I’ve just been given a heads up on something I believe is really worthwhile. Holly Mann, a well known internet marketer of the highest integrity, is the author of the best selling work Honest Riches. This 277 page eBook has sold something like 40,000 copies and, since I have a copy myself, I can vouch for the extremely high quality of Honest Riches.

However, this not a sales plug; Holly has decided to help a country that has recently suffered terrible devastation- Haiti. Specifically, Holly is raising funds for the Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières organization to assist their relief operations in Haiti, and is offering Honest Riches as a free gift to anyone who donates $20 or more to DWB / MSF through Holly’s special page.

Honest Riches normally sells for something like $37, so this is a great opportunity to both help out a devastated country and get yourself a high quality internet marketing information product. Honest Riches (277 pages remember) is packed full of solid info and contains the following sections:

• Book 1     Affiliate Marketing
• Book 2     Research & Preparations
• Book 3     Profiting Without A Website
• Book 4     Website Creation
• Book 5     Search Engine Optimization
• Book 6     Advertising Methods
• Book 7     Product Creation
• Book 8     Advanced Monetization Methods
• Book 9     IM Toolkit
• Book 10   Holly Mann’s Personal Resources

Just to be clear, I am not promoting this as an affiliate – I’m merely trying to help Holly’s great cause. Your donation will go to DWB / MSF in it’s entirety. Here’s the link again:

HELP HOLLY HELP HAITI

First off I would like to wish you a belated Happy New Year and the greatest success for 2010.

I’ve been offline for a while as we moved house in late December and this brought with it all the usual disruptions. In fact, Etisalat (our local telecommunications provider) has still not shifted our internet connection to the new location (so I’m having to poach a weak WiFi link from a nearby hotel – not good at all).

As usual, with such moves things are slowly getting sorted out thankfully.

I have to say that, as with many folks, 2009 was not a great year in the general sense and I’m relieved it is over and everyone can look forward to a less stressful 2010. Having said that, 2009 was my most successful online year. This is relatively speaking since, for various reasons, I was not able to meet all my targets but at the same time many valuable lessons were learned.

I’m looking forward to 2010 being a great year and have some interesting projects lined up, which I will let you know about as and when they are completed. Likewise, I trust you have set your goals for the year and I wish all the best in achieving them.

Just one thing I want to touch on briefly. Have you noticed the huge increase in the amount of web pages equipped with Exit Splash. Seemingly even giveaway sites done under ad swap are using them – so I’m seeing too many of these for my liking:

Don’t get me wrong, I actually think Exit splash is a good bit of software, and I nearly bought the product myself. However, the pop-up is quite ‘in-your-face’ and, with so many people having purchased the product, the above image is becoming a little too commonplace (IMHO).

I have seen Exit Splash used for discounting a product and this is great (I’ve even bought something myself this way) but seeing it used on a giveaway page (and then linking to the same giveaway) is a bit like grabbing a customer by the shoulder as he tries to leave the shop. A bit too unsubtle for my liking.

One suggestion I have for the developers is allowing purchasers to customise the pop-up with images, just for uniqueness. Anyway, just my 2c worth!

Once again, I wish you well for 2010, both in you online endeavours and all things important to you.

Hey, I was watching the NASA channel this morning and
they were showing that Rover thing and guess what they found?

Rocks! No, not newbies, but since you’re here, read this.

If you are a newbie, it feels like you’re on Mars sometimes.
If you tell your friends and family
that you’re going to make money on the internet from home,
they either laugh like you’re an idiot, or pull you to them like
they just found out that you have a terminal disease. Oh
poor Jimmy has lost his mind I tell ya!
Make money at home in your under drawers! Get the straight jacket Pa!

So, when you’re down and you need a little help, who ya gonna call?
The Honest Work From Home Forum, that’s who!

I can hear it now. You’re thinking, a forum, yeah right.
I tried that once. I asked a question and 6 people laughed cause I was so stupid,
and the two people who did answer my question were so far over my head,
I didnt have a clue what they were talking about. No thanks.

Well listen, It’s hard to start out with no knowledge and no support.
There are plenty of people who will give you the knowledge you
need, just pull out that credit card right now cause you’ll
never see this offer again! Sound familiar?

Seriously, there is a place you can go and feel right at home.
Wouldn’t it be nice to ask a question and get a real answer
you can use? How about some encourgement when you’re down from
people who have been there? Just having friends who
understand makes all the difference.

Come on over and check out our place and introduce yourself to your new Internet family.

Do it now before you forget.

Internet Marketing Mastermind Forum

With thanks to Donn Wright for the “lyrics”!

After a fair amount of deliberation I took the plunge and purchased Dave Nicholson’s new product, Tweet Dynamite, a few days ago. Regular readers will know that, although I post regularly on Twitter, I am something of a cynic a far as Twitter being a money making opportunity is concerned. Hence the deliberation – but I’m pleased I made the purchase.

The product consists of nine tuition videos, each one very well presented, easy to understand and all less than 10 minutes duation or so. Since I already have an established Twitter account, with a particular spin on my posts, I decided to create a new account for Tweet Dynamite. The whole thing, from start to finish, took me about 2 hours to set up, although the process could be done quicker.

The whole idea behind Tweet Dynamite is to set up an account that automatically follows people in your niche and automatically posts Tweets, also in your niche. Your profile will contain a link to your main web site and Dave also explains how to add a money making idea to the whole thing!

The automation works as advertised although, as Dave suggests, I Tweet manual posts on a regular basis to keep everything as *human* as possible. Unless you have plenty of time (and who does) to research and post lots of Tweets manually then Tweet Dynamite is for you.

Although it is early days I have checked my website on Google Analytics and there has been a steady increase in traffic since I implemented Tweet Dynamite. You can check out Tweet Dynamite here.

Hi…it’s been a while since I posted, however today I think I have something you will definitely like.

It’s not often you come across a free step-by-step video course to starting and building a successful online business. One that doesn’t even require an optin! Well, that’s exactly what Chris Farrell is offering. Here’s an introductory video by Chris:

Click the link above and see what Chris Farrell can teach you!

Right – I haven’t had a rant about Twitter for a while now! Today I would like to talk on how not to use Twitter. Now, before anyone harangues me on what I have to say, please remember that my comments are my opinion only. On the other hand there are a lot of social media people who will agree with what I have to say.

So let’s go. Right – when I checked my email a few days ago I had a few new Twitter followers and, as I usually do, I opened up each persons profile to see what they were about before following them. One persons profile appeared like this (and has been unchanged up to today):

Huh!?! Okay, I don’t know about you but this is completely wrong. You can see that Xigum follows me – my mugshot is 4 across and 4 down in Xigum’s following list. But what can we learn about Xigum from his / her (?) profile? Let’s see:

• Name: Okay, so this Tweeter is called Xigum.
• Photo: Nope, no photo. Xigum is using the standard Twitter o_O picture (o_O can be read as oh-Ohhh, so even Twitter frowns on this).
• Location: No location is given. No major drama but it would be nice to know.
• Web: No web page URL is given. No problem really, if Xigum doesn’t have a web page.
• Bio: No bio is given. No photo, an odd name and no bio. Xigum has decided to remain anonymous.
• Updates: No – no updates. Huh?

So what ‘crime’ has Xigum committed you may ask? Well, unless I’ve got it all wrong, Twitter is is a Social Networking site. As such, users are, not surprisingly, expected to be social (i.e. introduce yourself to Twitter world using all the profile tools available) and they are also expected to network with other users (i.e. make regular updates for followers to read).

So Xigum has decided that he / she does not need to follow these basic guidelines, and I can tell you that Xigum is not alone. There are plenty of Twitter users who have done exactly the same thing as Xigum. So, if you are going to use Twitter, take the time to make a complete profile, including photo, and post regular updates.

By the way, you may be unsurprised to learn that I did not follow Xigum back!

We all know that one of the main challenges on the road to internet marketing success is building a list of targeted subscribers – summed up by the phrase “the money is in the list”. There are, of course, several tried and tested methods for building subscriber lists, however I have just watched a video by Socrates Socratous that explains a simple method that can be used to augment your usual list building techniques.

The video, which requires an opt-in, can be seen here: “How to Get 3,345 Subscribers With Less than 2 Hours of Work”

This video (actually a series of self-starting videos totalling about 30 minutes or so) gives step by step instructions on taking a PLR eBook with give away rights, editing the authorship of the eBook and doing some “voodoo” (Socrates word) to it before uploading the eBook to a particular site which receives daily traffic numbering in the millions.

There is no cost involved in the process described by Socrates (unless, of course, you need to buy a PLR eBook). The video is also accompanied by a bonus package which is needed to do the “voodoo” work. Again, the video can be viewed here:

“How to Get 3,345 Subscribers With Less than 2 Hours of Work”

So, what about that title then? Okay, I carried out Socrates instructions yesterday and uploaded my giveaway eBook today, so I need to wait a while before I see any results. To be honest, the video does not explain how the number 3,345 (subscribers) is derived.

What Socrates does say, however, is that with this system you should expect to get about 100 new subscribers per month per product, so this is very much a rinse and repeat process. It took me longer than 2 hours to set up my first product but this was only a learning curve thing – once up to speed I would definitely expect to produce and upload a new eBook in 2 hours or so.

So, is it worth it? Well, like I say, I will need a few weeks to see the effectiveness of this strategy, but I will definitely get some more products uploaded in the interim. So yes, it’s definitely worth giving the video a watch and the bonus material is worth downloading in its own right.

I truly believe that the video is of a very high value, yet Soctrates is giving away the information for free for reasons he explains in the video.

To conclude, the whole strategy seems like a great idea, and worth trying to augment your existing list building strategies. So, once again, you can view the video here:

“How to Get 3,345 Subscribers With Less than 2 Hours of Work”

Right, I’ll be honest here. If it hadn’t been for the half-dozen kind comments I received on my last post I would have deleted it, since it played havoc with my AdSense content! Okay maybe not, since I hadn’t posted anything in a month and even this post is being written two weeks on. So my one post a week target needs a bit of fixing and this is my latest offering, on topic this time.

So, I’ve lost a bit of business building momentum over the last month or so, most particularly on my product creation as part of the Masterclass program. If you lose momentum it’s a well known fact that it is difficult to regain it, however I watched one video and read one blog post today that have given me the jump start I needed.

The video was by Lee McIntyre (I subscribe to his newsletter) and the subject was basically…if you don’t believe you can succeed online then you won’t. Now this was a 25 minute video, which is fairly lengthy to get such a simple message across. Sure, Lee recounted some of the self-doubts that he experienced in the past but he kept banging on about this self-belief message. It took me the full 25 minutes to really get the message though; it’s not simply having the belief that you can succeed online – that’s easy, and I do believe that I can. It’s having the self-belief to get your products out into the market, about casting away the self-doubts about whether those products will succeed or fail, and so on.

The blog post was John Thornhill’s latest offering which can be viewed here. John’s message about basic online success is frighteningly simple – create your product, drive traffic to the sales page and then repeat the process. After reading this post, I felt as though it had been directed at me personally. Sure, I had had a medical issue and lost momentum on my product creation effort, but then I go and write a blog post about it and I also started a similarly themed thread on the Masterclass forum! Enough already! Real action was required, not some kind of self-pity.

So, thanks Lee and thanks John. Your reminders that self belief and effort are required to succeed couldn’t have come at a better time for me. Even writing this post has got me back into the swing of, well, writing – and product creation will resume tomorrow morning sharp!

Some time in early December last year I was taking a shower and noticed that I had two pimples on my legs, one on each calf. No problem I thought, insect bites, and blew them away with my shower mitt. On Monday 13 April, 16 days ago, I woke up in Room 405 in Welcare Hospital, Dubai having just had surgery on both calves to remove cancerous lesions that those two pimples had mutated into. The intervening four months aren’t really important – obviously the pimples got worst, biopsies confirmed the condition and I went under the knife.

For the first six days after surgery my legs were locked with splints to protect the skin grafts. I was pretty comfortable though – no real pain, a private hospital room with a flat screen TV, and plenty of decent nursing care. I watched more movies during that period that I probably have in my whole life! When the splints were removed I attempted to walk and found I couldn’t – both calf muscles had gone into deep spasm, probably from a mixture of surgery trauma and not being able to move while my legs were in splints. To cut a long story short I was discharged last Friday. By this stage I could get about, but only by using a walking frame. My wife collected me and we went home, 10 days after I was admitted.

Our bedroom is upstairs and while I can just about get up and down those stairs I decided to set up camp on the sofa in our living room. This is primarily because my normal sleep pattern is shot (I’m writing this at 5.30 am) and it would unfair on Lana if I was sharing the bed and being awake most of the night. Another reason I’m camped out here is I have 24/7 access to my laptop. The hospital did not have any internet facilities so I have lost 2-3 weeks on the Masterclass course. I contacted Dan at the support desk and he replied “no problem – work hard and you will catch up”. Great reply – I felt good.

It’s about time I came to the point of posting all this. Well, for starters I am not soliciting sympathy of any sort. You see, I had plenty of time to think while in hospital and also now, while recovering at home. I have found so many reasons to be grateful; to my company for understanding the situation and supporting me, to my wife for helping me and doing things only she can do, and just generally for being alive and discarding all the negative thoughts I had harboured not so long ago. I’m sitting here typing, in some discomfort, but hey, I actually feel great, I feel positive about the future. My goal is to be a full time internet marketer by the end of 2010 and my recent experience has simply reinforced the desire to achieve that goal in a way that is difficult to describe. I can come with catch phrases – ‘no pain, no gain’ for getting my legs back in shape, ‘focus and courage’ for getting a difficult work task done. There are plenty of other such phrases as well.

I think I found some kind of inner strength whilst in hospital, a strength that perhaps came from the realisation that time stops for nobody, that what must be done must be done now and done well. No procrastination, no wavering, no negative thoughts or influences. I have an eBook to put together and I am behind schedule, but no matter – I will complete it no matter what it takes. I will achieve my goal.

So, really, I just hope this tale can provide some kind of inspiration to anybody who needs it. Before I finish, one more thing. The cancerous lesions that were removed from my legs were sent for post-op pathological examination. The result – pseudocancer, not actually cancer at all. The lesions just presented themselves that way.

Life is good.

The use of traditional forms of advertising and product marketing platforms, such as newspapers, magazines and television, is slowly on the decline. It is evident that an increasing number of businesses are turning to the internet for promotional needs, for the simple reason of cost effectiveness gained from the enormous reach of web based advertising coupled with reasonably priced advertising solutions.

In a further advancement of online promotion several brand name businesses have ventured into social media marketing (SMM). It is such a pioneering aspect of promotion that businesses are not entirely sure of the best way of using SMM. This was most recently demonstrated by the Mars relaunch of its candy brand Skittles.

Essentially, in its original form, the Skittles website allowed a real time uncensored feed from posts on Twitter (a post would have to include the hash tag #skittles to be fed to the site). This novel yet somewhat naive venture into social marketing had, perhaps predictably, disastrous results. Many Twitter users abused the idea by feeding obscene / derogatory posts or by submitting promotions to their own products. Mars quickly changed the format of the site and, after some morphing, it now appears to be a YouTube.com driven site. So Mars initially made a mistake, but how does all this apply to the internet marketer.

Basically, the average online marketer could take advantage of the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like. These are free to join sites and are, generally speaking, very user friendly. Another tool that is becoming the norm is the use of video and audio on websites and blogs. So how does the online marketer go about generating visitors to monetized websites or blogs using social networking sites. Perhaps Jack Humphrey’s excellent article The 90-10 Rule for Successful Twitter Networking should be used as a guide. Jack basically advocates making 90% of your content value related and just 10% as promotional content (although Twitter specific, this article should be a guide for all social network marketing). This makes sense if one gives more than a passing acknowledgement to the term social networking (a self-explanatory term if one thinks about it). After all, you would not wish to be bracketed with a group comprising cold-calling telemarketers or in your face door-to-door salespeople.

So is social marketing the way to go? Well, clearly it is an area worth exploring and testing. Whilst methods of effective social networking promotion are still being developed, particularly on the limited Twitter platform, it is possible that these methods will, sooner rather than later, become extremely effective and the internet marketer would be wise exploring the possibilities now or be prepared to play catch up later.