Internet Marketing Dope

Of course you have heard about the net neutrality issue, but a recent proposal by the FCC to create a “Do Not Track” list, modeled after the “Do Not Call” list could change marketing online, and perhaps even bring an end to affiliate marketing.

One possibility is a browser setting that would prevent affiliate tracking. That means that the affilate would not get the credit for directing the customer to the sales site, and therefore there would be no way to effectively track affiliate commissions.

Of course it will take at least a year or 2 for this to actually come to pass, if it does affiliate marketers will be put out of business overnight.

You can read more about the proposal here.

Every internet marketer should be paying attention!

I can’t deny the truth, I can be quite lazy. I can also spend my time doing the things I would rather be doing, instead of the things I should be doing. And the truth is, most of the time I would rather be doing something other than what I am supposed to be doing.

In a flurry of excitement and inspiration, I started this blog this past summer in Cleveland. Since then I have moved across the country to the Pacific Northwest due to my wife’s career.  Since my wife has a job and I do not, it has fallen on me to take care of the everyday household responsibilities.

I do laundry, dishes, shopping, cooking, and most important, I am an actively engaged parent to my 7 year old daughter, which is something I wouldn’t give up for anything. And I am finishing up 3 classes (Red Hat Linux administration, in case you are interested) that I was working on when the whole business about moving across the country came up.  I had so much to do that I was forced to take incompletes.

But that’s no excuse. The truth is I have been lazy and I have neglected this blog. The truth is I have also neglected my other blog, but not as badly. I am a guitarist, and I love the blues, so I have a blog for blues guitarists. You can check it out  if you are interested.

So, now that I am settled in my new home, where it rains pretty much all of the time this time of year, I resolve to get back to this site, and to do it right.

Stay tuned, there is more to come.

After the disappointing experience with Crowd Mountain I was extremely wary of giving my hard-earned cash to any other “guru” who promised amazing success with their step-by-step system.

But I decided to try Sara Young’s Easy Paycheck Formula, and I’m so glad I did.

What is Easy Paycheck Formula?

EZPF is a course, offered by Sara Young, on affiliate marketing using article directories. It is designed to help even the beginning online marketer make money as soon as possible, using online article directories. An example of the kind of article is this one on the Fisher Price Laugh And Learn Jumperoo.

Why I Tried Easy Paycheck Formula

First of all, I liked that Sara is very much a real person. She is a mother of 6 children who figured out how to make a living online the hard way: trial and error. She comes off as very smart and  very genuine. To put it simply, I like her.

Second of all, the price is right. Some of these internet marketing “gurus” charge so much for their crappy programs. They are good sales people so you pay it believing that this will make you rich, cure baldness and fix that erectile dysfunction issue too, only to find that it’s more of the same tired information.

But Easy Paycheck Formula is only $47. Hell, I can swing that. And if you want the Easy Paycheck Formula On Steroids, where you have access to even more of Sara’s excellent teaching and support, it costs $27 per month.

I opted for the EZPF on steroids, figuring if it wasn’t worth it I would cancel, and the great thing is that even if I io cancel I don’t have to pay anything else, ever. So far I have not canceled it. In fact the extra goodies that come with the “On Steroids” version have been great. She actually gives “On Steroids” members good, viable keywords to start making money as soon as possible! And a lot of them!

The Good And The Bad: Easy Paycheck Formula Review

Let’s start with the good: Sara’s teaching style is easy to follow and straight to the point. The course is action oriented, you get started right away. Her strategy is simple and logical. Of course a large part of success is in the details, which she explains clearly.

One of the best features of her approach is that there is nothing else to buy. You don’t need to spend any money to succeed with Easy Paycheck Formula. I do suggest, however, that if you are going to do any marketing online you should have Market Samurai. I have used it from the beginning on my keyword and niche research for the EZPF course. Sara does recommend it too, but it is not absolutely necessary.

The key to success with this strategy is to do something everyday. if you follow Sara’s instructions, spend about an hour a day working on it, you will make money. It’s that simple.

EZPF support is absolutely fabulous. One of my favorite things is that Sara is truly there to answer questions and help in any way she can. She even wants you to email her if you are not making money so she can take a look at what you’ve done and help you work it out. Now that is service!

The bonus material included with the course is very good. It is relevant helpful.

The Bad

To be honest I don’t have much to say about EZPF that is negative.  I do think that she could have more clearly defined what makes a viable keyword. Sara’s keyword research approach is simple and straightforward, but she doesn’t do a great job of explaining the criteria she uses to select keywords.

Should You Try Easy Paycheck Formula?

If you are looking for a way to make money online I think EZPF is definitely a good buy. Sara has a straightforward teaching style and easy to follow approach, provides excellent bonus materials  and provides excellent customer service and support. Easy Paycheck Formula gets my thumbs up.

You can find Easy Paycheck Formula here.

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If you are like me you have spent more than a few dollars on some of the many training courses available from the internet marketing gurus out there.  The latest for me was Crowd Mountain from Michelle McPhearson.

The first thing I’d like to say is that overall I don’t regret it.  The first six weeks were terrific.  I learned a lot, and made some money using her techniques.

The second thing I have to say is that I quit after 3 months because apparently Michelle quit after the first 6 weeks.

The first 6 weeks of Crowd Mountain consists of her “Boot Camp,”  6 modules, each a week long,  where Michelle walks you through keyword research through setting up your site, SEO, and promotion with social networking.

Boot camp is excellent.  Michelle has a great way of explaining everything concisely and to the point.  She walks you through everything step-by-step in several videos per module. The videos are not available for download, but there is a pdf transcript available for download for each module.

Each week there is a Q&A webinar covering the topics of that particular module, which fill up very quickly…I couldn’t join one of them.  Fortunately a video of the webinar is made available afterwards though.

Michelle’s method uses WordPress, and she does make available some pretty good plugins, but to be honest they are not really essential.  The YouTube dropper plugin, for example, allows you to search YouTube for videos and drop them in your post from the WordPress edit post page.  That’s nice, but it’s not a big deal to open another tab in your browser and search YouTube. And I like the SmartYouTube plugin which makes embedding a YouTube video in  WordPress easy.

One of the best features of Boot Camp is that Michelle demonstrates exactly how she uses Market Samurai, which is also essential to the program. Her way of cutting to chase, ignoring the irrelevant and only considering what is truly important makes the keyword research process clear.  For a beginner or intermediate internet marketer this is absolutely terrific.

It cost $127 per month for a basic membership of CM, with the option to become a “mastermind” member for an additional $70. Mastermind members get an additional Q&A as well as the ability to access all the Boot Camp modules at once (rather than waiting for access from week to week), and access to the archives).

Personally, I found the levels of membership a bit of turnoff, but all things considered Boot Camp was absolutely worth it. After Boot Camp is when nothing happened.

And I do mean nothing happened. Everything just sort of stopped, except for the monthly billing.

Posts on the members message board ranged from concern to outright anger.  Slowly we started getting some answers from Karen,  Michelle’s right hand woman. Michelle is moving, Michell has the flu.  OK. Great.

I figured she will make good on this lapse. After all, Boot Camp was so good, and Michelle seems to be a woman of integrity.  I waited it out.  I watched the message board.

It turned out that negative comments were not to be tolerated. Karen chastised those who would complain, and the negative posts were removed. Let me be clear that I did not post anything, no sour grapes here, I only watched. It had a Soviet Russia feel to me.

After a couple of weeks it was promised that Crowd Mountain would be getting back on track. Lessons on outsourcing and email marketing were promised.  The calendar was filled with workshops etc.

And then nothing happened again.

The silence was deafening, the message board filled up with angry comments, which remained a longer time before being removed because no one was monitoring them! The Crowd Mountain staff, including Michelle were nowhere to be seen!  Michelle did send out a few tweets to her twitter followers, but her paid subscribers were being ignored, it’s that simple.

After about a week of that I decided to cancel my membership.  I logged into the support forum and asked that my membership not be renewed when the current month ended. I explained that boot camp was great, but not much had happened since then.  To their credit they canceled my membership when I asked.

It seems that Crowd Mountain lost a lot of subscribers after boot camp.  What I have discovered since is that pretty much the same thing happened the first round (this was the second round of CM).

If I had to do it all over again, I would, but I would pay for mastermind access, get the info and get out after the first month.

To be honest, I thought Michelle was terrific at first. She’s very smart and her explanations are straight to the point with no nonsense.  It was very disappointing to find that she is indeed lacking in integrity.  Her disregard for her paid members is shameful.

Now she is sending out emails promoting her new free outsourcing webinars, with Joel Peterson. It seems to me that these webinars may have originally been for her paid members, but now that she has lost so many of us she has adjusted her strategy. This will no doubt be followed by a a pitch for something, possibly to get new Crowd Mountain members.

If you do a Google query for “Crowd Mountain Review” you will mostly find 2 kind of sites: those that are Crowd Mountain affiliates, which tell you how fantastic it is, and those that are complaining about how after Boot Camp CM went to hell. I’m not going to link to any of her affiliate sites, but you may want to read this thread on the Warrior Forum.

To be clear, I take no pleasure in writing this post.  I wish it could have been a glowing review. I welcome comments from people who either agree or disagree with me.  I especially welcome comments from Karen or Michelle. You guys have a lot to offer, and I would love to see you set things right.

The big news today is that YouTube has extended the length limit on uploaded videos for all users to 15 minutes.

Read all about it on the YouTube blog.

And to celebrate they are putting on a contest called “15 Minutes Of Fame.” Winners of the contest will have their video featured on the home page of YouTube.  Get out the video camera, folks, and get to work. You only have until August 4th.

I’m just finishing up the first week of the 30 day challenge, which focuses on these concepts:

• What is a niche?
• Finding good niche and micro-niche ideas
• Understanding broad match and phrase match data
• The process of finding good keywords and using them to plan your website
• How to evaluate the competition in your niche
• How to determine whether a niche is commercially viable

So far the Challenge is pretty good, but it is a rather simplified view of market research. Since it is free and on YouTube it seems to me that every aspiring internet marketer might benefit from it.

A lot of emphasis is placed on learning to use Market Samurai. The free training that accompanies Market Samurai is excellent, and much of the information in the 30 Day Challenge regarding the use of Market Samurai  is equally excellent.

They go at a rather slow pace, which may be a bit annoying if you are not a beginner.  But you have to keep in mind that the Challenge is designed for everybody, including absolute beginners.

It’s also kind of fun to do this knowing that thousands of other people are doing it as well. There is a community. And for comraderie and support you can go the to http://challenge.co/forum/

The factors used in the Challenge to evaluate the competition are minimal compared to what I usually do, but in the spirit of truly evaluating the course I am going to stick their method. Once I set up a site for the Challenge I post a link so you can follow my progress.

And if you’d like to go through it yourself, you go to http://www.challenge.co/

There has been a lot of buzz online with the introduction of Google Caffeine, the new indexing system that brings new content to the search results in almost real time.  It seems to me that it’s a great improvement, considering the fast-paced nature of today’s internet and the fact that more people than ever are using the internet for news, for business,  and of course to manage their social lives.

But what does this change mean for us webmasters? How does it effect our SEO efforts?

In recent years  SEO has been a sort of two pronged process. The first consideration is content. Your website has to have quality content and it has to be optimized with all the elements that Google wants to see: metatags, header tags, useful content, a good internal linking structure, etc.

The second, and in some ways more important consideration, is linking.  It is important to have as many links to your site as possible, especially those on-topic, the higher the page rank the better links.  And of course, it is important to have these incoming links use your keywords in the anchor text, to help convince Google that your site is a valuable resource to people interested in your topic or niche.

That’s all old news.

But now, with Google all strung out on a Caffeine frenzy,  another element has been introduced.  This is what internet marketer Ryan Deiss calls “Activity.”

Before I go into more detail, let me just share something.  I have way too many email accounts.  A couple of them are what I think of as my junk accounts.  I am on so many mailing lists it would be impossible to read all the crap I get in my mail every day.  I’m not talking about spam, I’m talking about lists I have opted into.

Every day I check these accounts.  I may read a couple of these emails, or I may not.  The other day an email from Ryan Deiss caught my eye.  It was an offer for a free market research tool called Cherry Picker. It sounded interesting so I downloaded and installed it.

Cherry Picker turned out to be a pretty cool tool that does pretty much the same thing as SEO competition function in Market Samurai, which I already own and use every day. I don’t really need Cherry Picker but it is a good free tool.

Then I downloaded his “Free Traffic Report, ” which turned out to be interesting. And today I received a link to some videos explaining his view of  modern search and SEO.

Ryan delivers his message with a bit of overblown hype, which I find annoying, but what he is saying seems  to me to be very true.

Here it is in a nutshell:

1. People have become savvy regarding paid listings and they want none of it.  PPC just ain’t what it used to be.  According to Ryan, the 1st paid position in Google search results will only get 1% or 2%  of the traffic.  Instead the organic search results are what people are clicking on.

2.The change that Caffeine has brought to SEO is to add a 3rd necessary element to SEO, and that element is what he calls “Activity.”

What is Activity?

The days of setting up a static website, getting as many links as possible and waiting for the traffic seem to be over.  Now Google is favoring sites that are constantly active. Activity can include frequent addition of content, comments, and traffic.

Ryan points out a few things I won’t repeat here, but one thing that struck me is that Google invested a lot of money in developing the Chrome browser and they just give it away.  Why? Data of course.  They are watching us.  And they are using that data in many ways.  Could it be that they are taking into consideration peoples surfing habits, and factoring that into search results?

Now it’s obvious that Ryan is gearing up for a product offering.  But at this point he is giving all this information out for free, including the Cherry Picker software.  I don’t know whether or not I will buy his product, but I do think it’s worth checking out what he has offered so far.

You can find it here.

If you do check this out, or if you have had any other experience with Ryan Deiss, please leave comments and let us know.

It all begins with an idea. Sometimes you stumble on the idea. For example you need to solve a problem, search for a solution and find what is available lacking or non-existent.

“Ah ha!” you say to yourself, “this is an opportunity!”

Sometimes you have a love.  I love to play guitar.  I love to share my love of music and guitar with other people. So I wrote a couple of instruction manuals for guitarists. I attempted to put together the information I wished I would have had years before when I was struggling to get my chops together.

I sold them on Ebay and for a couple of years I did quite well (until Ebay changed their policies effectively putting that idea out of business a story for another post perhaps).

Wherever the idea comes from, when you embark on a new marketing project online it is exciting and filled with hope. When I register a new domain and begin a developing a new website I am filled with anticipation and excitement. I can’t wait to see how this new idea will turn out.

I am a rather emotional thinker and decision maker. I have the tendency to let my heart lead, and to let my heart convince my head. Of course in business this is can be very dangerous. This kind of thinking leads to mistakes, sometimes costly mistakes.

Recently I did an inventory of all the domains I own, and when I include the domains I either sold or let expire I realize that they illustrate a kind of history of my decision making process. Some of these domains represent projects which have been generally successful. Not that they couldn’t be improved upon, but still, I am generally happy about them.

But the others, the failed projects, are much more instructive.  In every case I can honestly say that the reason they are failures is because of my emotional way of making decisions. In short, I jumped into these projects too fast, and without doing the essential research and planning that either would have made these projects a success, or would have convinced me to scrap the idea in the first place.

But I do not wallow in despair at this realization. Instead I am elated to have identified the primary reason for past failures. Now I can take steps to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

This begins with resolve to listen to my heart, but to always be sure that my actions are guided by my head.  I resolve to plan extensively before one red cent is spent on implementation.  I’ve done it before, I will be sure to do it always.

Please feel free to share some of your failures. They can only help.

I have to ask.  Please be honest. Is this site ugly? Is it too cluttered?

Please, give it to me straight. I can take it.

This site is built on the WordPress platform, and the Thematic theme.  The design you are looking at today (although not necessarily in the future) is a child theme for Thematic called Commune.

I am starting this blog on a shoestring budget. I am definitely not a designer and at this point I can’t afford one.  Hopefully after a while that will change.

One of the great things about WordPress is all the free themes available.  But the problem is finding a decent one that you can live with.

When I decided to use the Commune child theme I thought it was pretty cool.  Now I have been looking at it for days and I’m not so sure.

So, what do you think? Is this site ugly?

This year I am taking the 30 Day Challenge. In case you don’t already know, the Challenge is a free online internet marketing course designed for everyone from beginner to advanced. The first 30 Day Challenge was in 2005, so this is the 6th year.  It is put on by a group of people including Ed Dale, Guru Bob, and the guys from Market Samurai (an essential bit of software in my opinion).

The pre-challenge lessons began a couple of weeks a go, I’m not sure exactly what day, and I’ve only just started going through it so I’m a bit behind.  But I do expect to be caught up within a day or 2.

So far my impression of the Challenge is quite positive.  It is designed to help anyone, even beginners, so the lessons at first are quite basic, but as Ed Dale, the primary mouthpiece of the Challenge, points out, every great musician spends a lot of time going over the basics. The basics form a solid foundation for success. I’m sure some of the more experienced find the pace annoying, but I don’t mind. I’m a musician…I know exactly what he means.

There are 2 things I especially like so far. First of all, it’s free. It’s rare to find anything of quality that is actually free, but this is really and truly free.

So far the only way I can see that they will make money from this is when people actually buy Market Samurai. But you don’t have to buy it to participate in the Challenge, there is a free trial period, and a special extension for the duration of the Challenge.

The 2nd thing I like, and I really like this a lot, is that they don’t make crazy promises.  They don’t build up your expectations that at the end of the course you can retire and spend the rest of your days sipping expensive liquor on your yacht.  Instead the goal of the challenge is to make only $1.

That’s right, just $1!

That tells me that the point is to gain some skill and experience, not get rich quick.  So far it seems quite legitimate.

So as I go through the steps I will keep a chronicle of sorts of my progress and impressions of the 30 Day Challenge.

Stay Tuned.