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Are You Suffering From Information Overload?
This seems to be a common complaint from Internet marketers. There’s too much info out there and they can’t keep up with it all. As a result, they’re completely overwhelmed and get nothing done. Are you one of these poor souls? If you are, don’t fret. There are ways to deal with information overload. Even as an established and successful marketer for over five years now, I have to deal with this problem as well. In this article, I am going to share my personal tips for dealing with information overload. I have no doubt that you will find these to be very helpful.
At the top of my list is doing just that…making a list. What kind of list? Let’s say that you’ve decided that you want to learn pay per click advertising, list building, article writing and copywriting. Now, obviously, you can’t learn all of those all at one time. Your head will explode. So what I do is make a list of each item I want to learn and order them according to importance. In other words, which one do I need the most right away? I then concentrate on that one and ONLY that one until I have mastered it. I then cross if off my list and move on to the next thing. Trust me, this is a very effective method to dealing with information overload.
Another great method for dealing with information overload is developing what I call tunnel vision. This is a little harder to do, but if you can pull this off, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Let me try to explain how this works. Let’s say that I am working on a project that requires me to do certain things and have certain skills. I will look at my list of things I want to learn and see if any of those skills for that certain project are on it. If so, I will tackle ONLY that skill and master it. I will pretend that the other skills don’t even exist, no matter how tempting it might be to include them in the project. If they’re not needed, pretend they don’t exist.
Basically, what this all comes down to is discipline. And quite honestly, I don’t know how to teach that. Yes, it’s very easy to see the new shiny ebook on whatever and convince yourself that you have to have it. But if you really look at it rationally, you’ll discover that there are very few things that you really need.
And THAT is how you handle information overload.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Affordable Mentoring Services From A Marketer In The Trenches. I’ll keep you on track.
Social Links
Back in my last post here that I entitled Link to Your Success, I talked about some extra ways of obtaining good, strong keyword anchored backlinks for your sites. Well in this instalment, I’m going to follow that on with another useful way of obtaining links directly for your blogs as well as helping their SERPs ranking at the same time.
Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as “pligg” sites. I’ll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?
Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!
But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?
Build your own social pligg site!
Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don’t like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.
The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious – you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.
A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.
As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse’s mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.
TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB
TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?
And much to gain!
Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum
Affiliate Marketing Blunders
When I see some of the boneheaded things that some affiliate marketers do, I begin to believe that the failure rate is indeed 95% or higher. So much of the failure could be avoided if affiliate marketers would just avoid some of these blunders. Well, in this article, I am going to cover just a few of the things that turn affiliate marketers into failures. Hopefully, if you avoid these, you’ll have a decent shot at becoming a successful affiliate marketer.
The first thing I want to go over is how affiliate marketers pick their products. Sometimes I think they just close their eyes and pick them randomly. Absolutely no thought goes into this process. Hey, let’s just find the top selling product at Clickbank and promote the heck out of it. Um, no offense, but this is probably the stupidest way to go about it. Product selection is critical and just picking the top selling product is NOT the way to go about it.
Next on the list is how affiliate marketers promote these products. Laziness doesn’t even begin to describe it. Most marketers simply take the ads that the product creators kindly write up and blast them all over the Internet without changing one word. Let me tell you something, this is no way to promote a product. Think about it. If everybody on the Internet promoting this particular product is doing the same thing, how does anybody stand out from the crowd? They can’t. And if they don’t stand out, how can they make any sales? They don’t. This is why this is such a stupid thing to do.
Finally, there’s getting paid, or more specifically, making sure you’re promoting a product where you know you’re going to get paid. Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anybody else. But after being burned way too many times, I have finally smartened up and made sure I was promoting a product where I could be reasonably sure that I was going to get paid. The last time I didn’t get a commission was a very long time ago.
There you have it. Those are the three biggest blunders that affiliate marketers make. They pick lousy products, they don’t promote them properly and they don’t even know if they’re going to get paid for their efforts. Okay, want to know how to nail all this down and more? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin?
Check out my new book…Affiliate Assassin
Please don’t make the same mistakes that so many affiliate marketers make.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Turn Yourself Into An Affiliate Assassin
Keep On Writing Those Articles
I’ve been told the importance of article marketing for targeted traffic and have seen results. It never ceases to amaze me though. I check my blog stats daily to see where my traffic is coming from and I almost always see stats from an ezine where I am published. Some of the articles are close to a year old (when I first started in this business) but I will admit that most are from my more recent articles.
Why would that be, you may ask. Its because practice makes perfect..that’s why. I never thought I was much of a writer though it was not difficult for me. Come on, I’m a math teacher. My articles became better, maybe a little more interesting and gave some information that was useful to people. Who knew?
Keep writing and reading articles to see what others are doing. Don’t think that because it has been written about before that you can’t give a different twist. I struggled with that for a long time because I honestly thought that I didn’t really have anything special to say. That is not true…ever!
Article marketing is not just about writing for your niche. Write about anything and everything. Its your presence (and resource box) that will brand you. Don’t lose sight of that concept. You would be surprised about how many people are actively seeking information that you are able to give.
Remember, there will always be someone out there who is just starting out in this business and wants to absorb everything, try anything and do what it takes to be successful.
I’m one of them.
Read more of Laura’s posts at http://www.moneymakingmathteacher.com/blog
So You Wanna Be An Affiliate Marketer
Hey, remember those books by the great John Patrick, “So You Wanna Be A Gambler?” The series focused on what it took to become a competent gambler in the casinos. Well, if you want to become a competent affiliate marketer, there are some things that you need to know as well. I’m going to cover a few of those things in this article and then direct you to where you can get more information. Hopefully, by the time you’ve gotten all this info, you’ll know if affiliate marketing is right for you or not.
Let me start off by saying that affiliate marketing does have its advantages over selling your own products. The biggest advantage is that there is simply a whole lot less work for the affiliate marketer to do. For one thing, you don’t have to go through the agonizing process of creating your own products. If you think it’s easy to do that, it’s not. I’ve been creating my own products for years and the amount of work is astronomical.
Aside from the time factor of creating your own products, there is the cost factor as well. Affiliate marketing doesn’t cost anywhere near what it costs to create your own products. Some professional quality software products needed to create certain types of products cost hundreds of dollars. For example, take Photoshop which is the top product for creating ecovers. You’re talking about $600 in cost. If you want to create video products, Camtasia is about $300. That’s close to a grand for just two products.
And then of course there is knowledge. To create your own products, you have to have a solid handle on the subject matter. All my products are created from what’s crammed into my head. That knowledge did not come overnight. Some of it took me years to accumulate. What you don’t know, you have to go out and research. And let me tell you, research can be a painstaking process. One product I created took me almost one year to create because of the research required.
Okay, so you can see where affiliate marketing has its advantages. However, we haven’t touched on the disadvantages and other pieces of info. Well, in my signature is a free report that you can pick up. It will go over all the pros and cons of affiliate marketing versus creating your own products. I am sure that by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll know whether or not affiliate marketing is right for you.
So you wanna be an affiliate marketer?
Then you better know what you’re up against.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Why Affiliate Marketing?…Find Out HERE
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