I was sitting with a sales team tonight at a function. While there I was listening to the sales banter. It reminded me of all the different times I’ve been on sales teams over the years.
I remember selling water purifiers, workout pants, cars, photography packages, timeshares, office supplies, and a host of other things years ago. I went to motivational seminars and endured countless sales meetings. I fretted over quotas and spent many days fearfully contacting leads and desperately going through the motions.
I wanted to excel. I was working hard …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Hey guys,
I know, I said the next post was going to be “How to create a membership site (part 2).” I want to get to that post but I have been really slammed with a lot of copywriting and consulting gigs lately. I have barely had time to catch my breath. But…in an effort to give you something good, I though I would do a short screencast about a couple of tools I use for researching niches and keywords for profitability.

I’ll try and do membership sites part 2 as soon …

Curious about Google Adwords quality score or why you have to pay what you do to get the positions you get? Here is a very informative video of Hal Varian, Google’s Cheif Economist explaining everything.

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Upselling, downselling, and cross selling are well established methods of increasing sales. Are you utilizing all of these in your business?
I eat at an Indian restaurant sometimes. The owner is always in there working every sales angle he can. He’s incredibly smooth and before you know it you’ve spent a hundred dollars on a dinner for two.
“Care for some garlic nan with that? How about some saffron rice…it’s wonderful…by the way…have you tried our ginger lemonade? It’s very refreshing. Did you know we have a family brunch special on Sundays? …

That’s right, you should test everything and make sure every advertisement you run has some key code. It’s really the only way to know if money you spend on advertising is well spent.
I am used to testing ads online, but it’s been a while since doing much offline advertising. Today however as I was mulling over what to write about a situation arose. I noticed my supply of business cards was getting low and I am getting ready to launch an offline campaign and thought it would be good to …

I wanted to do a quick review of Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind course.  Whether you are an experienced blogger or just starting out you will undoubtedly benefit from blog mastermind.
I have purchased dozens of courses over the years and this one really over delivers.  From an info product creator’s standpoint I would recommend buying this product just to see how much it over delivers.  Yaro’s course really raises the bar for others out there creating info products.
Before I tell you more about what’s inside let me just give you my …

If you are doing any kind of development or playing around with the look of your sites the Firefox Web Developer Addon is a must have and here’s why…
Have you ever seen a site with a cool looking background image and wanted to make it your own? With the Web Developer Addon one of the features is the ability to view all of the images in a document neatly displayed in rows with the paths to their location. So, it’s easy to find that background image drag it off to …

By David Ogilvy
Ogilvy & Mather has created over $1,480,000,000 worth of advertising. Here, with all the dogmatism of brevity are 38 of the things we have learned.
1.  The most important decision. We have learned that the effect of your advertising on your sales depends more on this decision than on any other: how should you position your product? Should you position Schweppes as a soft drink – or as a mixer?  Should you position Dove as a product for dry skin or as a product which gets hands …

This is the final installment in the review of WL Marketing’s directory submission service.
I signed up for the 2000 directory submission package spread over four weeks. The service was only $105. I thought regardless of the outcome, submitting to 2000 directories over four weeks is more than I am willing to do for $100 bucks, so why not.  I felt for  a while that it was a complete waste of money but perhaps I didn’t give the service enough time.
I still question the quality of the links and directories my …

Sue Griggs, an acquaintance who saved her house from foreclosure through internet marketing recently created her first information product - My Work At Home Solution. Sue sent me the product and asked if I would give it a review. I told her I would be happy to as long as she could take the good with the bad.
Sue’s story is a story of hope for many people in these troubled economic times. Before being forced into a situation of having to do something or lose here house to foreclosure, Sue’s …

If you answered yes, I recommend Michael Gerber’s book, “The E-myth Revisited.“  I have to say, that out of all the books I have read on business or entrepreneurship this is one of the best.
Something like 90% of all small businesses fail within the first 5 years.  Why? If you are in business for yourself now you may be acutely aware. If you aren’t, let’s look at the scenario.
You…are some kind of technician, perhaps you are a programmer, engineer, carpenter, plumber, cake baker, or retail worker. Whatever the case, you …

Okay guys, I know…I give away a lot of good stuff on this blog for free. I don’t usually endorse products but I am going to today. The product I am speaking of is an Internet marketing product that has been around for probably 6-7 years now. That should say something about it’s quality. I have personally applied many of these concepts on a daily basis for the past couple of years and have earned my employer somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million per year.
To be perfectly honest I …