Friday December 21st, 2007: Issue #874
December 21st, 2007Here we are then. The last issue of Kickstart in 2007 - the 117th of the year. Christmas is almost upon us and that strange limbo time that starts on December 27th and ends on January 1st is about to begin.
Wouldn’t it have made so much more sense to make Christmas Day December 30th? That way all the traditional fuss and faff over who is working between Christmas and New Year, how much food siege-minded shoppers have to stockpile, and what to do with relatives who don’t fancy going home would have been avoided.
We have Pope Julius I, in the 4th century A.D., to blame because he decided to change the ‘movable feast’ that the birth of Christ had hitherto been into a fixed feast day. Conveniently, the pagan people of Europe already had a handy feast-day on December 25th - the Winter Solstice, or Return of the Sun - so he decreed that Christians should celebrate Christ’s birth on that day henceforth. The intention was to ‘Christianize’ an old-religion celebration, but the long term effect was to cause hard feelings all round the world as some people have to work the days between Christmas and New Year and others get to relax in the fuzzy non-time of a non-holiday.
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If you are a new subscriber to Kickstart, you can read all the more ‘normal’ back issues at the archive website at http://kickstartarchive.com
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Wednesday’s Kickstart was huge at over 5000 words. I’m very conscious of the fact that you are busy and reading a major missive like that is not high on your agenda this close to Christmas (or, perhaps, anytime!). So I’ll try to keep this final Kickstart of 2007 as brief as I can.
There is a lot to cover though, so we’ll see how I do!
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Calling all writers…
Buried deep inside Wednesday’s Kickstart was the news that I’m allowing myself to sell a few copies of my Keyword LSI script at the knockdown (and frankly ludicrous) price of $27.
You can test drive the script at http://www.keywordhacker.com/lsiplus/ for a few more days. After that I’ll be taking it down.
What does it do?
I really need to write a sales page to whet your appetite with all the wonderful benefits the script will bring you, but for now I’ll have to settle for listing the key ones:
1. It finds the words and phrases that the search engines expect to find in articles and webpages on any given topic. This is really important - so much so that the whole idea has a name: Latent Semantic Indexing. Filling your articles and webpages with words that are demonstrably related to your base keyword or phrase makes it appear much more relevant to the SEs and a much richer reading experience for real people.
2. It lets you examine the top ranking web pages for any given keyword to see what makes them stand out. You can see at a glance the PageRank, Alexa rank, wordcount, most significant words used, title, keyword and description meta tag data and a listing of all the important headlines used on page. This kind of market knowledge is priceless when you want to optimize your own pages.
3. Proponents of article writing often give you generic advice that articles should be between x and y number of words, and that keywords should be used z times per 100 words. It all sounds so logical and rational. My Keyword Hacker LSI tool shows you why such general advice is worse than useless. The program takes your keyword or phrase and shows you how many words the top ranking pages actually have, and the % that the keyword is used. The fact is that the numbers change for each niche. There is no point in writing a 1500 word keyword-dense article if the top ten search engine results all have under 500 words and a keyword density of less than 1%!
Anyone who writes articles (and if you are in Internet marketing that should be you) or builds web pages, really needs to understand the things my script tells you.
Send me $27 by PayPal to m.avis@ntlworld.com and I’ll get it to you as fast as I can. You will need your own domain and the knowledge of how to upload the script to your server by simple FTP.
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Martin’s Journey (Part 2).
We left our hero surrounded by 7 large three-ring binders full of the printed out pages of the biggest ebook he had ever seen.
To be more accurate, Make Your Site Sell by Ken Evoy was the only ebook he had ever seen up to that point and it was pretty overwhelming. [Incidentally, that book - or rather the 2002 ‘updated’ version of it - is now available for free from http://myss.sitesell.com/products43.html if you’d like to see it for yourself.]
MYSS did several things for Martin. First it made him realize that Internet marketing was just a common sense application of his real-world skills. Second it instantly addicted him to ebooks. Third it (rather dangerously) made him think he was an expert. Fourth, it lulled him into a false sense of security. Fifth, I’m ashamed to say, it inadvertently encouraged him to become a liar.
This was late in 2000. Martin was excited as can be and went looking for other ebooks he could devour. You may recognize the syndrome: “I’m going to make money online, but first I have to read just one more book on the subject, and then just another one …”
Six or seven months later, in July 2001, Martin’s online adventure actually got started.
As you may have noticed, Martin is a contrary soul. While everyone around him was building websites to make money, Martin decided not to immediately follow that route. Instead, he jumped straight in an began writing an ezine.
No matter that he had no clue where his subscribers were going to come from. No matter that he was at best a wide-eyed pre-newbie with a lot of hope and zero experience. No matter that he’d never written anything worth reading in his life - apart from a lifetime of business reports that almost certainly were never read by anyone!
No, Martin was not exactly qualified, but he had always had a ‘why not have a go’ attitude, so he had a go.
That first newsletter was called BizE-zine. There are a few people who subscribed to it way back in those wide-eyed days who are still subscribers to Kickstart. If you are one of them - Martin sends his apologies. Looking back those early BizE-zine issues weren’t what you could call quality writing.
It is quite shocking now to see how much of a liar Martin became - quite without realizing. Early issues of Kickstart were full of pompous articles about how to make money online - when the honest truth was that Martin hadn’t ever made a single cent! And, if we are to remain honest, didn’t for quite some time.
Nowadays Martin despises the whole Fake It Until You Make It concept, but back then he didn’t see any problem with giving advice about things he didn’t fully understand and hadn’t even tried for himself.
Martin did start one thing from the very first issue of Kickstart that he has tried to stick to ever since: he only recommended products that he had bought and read himself. That first issue had a recommendation for Make Your Site Sell!
It’s just a shame it didn’t have any readers and so didn’t make any sales or money!
Making money was something that was still a long way in the future for our intrepid Internet explorer.
Despite its shortcomings (which may be more evident in retrospect that the were at the time) BizE-zine started to attract subscribers. A few here, a few there, and before long it was being sent out once a week to about 1000 people.
Amazing!
Of course, none of them ever bought anything that Martin recommended and our hero began to wonder if spending all this time writing was actually a serious business proposition or not. By October 2001 Martin was getting very discouraged indeed. All those ebooks made it sound so easy. And, in fact, getting subscribers had been a lot easier than he’d expected. But actually making money? Not so easy.
October 3rd 2001 saw issue #10 of BizE-zine and if things didn’t look up soon, probably one of the last.
That date is Martin’s Red Letter Day. The day that marked a turning point. The day that saw not just the first online sale he had ever made, but the second one as well!
One person joined the Warrior’s Forum (you had to pay to join in those days) and another bought a book by a chap called Mike McGroarty.
Whoo Hoo! I have to tell you that the first day you make money online is as exciting as the first time you … well you probably know where I’m going there. In fact, in one way it is a whole lot more exciting because you can actually tell people about it!
The rush is incredible. This stuff actually works!
Martin was as excited as it’s possible to be - forget the fact that the total commissions amounted to about $40 and the first commission check that arrived (for $25) was uncashable because Martin’s bank charged more to deposit US Dollar checks than the check was worth. That didn’t matter one bit.
What mattered was that the process had been vindicated.
The next sale didn’t happen for another month, and after that they were very sporadic, but Martin’s future was set now, so the lack of the anticipated Internet millions made no difference. The unquenchable enthusiasm for Internet marketing was burned into his soul.
The next breakthrough came when Martin discovered seminars.
I wish I could remember the date, but the first seminar Martin attended was put on by a chap called Peter Twist in a very cosy room in a hotel in Birmingham. It was a completely nervewracking experience for Martin because he didn’t know what to expect, but it ended up changing his life.
The speakers were all fascinating, but the real eye-opener for Martin was meeting the other attendees. These people spoke his language, understood his problems, shared his excitement and were at all kinds of stages on their own journeys. Some were far ahead of Martin, some were still just beginning. But all had something to say and share. There are people who Martin met at that first ever seminar that he is still good friends with all these years later.
What Martin didn’t know at the time was that he was becoming part of a network. And that, if you don’t know already, is one of the biggest secrets to success.
Subscriber numbers continued to grow, sales started to happen more frequently and slowly, Martin became better at writing (which was a very good thing!)
Still, though, the promise of an Internet marketing career that could bring in untold riches was a distant dream. At best, Martin had built a paying hobby.
BizE-zine lasted for 72 issues, but had to close its doors in April 2003 to make way for Martin’s other newsletter, Kickstart Daily. Kickstart had begun life some months before and was proving to be much more popular with the readers. While BizE-zine never managed to attract more than 1100 subscribers, Kickstart sailed past that number in its first few months.
Since then, Kickstart has evolved, Martin has evolved and Internet marketing has evolved. The online world of late 2007 is a quite different place to that in 2001. But that’s part of the continuing excitement. Martin is still like a kid in a candy store - wide-eyed with excitement every time a commission check arrives or a sale is made. He may have taken a long time to get to the point where making money online was a real business proposition and not just a hobby income, but having done so, he doesn’t regret a single day of the journey.
While Martin primarily sees himself as a writer, his Internet activities encompass a wide range of disciplines. He has written 8 ebooks (that he can remember), produced a DVD set, created more PHP programs than he can recall and launched other products that have sold well.
He has spoken at half a dozen seminars, on a variety of subjects (and is always happy to consider speaking requests).
He has been interviewed more times than he can remember, has so many websites and domains that he has lost count.
Martin has had many days when his Internet marketing income has been zero. Most days though, bring in more than enough for him and his family to live on, and once in a while a really good day emerges when several thousand dollars make their way to his bank account. Those days are very exciting and even his wife gets interested when they happen.
It has been a long journey, but a wonderful one. Some great people have been there along the way to guide, steer, and support - and the friendships that have been made along the way are priceless.
A little over six years on the journey is by no means over. In fact, it is just beginning.
Now that’s an exciting thought.
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Before I move on to the second part of my review of the top products that have been recommended in Kickstart during 2007, I really must let you know that the very special price deal on Tony Shepherd and Sara Brown’s superb ebook, ‘Licensed to Quit’ ends this weekend. After Sunday you’ll have to pay about double for the book that gives you a real-life step-by-step plan to make money online that really works.
http://www.sara-brown.com/invitation
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Of all the 45 products that have been in Kickstart this last year, there has only been room for less than half in this week’s Kickstarts.
Wednesday saw the ten top ebooks and today I’ll tell you about the top 7 non-ebook products.
One thing I should explain though. In the interest of some kind of brevity, I’ve excluded all the many wonderful $7 ebooks that I’ve loved this year. Maybe I’ll review them all separately in the New Year. I’ve also excluded most membership sites, and all of my own products. There is plenty of time to tell you about them later! 
1. XSitePro
Almost all Internet marketers need to build websites every now again. Some use FrontPage or Dreamweaver, some prefer to write the HTML/CSS code for themselves. Either way it can be a struggle.
XSitePro is a program that was designed by Internet marketers for Internet marketers and it makes building professional, high quality websites an absolute breeze.
You don’t need to understand a single thing about how web pages work - XSitePro does it all for you.
The tutorial that comes with it is a masterpiece of clarity. Anyone, even without any experience of websites at all, will have a working site up and working in about an hour. It really is that easy.
Here is the really good news. The developers of XSitePro have been working really hard for the last year to produce version 2. (I thought v.1 was good, but wait until you see what v.2 can do!) Everyone who buys the current version of XSitePro now will be given a free upgrade to the new version as soon as it launches (early in 2008, hopefully). That’s a great deal because the new version will be more expensive when it goes on sale.
When I met Paul Smithson, XSitePro’s developer at the last London Lunch, he gave me a print out of all the new features that will be in v.2. Although I’m sworn to secrecy, I can say that the list runs to 9 pages!
If you want to build websites, XSitePro is made for you.
http://www.urlnex.us/xsitepro/
2. Web Hosting
Earlier this year I moved some of my hosting to HostGator and I haven’t regretted that decision for a moment. They offer more webspace and more bandwidth for less money than any of the other hosting companies I use. Their servers are fast and responsive (important when you are performing admin duties on your sites) and the very few times I’ve needed to contact support they’ve been brilliant.
I have no qualms whatever in saying that if you need hosting that is great value for money, make HostGator your first port of call.
http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/
3. Text Editor
There is one program that I use almost every day of my life. I’m using it right now. That program is called Text Formatter Plus and it is the text editor that I write Kickstart on.
I don’t know what I’d do without it.
TFP has some really clever features that you don’t get in regular text editors. It’s entire purpose is to make the writing of ezines easy. And it fulfills that role to perfection.
If you write ezines or online newsletters in plain text format, check out Text Formatter Plus. It’ll save you a bundle of time and quickly become completely invaluable to you.
4. Instant Article Wizard
Instant Article Wizard is a work of genius from Jonathan Leger - -a guy who seems to be able to create one genius product after another.
What the program does is very clever and very simple. It helps you write great articles, at record speed, by gathering sentences from all over the Internet. The point is not to just copy and paste those sentences into a strange-looking article, but to use them as the basis of your own work.
It is a lot easier to show you than tell you, so take a look at the video review I created.
Instant Article Wizard is surprisingly low priced for what it does, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it is lightweight. it certainly isn’t. This is powerful and valuable stuff.
http://www.urlnex.us/InstantArticleWizard/VideoReview/
5. Unique Article Wizard
Not to be confused with Instant Article Wizard (above). Unique Article Wizard is a membership site that posts your articles on dozens (hundreds) of article directory sites. And because of its clever (and secret) way of changing the articles, it posts a different version to each article directory.
The result for you is a huge number of backlinks to your sites with very little effort on your part.
If you are an article marketer, or you understand the value of promoting your sites and products with well written articles posted to article directories, a membership to Unique Article Wizard is a must for you.
This site is one of my secret weapons, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t be one of yours too.
6. SLOBS
What a strange name for one of the cleverest and simplest ways of filling a blog up with highly targeted content that the search engines will love. SLOBS is a system that was devised by my good friend Glenn Leader. It lets you put as many blogs as you like completely on autopilot.
The system finds the freshest content and posts it to your blog completely automatically. There is no RSS stuff to be concerned with and once you’ve set it up you can just forget all about it.
SLOBS stands for Super Lazy Organic Blogger System and it completely lives up to its name.
The link below takes you to a special Kickstart invitational page that Glenn set up way back when I first mentioned SLOBS in Kickstart. it still works, but you should know that the system has been upgraded since then and when you buy from that page you’ll actually get the more expensive SLOBS-2 for the same price.
http://www.cloudzero.co.uk/slobs/martin/?id=kickstart
7. Niche Inspector
I’ve written so much about Niche Inspector over the last year that I almost don’t know where to start. Quite simply, Niche Inspector is the best and simplest to use keyword research tool that I own (I own four of them).
Keyword research is one of those annoying, but vital tasks that everyone who builds websites, writes articles or researches niches needs to do. There are any number of great programs out there, from very cheap to very expensive, that will find huge lists of keywords and phrases for you. Mostly they all do a good job.
Where Niche Inspector really stands out is in the research tools it has built in. You can filter your keyword lists really easily to make sense of them in seconds.
The link below goes to my video review. Take a look and see how Niche Inspector can easily become one of your most used tools. I’m surprised that my copy hasn’t worn out I use it so often!
http://www.kickstartdaily.com/nicheinspector/
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“What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace.”
Agnes M. Pharo
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It is time to bring 2007 to an end, as far as Kickstart is concerned. I’m still at the other end of the email though, so you are welcome to write to me anytime you like.
The Kickstart forum is still open for business 24/7 - including Christmas Day - so if you have a comment, an observation, a question or an answer - or if you just fancy some good old-fashioned joking around - the door is always open for you.
http://kickstarttodayforum.com/
There are some strange folk in there, but we don’t bite and you may feel quite at home!
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All that’s left to say is that Delia and I wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas season and a healthy and prosperous 2008.
Martin