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Kickstart Today
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Monday April 14th, 2008: Issue #909
Kickstart Today is published three times each week for opted-in
subscribers only. Publisher: Martin Avis. Your comments are
always welcome – to respond to anything you read here, please
click ‘Reply’
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Greetings!
This rant may well upset seven Kickstart readers.
I apologize if it applies to you, but hopefully you’ll see what I
mean by the end.
When did it become ‘efficient’ to improve your own efficiency at
the expense of other people’s?
There is a growing trend for people to set their email program to
send an automated message to everyone who contacts them saying
something along the lines of “I’m working to improve my
efficiency by only checking my emails once a day. I’ll get back
to you when I do.”
Automated messages like that drive me crazy because every time I
send out Kickstart I’m currently receiving seven of them. As I
can’t tell from the subject line (it is usually just a repeat of
the Kickstart subject line) if the message is an automated
response or a real subscriber getting in touch, I have to open
and read them.
It is wasting my time. Their drive for efficiency is making me
less efficient.
I see no good reason for sending out such messages anyway. What
does it say about you? That you are too lazy to read your emails?
That you have no respect for others? That my message to you is
unimportant? That you are far too busy?
If you are that busy, why are you subscribing to ezines at work
anyway?
Most real people who are not welded to their computers only check
their emails once or twice a day anyway, so why send out a
message to make you look different?
I don’t mind out of office replies so much. They at least have a
practical purpose and are easily identified, but these ‘I can’t
be bothered to read your email and might get to it later if you
are lucky’ messages are something that should be nipped in the
bud before they spread any further.
If you have such an autoresponse message set up, don’t be
surprised if Kickstart disappears from your inbox sometime soon.
I can see how the policy of only checking emails once or twice a
day is good time management. That’s not in dispute. It is the
fact that these people choose to tell me that it is their policy
every time I send them an email that gets my goat.
When you think about it, if you have a business where people are
likely to get irritated if they don’t hear back from you
instantly, then a once-a-day email policy is probably a bad idea
for you whether you announce the fact or not.
And if your contacts aren’t going to worry about a delay in your
response time, then you also don’t need to rub their faces in the
fact.
Either way, the autoresponse message is counter-productive.
And damned annoying!
When only one person did it I could ignore it. Now that the idea
has spread to seven, it has reached its tipping point.
Please stop sending them to me before I stop sending anything to
you.
#~#~#
A thread over at the Warrior Forum really shocked me this
weekend. A young guy of 18 wrote to say that his mother has been
asking him to contribute more to the household expenses and that
unless he did (and gave up his silly ideas of making money
online) he should go find some place else to live.
The kid (for that is what I see him as) moaned that he did
contribute – he pays his own car and phone bills and also pays
his mothers cell phone bill.
What shocked me was the number of people who very vociferously
told him that his mother is unreasonable and that he should get
out as fast as he can.
Has the concept of family and reponsibility broken down so much
thses days that this is seen as good advice?
What’s wrong with his mother asking him to chip in a bit more to
help with the household bills? You can bet he eats more than his
fair share of the food! And what parent hasn’t at some time said
‘unless you pay your way you can find a place of your own’? Its
not as if we actually mean it – we are just trying to make a
point.
But a disturbing number of so-called Warriors seem to think that
advising an 18 year old to leave home in a huff – and maybe
dAMAge his relationship with his parents (who so many see as
evil) is good an appropriate. It is quite telling that many of
those dumb advisor seem to be little more than teenagers
themselves – or were themselves thrown out of home at a young
age.
Perhaps it just says a lot about the kind of people who now
frequent the Warrior forum.
It left me really sad – family is way too important to throw
away. And hormone-ridden, teen-angst tantrums can take years to
mend. I hope the original poster doesn’t listen to such awful
advice and grows up enough to realize that paying a cell phone
bill isn’t really paying his fair share – and that the fact that
he pays his own car bills is totally irrelevant to his mother
who, by his own admission, is struggling to make ends meet.
As to making money online being a real business or not, I can see
the mother’s point. If she is seeing her son spending all his
hours on the computer with little to show for it, then she has
every right to assume that he is wasting his time. Of course, if
he were to apply himself correctly and turn his online hobby into
a regular paycheck – not a particularly hard thing to do – she
might come round in time.
Talking is easy – doing is something else entirely.
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Something else that appalled me was a young couple I overheard
talking in the sauna at my health club this morning.
The woman seemed to run some kind of office cleaning company and
was building her business up. Good for her, I thought. But then
she said more.
She told her partner that a local accountancy firm had asked her
to clean their offices from 6 to 8 in the morning. She said – and
my jaw dropped in AMAzement that she admit to such a thing in
public – “I told them that I could only do 4 to 6 in the morning
and they agreed. that means I can get away from there before 5
and do another job in the same time. They never get to work that
early, so they’ll never know the difference!”
Yes, that’s right – her whole business plan seems to be based on
conning her clients and double-charging her time.
Later she was telling her partner that another client of hers was
threatening to fire her. She was genuinely aggrieved (as was her
partner) and honestly thought the client was totally ‘out of
order’ and being completely unreasonable. Why was she being
fired? Because, by her own admission, she’s failed to turn up to
do his cleaning three times in the last few weeks. “It wasn’t as
if the place was very dirty,” she said “and how was I to know he
was having a party?”
Am I just old fashioned, or is the concept of personal
accountability disappearing faster than the ozone layer?
I’ve every respect for entrepreneurs who are prepared to start
work at 4 in the morning, but none whatsoever for people who
think the world owes them a living and don’t care who they cheat
or lie to to get what they see as their rightful share.
It was as much as I could do to bite my tongue – but the woman’s
partner was a very big, very rough-looking (and sounding) man who
could easily have flattened me with a passing glance. I chose
discretion over verbal outrage.
#~#~#
The http://imkickstart.com blog – home of the Foolproof,
No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online has seen a
few changes this weekend.
The first thing I did was sort out the navigation. As it was, you
could access the last 15 posts from the navigation sidebar, but
the only to get to each post from the beginning was to click on
the ‘previous’ link. Clearly, that was not efficient and would
stop most people from wanting to read more than one or two posts.
I’ve done three things to help.
1. Installed a plugin called ‘Yet Another Related Posts Plugin’
that displays a list of posts that are vaguely related at the
bottom of the page.
2. Added new categories to give another way to get to themed
posts.
3. Created a static page on the site (called ‘What Is On This
Blog’) that lists, and links to, all the parts of the course
posted so far, in ascending order – with a brief description of
what each one is about.
Next, I added another plugin called Googmonify. This one lets me
add Google AdSense blocks wherever I want them in my posts. As
you’ll, see, I’ve added a horizontal AdSense block at the top of
the page and another one at the bottom. A quick change that took
about 2 minutes to install and a few minutes to go back and add
the code to each page. The result is that the site has already
generated a couple of dollars in AdSense income. Not much in 48
hours, but it is a start. AS traffic increases and the number of
pages grows, I expect that income to build up.
Finally, I added the new PayDotCom recommended products widget to
the sidebar. I’ll test this to see if it makes any money, but it
costs nothing to install, so I’m happy to try it out.
I tinkered a little with the site’s underlying CSS to make the
paragraphs display a little further apart, which to my eyes
improves readability.
I’d love to know what you think of the changes – and your views
on the site and the lessons. Feel free to comment on any of the
posts – the more the merrier!
#~#~#
On a recent visit to Borders I was browsing the marketing section
(as I always do) and saw a book on WordPress blogs. The book cost
£29 ($58) and frankly, it was full of puff (a polite way of
describing what I really thought).
When you boiled it down to the essential basics, there wasn’t
much more in it than you can read for free in the Foolproof,
No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online – and it
didn’t have video and was substantially out of date too! Don’t
say I don’t give you AMAzing value here in Kickstart!
Offline books on the Internet and Internet marketing almost
always suffer from the problem of having been written months –
often up to 2 years – before they are distributed to the
bookstores and then they sit on the shelves forever. Borders has
several books on eBay and Google that were written in 2002 and
2003. How much use do you think they would be now?
People often complain that online ebooks tend to be expensive,
but when you consider that most of them are bang up to date, and
those that aren’t almost all give you some kind of email access
to the author, then their real value is more obvious.
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself – send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Aldo Leopold said,
“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until
‘progress’ began to do away with them. Now we face the question
whether a still higher ’standard of living’ is worth its cost in
things, natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the
opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”
Today’s quote was kindly supplied by Kickstarter Norman Holden.
If you have a favorite quotation to share, please sent it to me
by email.
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Today’s Power Thought
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Why do you worry about things that are on your mind at the most
inappropriate times?
At 2 in the morning, you can’t finish a report or return a phone
call.
You can’t buy the batteries you’ve just remembered when you are
standing in line in the butcher’s shop.
The perfect answer to an awkward question does you no good twenty
minutes after the client has gone.
Your mind is made to worry. It never forgets, it just puts things
into places that it reviews every once in a while.
Unfortunately, your mind has no mind of its own. It is like a
glorified pigeon-hole box. Everything is tucked away, but there
is no central command to tell it precisely when to check the
contents.
That’s why you remember things at all the wrong times.
And that is why you worry.
This type of worry is the outward effect of your inner knowledge
that you might forget something important.
As soon as you have a clear first and last step strategy, your
mind can let go and move on to the next item on its list.
What do I mean by a first and last step strategy?
What is the item in your mind that is causing you the most worry
(let’s keep this to business for now).
Perhaps it is a report that you’ve been putting off, or a
conference you have to organize.
Take a single sheet of paper and at the top, as a heading, define
the problem by writing down the best possible outcome. What is
the result that you’d most like to see. Write it is present tense
and in detail.
Now, below the heading, write down the next step that you have to
take to reach the outcome you have defined. This should be a
small step. Maybe as small as ‘write an email to Jim’.
Just one step. Beside it, write two things: the date and time you
must do it, and the place. In this case you might write, Friday
26th Sept, 9.15 AM, computer/office.
Now you have to make a habit.
Fold up the paper (you’ll soon have a sheaf of them) and make an
appointment with yourself to read it at the same time every
morning BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE.
This may be on waking, over breakfast, on the train. It doesn’t
matter so long as you do it every day a the same time.
In less than two weeks it will be an ingrained habit.
Now you know the first tasks you have to do today. Your list has
told you.
As soon as you’ve completed a task from your ‘Worry List’, tick
it, and write underneath it the very next action you have to take
to achieve the objective at the top of the page.
If the next action is today, either do it now, or leave your list
prominently on display. If it is not today, fold up your list and
forget it for now.
By doing this, you are taking away your mind’s ability to make
you worry. It will know, and come to trust, that the items in its
pigeon-holes won’t be overlooked, so it will concentrate on more
important matters.
And you might get a better night’s sleep.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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Part 18: Getting the maximum value from PLR articles
In the previous installment of this course we looked at why
private label material is such a good idea from both a money and
time saving viewpoint. Today we’ll take a slightly deeper look at
private label articles specifically to see some of the many ways
they can be put to profitable use. A good word to use here is
‘repurposed’ – most people use plr articles in just one way, but
here you’ll see that there are at least 18 alternatives.
The good thing is that most of these are not mutually exclusive.
If you want to squeeze every penny or cent of value from the many
private label articles that you will inevitably collect, there is
nothing to stop you exploiting each article in a multitude of
uses.
The only word of caution is that you should check the terms and
conditions of your private label articles supplier – some are
more liberal with their terms of use than others.
18 Ways to Profit from Private Label Articles
1. Mini Sites
Each pack of articles (usually between 10 and 40) can form a
niche mini site in its own right. A mini site is usually a small
website that is focused on selling one affiliate product – or an
ebook that you’ve created yourself, perhaps from a private label
ebook source.
2. AdSense Sites
Similar to mini sites, except here the primary monetization
method is from displaying Google AdSense ads. This is by no means
as profitable as it once was, but can still bring you in a good
ongoing income if you build a string of such sites. With your
content being provided by plr articles there is no real excuse
not to!
3. Portal/Content Sites
Content sites are normally much more complex than basic
made-for-AdSense sites. A content site will build up over time
until it can have scores or hundreds of pages. A recent strategy
for such sites, that works well with the search engines is
siloing. In a siloed content site, you would place themed private
label articles in their own directories and link them together
vertically – with the last article in each directory (or silo)
linking to the first in the next folder (silo). We will look at
such internal linking strategies later in this course.
4. Creating eBooks
If you can collect together a sufficient number of well-written,
tightly-themed articles, there is no reason why you should not
then use them as the basis for an ebook. Naturally you will want
to augment the content by adding information of your own and
rewriting the articles to expand on their themes. The overall
result will be that you can produce an ebook a lot faster by
using the articles as a starting point than you can if you have a
blank screen to begin with.
5. Adding to existing eBooks
One of the most important things when creating your own products
using private label ebooks as your starting point is to add new
sections, improve existing sections and generally make the book
‘your own’. Private label articles can easily form a big part of
that added material.
6. Special Reports
If you don’t want to go to the effort of creating a whole ebook,
or if you feel your private label articles are not of sufficient
depth for an ebook, then why not consider using them to create a
series of short special reports. Five or six themed articles can
be put together and surrounded by a commentary from you and then
sold as special reports in their own right.
7. Autoresponder series
A great way to get subscribers to sign up is to offer them an
ongoing series of tips and ideas as a free autoresponder series.
Needless to say, many people have a great deal of trouble writing
such autoresponder courses, but using well written plr articles
can shortcut the process. Many private label articles are of the
‘tips and strategies’ format and so can be adapted to the
autoresponder series format with minimal effort.
8. Ideas bank
I often benefit from plr articles without ever using them! I just
read through them looking for ideas and inspirations. You’d be
surprised how often I find it too – if only to spark my thinking
into a whole new sub niche.
9. Keyword research
One thing is for sure – in order for someone to have commissioned
plr articles for you to use, they will have had to have done some
good keyword research first. And by looking at the theme of each
article in a pack, you can soon get a useful list of profitable
keywords to use in other sites and blogs.
10. Adding to web pages
Even if you are adept at creating content on your own, private
label articles can be used to add depth and content to your web
pages. By adding a carefully chosen plr article to your page you
can increase your wordcount (if your niche needs ‘meatier’ pages)
introduce LSI words and ideas and increase your main keyword’s
on-page count.
11. Sound bites
Not many people do this, but it is very easy to read a private
label article into a microphone (using the excellent free sound
editing software from www.audacity.com) and then let people
listen to the content on your pages.
12. Blog posts
Just as you can use the articles to build web sites, you can also
use them to build blogs. And because they are plr articles, you
won’t have to show someone else’s resource box at the bottom of
each one. You are perfectly at liberty to post them as if you are
the author. A blog that is constantly fed new content on a daily
basis will very quickly get the attention of the search engines.
13. RSS feeds
RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a method by which other
people can take your content and put it on their own websites and
blogs. By creating an RSS feed for your plr articles, and adding
links within them back to your sites, you can get a growing
number of backlinks. We will look at RSS feeds later in the
course.
14. Forum posts
Be careful here. many forum owners don’t like people to post
articles, and those that do expect them to be of a high quality
and written by you. Having said that, there are forums that are
less picky and may allow you to put up the occasional plr
article. The benefit is that you will also usually be allowed to
add a ’signature’ line to your post with a teaser ad to attract
people back to your own URL.
15. Your own members
Some private label membership sites make no restrictions on the
way you use the articles – including reselling them on to your
own customers and or membership site subscribers. This can be a
very welcome and useful service to provide your membership, but
make sure you check your supplier’s terms and conditions first.
16. Article Directories
In general, article directories don’t like to see private label
articles posted. however, if you use the plr article as the basis
for creating a new article of your own, then the objections often
disappear. The secret is to make sure that you change substantial
parts of the original by rewording and rewriting throughout. At
first glance this may seem to be a lot of work, but it quickly
becomes second-nature and is a lot quicker than writing new
articles from scratch.
17. Ezines
Let’s be honest, most ezine publishers run out of things to say
every now and again. When those dry patches appear, private label
can prove to be a great source of inspiration – or even of
pre-written filler articles.
18. Offline Newsletters
There is a huge, and still largely untapped market for real paper
and ink newsletters. The number of markets that can support
monthly newsletters is vast and the number of people filling the
demand is tiny. Private label articles not only help you to find
suitable niche markets to consider creating a mailed-out offline
newsletter for, but they can also help provide some of the
content.
There are lots of other ways that PLR articles are being used
every day by canny marketers. Think around the edges and see what
you can come up with.
But here is the golden secret – and the dire word of warning.
Private label may be a short cut, but it shouldn’t be seen as the
easy way out. You do still have to make sure that everything that
goes out in your name is of the best quality that you can make
it. Your reputation is your number one resource and it is
incredible easy to lose. Whatever you do with private label
articles, take a step back and ask yourself how you can improve
it, how you can add value, how you can make it visually
appealing, and how it can help grow your reputation rather than
diminish it.
Keep that in mind and you’ll profit from PLR for a very long
time.
*** Catch up with parts 1-17 of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online at http://imkickstart.com
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Fascinating Facts
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You may think that most of what I write about in Kickstart is a
load of clap-trap, or nonsense.
Where, though, does the word clap-trap come from?
It is an old theatrical term meaning a cheap stunt designed to
win applause at any price.
Now surely you don’t think I’d do that, do you?
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Kickstart Products for you to enjoy AND make money with!
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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
Each of the four products listed have affiliate programs that you
can make money from. Please visit http://www.urlnex.us/affiliates
for more details.
#~#~#
Do you enjoy Kickstart Today? Please tell your friends!
http://www.kickstartdaily.com
Let me know what you think – about anything! To contact me,
please reply to this email and remember to put ‘Kickstart’ in the
subject line so that it doesn’t get filtered.
Visit the Kickstart Blog – Your comments will be very welcome:
http://www.kickstartdaily.com/blog/
Kickstart has a forum too! http://kickstarttodayforum.com/
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