reader to catch up on important blogs is a lot of job and takes time that 44tips.com saves me.

As an Internet Marketer I’m also monitoring my Twitter, Facebook and a few other social medias. I’m searching for pictures for my blog posts and  I often watch youtube clips on various topics. And don’t forget music. I always need my music when I’m working and I stream it from youtube or get the latest re-mixes from many different music sites.

Am I getting to the point soon?
Yes! My point is, 44tips.com has gathered all this information on one nice start page. You can connect to every social network and at the same time get faster to your bookmarked websites and follow all your RSS subscribes sites in one place. It’s super awesome and time saving from an Internet Marketing view.

You should absolutely try it out.

You have probably heard the fuzz about this on the Internets this week. There something new out there and it’s called RSS Cloud, but what is it? Do you need to take some kind of action on this? Would RSS Cloud help you in some way and how?

What was RSS Feeds again?
Hopefully you know all about RSS feeds and how they help you out. In short, when you post a new blog post, people that are subscribed to your RSS feed will get your latest blog post in their RSS reader or email depending on their way of subscribing. That way they have one place where they read all their post of interests and don’t have to surf around to see if their favourite blogs are updated or not. In most cases this means more traffic to your site.

Before in the old days it could take up to one hour after you posted your blog post until all your subscribers would get your latest post in their favourite RSS reader. You would have to ping all the directories and make sure everyone got noticed. And by the old days I mean before RSS cloud was born. Now the game has changed.

Why is RSS Cloud better then regular RSS?
RSS Cloud brings new technology to the table that pushes your latest blog post to your readers the very same second your push your publish button. No more waiting for their favourite updates of the day, your blog post. This is awesome in so many ways. We will soon see a bunch of new applications that will make this look super cool and it will benefit the traffic to your site in big time. Big RSS directories will have live updates in various categories and if your blog post will probably reach a level of new readers that will subscribe to your content that way.

RSS Cloud Installed on all Wordpress.com blogs
The best part is that Wordpress.com is already supporting this. That means that over 7.5 million blogs are ready to use this. So companies out there needs to take some serious action the next couple of weeks. At this point only 1 RSS aggregator, River2, is supporting RSS Cloud. But it’s said that the ultra cool and hip RSS reader LazyFeed will support this very soon to.

How to install RSS Cloud on hosted Wordpress blog
If you are using a self hosted wordpress blog like me there is a Plugin to help you get started right away. Joseph Scott’s easy to install plugin can be downloaded here. You just upload the folder to your plugin directory and find it under plugins in your wordpress admin panel.

Now you should be ready for the future. Today there is an RSS Cloud Meetup in the US, so I’m guessing more fantastic news will get spread around about RSS Cloud later today.

This is the first tips about podcast’s of many to come that I want you to listen to every week. Last night I gave you a great tips about the very new Internet show, TWiST or This Week in Startups. Today I want to give you a tips about a show that is more for all you Internet Marketers out there.

The podcast’s name is Internet Marketing This Week and is brought to you from four of the biggest Internet Marketers out there. You should by now know the name and faces of Ed Dale, Lynn Terry, Michelle MacPhearson and Paul Colligan. Every week they get their skypes together and talks about various topics that is important in the Internet Marketing world.

I really connected with them on a whole new level when listening to them every week talking about their up’s and downs, what type of products are selling best, different kinds of product launches, what mistakes people do and what super cool product creation tools that are out there.

You learn so much more then just jumping around their blogs and you get an insight of how much work it actually is to be one of the best Internet Marketers out there. So start educating yourself on what’s new in your industry. Listen in on Internet Marketing This Week now.

I think it’s about time I slow down a bit and listen more to my visitors to get an better understanding on why you are on this blog and what you want to learn from it. That’s why this blog post will be a poll with the question; What do you want to learn in Internet Marketing?

I know a lot of the right people that are helping me, but what I struggle with is maybe not what you struggle with. So with a better understanding I hope to make this a better blog. So please take a few seconds and help me out. Also if you can, give me some comments so I have more to go on. Thanks!