Landing pages are the shit. If you’re marketing online, buying media, etc…the landing page is your best friend. Whether you’re an etailer or direct marketer, or corporation if you have concrete goals for your SEM efforts landing pages pay for themselves over and over again.
Having worked on thousands of these pages for companies with budgets up to $500k/mo I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t (although I still get it wrong a lot and only testing yields the final result). Now, for your benefit…here are the …

Craigslist is killing me!
Far and away, Craigslist is my favorite traffic source right now but damn they make it hard to get and keep ads live.
I’ve learned a lot since I started Craigslist posting. Craigslist is a world unto itself. This is a marketplace and the competition can be fierce. You’ve got other Craigslist marketers who go around flagging ads of competitors.
Not only that, Craigslist doesn’t like marketer like us. I understand, their business model works a lot like Googles. Google makes their money by providing the most relevant content …

Getting more traffic to your site is one of those perennial topics. Even though you may have seen a lot of these tactics there’s probably some good one’s you haven’t. Additionally, the fact is most of us simply don’t have time to do everything listed. That’s fine, you have to discover what works best for you and apply the 80/20 principle focusing on the best results for the least amount of time/effort/expense.
Getting traffic is going to cost you either in terms of time or money. There are still keywords you …

Taking credit card payments is an important part of most businesses. If you’ve got a new or unproven direct response business, diet pills, penny auctions, info products, etc… you probably fall into the high risk category.
Why, a number of reasons. A couple are…a lot of direct response businesses are poorly planned. They’re started by individuals very often on limited budgets, with mediocre products, and limited customer service. There’s seldom a plan for managing growth, and dealing with customer service to keep chargebacks down.
What ends up happening is customers get mad …

For anyone who works online you understand the loneliness of having friends and clients around the globe you rarely meet face to face with.
Tonight I had the great pleasure of having some drinks with someone who really knows how to make a deal. RL has run many networks over the years. Since 1995 he’s been running high traffic golf and tourism sites.
We spoke a bit about some of the deals he’s worked out and frankly, I was blown away. But…our conversation reinforced my feelings that all online efforts need supplementing …

In the past few months I’ve had the good fortune of working with a number of successful serial entrepreneurs; people who’ve built multi-million dollar companies and sold them or taken them public for tens of millions.
In our conversations I am always amazed with their similarity in thought and personality type. So similar in fact, I sometimes get confused with who I’m talking to. I remember saying to one of these individuals “wow, that’s so weird, this sounds almost identical to a conversation I had with another successful serial entrepreneur just …

A lot of the questions in forums surround list building. Many people, myself included don’t always want to wait for names to dribble onto our lists. If you have a product and want to start selling it immediately renting the right mailing lists from a broker can help.
Like any media buy lists can either cost you a lot or make you  a lot. If you’re considering renting a list of names make sure to ask your list broker the following questions. Nothing will guarantee your success but these questions will …

Ever want to download a free report, checkout a freebie video series, or some new piece of software, but don’t want to enter your email because you don’t want to be bombarded with affiliate promotions? You could just enter a fake email right? Not if the company has optin verification setup.If you have your own domains you can most likely just go in and create a temporary email address. What a hassle though.
A better way is to use a free email service like 10minutemail.com. 10 Minute Mail is a free …

Hi Guys, you know I don’t usually shamelessly plug things here but I think this is worth your while. Hostgator is having a crazy sale and if you do business online or need hosting this is a great deal. I am going to show you the deal and put an affiliate link to Hostgator. If you think this is a good deal and need hosting click through on my link. Here’s the deal:
This will apply to the client’s first invoice (first term length they sign up for whether that be …

When your writing a piece to get people to take action it’s helpful to write good bullets (also called fascinations). Bullets are so powerful that people will order a product or fill out a form just to get the information in one of the bullets. That said, if you make a promise in a bullet, make sure you back it up.
I could be wrong about this but based on my experiences men respond better to bullets. Men will read through a long list of bullets before women will. It depends …

Seems greed and fear aren’t the only motivators after all. Good no doubt, but when the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Yeilding to pressure from the feds said that drug reps could no longer court doctors with ballgame tickets, golf games, or meals they had to turn to other tactics.
Some brilliant sales trainer came up with an even better idea, one that wouldn’t cost the drug companies nearly as much. The premise was simple - pander to doctors egos.
Here’s how it works. A drug rep identifies a physician …

I’m still here! I’m Still here! No, I haven’t forgotten about my blog, and I have a ton of excuses (probably none of them good) as to why I haven’t posted much lately.
Anyhow, in an effort to keep content fresh on this blog I have been reaching out to some people I know to write guest posts. I am also interested in finding a regular blogger to help me with adding good content. So, if you’re someone passionate and knowledgeable about online business and likes to write please contact me …

Lately things have been more complex and harder to keep track of. Like Michael Gerber describes in what may be one of the most important entrepreneurial books of all time “The EMyth,” as things grow and get more complex I begin screwing up. There’s just too much for one person to keep track of.
So, as we hire employees, do more work for more clients, and get involved with more and more things it becomes necessary to develop or employ some system of managing employees, suppliers, projects, tasks, etc…
That said, I’ve …

I’ve been spending a lot of time offline lately with this new bath and skincare business. Along the way I’ve been reflecting on the causes of online business and home based internet marketing failures. A quick search in any of the internet marketing forums reveals groups of people frustrated with their inability to make money online.
After some reflection I’ve identified 10 factors or common mistakes contributing to online marketing failure.

Unrealistic expectations brought about by hyped up sales letters, marketing gurus, and forums.
Products with no REAL value. If you look at …

SEOQuake ia a  killer must have SEO and competative intelligence tool. If you’re doing any kind of online marketing and SEO related work you should download SEOquake now. It’s free and gives you an amazing amount of data displayed in a DHTML layer beneath the search engine results and whatever page your on.
SEOquake by default comes loaded with a number of parameters by default but you can even create your own. Checkout the features and you’ll quickly see the value power of this toolbar:

Google PR
Google PageRank of current page
Google Index
Number …

Facebook advertising has been the all-the-rage for a while now and for good reason. Few advertising mediums allow you to target groups so specifically. The information you place on your profile page makes that targeting possible.
For instance, if you say your into gardening and do it yourself projects those ads are displayed to you. If you’re considering going into a certain market change your interests in your profile page and wait a few minutes and you’ll see ads directed at those interests. If you go to the bottom of those …

A few years back in response to link spam and people trying to game link based page ranking by search engines the “noFollow” tag was created. This tag protects a page from passing pagerank with links. Many blogs now are setup to “noFollow” comments.  There are still good reasons for commenting on blogs even if they use “noFollow” tags.You just don’t get the benefit of the backlink.
There are still however some high PR blog pages that still have “doFollow” commenting. So, if you’re looking for some backlinks you don’t have …

Okay guys I’ll try and get this right. Sorry, I just got back from a nice dinner(no, not a “niche” dinner…well kind of) - carne ranchera and some margaritas. Anyhow, if you’re looking for a rock-bottom bargain on private video hosting for membership sites and whatnot Amazon’s S3 service is the way to go.
At my last company I worked in business development. One of the projects I worked on involved online backup and storage. I learned that even many of the big players in that space use Amazon’s S3 to …

I picked up a good book in the airport the other day - “Yes” 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. Social psychologist Robert Cialdini PhD, Noah Goldstein PhD, and Steven Martin have put together another fun and interesting read on persuasion techniques.
After enjoying Cialdini’s other book  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion I was curious to find out what this new book had in store. Yes is a fast read with  entertaining anecdotes gained from real world social psychology experiments of Cialdini, his team, and other researchers.
Chapter one entitled “How …

I just returned from  a trip to North Carolina, while I was there I visited some friends near the Blue Ridge Mountains and Pisgah Forest area of Brevard where I rediscovered the importance of staying true to yourself, and how authenticity and consistency draw people like a magnet.
Mike took me to the backyard, showing me a lovely Garden containing varieties of Kale, Lettuce, Basil, and other organic delights.  As I sit here now I have little inclination for gardening. However, at the moment I was captivated by all he showed …