THE SCENARIO
You're trying to find some good marketing software products and ebooks and you've been looking around, trying to figure out who has what to offer.

You've seen a million websites that have these mile long sales pages and are full of hype. You're confused, and need some background on these people that are offering these hyped marketing products.

MY ANALYSIS
On my few days off, I was trying to put in perspective the products that we sell on this site. It's a part of trying to help define our customers expectations when they buy these marketing software products and ebooks.

One thing I noticed is that most, if not all, of the developers of these clickbank type products are really small companies and home based businesses.

These are not companies that have had millions of dollars of cash injection put into them. They haven't had tons of research and development dollars put into them.

These developers are people who have most likely done really well themselves on the internet and want to share their successes with other people and make a few bucks at the same time.

It's important to keep in mind that anybody who can write software that is reasonably well tested and for sale has to have a certain amount of competence. That goes for ebook developers as well. It's not particularly easy to write an ebook that is going to genuinely help the reader.

EXPERTS HAVE A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE
Being an expert and developing a product takes hours of research, study, development etc. That's why I give credit to these products.
Because the internet is such a highly fluctuating place, it's difficult to get financing from banks and venture capital companies to support the development of these one-off products.

The developers of these internet marketing software and ebooks must then finance and market the development of their products on their own. You have to give them credit for their creativeness and diligence.

That's why we thought it important to develop our review system here, to develop some standards for which to evaluate the usefulness and value of each product.

LARGE CORPORATIONS HAVE A BUDGET FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE
The benefit of large corporations is that they have the resources financially and employee wise to develop all of the supporting documents and product manuals. Large corporations such as Microsoft and Symantec have customer service help desks that their customers can call in to. These companies have the budgets to develop, train and maintain these customer service departments.

SMALL COMPANIES DON'T HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE OR BUDGET TO MAINTAIN CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENTS
With a smaller, homebased business, the customer service department is also the developer of the product. The small business owner is usually doing his/her best to get through their daily chores.

We believe that by doing our news & reviews, we are adding value for our customers when they are shopping for internet marketing software & ebooks.

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IS SEO DEAD? HAS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION GONE BY THE WAY SIDE?
There was some chatter on the RockStars program, on WebMasterRadio.fm with 'Oilman' Todd Friesen and Greg Boser 'WebGuerilla', that people are talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) being dead?!!

I don't think SEO is dead. I DO think the rules have changed quite and bit and it is worthwhile to be mindful of what the search engines want in order to get some free traffic. I love free traffic.

SUPPLEMENT SEO WITH DIRECT WEBSITE MARKETING
However, I think it's also prudent to work on developing traffic with many other types of direct, controllable marketing. This ensures that you're insulated against the whims of googles algorithm changes.

If you're developing traffic with other types of marketing methods then worry about search engines will become less and less.

I am becoming more and more excited about internet marketing as I learn all of the techniques of the people that we're reviewing. That's the great benefit of studying and learning about different types of website marketing. It's a pile of things to learn, but I've developed a whole set of new strategies that I'll be able to share with our readers.

TIME TO TAKE ON THE NEW LEARNING CURVE?
SEO is not dead. People will be getting free traffic as long as google, yahoo msn etc will be giving it away. By that definition, people need to continue making their sites appealing to their visitors as well as the search engines.

It's also important to take on the task of learning a few other ways to market your website. We'll be here along the way to help out.

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Tomorrow we should be showing a new link to show some new products by 8 new categories. I'm trying to give our readers and customers better ways to shop for software.

If you want a quick preview have a look at Website Marketing Software & Ebook Menu

As time progresses we will continue to add more and more products to fill up these categories.

WE DO SELL PRODUCTS ON THIS SITE
The purpose of review products and filtering out bad products is to help our customers find good products.

There may be some concern about our keeping objective with selling products while reviewing them. It is our intention to give solid evidence to substantiate our reviews. We will provide facts that back up our reviews which will strengthen our sales discussion even more.

Not only that, we are being pretty harsh on sites that we don't feel are solid value for our customers. It's easy to evaluate crappy no-value sites and very difficult to do good quality reviews on good products and ebooks.

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I am taking a few days off . I will be back on Tuesday.

In taking a few days off, I am developing some great ideas for the site.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend!

Jeff Alderson's website marketing products

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GOOD THINGS TAKE TIME
Wow... sometimes good things take a while to develop. After reviewing 200 websites for marketing software products and ebooks, my mind was spinning trying to categorize these websites and make them a little more black and white for our visitors.

A SOLUTION TO A COMMON PROBLEM
I think I've got a system that is pretty black and white for reviewing these mile long hype filled web pages. Although I do enjoy the hype and sales language, I found myself getting bogged down in trying to understand what the product was really supposed to do.

I'm really excited to know that a marketing software product or ebook is going to direct 58,765 visitors to my site, or make me $34,657 in 6 weeks!! I am even more excited to know what it's doing and if it's really what I want for a marketing tool.

15 CATEGORIES OF WEBSITE MARKETING PRODUCTS AND EBOOKS
After studying these sites in detail I was able to come up with approximately 15 categories that most of these products fall into. It was really great that after determining these 15 categories, my work had then become easier.

After determining these 15 categories I was able to quickly go through the list and allocate the products that we're promoting in this site to those categories. I believe that this will be greatly helpful for our customers as they will be able to shop in the categories that suit them. Not only that, the products in these categories will be reviewed, for the most part.

BETTER THAN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A BUNCH OF COLD WEBSITES
Instead of trying to go to a bunch of 'cold' websites, they'll be able to look through our already previewed and reviewed websites to see what we're recommended.

SHOP BY CATEGORY
Example: we will have a section for all of those who are interested in marketing their sites with Newsletter, Email List and ezine products and services. (I know that this is a valuable service as it's taken me several hours and weeks to work through these sites to see what's good and what's garbage.)

It's also nice just to see a list of related products categorized in a nicely done and nicely reviewed area. I hope that our customers and friends will enjoy how we've built these categories.

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UP-TO-DATE & RELEVANT WEBSITE MARKETING PRODUCTS vs
OUT-OF-DATE & IRRELEVANT MARKETING PRODUCTS
In an attempt to give people better service and helping them find things better on our site, I have been thinking of different categories that our software and ebook products fall into.

I thought of the following categories that website marketing and software may fall into. (I'm writing this out because you may find it helpful if you're site is somewhat disorganized or doesn't follow a theme.):

ONSITE WEBSITE MARKETING & EBOOKS
Onsite marketing is what you do on your site to get people to buy your product or service. This can include Search Engine Optimisation.

Examples:

• Onsite content pages
  
• Keyword development
  
• Graphics
  
• Forms
  
• Sound & video etc.

These are all things that people have to be at your site to see and listen to

OFFSITE WEBSITE MARKETING & EBOOKS
Offsite are all the ways you try to get in front of your client that are not on your site. This type of marketing has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimisation.

Examples:

• Newsletter Emails
  
• Blog Chat
  
• Forum Chat
  
• Banners
  
• Popups
  
• Links on other sites
  
• Offsite Classifieds

These are offsite marketing that you do to get people to click to your site.

NEW AND RELEVANT Versus OLD AND OUTDATED
As I started to think about what's relevant and what's not relevant with regards to online and offline marketing, I started to see more categories.

The problem with advertising on the internet is that it's an ever changing market place. As I've been talking about Google Update jagger. This update changed some of the fundamental rules about SEO and website marketing.

If you've mainly concentrated on onsite marketing (as I have), some of the techniques that you used to use are now irrelevant and outdated. Some of the website marketing SEO products that have promoted these now irrelevant techniques are now old and irrelevant as well.

SOME MARKETING TECHNIQUES ARE TIMELESS
One thing that's important to remember is that some marketing techniques are timeless and will hold true no matter what's going on in the ever changing internet marketing place.

When shopping for products that will help you market your site, it's important to look for onsite and offsite marketing. You need products that are going to help you exercise the KLT Factors: helping prospects to Know you , Like you, and Trust you. While this is kind of basic, it will always hold true no matter what the internet is doing at the time.

Direct marketing, ie getting out and actively marketing to people will always stand the test of time. The more things you do off site is just as important as what you do when people visit your site.

BOTTOM LINE:
When you're shopping for internet marketing products make sure that the products or services are timely and relevant. In one ebook I reviewed, there were a bunch of out date links. Because these links made up a great deal of the value of the ebook, I felt that some of ebook was somewhat outdated, even though the bulk of the information was relevant and timely. ( I mentioned the outdated links to the author, and he subsequently updated the links making the product timely and relevant again.)

I'll be doing my best to make sure we're giving you good quality products in relevant categories in a time fashion!

Cheers

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ClickTracks Analytics
One of the hardest things to do is admit openly when you do something dumb... Or not do something that you should have done along time ago.

Over the last 5 years, we have enjoyed some nice organic search traffic from Google MSN etc. We have never been terribly concerned about what our traffic is doing, because it's always been free and we've always had more than enough.

With google's most recent Jagger Update, they've thrown us out of our comfort level and into oblivion. We're being forced to change the way we market. our site and our products.

The first thing that came to my mind was "WE NEED TO BE DOING ANALYTICS".. We need to be analyzing what's going on on our website. We need to know our numbers if we're paying for traffic.

I installed ClickTracks Analytics and am starting to look at it. (This is where the horrified comes in). 63% of my free traffic is leaving the site without looking around any further. Not on this site, but another site that we manage. Had I have known this I could have done SO MUCH BETTER when we had the free traffic.

I am now able to see what people are doing when they're on my site. (This is where the excited comes in) . I'm glad that I have to only learn this lesson once. I am completely sold on doing using this analytics software on my sites.

Analytics tells what's happening on each page of your site. It's based on actual sendlogs or actual history of the traffic on your sites.

It tells where people are going on your site and how many are leaving. If 63% of the people are leaving after looking at the rest of my site, that tells me one BIG thing.... I need to greatly enhance that site. If I could get 50% more people to look at some of the other pages, I'm probably going to double or triple my sales on that site.

If I was paying for clicks to go to that site, I would be burning 63% of my money, because paid visitors aren't any different than free visitors.
They want value and to know that the site is credible.

CONCLUSION: If you're trying to make money on the internet and AREN'T using any type of formal analytics software, I encourage you to do so right away... Please learn from my horrible mistake.

Topic: website traffic analytic software.

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I love this post about Creating Passionate Users. This is a well written blog post that talks about more important and long term methods to advertise to people than just hammering them over the head with money and advertising.

They talk about

The most important skill today is... teaching.

Whatever it is you're launching is probably not in short supply, and there's always someone who's doing it better, faster, and cheaper (or will be within weeks). Most of us authors, non-profit evangelists, indie software developers, small start-ups (the soon-to-be Fortune 5,000,000) can barely afford broadband let alone a "marketing/ad campaign". We can't hire a publicist. We aren't going to be on Oprah.

How truthful and refreshing.

Getting people to like you by adding value to them and helping them use your product better, or do something better.

Here's another great bit of wisdom

But passion requires real learning. Nobody is passionate about skiing on their first day. Nobody is passionate about programming in Java on their first day. Or week. It's virtually impossible to become passionate about something until you're somewhere up the skill/knowledge curve, where there are challenges that you believe are worth it, and that you perceive you can do.

I share these beliefs.

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I thought I should write about this here as I'm starting to get some decent reviews going.

25 Ways To Grow Your E-Newsletter List

I liked her style. Dianna Huff is a B2B copywriter and indicated that she works with Fortune 500 companies. Being that she works for Fortune 500 companies she is interested in quality and credibility. She described how she wrote her book about developing a newsletter email list. She said she did so out of necessity. She researched so many ways to build a newsletter and finally got successful at it.

Dianna indicated that she has a list of 1500 high quality subscribers and doesn't want to grow it any further. Every time she sends out a newsletter she gets more business than she can handle, so she has to be careful at this point. (A nice problem to have)

She mentioned that her techniques are for new newsletter list developers who want a high quality lists and not huge spammy lists.

I like the concept, I like her low-hype approach and I got a good feeling from talking to her on the phone.

Check it out...25 Ways To Grow Your E-Newsletter List

See more RECOMMENDED PRODUCT reviews:

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I'm interested to know what's going on a WMW pubcon because I'm not there this time around.

Check out this blog and this blog as the writers are in Las Vegas at WebMasterWorld, in person.

I learned so much from going to WMW, it's taken me six months to implement what I've learned!!

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