Tony's Big Thing on the Web

If you are at the stage where you are searching for solutions to build a business web site in terms of how to design and upload it to a web host then what I have to say may change your mind about what’s really important in building a business web site.

It may come as a shock to some people, but building a successful business online has very little to do with creating or putting up the actual web site, in fact in some cases you don’t even need a website.

It Doesn't Sell Well
There are very few people online who will actually tell you what’s really involved and how much work and resources it actually takes, because that’s not what most newcomers to the web want to hear – it does not sell well !

By the time a newcomer is set on the idea of putting up a business web site he or she has already read a ton of stuff on how easy it all is and all you need is to buy this ebook or that piece of software or find the holy grail – the Secret to Online Success.

What is more, so many people now believe they can do all this for free.

Let’s face it, if most newcomers to the web knew the real truth, most of them could save themselves a lot of time and money. That is by not downloading free stuff or buying products on the web that feed their dream to make riches and sit on the beach all day. Apart that is from the 1 or 2 hours they need to work to keep the money rolling in from their business web site or sites that run on auto-pilot.

In fact if you read the true life stories behind the big names on the web, in virtually every case you will find they spent years struggling to make ends meet and in many case they went 10’s and in some cases 100’s of thousands of dollars into debt to follow their dream.

Instant success did not happen for them and more than likely will not happen for you.

If you choose not to believe me, I won’t lose any sleep over it, but you may one day when you look back in a few years and say, gee I wish I’d paid more attention to some guy I read something about on a blog once, but I can’t remember where.

I also mention his link management script because it features in the story I am about to share with you regarding one of Duncan’s current projects. You see, Duncan is one of the very few people, in fact only the second one I know in the past five years, to offer to share how he goes about building a web business in real time.

The first person I know who tried this over the shoulder approach was David Vallieres, but he was charging a monthly fee and closed the project down after only a few months.

Now I don’t mean how Duncan creates or puts up a business web site, that’s easy, but how he markets and promotes it on the web, how he gets the site top rankings in the search engines, how he builds links, creates the product to sell, builds a mailing list, tests and tracks his marketing efforts to see what works and what doesn’t.

If you want to follow along and see what Duncan does on this project and how he does it then you should visit the blog he has set up for it, a link to which you will find at the end of this blog.

For my part I am following the reports on his progress with keen interest and I shall be offering my insight into what he is doing and how he is doing it in future posts on this blog.

What is clear to me so far is that Duncan is not trying to hide anything. For a time I thought he was not telling the entire story like so many other gurus on the web. It’s often not what they tell you, but what they don’t tell you that really matters.

You see I knew about Duncan’s secret weapon for getting thousands of links to any site he chooses so I suspected he was using it on this project to boost his site’s rankings, something most people don’t have the resources to do.

In fact I didn’t just suspect he was using his LMA script, I knew he was, but more of that in a later blog. The point is that eventually Duncan did say that’s what he was doing in one of his later project reports – so full marks to Duncan for telling the whole story.

So if you want to gain some first hand experience on how to build a business web site as it happens, but more importantly promote it then I recommend you follow this blog and the one Duncan has created for this project at: http://www.onlinemarketingtoday.com/worm-farming/

This niche project began in late February 2007 so you have some catching up to do by reading Duncan's blog entries if you want to follow along.

Tony Simpson
Web Page Add Ons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 02:03 PM | Permalink

A few months ago I joined eBook Niches a membership that provides 4 ebooks per month in specific niches, but are they really niches - you judge for yourself.

The ebook niche member’s site is run by Robert Blackstone & Adam Maywald and requires a monthly membership fee.

During my membership I downloaded and evaluated 12 ebook packages, covering a wide range of topics from Boat Safety, to Modelling, Home Schooling, Anxiety, Dog Training and UK Debt.

Each package has one ebook in pdf and word format, 20 PLR articles, an email course with a sales letter and graphics, provided in case you want to try and sell the ebook.

In the ebook niche package you also get a short list of 3 or 4 niche product affiliates and the results of the keyword research that I assume went into choosing the ebook subject in the first place.
 

So, what can you do with this ebook niche package ?

Well, you could try and sell the ebook, or give it away, or use the content for your own ebook or web pages.

Ebook niches make the claim that these are quality ebooks. Well, they are better than some I have read, but are they of such quality that you could, or would want to sell them ?

Personally I would not try to sell them. Many of them are not particularly well written and come from the ghost writer factory. The only possible use for the material that I would recommend is content for your own web pages.

However, whilst you are free to use the ebook and articles as you please, I would caution you against using the material as provided.
 

Secondly, the content is not particularly good and I generally found I could get no more than 1 or 2 pages of quality web content from the ebook and articles.

Out of 20 articles I could usually only piece together one article that I would consider good enough to publish.

So, don't expect not to do any work.
 

eBook Niche Keyword Research
On the subject of work I would also suggest you don't rely upon the keyword research data that is provided with each ebook niche package. Firstly, I would seriously challenge whether many of these topics are actually in a niche at all.

As I have found from other product evaluations I have done on niche offerings - like Niche Monthly, Niche a Day and Article Underground, the keyword research that is the basis for these products is in many cases, extremely flawed.

It is clear to me from the keyword research provided with all these types of products that it can not be relied upon. For this reason I always do my own keyword research.

What I usually find is that the keyword phrases that have been chosen are either not in a niche, or if they are, not in one that you could get a high ranking for with a search engine any time soon.

The cost of membership to ebook niches was $47 per month, but quickly rose to $97 a month. Is it worth $47 or $97 per month, well not to me.

Tony
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A worldwide Internet payment processor recently declined to donate even one cent to a charity to feed a starving child following changes it made that caused severe problems to a charity website.

One of the world’s largest Internet payment processors has over 100 million accounts in 103 countries recently caused a charity website’s payment pages to appear to its English customers in the German language.

It was not until someone from Ethiopia wanted to make a donation did the problem come to light. The person wanting to make the donation could not because they couldn’t understand the German payment page being presented to them.

The switch to presenting the sites payment pages in German had probably been like that for about 3 weeks. That was as far as I could tell from another website affected by the same problem.

The payment processors first response to the problem was to suggest that the fault was with the charity website using the wrong code on the sites webpage’s.

This ignored the fact that the pages reverted to being shown in German rather than English when no changes had been made to the sites payment pages. The pages were in English when they were first created.

The next response to the issue was to suggest that the problem was caused by the fact that the charity sites account is based in Switzerland and therefore any payment pages created will be shown in German.

If that were true, why did they choose German, since Switzerland has three main national languages, German, French and Italian and each is the main language in different parts of Switzerland. Millions of people in Switzerland don’t understand German because their language is either French or Italian.

According to the payment processors logic let’s suppose you were running a business in China and wanted to accept payments from English speaking countries. Because your account is based in China your customer’s initial payment page rather than being presented to them in English would be presented to them by default in Chinese.

The suggested solutions to the problem were many and varied, but the end result was that the charity site had no other choice but to replace all the payment code on every affected webpage.

The problem affected not just the charity website but other websites as well.

When the payment processor was asked if they would like to donate something to one of two children’s charities by way of compensation or to show good faith for the problems they caused their response was that they do not offer compensation for their errors.

Continue reading "Payment Processor Declines to Feed Child" »

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Publishing web content with Articles can be a very hit and miss affair as some of my previous tests with Article Announcer and Google’s Duplicate Content Filtering have shown when publishing my own original content articles:

Article Announcer Review - Testing Product Claims and Google's Duplicate Internet Content Filter in Action

Despite this many webmasters still believe it’s an effective way to add pages to their web sites by using other people’s article content. With the web growing at an ever increasing rate it seems clear that search engines needed to find ways to cut out duplicate content.

If you think about it, why would search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN want to keep spending money adding computer resources to index and store all this duplicate content.

If a search engine has a page indexed for an article, why would they want to index and store 400 more pages exactly like it ?

Of course, in reality they don’t and it’s one reason why Google in particular is so keen to remove as much duplicate content as they can, or at least get it down to a more manageable amount.

To try and side step the search engine’s duplicate content filters web content publishers have resorted to various methods to modify articles to make them slightly different from the 400 others using the same article.

It was being suggested one should aim to have at least 20% original or changed content in an article to avoid the duplicate content filters. The problem with all this is that it’s only a matter of time before the search engines learn how to detect even this sort of content.

If the changes following Google’s Big Daddy update are anything to go by it would seem Google has taken another step forward in detecting and removing this sort of content. Many webmasters have reported entire sites being dropped from Google’s index and Adsense revenue completely drying up as a result.

My own personal experience of some of these PLR articles is that they are of very poor quality, written by ghost writers, who it’s clear, frequently know very little about the subject they are writing about.

I don’t blame the ghost writers, after all, when they are being paid just a few dollars per article, what can you expect.

Webmasters just want pages to put on their websites that firstly get indexed and secondly ranked by the search engines. They then hope to get some traffic and make money from Adsense or other advertising.

One of the more enlightened sources of web publishing content using articles that I have been looking at over the past few months is Article Underground.

I should make it clear I don't use Article Underground and this blog entry is not in any way promoting it.

Mike Liebner who runs Article Underground has produced some excellent videos that walk you through the steps you need to take when publishing articles, not just his, but any article.

Of course, the videos are a promotional platform for Article Underground but that’s to be expected. In the video’s you see how he chooses article subjects to have his ghost writers create articles about using keyword research.

I have stressed the importance of Keyword Research many times on my site but it’s still a mystery to many newbie webmasters who simply just don’t understand it, or worse still think they do.

As someone who has been perfecting keyword research and discovery for many years I can say that Mike Liebner has a good system. I don’t fully agree with some of his assumptions and it’s clear he doesn’t fully understand some of the issues himself, but none the less it’s a good process.

Whilst he admits the results are modest ones, he is being realistic about the earnings from his example site and for that I give him credit. He does show some spreadsheet predictions of revenue, but for me there are some very big but’s and if’s in his forecasts.

The expectation of any webmaster joining Article Underground is clearly to be able to use some of the 400 articles per month they get and to publish them as web content. This they can do, using the processes that come with Article Underground membership.

The assumption in all this is that a member can achieve the same sort of results or better, than Mike shows in his video. However, I feel there is one big flaw in this argument and that is Mike is not using articles that the membership uses.

If you’re wondering why, not using the same articles as Article Underground members matters, I’ll explain.

As a member getting your copy of an article indexed and ranked by a search engine you are competing against other members using the same article.

Mike on the other hand is not competing against anyone since he uses articles that no one else is using. He makes it clear he does not use articles from the membership.

Mike Liebner does make it clear that there’s a lot more to publishing web content with articles than just putting up a web page and he’s right, there is a lot more to it.

So is it still effective to publish web content with PLR articles ?

Yes for the time being, but how long it will last very much depends on the search engines. How much you will earn from it with the likes of Adsense is a completely different topic on which you will find a blog entry called Adsense Videos from Michael Cheney.

Tony Simpson
Web Page Add Ons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in mid January this year I wrote a item called Niche Products Monthly - Hasn't Found a Niche, in which I showed how and why the products being offered, could not by definition, be classed as being in a Niche.

Since Niche Products Monthly is new, I decided to give them a fair chance and wait to see if the 2nd month’s product offerings were better Niche Products. The 3 products for February were on Bass Fishing, eBay Power Selling and an Insiders Guide to Real Estate.

As with the previous months niche products these three come with a ready made easy to upload website, 50 Private Label Articles, an ebook, Ready made PPC Ads for Google and Overture and Autoresponder course and around 1000 keyword phrases all related to each niche.

I was not alone in voicing my concerns about this, as was evident from other comments on the Niche Monthly Forum. However in the 2nd months batch of products the keywords still come with no competitive data.

Just as before I have to seriously question why this should be, since these keywords are supposed to be collected using the widely accepted Wordtracker service used by many for keyword research. Wordtracker does not supply keywords without competitive data, so why would Niche Products Monthly not supply this data ?

Could it be that if they did supply competitive data that it would be quickly obvious to everyone that these products being offered are not in a Niche.

So there's certainly a market for fishing products and it could be argued that Bass fishing is a Niche market within the larger market of fishing.

But if we relate marketing to fishing, there is no point in having a large pond of hungry prospects (fish) if you don't have the means to reach them.

Simply putting up a ready made web site does not mean it will ever be seen by your prospects (fish). The point about having a Niche Market and a Niche Product is that you need to fish in a small pond, that has enough hungry prospects (fish) willing and having the money to buy your product and they are in a pond you can reach.

For the exact search phrase " bass fishing " there were over 22,000 searches/month on Overture. So there are lots of fish, even if Overture over estimates them, but that's another story. However there are over 4.2 million others trying to catch the same fish, as shown by the number of other web pages targeting this exact phrase.

If we dig deeper to a niche within a niche (sub niche) then we come up with " largemouth bass " which is in fact mentioned in the ebook that's part of this Niche Products Monthly offering. Whilst there are still over 4,400 searches for " large mouth bass " there are still too many other anglers looking to fish in the same pond, namely over 984,000.

Slightly better is " large mouth bass " with over 1,100 fish but still 147,000 other anglers.

" small mouth bass " doesn't fair any better with over 727,000 other anglers and 1,700 fish.

A niche pond that does look reachable is " bass fishing lure " 1,800 fish; 26,800 other anglers or " bass fishing tips " over 1,700 fish and only 80,600 other anglers.

The product ebook supplied is too general to appeal to someone looking for specifics about bass fishing lures so perhaps we are left with bass fishing tips. Yes the ebook does cover some tips but even I can tell (and I'm not into fishing) that it's very beginner's stuff in the ebook.

Let's face it these types of ebooks are written by ghost writers hired from elance.com or the like and the author probably knows nothing about fishing let alone bass fishing. So will anyone buy such a general ebook from an unknown author, or are they more likely to buy from an author who has actually done some fishing.

I mentioned that each niche product comes with ready made ads for Google and Overture so just in case you can't get the ready made web site high enough in the natural search engine listings you can start using PPC to get traffic to your web site.

I did a quick check to find how many sites existed were using last months niche products. Whilst the most I managed to find was 35, only 2 of those appeared in Google's search results and that clearly shows how effective Google now is in filtering out duplicate content.

Getting traffic through PPC for a $27 ebook is very much border line in being cost effective. If the site conversion rate is 1 in 100 (typical) you will only earn any money if the CPC is less than $0.27.

I won't waste my time or yours giving you a similar breakdown on the other two Niche Monthly Products for February but it seems clear at least to me that Niche Products Monthly - Still has no Niche or at least not one anyone can reach that cost effective.

If anyone using these products would like to leave a comment on this blog that they have done well with them I would be happy to be able to report it.

Until then

Tony Simpson
Web Page Addons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This week saw the avalanche promotion of Butterfly Marketing. I have no idea what that is but it was promoted more fiercely than I've seen for any new product in the past 3 years.

There was so much hard selling that some affiliates clearly decided the competition was too hot and used a form of reverse psychology in not promoting it.

What I do know about Butterfly Marketing is it's a home study course that sells for just under $1000 and comes from Mike Filsaime.

I first came across Mike Filsaime about 18 month ago and I must say the first time I saw a photo of him he looked like a typical used car salesman. In fact my first thought was - would you buy a used car from this man ?

Ironically, I learned quite recently that Mike Filsaime was indeed a former car salesman.

The first to tell me about Butterfly Marketing a full 30 days before the launch date, was Brian Edmondson. Brian was quick to tell me he was a preferred partner with Mike on this project. Also, he and Mike would be offering special bonuses to anyone who purchased through his affiliate link. He also told me he had pre-ordered his own copy.

Do you really think a preferred partner would be expected to order a copy ?
I would expect it for free and certainly expect to have studied it before deciding to promote it, but of course most affiliates skip that part.

21 days before launch I'm told about Butterfly Marketing by Jeremy Gislason but with no strong promotion.

15 days before launch I'm told by Joe Cooper, who was keen to mention his unbelievable bonuses for ordering through him.

9 days before launch comes Gary Ambrose telling me he's one of the guys that Mike asked to help him create the course itself and he's "offering an absolutely insane bonus package" to use his words.

On the same day, Joe Cooper is once again telling me about how he is one of the few lucky people to pre-order the Butterfly Marketing package and couldn't see how anyone can get the package and not succeed.

"the people he has spoken to about the package have ALREADY decided they are going to be getting it when it is released WHATEVER the price!"

5 days to countdown and Jeremy Gislason returns to tell me quote:

"Don't buy Butterfly Marketing until you have seen our Mind Blowing Shock and Awe Bonus offer that will be revealed on the 30th/31st."

The same day comes Dr Mani with a repeat visit from Gary Ambrose. Gary tells me he's a "Butterfly" Marketer and hopes that I'm willing to open my mind to this with proof on video from his bank account records.

These receipts he maintains he achieved by quote "releasing his "Butterflies into the Market."

4 days to go and it's the turn of Russell Brunson with a video that I should quote "go and watch before Mike finds out and asks him to take it down."

Well I guess Mike Filsaime didn't find out because on Feb 2nd the video is still there.

3 days before the big day and Joe Cooper can't resist yet another reminder quote:

He also suggests "if I want to find out first hand about whether all this 'hype' is justified or not I should visit......" another web page - I didn't.

On the same day I get more emails about Butterfly Marketing from Dr Mani, Shawn Casey, Michael Rasmussen and yes Joe Cooper again!

The next day it's Jeremy Gislason, Gary Ambrose, Shawn Casey and Dr Mani.

On launch day it's yet more emails from Jeremy Gislason, Michael Rasmussen, Joe Cooper, Henry Gold and Shawn Casey who is going to give me a $10,000 bonus if I buy "Butterfly Marketing".

Following launch day after all these affiliates telling me why I absolutely can't live without Butterfly Marketing I get two emails telling me not to buy it. One email was from Alan Reece, the other from David Vallieres. Of course they both make good arguments for not buying it, but recommend another product instead.

Even as of writing this the affiliate wars are still going on as Gary Ambrose and Joe Cooper battle it over who is offering the best bonus to buy through them and even that their bonus is better than Butterfly Marketing itself.

It's like watching a feeding frenzy of a large group of sharks.

To quote a line from Mike Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing Sales Page:

"Are you tired that every single freaking day you open your inbox, and the "New Amazing Super Wizard In A Box" has just been revealed. STOP The BS!! "

I can not help but think yes Mike you got that right and what's more is the "New Amazing Super Wizard in A Box" actually Mike Filsaime himself.

"Can we cut it out already with the downlines, and MLM?
The only people that make serious money are the owners and the top .01% and we all know it."

Hmmmm and I wonder whose going to make the most money from Butterfly Marketing - Mike and his Partner Affiliates without any doubt.

Now I say partner affiliates because that's what makes this promotion so insidious, all the hard hitting affiliates who have contacted me are also directly involved in this project providing a case study - testimonial or an audio interview that's part of the product.

Many of them have contributed to the product and feature as part of it - Gary Ambrose (Interview)

I'm sure you recognise the same names who have been so keen to convince me to buy Butterfly Marketing.

Are all these affiliates noses like Pinocchio's going to get longer for not telling the truth - No because we don't live in a Fairy Tale.

Like Moths to a Flame these affiliates and partners have been fighting to reach the flame - that shiny glow that attracts - that pot of Gold that awaits them - the affiliate check.

So, perhaps some people and Moths do live in a Fairy Tale !

Yes, let's not forget the Moths who buy Butterfly Marketing drawn by the promise of a promise for their pot of Gold.

For all you Moths who bought Butterfly Marketing let me re-quote what Mike Filsaime say's himself:

"The only people that make serious money are the owners and the top .01% and we all know it."

So like Moths, before hitting the flame, think about that quote before you buy and get burned.

For those of you still undecided as to whether to wing your way to buy Butterfly Marketing let me tell you the short version of what you get in the package.

Basically what you get is a Manuscript and 9 CD's the contents of which you could probably get on one CD or DVD. But then it looks so much better value to pay $997 for 9 of them.

The Manuscript is said to be originally a separate project on how to make money with membership sites. So I guess that's what it's still about.

What you also get is his Plug-N-Play Viral Website Making Software that could easily sell for $2997.00.

So why not sell it for that if it's so easy !

Let's not forget the 9 CD's, what's on those ? Well the software must be one.

Then there are two DVD's of Mike Filsaime Teaching Butterfly Marketing On Stage in two different seminar locations.

So I guess you get to see almost the very same thing twice.

Then there are 5 CD's with 5 separate recorded interviews with 5 different marketers.

Last but not least is the CD that allows you to access the member's area and learn about the course.

And all this for only $997 !

Delivered to your door with an extra $38 Shipping and Handling.

As if they can't afford to include the shipping in the $997 price.

A 30 days guarantee from receipt of your package, you review the entire course, and if you feel this Package does not do all that they said it would do for you and more, simply return it for a refund. It's that simple.

So, you have all of an entire 30 days to prove if Butterfly Marketing Works for You - so I hope you can work really fast !

P.s If you want to return the product, don't forget you have to pay your own $38 or more, for shipping.

I wonder if they still have one of the 1500 copies left for me ?

Until the next time

Tony Simpson
Web Page Addons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Jason Gazaway recently launched a new membership site called Niche Products Monthly, but does he know what a Niche really is ? Because all the first months products are clearly NOT in a Niche.

The stated aim of Niche Products Monthly is to provide its members with 3 Professionally produced Private Label Products per month targeted at a Niche Market.

It received heavy promotion from many well known names on the Internet, like John Delavera, David Vallieres, Keith Baxter and David Zohar to name but a few.

The first months niche products were:
A Beginner's Guide to Yoga
Quick and Easy Guide to Baby Showers
Wedding Savings Revealed

The Wikipedia Encyclopedia defines Niche marketing as the process of finding small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them.

I'll illustrate this with an example
Let's say I think there's a market for a Beginners Guide to playing a Guitar.

Do you think its been done already ? You bet it has and in a big way.

Then I decide to dig deeper and look at Guitar Picks (Google 5.4 million results), those small pieces of plastic or bone, that are used to pluck the strings, but it's still not targeted enough.

What about Custom Guitar Picks (1.3 million results on Google) or Handcrafted Guitar Picks (Google 63,500 results).

A quick check on Yahoo/Overture indicates a healthy number of searches on words related to guitar picks and with a few selected search variations I could easily assume more than 2,000 searches per month.

So Handcrafted Guitar Picks would be a niche product. It's in a highly targeted market that's small enough to be reachable with a website that does not have too much competition (63,500).

The results for Yahoo are similar with 57,800 search listings. It also has 4 Google Adwords Ads which shows there's a healthy market, but not too many Ads that would make it too competitive.

Depending on how you search on Google or Yahoo for a Beginner's Guide to Yoga there are between 670,000 to 920,000 search results and on MSN 45,000.

Searching for a Guide to Baby Showers tops the scales at 3.6 million on Google, 7.9 million on Yahoo and a mere 270,000 on MSN. This is a lot of potential competition.

Keyword research on Overture shows the closest search phrase to be Yoga for Beginner which has around 4,000 searches per month, but over 2.2 million other competing web pages. So clearly it has way too much competition and would be virtually impossible to reach with a new website.

The Niche Products Monthly - A Beginner's Guide to Yoga is therefore not a product in a small Niche Market which is reachable with a new website.

The phrase 'baby shower guide' on Yahoo/Overture turns up over 3.1 million other competing pages and only 43 searches per month. Other related terms all have more than a million competing results and searches in double figures.
So once again this does not look very promising as a niche product.

The third product offering from Niche Products Monthly is Wedding Savings Revealed. Once again just a quick keyword research revealed terms related to saving money on a wedding all had high levels of competition (over 9 million) and low search demand (less than 170 searches per month).
Another product not really in a Niche.

Niche Products Monthly also supplies ready made websites for each one of these products that are aimed at selling the product ebook as well as having loads of pages of articles on related search terms. The idea behind this is to build Adsense earning websites.

The problem with this idea is that up to 750 other members of Niche Products Monthly could be putting up the same product websites using the same Duplicate Content. Google in particular has recently become very good at filtering out and de-indexing sites built using these types of automated programs.

And how well are they likely to rank for search terms to be able to get enough traffic ?

These and many other questions will perhaps come to light in the member's forum, assuming of course they publish these sort of observations and comments. It's often the case that negative comments on these product forums are never published.

An update on Niche Products Monthly can be found at Niche Products Monthly - Still No Niche ?

Tony Simpson
Webpage Addons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the run up to Christmas 2004 a lot of marketers were heavily promoting 117 gifts of ebooks and software you could download. And so it is again in 2005, I have been receiving lots of email from marketers telling me about this years free Christmas gift bonanza.

Is this merely a repeat of 2004 well it would seem so. In 2004 it was called 117 Christmas Gifts and in 2005 they called it, yes, 117 Christmas Gifts.

I can understand calling it Christmas Gifts, but what’s with the 117 ?

Is it someone’s lucky number ?
Was it launched 117 days before Christmas ?
Are there 117 free gifts ?

Well none of the above is actually true, just as it wasn’t true in 2004. There were not 117 gifts in 2004 and there are not 117 Gifts in 2005 either.

Looking at what’s on offer they are mostly tired worn out products. Some never worked in the first place and others that have been overtaken by advances in technology and changes in search engine rules of engagement in the past 12 months.

Last year you could download many products without having to give your name and email address for every item download. This year every product I clicked on required you to complete another signup form. So, I did not bother with any of them.

What they are using to direct you to signup and download are “squeeze pages” which redirect you to the product website and another form to complete.

There was only one product that I found did not require me to supply my name and email address again and that was from Terry Gibbs. I know that not because I downloaded the product, but because Terry emailed me to tell me about it.

In his email, Terry tells me about the 117 Christmas Gift Offer from the point of view of it being Viral Marketing. He also points out Viral marketing is not the simple and easy process other marketers would have you believe.

Now isn’t that the hard truth about almost anything on the Internet for 99% of website owners – “It’s not the simple and easy process other marketers would have you believe.”

But why would marketers want to offer you these gifts ?

Because it's the season of goodwill ?

But there is also another good reason as it say’s on the web page where you sign up for these gifts:

"It's been a lot of work for us, but we know that our true intention of making these products available for free is to help you enhance your success in Internet business."

Hmm! So this is to help me enhance my success.

Well maybe, but as they say you don’t usually get something for nothing in this life and in this case as I’ve already said, you must give your name and email address and do it for virtually every product you want to download.

So who benefits from these Gifts ?

Well the individual marketers who offer products for download benefit, because they get your name and email address to send you follow-ups. They also benefit from traffic referred to their website when you click through to sign-up and download their product.

The marketers who are hosting the 117 Christmas Gift Package benefit from getting your name and email address and traffic to their website. Here’s the Alexa traffic ranking for this gift site for 2004 and 2005. Note the traffic peaks in December.

They also get the chance to present you with another product offering during the sign-up process to gain access to this gift site.

In addition to gain access to the full package of “Gifts” you need to refer this download offer to at least 3 friends who must also supply their names and email addresses.

From a web marketing point of view the 117 Christmas Gift scheme is both Viral Marketing and List Building.

It’s viral marketing because of the need for you to refer 3 friends to get access to the main part of the gift package and it’s list building for all parties because you need to sign-up to get each and almost every gift.

So do these gifts enhance your success or theirs ?

Well I’ve already said how the marketers involved benefit from these gifts.

How do you benefit ?

1. You get to download lots of ebooks and software that you think from what you have read and with your experience right now, will help you succeed.

2. You get to download lots of ebooks full of advice and links that may have been useful when the book was only 6-12 months old, but is now out of date.

3. You get to download lots of software that’s full of promise to do this or that, but actually most of it will do nothing to help you and never did, but you don’t know that right now.

4. You get to download lots of software that use to be effective but no longer is because the technology, search engines or marketing has changed, but you don’t know that right now.

5. You get to download lots of stuff that you’ll never read or use and will just take up disk space on your hard drive.

6. You get to download 1 or 2 really good products, but among all the other crap you downloaded you don’t know which ones they are.

But if you do find a free ebook or software download among your Christmas Gifts that really does enhance your success, as these marketers claim was the purpose of this offer, perhaps you could add a comment to this blog to let us all know about it.

Tony Simpson
Webpage addons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 07:11 AM | Permalink

Everyone I have come across who has written anything about distributing articles to article directory sites on the Internet, always stresses what a good way it is to get tons of traffic to a web site.

Over the past 6 months I have been tracking the amount of traffic I get from my own article distribution and I have to say the amount of traffic is closer to ounces than tons.

As well as tracking the traffic I received from someone clicking through to my site from the article, I also monitored how much exposure the article has had.

By exposure I mean how many other websites and web pages do my articles appear on when doing a search in one of the major search engines - Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Despite my articles being on 10's of thousands of other web sites the amount of traffic I get from them has been negligible. For example one article of mine was being reported by the search engines on an average of 19,800 other web sites for over 3 weeks.

From that one article that was featured on 19,800 web sites and for a time reported on as many as 23,000 other sites I received an avalanche of traffic - 14 visitors.

That's a daily CTR (click thro rate) of less than 0.003%. My best daily CTR on another article in the same period was 0.036%.

In total I have tracked the traffic generated from each of 9 articles over many months, during which time the best daily CTR was 0.07% and the worst was 0.0002%.

It would be good if a daily CTR of 0.07% was for an article exposed on 20,000 web sites since that would be over 420 extra visitors per month from one article. Unfortunately it seems the more exposure an article gets, the lower the CTR.

Tony Simpson
Webpage addons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 01:53 PM | Permalink

This week saw the wide-scale release of a software tool from Scot Standke & Jim Morris. Scot Standke has recently also been promoting his Keyword Bible and Keyword Avalanche sites and this free tool called httPulse seems to continue that promotion.

Users are encouraged to pass the free tool httPulse to their friends but my own use would suggest a word of caution, since for me at least this software gave some very strange results.

httPulse is supposed to enable you to check how many pages of a website you have indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN. And to do this for as many websites as you enter into it, tracking the results and producing reports over a period of time.

Regrettably httPulse’s first attempt at this on one of my websites indicated I had 578 pages indexed in MSN. That would be nice except that there are only 190 pages on the site.

I tried it also on a second site and once again it produced wildly inaccurate results on MSN. The correct results are easily determined and were verified.

Unfortunately this is not the first time I’ve seen a buggy piece of software from the stable of Scot Standke. He was responsible for another bug ridden software called Carbtrack which was a diet calorie counter and planner.

Carbtrack crashed constantly but the main difference with Carbtrack was that it was not free software and what’s more a claim for a refund within the 90 day guarantee period for a defective piece of software fell on deaf ears.

Scot Standke went from being responsive over the problems with Carbtrack to totally non-responsive within a week and did not acknowledge more than 3 requests for a refund that was part of his offered 90 day guarantee at the time.

Scot Standke never did honor his refund policy for a piece of software that did not work and httPulse seems exactly the same, it doesn’t work either. The only difference is I’m glad I didn’t pay for it.

Tony Simpson
Webpage Addons
Making Your Website Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 10:39 AM | Permalink

One of my big things on the web apart from my web business has to be my PC. PC’s you love or hate um, but you can’t live without um, a bit like a good woman really.

In fact my wife named my PC ….. Pricilla, because I think she views Pricilla as competition, especially when it comes to how much time I spend with her.

I guess in a way she’s right I do spend a lot of time with Pricilla but I’m not in love with her, she’s just a good friend without which I could not have a life on the web.

Pricilla is not my first love there have been a few others before her. My first real love was a BBC Micro with 128K of RAM wow! Mind blowing stuff but it’s what I cut my teeth on in the computing world before the web existed.

We were together for quite a few years until finally the day came when we could no longer live together. I wanted bigger things, more get up and go, more byte, she was just happy being a Micro.

After several more PC’s some of them lovingly hand built and nurtured, I finally met Pricilla and we have been together for the past 3 years. Like all good relationships we have our ups and downs.

Sometimes she doesn’t do what I tell her, sometimes she misbehaves and other times she just sits there and does nothing. But, most of the time we get on really well and I wouldn’t want to be without her.

Like most women she likes new things and I must admit I indulge her from time to time by buying her a new hard drive, in fact she now has five, with room for almost 500GB.

Unlike most of us, her memory has improved with age, with 1GB and she’s got a lot faster at 2.8GHz, but sometimes she still struggles to keep up with me. While I wait I usually go off to make tea.

But she’s a master or should I say mistress, when it comes to software because she runs over 320 programs and has over 80GB taken up with other software and reports.

Luckily she’s also never caught a cold, or should I say a Virus, because I keep her well wrapped up behind two firewalls and administer daily updates of Anti-Virus.

Tony Simpson
Webpage Addons
Making Your Web Site Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 02:15 PM | Permalink

I was recently reading an eBook that had something to say that I found refreshing, it actually spoke the truth. In my experience that’s a rare commodity on the Internet. The eBook was entitled Making Money Online – The Simple Truth by Darryl Graham.

If you’re prepared to look past the title which might at first sight say to you, Oh! No, not another book on how to make money online, Darryl tells it like it is.

As he puts it, this is not what you want to hear, but it’s what you need to hear.

In the eBook which is a mere 16 pages, a light weight compared to some, he tells some home truths about making it on the Internet.

Things like:

1. It’s not easy and will not happen overnight.
2. You’re not going to make money with no work and you are not going to make money with no investment.
3. You need to find something you can believe in, something you can use and something you will be proud to sell.
4. Stay away from the so called Guru’s, some of the biggest rip-off people online.
5. If someone tells you that you can make money immediately, they are lying to you so they can make money off you.
6. There are people online that prey on lazy or ignorant people who have no business being online.
7. If you are going to succeed, it will take time and it will take money and that’s the only guarantee for any online or offline business.
8. If you cannot give up some luxuries so you have money to grow your business, you don’t have what it takes to be in business and the odds are high that you’ll fail.
9. Don’t set goals that are unrealistic or goals you cannot reach.
10. If you don’t have passion for what you are selling and if you don’t believe in it long term, then nobody else will either.
11. Own and use what you are selling.
12. One of the great things about creating your own business is you have nobody to fault but yourself as to whether you succeed or whether you fail.
13. No matter what happens some people want to blame someone else for their failure.
14. People will join a program or buy a product and then because of their own ignorance they will not be able to do what’s necessary to make it work.
15. Be self-motivated, don’t rely on someone else.
16. Never stop learning and educating yourself on your business and other peoples business.
17. Stay positive and stay focused.
18. Prioritize - Set aside a specific number of hours per day or per week, to work on your business and stick to it.
19. Enjoy what you are doing or it’s not worth doing.
20. Believe in yourself and your business.

I fully agree with every point and if you want to read the complete eBook you can download Making Money Online

Tony Simpson
Webpage Addons
Making Your Web Site Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 04:10 PM | Permalink

If you’re operating a website do you need to be smarter than the next guy or gal running a website ?

Well if my experience is anything to go by, it would seem not.

If you’re running a website do you need to know how to create one, or know how it works ?

No not that either, at least not these days. You can put up a business website in a matter of 15-30 minutes and not have a clue how it works.

If you’re running a web site do you have to be smarter than your subscribers ?

This is a question I have had cause to ask myself over the past few months. Why ?
Because I have been dealing with quite a few website owners over the past 12 months and been trying to help them with their website design and promotion.

OK nothing unusual in that, but what has surprised me is how many of them seem to know less about how a website operates than either their visitors or subscribers.

I’m not referring to how a website works behind the scene’s, I’m talking about website owners being able to follow instructions and directions just like they would expect their visitors and subscribers to do when coming to their website.

Let me give you an example as a website operator, you have a list of subscribers and you email your subscribers some information. The email requires the subscriber to read it then click on a link for more details.

Nothing too difficult so far, but then you receive a few emails from subscribers saying they don’t know what they are expected to do when to your mind you’ve explained everything clearly.

So, what’s the problem, you check what you have written, you check it with other people to see if it’s clear to them. They say yes, it’s clear to them. So you’re left scratching your head wondering how else what you wrote can be explained to those subscribers who don’t understand it.

They say you have to write to people who use the Internet, like they are still in the 7th grade, so that must mean like they are 12 years old.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be written to like I’m 12 years old.

Now depending on who your subscribers are of course, you have to make adjustments, but in my case, my subscribers are all adults with ages from 18 to 70 and all running websites. This means if my subscribers don’t understand what I write, I must have some subscribers who are 7th graders and also running websites.

So to answer my earlier question, if you’re running a website do you have to be smarter than your subscribers ? Once again it would seem not, in fact it could be a disadvantage.

After all, I clearly have website owners who are like 7th graders, then surely they can’t be smarter than their own subscribers who could also be 7th graders. Hmmm, I wonder if anyone reading this will understand what I mean ?

Tony Simpson
Webpage Add ons
Making Your Web Site Work for You

Copyright Tony Simpson - Webpageaddons.com | Posted at 11:18 AM | Permalink