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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From what I hear, the response to Google Analytics is so good that google's servers are not able to handle the load.

Google has says that they would take 12 hours for them to have initial data reported. It's been alot longer than 12 hours, and my data is not reported. No biggie.

What was google thinking.. Understandably Google's trying to pull out all of the stops to compete with Microsoft and Yahoo. They're giving a feature rich service away for free. Of course their servers are going to be jammed.

As is the way of the internet, I'll just wait and see what happens.

UPDATE: It's now 36 hours later and google analytics is not up and running. Hmmm...

I think Google wasn't anticipating the response.

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I just visited 1clickpromotion as I was searching for sites which do viral marketing.

I quickly read the page and then scrolled down to the bottom. I clicked the buy now button and paypal gave an error message that said,
"Error Detected
This recipient is currently unable to receive money. "

That's not something you see every day!.

I then checked Alexa to see there were any reviews on this site: This was even more interesting: Alexa Review 1clickpromotion.

This wasn't pretty at all. This is an example of a bad website that is dishonest, gave horrible customer service and was shut down.

This site is provided by: Micky Multani - 1clickpromotion.com
DON'T BUY FROM THIS GUY!!

Visit our Marketing Blog

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I've read some reviews about products that I am reviewing and promoting on this site. I often hear about people who are disgruntled because the information they read in the ebook can be readily available on the internet.

Well... Yes... Of course.... the information is available on the internet. Which information isn't available on the internet?

Sometimes you have to spend hours searching for that FREE information. I've spent hundreds of hours researching free material on the internet. If my time is worth... say $10 per hour and I spend 10 hours looking for free information that is available in a $35 book, you're losing money. You've spent $100 of time when you could have purchased the ebook for $35 and spent the 10 hours learning even more and marketing your products.

The other problem: Some people are experienced senior marketers. They're buying books that are intended for junior marketers. Then they complain because the information is too light.

DO EBOOKS HAVE PAY BACK AMOUNTS?
Let's do some more math... If a junior marketer some spends $100 to buy an ebook that explains 25 ways to market a product for free that they haven't heard about, then that's good value.

If the junior marketer was going to spend 20? per click to get people to his site, and instead he practices the free way to get traffic, he would need to generate $100 (paid for the book) /20? (saved from not using PPC's) = 500 visits to his site using the free methods to get traffic to his site.

If a junior marketer is serious enough about using the free marketing methods described in the book, I'm sure that most people are going to get those 500 visitors for free over time using the free methods.

If the junior marketer is diligent with these methods over 6 months to a year, he's going to much more than make back his investment.

FREE VIRAL MARKETING SYSTEMS
I use different viral sites like WebBizInsider and AdLandPro Viral Community I don't get paid if you sign up for these, but I do get free traffic. People seeing my site for FREE!

You can find these on http://www.express-marketing.com/viral-marketing.html

These sites are free, and of course you can pay for stuff, if you want.
These are simple sites that you probably would find people complaining about the free traffic. With webbizinsider, I've had 150,000 people see my site at least. It may not be the best, most high quality traffic in the world, however, it's free and it's another way for people to get to know my site.

So, people can complain all they want. The idea behind marketing is to get free traffic and paid traffic. They do the same in offline marketing. Publicity departments strive for free advertising all the time. Richard Branson owner of the Virgin Brand is genious at getting publicity.

So... if you're just starting out.. you have to make a decision on how much you can afford to buy in ebooks etc. I would recommend buying some website marketing ebooks coupled with surfing the net for free information.

If you're a senior marketer, stop complaining about some of the ebooks available. If somebody has written a 165 page manual and sells it for $97, I think the junior marketer will have spent his money well if he learns enough techniques to save himself $98 in PPC's or other cash costs.

CONTENT OR INFORMATION IS NEVER FREE!
Remember... there is never anything done for free in business. Free internet content costs money to produce in man hours. Publicity costs money in the implementation stage. The costs of "free" content has to be paid for some how. My feeling is that companies won't give out free information unless they're going to make their money back.

(There you go.. I've spent 20 minutes writing this FREE blog post. Now I've got to sell 3 products to pay for my time !!)

Cheers.

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Oh My Goodness. it's -29c this morning.

I thought I would throw this picture in. It's hard to see the trees. The frost is 1/8" thick on the tree's branches. It's a really nice site.

HAVE YOU EVER HAD TO PLUG YOUR CAR IN?
That's pretty cold. I'm sure the folks in the southern U.S. have never had to plug their car in?!!! Plugging your car in means that it's so cold you have a heater that keeps your car engine warm enough to start in the morning.

I'm going to have to plug my car in if it stays this cold!

Also the frost is so thick on the windshield that I have a hard time scraping the windshield. We get frost on the windshield, however, when it gets really cold the frost seems to be glued on the windshield.

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Google Analytics
Google has published their Urchin analytics software and is giving it away for free. If not temporarily.

Google Analytics will tell you about the traffic on your site and what people are doing while they're on your site.

I'm pretty excited to try this out.

If you don't already have an analytic tool in place that you're subscribed to, I would recommend checking this out.

Google Analytics is now published - for FREE!

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I needed a little afternoon levity. That's the ultimate challenge for website marketing is to get in front of tough prospects. I saw this picture of cowboys, who probably don't like computers, out in the middle of nowhere. That's a good marketing challenge to sell these cowpokes on the internet.


Regarding the KLT Factors... I hammered out approximately 10 pages today. I'm excited about the new information. It's hard to say how long it's going to take to finish this ebook. There's so much to talk about and only so many hours in the day. The concept is making even more sense to me as I am getting the information into my MS Word doc.

Just remember: There are only three reasons why people buy from you. Those are the KLT Factors....

Stay tuned.

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DEVELOPING AND EASY STANDARD TO UNDERSTAND ADVERTISING
I've been working for several months to come up with a way to document and categorize my advertising experience into a method to communicate what I know with my readers. In effect I'm trying to develop some easy to understand standards.

After thinking about it on and off I believe I have come up with a simple, comprehensive method to explain how internet advertising works. The problem with standards are that they are simplistic in their most base form. They require a great deal of definition in order to understand their full meaning.

INTRODUCING THE KLT FACTORS
I'm calling my standards the KLT Factors. I started thinking about how EVERY method of internet advertising weighed against these Factors. I was able to come up with some definitions on how all internet advertising comes within these Factors.

I got more and more excited that I could define the benefits of each type of internet advertising based on the KLT Factors.

Oh by the way, KLT stands for "Know you, Like You, Trust You"

KLT Factors is not sexy or hype filled. It's a fundamental and foundational way to understand advertising and if an internet advertising product, software or ebook is going to work for you.

I am going to write a short version of KLT Factors ebook and start having people sign up for it.

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TAKE 132/ SHOT 36 LIGHTS CAMERA ACTION!
Getting the camera set up to do some video taping.

GEARING UP FOR OUR VIDEO
As part of our viral marketing campaign, I think it's really important to do some video so that people can get to know who I am and what we're all about.

It's fun getting in front of the camera, except for the bright, hot blinding lights. Setting up for the shot. Doing the shot 20 times to get it right. Good thing for digital cameras. This would be expensive if you were throwing away film all the time.

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Pictures from my office this morning.
Winter wonderland on November 14, 2005

This direction


That Direction:


It kinda looks the same with all that snow!

It never ceases to amaze me when I wake up in the morning and have 3 more inches of snow on the ground.

I thought I would show these pictures to give an idea of what it looks like in Regina, Saskatchewan Canada today.

Enjoy.

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ONE BIG SITE OR MANY LITTLE SITES?
I found this article: My second web affiliate programs experiment earns $1,000 (Update: up to $3,400) a month"

I like the idea of building one website per keywords or topic.

EXAMPLES ARE OUTDATED WITH GOOGLE JAGGER UPDATE
The site shown in this example was written in 2003. Two years ago!! This site is completely believable back then , when you could rise fairly easily in the search engine results.

With Google's update Jagger I am questioning if people should be relying on free search engine results as their sole method of marketing.

I DON'T HAVE ENERGY TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO MULTIPLE SITES.
What I mean by that is, in the past I have built sites that have risen to the top of the search engine results, because we worked hard at SEO. With 5 good sites which I wrote regular content for, we always did pretty well in the free search results. It was okay then to write a few articles here and there to keep people interested and the search engines happy.

All of a sudden, google changes their algorithm and my sites are no where to be found. The things that appealed to google no longer appeal to them. Google changed their mind. And because I only have infrastructure to keep writing articles, I DON'T have the infrastructure and training to know how to attract visitors without those search engine results.

If this has happened to you, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

I am currently aggressively seeking ways to invite visitors to my sites without the search engine results. It's a completely different kettle of fish. In some ways I wish I hadn't been spoiled with lots of free search engine results for the last 5 years.

The other thing is, do I have the time and energy to apply all of these viral marketing methods to all of my sites.? Possibly. All of those sites I had built, and whose traffic just got decimated are going to have to wait until I figure out how to consistently drive traffic to my main site here.

VISITING FORUMS IS GOOD
I have heard that visiting forums on a regular basis and visiting with people, (and putting a signature in your post) is a great way to go. Asking questions, answering questions and general visiting is good for marketing. For that reason I like the following forums:
Search Engine Forums WebMasterWorld and Allan Gardyne's Associate Programs and Harvey Segal's Click Bank SuccessForum"

Creating traffic from non-search engine results is a whole new ball game. It's one that I embrace whole heartedly.

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GOOGLE UPDATE JAGGER 3 WINDING DOWN.
On (Google) Matt Cutts blog, he's telling us about the different status' of Update Jagger 3. He has indicated that Jagger 3 should be visible soon and is starting to wind down. See also SEroundtable

That's great!! Some of my sites are getting a little more visible. They're going from position 650 to 15 on the SERPs. At least we're heading in the right direction.

WEBMASTERWORLD IS ON NOVEMBER 15-17, 2005
I am going to sorely miss going to WebMasterworld in Las Vegas which has been immensely interesting the last two times. I attended WebMasterWorld in New Orleans in June 2005 and Las Vegas in November 2004. I will definitely be planning to get to the next Webmasterworld conference.

PUTTING SOME COSMETICS ON THE REVIEW SYSTEM
I'm just in the midst of putting some cosmetics on the review reporting system so that it looks a little nicer. Details Details Detail.

As well, I am going through some of the software and ebooks that I have purchased in the past and can personally recommend.
I generally research website marketing products before purchasing them. I have purchased a few dogs. I generally try to download the preview version before I make the purchase.

I will present some of these "RECOMMENDED" products to you shortly.

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What Makes Your Advertising Viral? clickz.com

This got me thinking: is viral marketing good for any brand?

As we create rich, viral advertising, we must keep an open mind in terms of what will motivate content sharing.

This is an interesting comment.

Is viral marketing good for any brand? Presumably I would say, YES!!

Isn't that what everybody strives for? The only companies who wouldn't want their brand to be publicly talked about are secret type governmental military services that are hush hush. That's fine with me. I don't want to talk about them any way.

Otherwise every retailer and manufacturer wants their product to be talked about at the office, at home and everywhere else.

Viral marketing is about you telling two people, and they tell two people, who in turn tells two people.

The key to viral marketing on the internet is to get people to take your information and share it with others. I think what Dorian Sweet is getting at is that not all types of viral marketing fit all type of products or services.

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YOU'RE INVITED
If you're one of the people / companies listed below, I want to visit with you and do product review.

I've invited several of the following people to visit with me so that I can interview them regarding their website marketing products and ebooks etc. It's the way of the internet. Many of these sites don't have contact emails or phone numbers on the site. So, I thought I would just do this the had way.

I invite all of the following people to drop by for a product review on this site. If for some reason I cannot get a hold of you, I guess I'll just have to review your site without your input. Such is life. To give our readership a better impression of who you are and what your product / ebook does, it would be a great idea to meet personally and talk about YOU!!

The invitation is out there.... Thanks..

Cron Enterprises, Inc - Shaun Cronrath
The Rich Jerk - The Rich Jerk
e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd.
Accel Innovation, Inc. - Janis Pettit &Terri Zwierzynski
4 Web Marketing
Tom "The Tool Man"
Marketing Kit
Prime Visibility LLC - Andrew S. Hazen
Search Engine Wizard
Computer Quest
EasySEO - Millennium Enterprises llc.
JennTech Inc
Costa Dedes
R. James Enterprises - Rufina James
Northern Pine Marketing Services - Tim Bossie
InstantAutomaticTraffic - David Hendra
MLM-e-Secrets - Tim
SunSteam Search and Directory - Lars
Professional Global Marketing
Rod Beckwith
autoalexapro - Nicholas A. Levenhagen
BrandingYouOnline - Rick Beneteau
Bizzy Bees Advertiser
Jimmy's Value World.
Winning Lottery Lotto Wheeling System -
Conquering-The-Search-Engines - Mark Flavin
How 2... Information Products
Click Ad Equalizer
The New Marketing Center - Ren? Ronse
Gardner Marketing Group Inc. - Jeff Gardner
AutoHitsMachine - Richard Brewster
Virtual eBooks - Laurie Duncan
Classifieds Central Free Classified Ads
Joel Comm
e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd. - Sebastian Foss
SearchMaster:
Ritchie Media - Ruth Ritchie-Farmer
Page Zero - Andrew Goodman
tipfortop - Teresa King
Instant Marketing Secrets, - Ewen Chia & Jun Lim
Tale Chaser Publishing - Jack Humphrey
misspelledtraffic
Fred Gleeck Productions - Fred Gleeck
Affordable Internet Solutions
Interactive Marketing, Inc. - Matt Hockin
Smart-Web-Promotion
Richard Quek
KDM Publishing
emallplex 2000
SND Systems, Inc - Mike Filsaime
ResellRightsIncluded - Chrisa Lopez
TrafficSolutions2004
MaxNet Profit LLC
Adpost Free Classifieds
DH Communications, Inc. - Dianna Huff
Sen Ze
Guaranteed Marketing LLC - Kevin Donlin
Schneiderman & Associates, LLC - Steve Schneiderman
Biz Site Biz E-zine
SearchEngineWorkshops - John Alexander
Michael Rasmussen
Total Advertising Network
Fit Biz Solutions - Eric Vaughn
AdSubmitPro
Universal Marketing Media, Inc. - Juan Walker
profitjump - Alan Yap
iwinweekly
AdtrackzAnalyzer - Jonah Klimack
Dynamic Media Corporation - Michael Campbell
123WebMarketing eBusiness Center - Jimmy D. Brown
MarketingStudies.net - Guerricom Rok Hrastnik
Grant Neilson
CE Buys, LLC, - Nick Pang
morethan1income - Leslie Gibbon
bloglinkinggenerator
SuccessInMotion - Andrew Daum
Free-Hit-Counters
Joel Mendoza
A-to-Z Internet - Graham Hamer
nichekeywordanalyzer - Oskars Baltais
AGPCommunity
startingamembershipsite - micheal
John Colanzi
Future Internet Marketing - Palyn Peterson
Awesome Seminars
Maryanne
AdwordsAnywhere
arielis web directory
Barbara Ling
Access Cafe Networks, Inc - Zachary McCullough
Roderick Hutchison
Chiara Publications
ezinead.net

By Monty Loree - Express Marketing - Affiliate Marketing Software and ebooks products

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Ann Althouse's Blog & Jane Galt Blog.

These are some blogs I follow. They are completely unrelated to marketing issues, but they sure DO get a ton of traffic.

Ann Althouse is a posting robot. She loves posting, mostly about politics, and she does get into some other creative topics. The people who read her blog I would consider to be well educated and very opinionated. This is a great audience.

It goes to show that if you put high quality information on a blog, people from different genres and interests will come by and visit.

JaneGalt.net (real name Megan McCardle) is another blog that amazes me. She posts a 5 line post on her blog and gets 86 comments. That's amazing!

The beauty of these blogs is that they are NOT commercial in the discussion at all. They do have ads on the sides, which is acceptable.

If you're interested in study some high traffic sites, these are good ones to study.

By Monty Loree - Subject - Blog Marketing - Ann Althouse from Wisconsin, althouse.blogspot.com and janegalt.net (AKA) Megan McCardle

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Oh My Goodness:
The Instant Guru

I've owned my own business for 12 years and I've learned alot of stuff over the years. I can't say I've met anybody who is an instant guru! That just doesn't sound right.

People go to university for 8 years to be a doctor. Would you want an instant guru doctor doing brain surgeon on you?!! It's just not logical.

I hate this type of site/blog. All of the articles are simply ads for the booklet. I'm sure it's great information but I can't support the concept.

The people that are truly successful, get into nitty gritty of their business, learn the fundamentals along with the the frilly parts. This takes months and years to learn and master.

I respect people who have been there, done that several times.
The Instant Guru is not something I promote.

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Blogging vs Ezine marketing

I was just reading this article after I read John Stafford's ebook about email list building.

While I can see the value of blogging, (you're reading my blog), I can still see the value of emailing and list building.

They're two different forms of advertising. One is getting into somebody's email box, the other is somebody visiting your site.

I've seen some blogs that have huge readership. These blogs are usually written by some people with a certain amount of "celebrity status".

To develop blog readership, if you don't have celebrity status, you need to get out and post on as many blogs as you can to get people to know about you. Developing blog readership this way is a lot of hard work. It's fun to visit, however it's hard work like everything else.

Developing an ezine is hard work in that you've got to work 50 ways to build your lists. You've got to work the systems that build lists. That's hard work. Most paths to success are hard work.

I'm seeing that a combination of blogs & list development & ezines are a good mix. I've seen magical things happen with blogs that I could never achieve with a regular website.

The whole idea is to be communicating with your prospects on a regular basis, and giving them good , valuable information and products and services. Ultimately, that will win the day.

Jeff Alderson's website marketing products

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Do you know how I know I like something? When I get enough practical tips in a 68 page ebook to give me a headache!!

I just read through John Stafford's 68 page "Your" money is in the list. ebook.

I'm reviewing the ebook with practicality and value in mind. It definitely has that.

For the past many years I have relied strictly on organic searches for our business. With the latest Google Update Jagger, which wasn't kind to us, I decided to go looking for ways that I could market my service in a fashion that I can control.

While the methods that are discussed in John Stafford book are not easy or immediate results, they are doable and give me the control that I' looking for.

Building email lists and staying in touch with people is one of the cornerstone marketing methods on the internet. I am embarrassed to say that I haven't taken advantage of this method at all in the past.

I was so impressed with this ebook that I thought I would write about it in today's blog post.

As I mentioned, I either like things or hate them. I either feel that I've received value from something, or that it is a waste of my time. For the fact that I was glued to this ebook for the last two hours with my jaw dropped on the floor means that it was pretty good!

I feel comfortable recommend John Stafford's 68 page "Your" money is in the list. ebook.

I am not new to advertising, but I am new to email marketing and so this book gave me several points that I hadn't thought about.

I'm going to follow up with more of a review but I thought I would write this out while I'm still glowing with excitement.

It's good to note that while conversing with John Stafford, he's been very prompt with emails etc. I value that as well.

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We are visiting each website that we have in our listed in our Express Marketing Tools. For the sake of expedience, we are marking some of the sites as Lightly Reviewed - No Recommendation for those sites which we think are worth spending some time reviewing.

If a site or product is a complete dog, (not valuable) we're marking it as not recommended.

Lightly Reviewed should at least say that some thought and effort went into the website we looked at and there is potential value for you.

Just thought I should clarify that.

Subject = Clickbank products website marketing software and ebooks.

Have I mentioned that we have a credit cards U.S. section and credit cards for Canadians section & TransUnion Canada Credit Reports.

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This is a photo of Andrew Petrick - and Monty Loree President of HomeGrown Advertising Inc.

We're in the midst of working with a client to help promote their stock trading software and training programs online. Andrew Petrick has been into stock trading for many years and is really knowledgabe about how to make money daily with his unique software system.

He and his wife Maria, (Maria's taking the picture) drove in from Winnipeg, Manitoba to meet with me on their way to Calgary, Alberta for some other businesses.

I am looking forward to working with Andrew. I have a fairly good understanding of his company and how his stock trading software works. It's pretty impressive.

MAKE 1% PER DAY TRADING STOCKS
With their software and training program, they are teaching people how to make approx 1% per day return at trading stocks. The creator of the software has been using it for about four years and makes a good living from just trading stocks.

Andrew is going to write a free ebook about stock trading as a start to our campaign. I will give that away to all of my readers and subscribers as soon as it is available.

If you have any questions about this stock trading system software and training product, just comment here. I'll get back to you shortly.

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I am inviting all Clickbank Advertisers who want me to review their site.

Currently I am concentrating on Clickbank Advertisers who focus on website marketing products, ebooks etc. It is our goal to develop a good comprehensive review directory for Clickbank products that people can trust and rely on. This is going to mean that we raise the bar on how these website marketing software and ebooks are reviewed and talked about.

It's all about credibility. As we've looked at many types of product and ebook websites, we've noticed many things missing. Many of these advertisers don't like to put their name and contact information on their mile long website.

To develop long term sustainable sales, we are asking for different pieces of information about the product, the seller, the developer.

Are these companies members of the Better Business Bureau, the local Chamber of Commerce? Any other business group or club that we could refer to to give us a third party verification of the sellers and developers credibility.

What I'm trying to say is that we're going to try to up the bar with regards to the standard of information that reported regarding advertising software and ebooks sellers and developers.

We want to refer the most credible products on this site. Ultimately the companies that are interested in the long term of a product will serve our readers and clients better.

So... if you are a Clickbank advertiser, we want to here from you. We want you to complete our survey so that we can get to know you and your product better. This will enable us to share that information with those who are looking for good quality website marketing software and ebooks.

Thanks

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You may notice that we're starting to get a few clickbank reviews chalked up on the right Express Marketing Tools menu. As we started to go through them today, we noticed that there were some advertisers who's sites were not in service, under construction etc.

We're quickly weeding out the poor quality, lack of value sites.

We're in the midst of contacting some of the good quality sites to get further information from them before we post any sort of review on them. We'll be getting to the good ones shortly.

In the meantime, have a look around and give me any feed back via the comment section here.

We need to know how to make this site the best value for our customers and visitors.

Thanks

Subject - Website marketing product reviews software and ebooks

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I started reviewing some clickbank products yesterday. It was interesting to see the varied quality of advertising services offered by different sellers.

There were some sites that I immediately dismissed as not giving proper value for what they were charging. The polite word for these sites were 'garbage'. There was even a site listed in clickbank that was no longer listed. IE I got a 404 error Page Not Listed error.

The crappy sites were actually easier to evaluate than the good quality ones. I will contact the site owners of the good advertising products and ebooks to get more information from them.

This will be able to help me get a better report to the reader.

Amongst other things, one things I am trying to determine is, if I buy this product, is it going to give me some type return on my investment and how long will it take to give me return on investment.

The software that I'm writing for this has gotten a little more complex and thus I am spending the time to learn what I need to, to give the reader the most value.

I'm getting more and more excited as I think we're going to have a pretty valuable review reporting service when I'm finished.

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It looks like some of our sites are finally coming back after getting tanked by Google Jagger Updates 1 and 2.

Is anybody else experiencing changes with your sites search engine results?

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I'm putting the finishing touches for the reviews we're going to be doing for clickbank products and advertisers. You'll see this located on the Express Marketing Tools ad area located at the top right of our page.

We will have some color coding to make it easy to see what we've done with the products , if we've reviewed them and a preliminary look and feel of what we think about them.

We're adding the Recommended and Reviewed bars to the bottom of each ad. This way you'll be able to see if we've reviewed the website and product and if we recommend the website and product.

For the first little bit you are going to see mostly "Not Reviewed", "No Recommendations" until we start visiting the sites. Little by little we'll get the all of the clickbank products reviewed. We believe this will be a great tool for all web marketers who are shopping for website marketing software and ebooks to help them build their businesses.

Also, I've put a comments section on these posts so that you can comment, ask questions etc. Please feel free to communicate with us and comment on what we're doing.

Thanks

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Well, CNN hasn't dropped by to do a story of the 3 inches of snow we received so I thought I would post some photos to give you an idea of what we've got for weather.

You're wondering what is the danger when we get 3" of slushy slippery snow..? Well it slows every thing down on the road. And you have to drive VERY CAREFULLY. Otherwise your car will slide into the other cars, other the other cars may slide into you.

It's always somewhat tragically amusing to see all of the accidents that occur when we first get snow. People forget about the slippery factor and drive like they usually do, until they hit a patch of ice.

When you hit your first patch of ice, you've then got to instantly remember all of your ice driving skills that you'd forgotten 7 months ago.

Here are a few more pictures:

This is a close up photo of my car to show how many inches of snow we've gotten so far this morning.


This is what my view is out side my office when it gets snowy out.

I'm inviting CNN to come and visit and report on this incredible weather we're receiving. I'm calling this "SNOWFALL ANDREA" :-)

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I wrote the first 6 rough chapters of my new ebook - Expectation Management yesterday. I got on a roll and cranked out a few pages.

You've heard that sometimes people take things for granted. Well I take for granted the experiences that I've accumulated for being a work-a-holic for the last 20 years! It sounds kind of funny but it's true.

I'M HAPPY TO SHARE MY EXPERIENCE
I've hit some highs and lows, and have accomplished alot since 1985. The first ebook is going to be fairly simple to write as I can pretty much do this one in my sleep. I'm focusing on common sense information that I've proven over and over again over the last 20 years.

The purpose of the book is to help people develop their expectations as they're starting to build their online business as well through out the journey. I'm guessing the ebook should be approx 20 pages in length.

As I mentioned, I am giving away this ebook for FREE to all of our newsletter subscribers. Make sure you sign up if you haven't already.

Although I like to generate excitement through advertising, I also feel that it is important to get excited about the nuts and bolts of business development. It's important to get excited about developing the foundation of your business. That's what my ebook is going to talk about.

What you expect of your business is probably what is going to transpire with your business.

I should be releasing the first cut of this ebook - Expectation Management - by the end of this week - November 11, 2005.

Once again, it's free, and it's a non-hype ebook. If you've been in business for a few years, you'll probably think that this is a good refresher ebook. If you are new to web marketing and online business there will be alot of good information to use to plan and consider while you're developing your business.

Sign up today on our newsletter signup area

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I am currently writing my new ebook entitled:
Expectation Management.: A guide to help entrepreneurs manage their expections in the businesses.

This is the second ebook I'll have written. The first is Credit Repair for Canadians which is a 40 page ebook.

THE NEED FOR THIS EBOOK
The thing I see time and time again is product hype and how it gets people expectations out of the realm of possibibility. When new online business owners are starting their businesses, they get promised so many things from so many Gurus.

Some of these online business owners fade away because they never really figured out what they can and should expect from owning and operating an online business.

This free ebook goes into a reasonable amount of detail on how to Manage your expectations with an online (or any) business. Managing your expectations over the long term will help you stay in business and be happier over the long term.

GIVING THIS EBOOK FREE TO NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS
I am giving this ebook away for FREE to all of my newsletter subscribers. If you are not currently a subscriber, please sign up on the form on the left menu. You will be sent an ebook automatically when I am finished.

Please feel free to let me know what you think and make what ever critiques you can.

This is our way of giving back to our readers and clients. Your continued success means our continued success.

I'll let you know as soon as my ebook is finished. Expectation Management will be helpful for all people who are working on their online business.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY!

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That's a pretty relevant saying. It reminds of the old Joni Mitchell song, Big Yellow Taxi.

I DID APPRECIATE IT - NOW I REALLY APPRECIATE IT
I did appreciate all the years that our site were on page #1 or at #1 of our main keywords. We've had that privilege since 2000 when we first started with our websites. It was no accident that we got top rankings with our sites, we had to work pretty hard for it.

With the latest Google Update "Jagger", we've lost our coveted ranks on Google. Our sites are nowhere to be seen in the Search Engine Results, the way we're used to.

MISSION - COLD CALLING ON THE INTERNET
It is my new mission to figure out how to develop traffic and sales for my site through NON-Google methods. I am starting to learn quite a bit about true viral marketing and community development on the net. We had these things in place before, however, as we're shifting the focus of our business, we are having to change how we're marketing as well.

The people who do well with non-google traffic are those who network quite a bit in forums and who get their names published in different documents, ebooks. These people develop their names into a recognizable brand.

The internet has long been an anonymous place. People like to sell things with anonymity. The problem with this is that you then rely on the strength of the product name or some other brand to sell your product. You may be able to sell with out using your own name, however, you're at the mercy of the product or service you're selling losing it's credibility.

By the way... My name is Monty Loree - President of HomeGrown Advertising Inc (1994) ;-)

I'M SORRY, I CAN'T TELL YOU MY NAME?! - OUCH!!
Branding your name is important on the internet is important as it helps people trust you as you're selling products. Imagine a sales person doing a sales call. He tells you he has a great product for sale, however he can't tell you his name or his companies name. This would create immediate doubt in your mind about the product.

SELLING WITHOUT AN OFFICE OR SALES FORCE?!!
Imagine yourself with your new company and a great product that's going to help millions. You're standing at the front door of your retail store waiting for people to come in to buy. You do a little advertising in the newspaper and you tell people about your product yourself. Sales are miniscule because people aren't familiar with you or your product or your credibility.

The next thing to do is do a little more advertising and put a sales person into your work force. The sales person is paid to talk about your credibility and your great products.

MORE SALES PEOPLE=MORE SALES!!
Ultimately the more sales people you have out there telling people how good you are and how great your product is, the more sales you're going to make.

This is what they refer to in the online business as Affiliate Marketing.

I'm just in the midst of research affiliate marketing and how it works. I will let you know my findings as I find them. I like the similarities between traditional marketing and affiliate marketing. Same thing, just a different medium.

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I've received this email at least 40 times in the last 2 days because I turned the automatic budget feature off in my account. My account had run out of money.

Is Yahoo starved for cash..?!! I got the message after the first time I read it. I woke up this morning and had another 20 of these emails in my box from overnight!!

Ok... I went and refilled the account with some money.. Yahoo, you can rest easy for a while.

Dear Sponsored Search Advertiser,

We wanted to let you know that we attempted to process a credit card transaction on Nov 05 2005 07:13 PT to deposit $100.00 to your Sponsored Search account: xxxxXXXX. Unfortunately, we were not able to complete the transaction because the credit card was declined.
This typically occurs if the credit card we have on file has expired or reached its credit limit.

Please log into your account and click on the Money Manager tab to update your credit card information.

We value your business and we're here to answer any questions you may have. If you'd like to reach our Customer Solutions department, please use the Support Request form, a link to which is found at the bottom of nearly all pages within your account. For questions regarding specific charges to your credit card, please call 1-866-Yahoo-SM and we will be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing


Please do not respond directly to this email because we are unable to receive e-mail responses to this address. If you would like to contact us please use the Support Request Form, a link to which is found at the bottom of nearly all pages within your account.

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People are asking why we stopped offering reciprocal links and have discontinued our reciprocal links exchange on this site.

SEARCH ENGINES ARE PENALIZING SITES FOR HAVING LINKS
The simple reason is that the search engines are starting to penalize sites with lots of reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links used to be a good idea in the past.

The logic behind why search engines are frowning on reciprocal links farms are, "who looks at reciprocal links pages anyways?" Aside from generating the reciprocal links themselves, what value are reciprocal links pages to the reader?! I heard this directly from Matt Cutts who is a senior software engineer at Google at the Webmasterworld conference in New Orleans June 2005.

OUR SITES ARE GETTING PUNISHED
Because we heavily practiced link generation and trade in the past, our sites have now fallen out of grace with the search engines. This means that whereas once upon a time, many reciprocal links gave us high rankings on google, they don't any more.

It seems that the world of search is heading towards get more money for the search engines. This means google and yahoo wants to give free searches to free types of sites. This is not true in all cases.

It makes sense that they would want to have commercial sites pay for traffic.

So... I recommend that if you're practicing reciprocal linking, you may want to think your strategy if you think it's going to give you top results on the search engines.

BENEFITS OF RECIPROCAL LINK EXCHANGE
Reciprocal link exchange is a great way to network on the internet and get to know other webmasters. However, it seems to be a lot of work for the benefit received back.

So... that is why we have stopped doing reciprocal links on this site. We enjoyed getting links from people all over the world. That was pretty exciting.

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I am so excited.

After working on this marketing ebook and review system project for about 4 days, I finally completed the first portion of my review system.

The next step is to notify clickbank vendors that I am starting to review them. I'll be visiting websites and picking up their contact information.

In the meantime, if you are a clickbank vendor, please contact me and I will set you up with a clickbank review questionairre.

I love programming.. I like to do it when I'm relaxed. I don't enjoy it as much when I'm under the gun. I've learned / relearned some fundamentals of programming, system design etc.

Doing projects like this gives me a whole new respect for programmers and system developers!! The good thing is, that as I relearned some fundamentals of programming, this type of project shouldn't take more than 1-2 days at the most next time.

It's snowing like crazy here. For heaven's sake. It's only November 4 today! Oh well... people in Arizona will never know snow like we have in Saskatchewan.

Let's get the reviewing engines started

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This is a picture of snow that I took this morning in front of my office building as I was coming into work.

While snow is not something new or exciting, it tells me that we've got a long winter ahead of us. It makes me want to work even more because, let's face it, when it gets below 0c what else is there to do.

SNOW SNOW SNOW!! While other people have hurricanes, tornados etc, we have snow. It's cold. Sometimes it gets to -45c here. They don't even have names for those days.

I think they should have a name for each -45c day.
Such as: -45c Wilma or -45c Katrina or -45c Rita. You get the idea.


I'm finished the first part of my review system. It was a great learning curve and interesting at that. I'll post more about it in another post.

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I offered to write a review for Bob Horton's PSDServices.com website. This website is in the business of Website Maintenance and Hosting for Churches, Nonprofits and Charities

I have known Bob for many years and know that he is quite capable of hosting and maintaining websites with a good amount of competence.
Websites are becoming more important for churches and non-profits in order to help their members keep up with events an information.

Some questions I have are as follows:
Does PSDServices offer any special services to churches and non-profits that are not available to other organizations.? Is this service just catering to that industry as Bob is a devout christian? This seems like a service which is run by christians for other christians.

Question regarding The Maintenance and pricing page.
Website Maintenance $30/month includes an average of 10 page changes per month
If 1000 churches signed up, PSDServices would be liable to service 10,000 pages per month. Even with Revenues of $30,000 per month would they be able to handle that type of volume?

This seems like an unreasonable price. I would like some more definition as to what I can expect for $3 per page.
Does this include text updates... Who writes/edits the text. Does this get into page modifications?

Bob mentions that he can update Calendars and events for churches. Is there some preformatted method for the churches to provide their event information? Otherwise, this sounds like it's unreasonable to offer that amount of work for $3 per page.

(In subsequent correspondence regarding this review, Bob Horton has assured me that he is more than capable of honoring the 10 page changes per month for the $30 price.)

What kind of a website can I expect for $100? It would be good maybe to see sample web pages or websites that one would receive for the $100-$500 price. Would the non-profits expect to get any search engine ranking for this price or are these all template website pages just designed for the church/non-profit to put on their calendar?

I do like the FAQ page. It offers some good questions and answers.

From a marketing stand point, this site has absolutely no credibility points. IE.. how long PSD Services been in operation. Who is the owner and what sort of qualifications does he have. Is PSD SErvices a member of the Better Business Bureau or Chamber of Commerce. If you're marketing to churches, what have you done for other churches and non-profits and how have you helped them.

If PSDServices is going to market to churches all around the company, I would hope that they would add some items that give their prospects confidence in them. Even if it's a letter from their current church pastor.

These are just a few quick points. The site has good potential. I would write out more definitions to give the readers a clearer understanding of what they're purchasing.

This site is located at www.psdservices.com

BOTTOM LINE: Would I be enticed to use this service by looking at the website alone? NO!!

Would be I be interested in using the service because I personally know Bob and what he can do? YES!!

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REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS

Who are these products?

TopReports

The Traffic Toolchest

Referral And Viral Marketing E-Book

Mlm-E-Secrets

Rss Solution Package
What are they going to do for you?Very soon I will be reviewing them for you and talking about them in detail. Who's good and who's bad and who's in the middle.

Is the author's ebook any good. Does the author actually have any experience in what he's saying or is he just trying to make a quick buck?

I'm writing the software this time.
In the meantime, it's been a while since I sat and wrote software. Previously I had to programmers who worked for me and built some pretty good software. For this project, I want to build the review software myself.

I need to get back in the trenches to see exactly what's going on with programming, databases etc. I feel that by programming this review system myself, I'll be able to better review sites with people who develop software and write ebooks.

Getting back into the trenches
Getting into the trenches means I'm getting back into the nitty gritty of things and is giving me a much clearer picture of what's working and what's not working.

So... while it's taking a little longer than I had expected to build the preliminary part of the review system, I think the benefits will be well worth it when it comes time for me to write the clickbank affiliate reviews or cj affiliate reviews.

I have programmed quite a bit in PHP and mysql and html in the past. That was four years ago. I haven't exercised making IF statements FOR or WHILE loops for a few years.

Internet marketers and developers have to be multi-talented.
It's interesting to note that people who make ebooks and software have a double duty. They've got to first create the product, and then they've got to market the product. It will be evident as to which the author or developer is best at, marketing or developing.

Personally, even though I am writing this review system in php and mysql, css and html, my programmers could have done a much better job. They would have used all of the bells and whistles and much better mutidimensional arrays and joined mysql queries.

The product reviews are the most important thing.
I'm going to build it so it works and looks good. It's probably not the fanciest thing in the world however, I want the reviews and the words to be of value to the reader. The words or the reviews are most important. The website itself is just a back drop or display area for the reviews.

I'm back to writing code for the balance of the day. I'm going to put a comment section on this page, to make this page blog style so you'll be able to talk to me directly in the near future.

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I'm in the midst of developing the review system software. Of course there are a few obstacles that I hadn't anticipated.. (As always)

I'm revving my engines and reviewing some sites so that I'll know what I'm going to write when I get going at this.

I am seeing some patterns of sites and products and what I like or won't like. I'm seeing sites that aren't much value, and some website marketing software which isn't great value.

I'm also seeing some good products and sites and am thinking about the best way to present these to my readers in order to best help them with their website marketing process.

My goal is bring a good review that will save the reader time and money in their marketing program.

If you have any questions or want your clickbank or other affiliate program product reviewed, let me know.

Now I'm back to to system development. Somehow, writing software is not the same as writing reviews!! :)

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Every year on November 1st, I get excited and have a sense of satisfaction.

I founded HomeGrown Advertising Inc back in 1994 and to date have helped thousands of customers all over the world with their advertising needs.

I get a sense of relief because they say that most companies fail after 2-5 years, and even more companies fail or fold before their 10th anniversary. For the fact that we've gotten to our 11th anniversary means that things should be alright! :)

We've certainly learned many lessons about marketing for ourselves and our customers on the internet as well as offline. We've also learned the sometimes excruciating lessons of how to navigate the business during growth and decline, through good times and bad times.

I must say that keeping a business going for 11 years is not for the weak of heart. It's been a tremendous amount of work, but it's been pretty exciting and fulfilling.

In the early days many people called me crazy and told me to get a 'real' job. After a few years, they just gave in and accepted that we were going to live the lifestyle required to maintain this type of business.

I would like to thank our customers who have 'paid' our way throughout the years. We certainly have tried to give you more than enough value for your money over the years.

In the meantime, I'm pretty exciting to celebrate HomeGrown Advertising Inc's 11th birthday all day today!!

Cheers!

Articles from November 2005
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