What brought me to the need to rant today is a new product that apparently has lots of affiliates promoting it. For a good portion of these, I can spot what the product is and just delete the email. Being lazy and not coming up with your own promotional email – at least subject line – especially on a big launch, means to me that you don’t really give a rip about the sale. I don’t feel badly when eliminating the email without opening it at all.

However, that’s not the problem here. This has to do with how the product itself is being presented and the use of those annoying pop up windows offering goodies if you’ll only cancel your exit.

I’ve come to expect that there will be the opportunity to change my mind about exiting a sales page, and it’s only slightly annoying for the one or two normal screens you have to get through to actually get off the page. But this new product, Rapid Traffic something or other, has TEN little windows you have to click on to get out of sales page hell, including the final audio “WAIT” that’s always too loud and makes me jump.

Come on… TEN? I guess it must work, but it only makes me annoyed with the marketer. Are all his products going to involve this difficulty in getting away from the page? I didn’t think this particular release was something I needed right now, but what about future offers. Will I even look at the sales page when I fear he’ll have even more “wait I have something for you” offers?

Probably not.

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If you’re paying attention, you know by now that the FTC has some new rules about how marketers do business, especially when it comes to testimonials and endorsements. This is a good thing. There haven’t been new rules propagated since 1980, several centuries in terms of the internet! There is a lot of information out there if you want to know more – and, of course, lots of opportunities to buy a product to help protect yourself. You can look at the article I wrote for Ezine Articles or just google “new FTC rules” if you want to read more.

This isn’t an article about the rules, per se. It’s more about the reason the FTC needed to make the rules.

It’s just that I was reading an article by Paul Evans of Nicheology (yes, the same as the advertisement over there –>) where he was talking about the great marketer/motivator Zig Ziglar. Apparently, Ziglar suffers from memory loss. His family was discussing Tiger Woods’ problems and teased Ziglar that he was lucky he couldn’t remember all his girlfriends that might get him in trouble (teasing because he was notoriously in love with The Redhead).

His response is something all of should take to heart and live by, a rule for life as well as marketing:

Zig’s response to the comment was, “When you always tell the truth and do the right thing you do not have to have a good memory.”

Just thought I’d share that with you today.

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The main reason for my post today is to tell you about a GREAT page put up by Michael Campbell. It is helping me finally make some sense out of search engine optimization, or SEO.

The basics of SEO shouldn’t really be that hard to understand. It’s simply the information you need to have, the links in and out of your site, the keywords used correctly, etc., to make the search engines find your site and rank it. The problem for me has been that I’m going along just fine and somewhere in the middle of things there’s talk about social networking that seems to be in a foreign language. POW! My brains explode, and I can’t make sense of the rest of the article or conversation.

I know social networking and sites have been important to getting ranked for some time now. And I’m sure that I have a bunch of information tucked away about how to do it. The problem is, none of this seems particularly intuitive. I seems that each web 2.0 site has a different way of doing things: different sign-up, different posting rules, different linking rules, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So I get impatient and my brain shuts down. Not a pretty trait, but there it is.

Today, though, I found a post by Michael Campbell called Jiggling the Web for Instant Search Engine Rankings that put it all together in such a way that I wanted, actually wanted, to learn more. Even if you know tons about SEO and SERPS, this is a worthwile read.

And, be sure to take advantage of the link to the interview given at the bottom of the page. Ken McCarthy interviews Campbell for over an hour. The information in that interview is mind-boggling. I plan to listen to it a few more times so I can have complete notes on all that’s discussed. This is definitely worth the investment of your time.

So, enough for now. Here’s some more information you might find helpful:

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“The secret to getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

What finally clicked is that this is exactly how I was able to be a successful caterer. You see, in the catering business, it doesn’t matter whether you’re cooking for 50 or for 500. The things you have to do to get the food on the table are exactly the same, just on a different scale. You still have to compute the amount of food you’ll need, compute the time you need to prepare it, shop for the ingredients, and then start cooking. And all of this requires detailed lists, with the individual tasks set out.

For example, if I’m making a caeser salad, my task list would look like this:

Make croutons: cube bread, saute bread in butter and seasonings, crisp croutons in oven

Lettuce: wash, dry, tear

Dressing: chop garlic, coddle egg, mash anchovies, combine with the rest of the ingredients, and chill

Grate or shave the parmesan

The thing about all this is that it’s second nature when I’m preparing food (even now when it’s only our own dinner parties I plan), but it hasn’t been an automatic thing for me to do in my internet business. So that’s something I simply have to incorporate in my workday.

Even writing about the process reminds me of how immensely satisfying it is to cross something off a list, marking it as completed. It’s a tangible way to show progress and to have a visual of how your work is going.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions is to start making lists. I’m off to do just that right now.

Oh, and here are a few more thoughts on getting started.

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The straw that broke everything was a transaction I had a couple of months ago. As I do on occasion, I was looking at listings for ebooks, seeing what kinds of rules were being broken (I know, I’ve written before about my 12 year old self yelling “you can’t do that, it against the rules”).

And as usual, I found that a good number of people were offering items for $.01 or $.99 with free shipping, with “CD” as part of the title. So, one of them being an ebook I didn’t have, I bought the $.99 item. I carefully looked through the listing to be sure there wasn’t the “if you really want the CD, you’ll have to pay this much more” that seems to be okay with eBay, and there wasn’t.

I got the email telling me that I could download the item, which I did. Then I emailed the seller and asked when my CD would be mailed. The response I got was an angry, what-are-you-nuts tirade about how it was impossible to sell and mail a real CD for $.99, so they refunded the money, and leave me alone. I did point out that she was in violation of eBay policy, but didn’t get a response to that.

And of course, I made my way through the nonsense that is “contact us” at eBay, and I reported the transaction. And waited. And waited some more. After a couple of weeks, I resubmitted by complaint, and waited some more. I did finally get an email a few days ago saying they’d had some problems, knew I had communicated, and would I please resubmit. I’ve done that now, but I really have no real hope that anything will be done. I really don’t think they give a fig about small sellers.

The incredibly frustrating thing is that there are many of us who totally revamped our businesses, invested in supplies to comply with the new rules, and are now being tossed aside by eBay. Granted what I paid in fees for my sales and my store aren’t even a blip on eBay’s radar, but, at least in my budget, every little bit adds to pot.  Apparently, eBay is doing so well with the big guys, they don’t need me anymore. So, bye-bye.

Now I need to design a new header. Another learning opportunity, because I cannot for the life of me remember how I did this one.

I have started work on developing a lot of little tiny, very specific, niche blogs. Some offer Clickbank products for sale, some are just meant to be authority sites with adsense.  I’m making a few cents with the adsense, and I’ve sold a couple of ebooks. Nothing that sends me to the world of the uber-rich, but the potential is definitely there. It is a numbers game – the more sites I have, the more the potential for sales/adsense revenue.

My biggest challenge is to find those tiny specific niches, and I’ve just joined a great new program that is helping with that. It’s called Niche Horde, and it is very very cool! (The link is an affiliate link. If you like what you see and buy the product, I get a commission. It’s how the internet world works. If you think that’s wrong, simply type nichehorde.com into your browser.)

Anyway, it’s a network of users who have a bit of code on their computers that goes out and gathers information about what folks are looking for on the web. I have no idea how it works, but it does, and that means that I get this incredible amount of information and suggestions about niches. If niche marketing is even remotely interesting to you, you really should take a look Niche Horde. The only problem is that it’s easy to spend hours with the program looking at stuff. Interesting for sure, but the setting up of the niche sites is what I should be doing!

Okay, enough of this. I need to get back to the doing rather than the talking about. Be well.

I got myself off track after seeing how many cooking and recipe sites there are out there and deciding I needed to learn more about doing business on the web. You know how completely I got sucked into that pit!

Kindle actually has been the impetus for me to venture back into the food niche. I am told that cookbooks rank in the top 10 for downloads of Kindle books, so I’m spending some time with that.  I’ve edited a couple of public domain books, and now I’m writing one about meringues (no, not just the fluffy stuff you put on top of lemon pies – when you flavor the meringue and bake it crisp, it’s very good!) I’m hoping to have it offered for sale on Kindle in a week or so. And of course, it will be coming to a web site near you, as well, for the non-Kindle readers.

And article marketing will be a part of the marketing program.

I’ve been really lazy about doing article marketing – which is just plain stupid, given how effective it is to getting traffic to your site. I did a few articles about my Ireland site and actually saw some traffic generated, even though that’s another over-saturated niche. But then I got distracted (surprise!) by the newest shiny thing and didn’t follow through.

I do have roughly a bajillion articles/article packs sitting on my hard drive. Many of them are duplicates, I know, and it’s just plain annoying to have to go through a file simply titled “900 PLR Articles” to try to figure out what they’re about. But who do I have to blame? I am making myself spend an hour each day doing just that, though. Most of the articles are on internet marketing topics and most of those are awful, so I’m clearing up some space on my hard drive. And, the ones on other subjects are often pretty bad, too. I’m thinking that for most of the giveaway article packs, ‘you get what you pay for’ is especially true.

I have found a new offering, though, that I’m thinking is pretty impressive, especially for free. A fellow named Mike Steup, who seems to have found his niche in everything to do with articles, is offering a free daily set of 5 articles. He cautions that they are very rough and need editing/rewriting work, but they are a starting point. I just got my first set (they’re about aerobic exercise, and I’ll be able to use them on one of my sites, I think), and I am impressed. They will need some rewriting and editing, but only to get around the duplicate content thing and to maybe add some content (they run a bit over 400 words per article). They are good enough to use as is.

Of course the reason he’s giving these away is so he can tell you about his other products, but I’m thinking it’s well worth a little sales copy to have access to this quality. You should take a look by clicking here.

I’m back to my recipes. Have a great weekend – a great holiday weekend, if you’re here in the U.S.

I have been busy with other projects, so I haven’t been exactly on top of doing what I need to do for my eBay listings. Actually, I pared my listings down to just the products that have sold in the past and kept them just in the store. I really need to relist for auction, tweak the listings, and take more care of the categories I’m putting the listings into.

Problem is, it’s hard to get motivated when I see so many sellers doing all the right things and still only making a few sales per week, for most of them, not enough or barely enough to cover their fees.

I did note a few  weeks ago that I was looking into using classified ads, and there are some excellent guides out there about that. There are a lot of sellers using the ads to collect names for their lists by giving away free reports, presumably then being able to sell to that list later. You can also give away a report or sell it for just a few dollars, but have an upsell or two.

You need to start with good information and be prepared to do the follow-up, and that’s where I’m being lazy. Ideally, you start with a very good informative book, write a condensed version that you offer for a few dollars. You then collect the email information to add the buyer to your list and send upgrade offers. You only need to sell a few of the condensed versions to make up the $10 you’re spending with eBay for the ad, and you build your list.

Whatever happened to “make money easily from your computer without doing anything”? Were they lying to me?

I am working on a couple of books to add to Kindle. I believe the best format is html, because you can add clickable links for the table of contents (especially important for something like a cookbook), so there is some work involved. Some Kindle products are getting bad reviews because the seller just slaps up the PDF without any clickable links. Scrolling through pages and pages and pages on a Kindle is not a fun thing.

I am told the Internet Selling For Newbies free CD offer is almost gone, so if you’ve been thinking about taking advantage of the offer but haven’t acted yet, now is the time.

Back to work for me. Be well.

Martin and Filsaime have been involved with internet marketing for years, and they’ve been very successful. Their credentials in the field are impeccable. And that experience shows in their new product.

I just wish I’d had access to something like this when I was a beginner. I have a hard drive full of “how to” materials that don’t come close to being this clear and this comprehensive. And, even though this is geared toward beginner, I found good information that kind of pulled a few things together for me. And I’ve only just started a full reading. The modules having to do with social sites, media, traffic, and joint venturing promise to teach me a bunch!

Oh, and the price is unbelievable. I’ve seen courses offered for 10 times this much that don’t come close to this amount of information.

As you might have guessed, I’m giving this program a huge thumbs-up recommendation. You can read more about it at my Internet Selling For Newbies Review site.

All was not completely wasted time, though. I did find some vendors who are actually selling ebooks on CD; I mean, they’re actually making sales. So I’m taking a closer look at their businesses and plan to emulate what they do.

I did see that there aren’t many offering free shipping. It’s more likely that they’re selling at auction with a beginning $.99, but charging full bore for shipping and handling ($2.95 to $3.95). Their offerings are also much more specifically listed to category, something I’ve not paid that much attention to.  And they don’t sell from stores, they auction their CDs.

I am still working through the eBay Classified Ad manual and will let you know. There have been a couple of personal life issues that got in the way of finishing that book and implementing the concepts. One of the advantages of working online from home is the ability to take that kind of time away.

I just realised that I’m talking about doing research on eBay without talking about the how. I’ve been doing this so long, I forget that what seems easy to me can be confusion to someone.

So here’s what I mean about checking on how other vendors are doing, and what they’re doing. Log into your eBay account, and then click on the “advanced search” spot next to the search box. You’ll see all kinds of ways to do searches; by seller and completed listings are the two I find most useful.

Just be careful. It’s easy to get lost looking at what’s working and not working – useful, for sure, but not to replace action (that was to remind me as much as you!).

My continued research shows this business of digital delivery for regular listings is widespread. In looking at one category – information products > how to guides > how to make money – with just 180 listings, there were almost 20 sellers offering digital delivery, and most of those with multiple listings.

Initially I only looked at the $.99 and below listings, but after accidentally opening a $9.99 item and finding “email delivery” just big and bold in the listing, I decided to check them all.

Yeah, I know, not exactly a productive use of time, except that in a way it is. If we can get eBay to enforce the digital delivery prohibition, then it should have a direct impact on my sales.

So, I started reporting the listings, a tedious process when you use the “report this item” link at the bottom of the individual listing. But today I did find that there’s a way to report multiple listings – limited to 10, but still – although it’s by item number, so you have copy the number from each item. But I have to open the listing to be sure it’s a digital delivery offer – some sellers have the language in some of their listings, not all of them.

This is the direct link to the reporting page:

http://contact.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ContactUs&wftype=2023&rcode=BN%25P10122&subject=Digitally%20Delivered%20Goods&bcrumb=%20Home%20%3E%20Help%20%3E%C2%A0Membership%20%26%20account%C2%A0%3E%C2%A0Rules%20%26%20policies%C2%A0%3E%C2%A0Digitally%20delivered%20goods&instruction=&expirationDate=

Or it can be found by going to the A-Z help index, to D, to downloadable media (policy), then to contact customer support at the bottom of that page. You are presented with a box in which to put the listing numbers of items that are non-compliant.

It is frustrating to think that eBay will just tell the offenders they can’t offer digital delivery other than for classified ads, because we certainly know they’re not doing any checking on listings to be sure policy is followed. And there are still the listings that offer “pick up” for the free shipping, and I don’t know that eBay will do anything about that kind of uncertain language.

I do encourage you to report offenders when you find them. If you sell information products through anything other than classified ads, then you know the kind of expense that entails, for supplies and postage, if you’re being honest and in compliance with eBay rules. When folks cheat, it takes a big bite out of your income.

Another thing I found in some of the listings was an exorbitant shipping price for folks who actually wanted the CD – $10 in a couple of cases. I guess eBay wouldn’t have noticed, since the actual listing itself says free shipping.

I also found someone selling 4 brand new fiction bestsellers (The Twilight Saga) on CD for $.99 and offering resale rights. I don’t think this person understands the concept of copyright, but I’m afraid they’re going to find out soon and in a very expensive way. I know there’s some confusion about public domain and the way the copyrighted material is delivered. This seller apparently thinks because they can put the books on CD, the copyright for the book itself is negated. Hope they have a good lawyer!

All of this nonsense did provide some good research on what is actually selling and what the good, compliant sellers are doing to maintain their businesses. This is research that should have been ongoing for me, but now has slapped me upside the head. This certainly doesn’t negate the need to diversify my business, but there are things I can do now to help the eBay part of my empire add financially.

Enough of the rant. I have eBay sellers to report! And a lot of work to do on my own listings.

Be well. Be successful.