Kickstart #901: This could be the next big thing
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Kickstart Today
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Wednesday March 19th, 2008: Issue #901
Greetings!
Easter is nearly upon us and at last the weather here has cheered
up a bit. It has turned cold, but at last the grey horribleness
has passed and a nice blue sky with occasional fluffy bits is
overhead.
I’ve bought a greenhouse, so later today I want to start putting
the frame together. Now, should I think positively and assume
that it will all fall together with ease and that the
instructions will all make perfect sense, or should I just accept
that in a few hours I’ll be swearing and cursing the wretched
thing because it is all together apart from one last bit - and
I’ll be a couple of bolts and a washer short.
I must be careful not to manifest by deepest suspicions, so let’s
say that it will all go swimmingly!
(Oh no - I should have used a different word - that will surely
make it pour with rain just when I can’t stop and take shelter!)
#~#~#
In all the feedback I receive, one of things people most often
say is that they’d like me to review more products.
It’s a tricky one because I don’t want to start reviewing stuff
just for the sake of it - and I’m certainly not going to fall
into the trap of recommending things that I haven’t seen or used.
On the other hand, I do recognize that most of the regular
readers of Kickstart have at least a passing interest in buying
stuff online and do look to Kickstart for an honest opinion when
new things come out.
I’ll see what I can do to get a better balance in future.
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Of course, it isn’t just new products that should be regularly
reviewed. Many of the products that have been around for a while
are still top of their class and deserve to be acknowledged as
such. Indeed, with new people joining the online marketing
community every day, it is vital that they be informed about the
tried and tested products before they rush off and potentially
waste their money on the latest fads.
One such old favorite is XSitePro.
XSitePro is a program that helps you build websites. It was
designed from the ground up by Internet marketers, for Internet
marketers and incorporates many features that you won’t find in
site building software elsewhere. Best of all, it is dead easy to
use. There is a comprehensive tutorial that will have you up and
running with the program in under an hour - and building top
quality websites not long after. The program was built to have a
short learning curve - but that isn’t to say it isn’t AMAzingly
powerful. It is. It is just that its power is easy to access and
simple to apply.
I wish that could be said of a lot of programs out there!
If you want to build a website - or many websites - but don’t
want to go to the fuss of learning HTML, or spending days or
weeks getting to grips with Dreamweaver, then XSitePro is the
answer to your dreams.
I’ve mentioned my friend David before, but his example is so good
that I’ll briefly mention him again. David is a working joiner.
He makes things out of wood. A bit over a year ago, David asked
me to help him build a website to promote his business. I refused
(some friend I am, eh?).
Instead I pointed him to XSitePro. Now understand this - David,
at that time, had barely mastered email. The idea of learning a
program like XSitePro seemed impossible to him. “Trust me,” I
said, “If you need any help, I’m just at the end of the phone.”
David did phone me a few days later - but not to ask for help. He
wanted me to see his new website. http://www.dmwoodworx.com
I’m really proud of him - and even more proud and impressed that
he has maintained the site and added new pages on a regular
basis.
Perhaps more importantly, the business that the site has directly
generated for him has paid for XSitePro many times over!
He even bought a new Windows Vista computer recently and
transferred XSitePro to the new machine and migrated all his
site’s files over to it with no bother - a couple of emails to
XSitePro support sorted him out in no time.
Very soon now, a new version of XSitePro will be launched. The
program has been almost completely rewritten to add dozens of new
features and ideas that users have asked for. It has been a
mammoth task that has taken over 18 months. I’m lucky in that
I’ve been shown a beta version and given a list of the new
features (and sworn to secrecy about them!) I can tell you that
it is mind blowing though!
The new version will be more expensive than the current one, but
anyone who buys XSitePro now will be upgraded to version 2 at no
extra charge - so it really is a good time to get yourself a
copy.
And to make it even sweeter I’m going to offer a 72-hour special
offer exclusively for Kickstart readers.
If you buy before midnight on Friday 21st March 2008 and send me
your purchase confirmation (along with your PayPal address), I
will send you $30 by PayPal when I receive my affiliate
commission from your sale.
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If you have AdSense on any of your sites, please make sure to
read the second half of today’s Foolproof, No-Nonsense Guide to
Making Money Online installment.
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With the Easter weekend coming up, Kickstart (and my typing
fingers) are due for a short break. The next issue of Kickstart
will hit your inbox in a week’s time on Wednesday 26th March.
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One more thing before I go.
I’ve just signed up for a new service that I think could take off
in a big way - and those of us in ‘on the ground floor’ could
reap great benefits. That includes you!
The service is called GadgetSpots Network and was recommended to
be by my good friend in Australia, Phil Wiley (who also writes
one of the few newsletters that I read every word of every
issue). It is the brainchild of a guy called Bill Burdin -
another Englishman who lives ‘down under’ - who has a history of
building successful classified ad networks.
After signing up, you get a small piece of code that is dead easy
to put on your web pages - the effect is that small ads, like
AdSense ads, are displayed.
Unlike AdSense, you don’t get paid when people click on the ads,
but you do get two rather cool benefits that AdSense don’t offer:
1. If other people decide to sign up for the service, you get a
residual income of $6 per month from the first tier, and $3
monthly from the second tier. If this thing grows as fast as I
suspect it will, that residual income will soon mount up to a
‘nice little earner’!
2. The extra clever thing - and the real reason it will be likely
grow in popularity very fast - is that you can place your own ads
that will appear on other people’s sites - at no extra charge!
Those ads can be for your own products, or, importantly, for
other people’s products that you are an affiliate. That’s mighty
powerful stuff right there!
It is really easy to set up.
I joined a few minutes ago and immediately upgraded to Pro status
(you can join for free, but the Pro status displays your ads a
lot more often.)
Getting my code snippet, adding it to my blog template and then
creating an ad for my Keyword LSI Spy program all took a total of
ten minutes. You can see the result at http://imkickstart.com -
and as creating ads is so easy, and you can put up as many as you
like, you can guess what I’m going to do next!
The ads, in case you miss them (!) are on the right-hand side. I
don’t know if you’ll see my Keyword LSI Spy ad on there, but it
should show up eventually!
I’m writing this after I’ve finished writing today’s course
installment, but you’ll see that it ties in perfectly - and
provides yet another method of monetizing your site!
If you want to join, either for the free or Pro version, you can
either click the link under my ad block on the blog, or go
directly to this link: http://www.urlnex.us/gadgetspots/
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The Quote of the Day
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M. M. Coady said,
“The man who has ceased to learn ought not to be allowed to
wander around loose in these dangerous days.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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You are not an island.
The good Lord knows that we are all flawed. We all have gaps in
our knowledge, gaps in our ability to learn and gaps in our
lives.
That is why He gave us other people.
I know that there are some things that I cannot do, no matter how
much I try. That is not negative fatalism, but an honest
assessment of my personality. My brain is not wired up to
understand tax forms, for example. It also refuses to understand
the technical workings of the Internet.
Yet I still manage to send my tax papers in every year, and I am
still able to make a good income online.
Because although I am able to admit that I can’t do some things,
I will not accept that my shortcomings prevent me from doing them
anyway.
I have accepted that I need outside help.
My accountant deals with the impenetrable language of the tax
office, and online I am always quick to ask for help from people
who do know how to do things.
I am not an island and neither are you.
There is no point in struggling uphill against your own brain’s
inability to cope. No matter what your blind spot, there is
someone out there with clearer vision. Ask them for help.
You are not showing weakness. You will be stronger for it - and
you can bet that they will be pleased as punch to be able to
help.
Ask and ye shall receive.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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Part 12 … Monetization.
Monetization is a big word (and one that I’m sure has only
recently been made up) that describes and almost infinitely big
subject.
There are just so many ways to make money online that it is
impossible for me to list them all here - even if I knew them all
myself! But today I’ll try to outline some of the major methods
of turning a few pages of text and code into money-making
machines that will pump cash into your bank account day after day
- even while you sleep!
(Did you like that hype-talk? I was just having fun - I’ll try to
keep both feet on the ground from here on in.)
* Active product selling
Perhaps the most obvious way to generate an income from a website
is to sell a product that you have personally own the rights to.
It could be something like an ebook or report that you’ve created
yourself, or it could be something that you’ve bought the rights
to because you think the product is good. It could even be
something that you’ve paid someone else to create for you (there
will be more on outsourcing later in the course).
However you’ve come by the item you have for sale, the chances
are that your website will take the form of a sales letter.
The format of sales letters haven’t changed much in over a
hundred years and the online versions - now often called sales
pages - are just a continuation of a long tradition of tried and
tested copywriting techniques.
There is no great mystery - you capture the reader’s attention
with a catchy and intriguing headline, stimulate their interest
in the product by talking about the problems it can solve and
showing how other people have loved it, fan the flames of their
desire to own the product by going into detail about the benefits
owning it will bring to them, and finally, give them a reason to
take action and buy it now. (I’ll talk about copywriting in more
detail in a later installment of this course and explain a neat
7-step process that I use when writing sales copy.)
Selling your own products is one of the more profitable ways of
marketing online and one that I highly recommend. However, not
everyone is comfortable writing ebooks or even special reports -
and certainly not everyone can write programs.
Which brings me to the next method:
* Affiliate selling
Affiliate selling means the process of selling other people’s
products. With this method, you are not so much ’selling’ as
‘encouraging people to learn more; your job is not to close the
sale, but to stimulate interest in the reader so that he or she
will go to the product owner’s real sales page.
And every time you do succeed in sending someone to a sales page
where they buy a product or service, you will be paid a
commission by the product owner.
The process is also ‘passive’ because it tends to work best when
you don’t appear to be selling at all - merely reviewing and
recommending.
Almost any web page can include some kind of affiliate sales
process. there are products and services in virtually any niche
you can think of that will suit your page’s content. All you need
to do is go find them. Affiliate networks like ClickBank,
Commission Junction, LinkShare and PayDotCom are great places to
start.
* Advertisements
An easy way to make anything from a small trickle of income to a
flood is to allow advertisers to place their ads on your pages.
If you are lucky enough to have a lot of traffic, you can make a
good income this way.
Perhaps the most obvious way to display third-party ads is
through the Google AdSense system.
In case you are unaware of AdSense, it is a service run by Google
that you sign up to join (at no cost). Once accepted as a member,
Google will give you a snippet of code to place in your web
pages. That code allows Google to ‘read’ your web page and
determine what it is about. they will then place small
classified-style ads on your page that are relevant to your
page’s subject.
The process is called ‘contextual advertising’.
Every time one of your visitors clicks on one of the AdSense ads
they are charged a small amount by Google (the advertisers bid to
be displayed, and so the actual amount that each click costs
varies hugely. Depending on the popularity of the keyword that
your page displays for, the cost-per-click could be anything from
a few cents to several dollars. Google then pay you, the site
owner, a percentage of the click cost.
A year or so ago, people got rich by building sites expressly for
the purpose of attracting high value AdSense ads, but as with
many things, the bubble burst and Google cracked down on what
they perceived as ‘made-for-AdSense’ sites. Accordingly, the
income from AdSense fell to a fraction of its former glory. Many
people reported a drop in their income of 90-95%.
But, even though getting rich with AdSense is now a lot harder
than it used to be, it is still a good way to generate small sums
from your sites with no real effort.
There are many other contextual advertising services, but until
very recently, Google has banned you from displaying them on any
web page that also displayed AdSense ads. That ban now seems to
have been lifted, so it appears you can now mix and match
contextual services.
Of course, contextual advertising such as AdSense isn’t the only
way to put ads on pages. You can, if you like, sell banner ads
(an umbrella term for all kinds of shapes and sizes of ads) on
your site. As an example, take a look at the very popular blog
http://www.copyblogger.com/ where you’ll see a block of six ads
on the right-hand side. They cost $1500 each per month. Build up
your traffic and you could find advertisers willing to buy ads
from you too.
* Donations
It is even possible to just ask for money.
Many sites nowadays have ‘buy me a beer’ buttons or links and
hope that visitors will value the content of the pages or blog
posts sufficiently to want to show their appreciation.
I suspect that this method doesn’t bring in much money, but it
certainly brings some - and with no more work on your part than
placing the link there in the first place.
* Drive customers to offline businesses
Anther frequently seen method of profiting from your website is
to use it as a shop window for your offline business - and to
drive customers there. My friend David’s site at
www.dmwoodworx.com is a great example. it is a high content site
that is focused on showcasing his offline joinery business. He
can send potential customers and clients there by way of his
business cards, email sig lines and letter headings and the
search engines will send him fresh traffic because there is a lot
of real content for people to see. Both ways, he puts his offline
business in front of interested viewers and generates plenty of
new contracts as a result.
This short introduction can only scratch the surface of the many
ways to monetize your websites and blogs. In future we will look
at them in more detail, and at other great systems and methods
that you can consider.
Meanwhile, before you can make money from your site, remember
that you have to have people coming to view it - and that is what
we’ll look at next time.
#~#~#
A Warning about AdSense - and reading the small print!
Although I have AdSense on several of my sites, and bank a nice
check from Google each month as a result, I don’t obsess over my
stats and rarely visit my AdSense account online.
Yesterday I did visit it and was greeted by a new terms and
conditions agreement that I had to agree to in order to keep my
AdSense account.
Of course, I did agree - without bothering to read any of the
interminable legalese.
Then I got to thinking. I wondered what changes they had made
that required a new ToS agreement. A few minutes Googling and I
quickly found the answer - and it is something that everyone who
has AdSense on any of their websites NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT.
Very soon (25th May) you will now have to display a Privacy
Policy on any website (or property as Google now call such
things) that clearly informs visitors that third party cookies
and tracking beacons will be placed on their computers if the ads
are clicked on.
The actual wording in the new AdSense ToS is:
“You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that
clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading
cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect
information, in the course of ads being served on your website.
Your privacy policy should also include information about user
options for cookie management.”
Failure to accept the new terms, and presumably to be compliant
with them, by May 25th 2008 will put you at risk of losing your
AdSense account.
Not a happy thought.
I’d guess that most people who make a few bucks here and there
from AdSense have no idea about the need to put up a privacy
policy page - or have much of a clue as to how to put one up
anyway.
Well don’t panic! It may be a bit of a fuss and bother, but it
isn’t hard.
You don’t need to put the privacy statement on each page - just a
link to it.
People who have sites containing hundreds or thousands of pages
may have a problem if they don’t have their navigation sections
in external files. Sites built with older-style site building
programs (the old made-for-AdSense site builders, for example)
will struggle. But modern, well-constructed websites that pull in
navigation from external files, or most blogs, will be very easy
to change.
If you have a big website that displays AdSense and have no clue
how to put a link to a privacy policy on all your pages, get
yourself a copy of a program called HTML Search & Replace. You
can find it at http://www.alentum.com/htmlsr/ (not an affiliate
link) where there is a 30-day free trial.
For well constructed sites, adding the link will be just a matter
of changing one file, or in a blog, making a link in your
blogroll.
What to put in the privacy policy?
I’m no lawyer, so can’t offer suggestions in the appropriate
language, but there is a very informative blog called JenSense,
by Jennifer Slegg, which offers a boilerplate privacy policy that
appears to do the job very nicely. You can copy and paste her
text and just change your site’s name and URL details - all with
her blessing.
http://www.jensense.com/2008/03/05/adsense-friendly-privacy-policy-sample-for-adsense-publishers-to-use/
This is something that is all too easy to overlook or forget, but
come May 25th you may come to regret not taking action. I plan to
add the privacy policy to all my sites - whether they display
AdSense or not - just to be on the safe side.
Better to get into the habit now than forget about it later.
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Fascinating Facts
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Have you ever eaten scallops? They are delicious when prepared
correctly, but chewy and rubbery when cooked for too long.
The scallop is a shellfish that has 35 eyes - all of which are
blue.
Here’s looking at you kid.
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Products you may enjoy
by Martin Avis
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‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ (Ideal for anyone
who is a member of the excellent PLRproEbooks site):
http://www.plrsecrets.com
‘You CAN Write Articles’ - Anyone can write articles to make
money online. This $7 ebook shows you just how easy it is.
http://www.youcanwritearticles.com
‘14 Days to Total Time Control’ - The book that will help you
control the time IN your life, so you can get on with having the
time OF your life. http://www.totaltimecontrol.com
‘Keyword LSI Spy’ My new script that lets you find the exact
words that the search engines love to see on your web pages and
in your articles - and a whole lot more!
http://www.keywordlsispy.com
#~#~#
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