Building My Affiliate Marketing Business » Success Mindset

Reason for Buying and Unsubscribed From Their List

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:37:18 +0000

I am on Tellman Knudson list for quite a while and I regularly receive emails from him promoting his products. I like the fact that his email is short and sweet but I have problem with his videos.

Not that his videos are not done professionally or have to watch. What I find hard to accept is that his video are full of sales pitches. Almost all his video will have the same story where the person presenting has gone through hardship, accidently found a formula and make big money from their system. Then they go on to tell you that you are not making money because you don’t have a money making system and the only way to make money online is to buy their system.

Every video I watched so far carry similar message that try to prove to you that you are not making money because you have not learn the right skills. They go on and on to prove to you that their system is the only way to make money. Their video never give away how their system work or based on what premise that it will work.

I think this is the old school of video marketing. Many other Internet Marketers that does video marketing now provide some value in their video. I don’t see that in Tellman’s videos at all.

Those who are doing it differently and become very successful have gone one step further in their video marketing.

For example Frank Kern gave away his Core Influence videos to his list as an enticement to his followers to watch out for his new product launch. During the pre-launch he gave away his money making secret like his autoresponder email template or list building software without asking for anything. Then he will show you that there are more than what has been given to you free to make big money online if you choose his List Control product.

Similarly George Brown has given at least one of his traffic making strategy during the pre-launch of his Traffic Ultimatum system. He make 3 separate videos showing how he made over $126K with one of his traffic generation strategy for free.

So if you were to have watch all the videos like I did who would you buy from based on their marketing approach. Of course I would for Frank Kern or George Brown products. They have proven that they provide value even if you don’t buy from them. They are willing to share one or two of their money making secrets and leave it to you to decide whether you want to invest in their product.

I can’t afford the price of List Control so I won’t be considering Frank Kern product. However I still feel grateful to him for giving away his money making secrets. Similarly I will consider George Brown’s Traffic Ultimatum system when I have done my due diligence.

Going back to those videos from Tellman. Will I buy from them just because their video shows promising return? Hell NO. I have absolutely no idea what are they selling and what am I getting because they never disclose anything in their video. All they are asking you is to buy their product and “hope” for return in your investment.

Even though they have their 60-day guarantee but I am not convince that I will be getting value from their products so I don’t think I will ever consider their products.

Also the only way to purchase products from Tellman and his company is via credit card. They don’t offer the option of using Paypal. So there is no quarantee that you will be getting you money back even if you ask for a refund because you have no control over the dispute. At least Paypal has an arbitration process that you can pursue if you have problem with the refund.

Now I know why some IMer are so successful because they provide value to newbie even if the newbie will never buy from them. They have master the concept of value marketing even before they start pushing their product.

So should I unsubscribe from Tellman list now since I am not going to get any value out of those videos that he regularly sent. I have spent quite a lot of time to view their videos and yet I am still clueless of what they are trying to sell.

OK. One more video and see how things go. If they never change then I’ll unsubscribe after the next video.

Related Websites

Another Way To Customize Your 404 Not Found Page

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:39:09 +0000

I just receive this email from another fellow Internet Marketer on how to customize your 404 Not Found page. As a techie, I am of course eager to try it out on my blog.

As always I like to learn any new skills and I am so excited about this WordPress video that is offered free by another marketer who is a bit of a WordPress expert.

What I like about this video is that it is delviered in a clear and easy to understand way.

I was really pleased to get this video as I have been putting off at customizing my 404 Not Found page for a while. There are many ways to customize your 404 Not Found page and I was still undecided which is the better way to go. Some suggest to just put a simple page to inform the reader that the page is not found, while other propose that you should do further marketing with you 404 Not Found page by including marketing information.

I guess I am pretty ok with HMTL and I like to tinker with my blog theme from time to time. If you are the type that just want to get a web page up as quick as possible without having to know any html code, then you will like the plugin that is presented in this video.

This video will take you by the hand and show you how to install and customize this plugin so that your 404 Not Found page will shows the relevant information when a user type in the wrong address to your pages. The intent is to keep the reader in your blog and continue to explore your pages.

The video is based on an older version of WordPress but you should be able to look at the menu in the new WordPress dashboard to work out the new location of the plugin and setting pages.

I managed to install this plug-in and customize it to have my 404 Not Found page in just under 10 minutes.

Click here to watch and learn about this plugin

Yes, the plugin work with WordPress 2.9.x.

Related Websites

Moving My WordPress Blog To A New Web Hosting Provider

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:54:11 +0000

I have been reading up on how to move WordPress blog to a new web hosting provider and finally did it last night.

After I have rebuild my blog I decided that besides affiliate marketing, I also want to venture into CPA marketing.. To prepare for that I acquire another domain (http://www.nichecontentonline.com) and planned to use it as my blogging platform for several niches. This way my additional expenses will be just the new domain only as I can add-on this domain to my existing web hosting services. After I have set up everything and started blogging for one of the niche I was still getting rejected by CPA networks. The main reason being that the IP where my blog originated from falls into those that are blacklisted by third party source DNSStuffs.com hence doesn’t meet the compliance standards of most CPA network.

To get around this restriction I decided to sign up for another web hosting service with Hostgator and assigned my new domain to this web hosting service. Yes more investment but I guess it is necessary if I want to be able to get started with CPA Marketing. Given that so many Internet Marketer uses Hostgator I am hoping that the IP restriction will not be an issue anymore. Since I have to move the domain I also need to move the WordPress blog to Hostgator.

With some planning based on the information I read from the web, I started backing up all my files and the entire database of my blog through cpanel. I also put the blog into maintenance mode so that anyone accessing to my blog will be informed as such.

Since I am moving my blog I also took the opportunities to upgrade my WordPress blog to the latest version which is 2.9.2. I took the source of the latest version of WordPress and than added all the themes, plugins and modification that I made to the blog before I upload it to Hostgator.

To simplify the process I used the Backup and Restore feature in the cPanel to transfer the database. This is probably the easiest way to migrate the database instead of doing export and import through phpMyAdmin. I then modify the wp-config.php to point my new blog to this database. Since I change the folder name where I install my blog, I have to add the following two lines into the wp-config.php file so that the site url is automatically converted for every posts.

define(‘WP_HOME’,'http://www.nichecontentonline.com/WaysOfMakingUp’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,'http://www.nichecontentonline.com/WaysOfMakingUp’);

I decided to take the easier route for this change rather than going deep into the database to change it. If you forgot these two lines, you’ll get an 404 error when you try to access to the dashboard.

I then change the DNS on my domain and waited for the propagation to completed before I can access my blog now running on Hostgator.

Now that I have moved this WordPress blog, I will need to manually edit the links and WordPress configurations to reflect it new location. Links in comments and posts would also need editing, as they will need to point to the new URL of the WordPress blog. There are still some broken links on the main page but I am fixing those as I find them. I still need to change the links on my inbound posts on another blogs to ensure that the search engine can find this blog.

Overall I am pretty happy with this move and I have learned a lot more about the various components of a WordPress blog as well as understand the database structure of a WordPress blog better.

Why I Unsubscribed From The Many Lists

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:37:25 +0000

Whenever there is a launch of a new IM product, my mailbox will fill up pretty fast on the day leading to the launch, on launch day and the day after. It is really madness when you open up you mailbox after a long day to find 200+ unread mails!

Another source of the emails are from marketers who are going through their Ad-swap routine and since I am on their lists so I am getting many emails from these marketers trying to grow their list.

Looks like I am on too many different lists.

The reason I get on the list of many marketers is because I want to see what they have to offer and also I want to look at how they set up their website, sales copy and promotion and hopefully I can learn something from them.

If I get a dozen of emails a day then I will spend the time to go through them to analyze what I think they’er are doing. If their sales copy is something new I will make a copy of it.

If it is like today when there are over 200 emails I just can’t possible go through every one of them. Also as I start to read some of the email, I can sense I am being “sold”. No matter how clever they worded their email, there is always the element of the marketers asking for a “buy or don’t buy” answers. I normally just file the emails and move on to the next one.

How I wish these marketers will tell me what they are up to rather than asking me to click on a link here or there before I find out what they want.

I guess what I am hoping to get is a an email from a top marketer that explain steps-by-steps how they made their money. Something to the effect that when I open the email there is an instruction on what to do today and I can follow to implement my own program or campaigns.

I know this may sound like a fantasy or a dream that many newbie marketers wish will come true.

Anyway today I have reach a breaking point.

Last night when I got through my “follow up” folder (yes I created one) in my hard disk, there are more than 80 items that I haven’t even started looking at . Most of them are free eBooks or PLR that I intend to spend time reading or implementing.

When I saw the long list of unread new emails today I know I have to do something. As I click through each email that make a sales pitch I decided to unsubcribed myself from his/her list for now. For those that offer information without asking for an opt-in, I stay subscribed.

Even this took almost an hour to complete so I know I am definitely over-subscribed and having unnecessary information overload from just reading emails. During the unsubscribed operation, I noticed at time I am on multiple lists from the same marketers. That is one of the reason why my mailbox filled up very fast during an Ad-swap exercise among the marketers.

Now that I am subscribed to a minimal lists I can start to focus on what I lay out in my plan – drive traffics. I already started doing this via free ads, free safelist, free traffic exchange and free traffic generation sites. I do have a squeeze page but have very low conversion rate so I need to review my squeeze page set up.

I am still struggling to use Twitter as a marketing front and my other Web 2.0 presence are still not converting.

I definitely need to take a step back and reassess what I need to make my list building work better.

Building My Own Money Making Mini Sites

admin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:47:43 +0000

This week is a new milestone for me in terms of acheivement for my online marketing journey.

Instead of spending time on more learning and research, I started building make money mini sites. It was a little bit hard at the beginning but once I completed one of the mini-site, the other is so much easier. With the mind set of focusing on speed of execution I am able to complete my planned task for this week within the timeframe I set for myself. I am very happy to say that whatever I have learned so far have helped me in completing the tasks.

The first mini-site I put up is called the Fully Automated Mini Site. The idea is that anyone who purchase the same mini-site can set up the same mini site then sell it.

The mini-site package will be sold for only $6.99 and the buyer would then put up the package for sell for the same price. Once the buyer click on the “Buy Now” button and completed the payment via Paypal.com, he/she will be brought to a BackOffice web page where the mini-site package can be downloaded.

On the BackOffice webpage, instructions on how to purchase a domain, web hosting, and modification of the html files are provided.

To help the buyer to drive traffics to the mini site, different marketing tools are also provided including banner ads, text ads, Adwords ads, list of safelists, traffic exchanges, marketing forums, list of search engine to submit to, etc. This mini-site package has been designed to provide step-by-step process such that the buyer can set up a mini-site for sell and drive traffic to it.

As a token of appreciation I have also included in the BackOffice web page some free gifts consisting of 3 PLR eBooks. I have also included additional write up on how to optimize the mini-site package so that the buyer can obtain more moneys from referral links which is not including in the original mini-site pacakge.

My next task to promote my own fully-automated mini site is to drive traffics to it.

I am looking forward to making more money with this mini-site.

The second site is a squeeze page for list building. Visitor who enter their name and primary email address will be able to download a free eBook that describe a step-by-step system for adding 100 leads (or more) to their list every single day.

This eBook also provide informaton on how to get high-quality traffic to your squeeze page for free and how to automate your listbuidling and get a steady stream of leads every day without any extra work.

If you would like to have a copy of this eBook for free, you can download it from here.

Cheers
Nighto Chan

Final Look at 2009 and Looking forward to 2010

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:55:15 +0000

I took some time off around Christmas to visit relatives and really went offline for a week. I drove south to visit the island of Singapore and thoroughly enjoyed my holiday with my wife.

The first thing I got back from the holiday is try to recover my failed Vista partition. I have spent many hours trying to recover it with the Vista DVD but it just couldn’t recover my Vista OS so I finally gave up trying to resuscitate that partition. I had to do the most tedious work of copying whatever files that can be recovered through the Command Prompt windows! Fortunately I have restructured my emails folder back in Septemer so most of my old emails were kept on my Intermet email account rather than downloaded to my hard drive as I have done previously. Still I have to spend considerable time to reinstall most of the tools that I need into my Windows 7 partition.

Today I spent several hours wading through the thousands of unread emails from list that I have subscribed to. Like you I probably got about 1,000 emails wishing me “Happy New Year and Merry Xmas” which I appreciate as I know there is a person behind the autoresponder. The other theme that I read a lot is that a lot of Internet Marketer has make their plan for 2010. Now that I am settled and having to go through each email, with the new barrage of offers, free ebooks and VIP programs started coming in. I am starting to wonder how do I keep up with all the information overload? I think I need to plan to decide who should I follow and who should I unsubscribe.

Anyway, looking back to 2009, it was really a year of learning for me.

Overall I think I have taken action a little bit too late.

I have the tendency to learn about something and understand it completely before I take action. By the time I finally understood what it needs to get online, start serious blogging and do affiliate marketing, I have spent too much time learning and not enough of action to make things work.

What I lack was the speed of implementation. I now believed that in Internet business, speed of implementation is the name of the game. Even after reading all the Internet marketing materials in my hard drive, I find that no one actually will give you a perfect business plan or the exact steps that I need to take. This is so much different from a job where you have the job description written out for you.

What it means to me is that I have to be in charge of my own success. And that means doing something that I am not comfortable with and implementing something that I am unsure what the outcome might be. Now I know why many people fail online because they simply take tool long trying to perfect everything which is what I did in 2009.

Even though I make just a little money in 2009, I still feel humble with the failure. I only hope that this failure will be my key to progress in 2010. So moving forward, I will focus on the speed of implementation.

My main focus for 2010 is on list building. As everyone know, your list of subscribers is one of the most important assets in your business. You can leverage your list of subscribers at any time to funnel more visitors to the website of your choice. That’s the theory and now is the time I put this into action. I will be focusing all of my attention and marketing efforts in 2010 on sending visitors to my squeeze page.

Following my plan for “revival”, I also started to visit forum more often and try to look for affiliate marketing opportunities. I think I am begining to have a better feels of the Internet Marketing space since I started spending an hour a day reading through Warrior Forum. I am hoping that by doing this high-leverage activity per day I will be able to create some form of growth in my business this year.

One area that I am exploring for 2010 is on the finding a personal coach. It has been said that with a coach, you can achieve exponential grown in your business. It would be nice to have a mentor that can hold my hand every step of the way so that I always know exactly what needs to be done next. Unfortunately this is a high cost item especially with one-on-one coaching program. I am hoping that as I grow my business I can make enough to get a personal coach in 2010 so that I can achieve my goals faster.

Well this is a bit of insight into what I have learned in 2009 and looking forward to a successful 2010.

Another Struggle to Get Online

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:22:02 +0000

Having resuscitated my blog from a mistake I made two weeks ago kept me going with my renewed effort to venture into the Internet Marketing world. All seems to be in good order until another mishap come up last week end. Murphy law said that if something failed it will fail without you knowing it.

Last Friday night my PC died on me!

The signs were there all along that the PC will be shutting down on me but I just didn’t know it is so abrupt.

First the operating system is slowly grinding to a halt. There are so much disk activities on my Vista operating system that it is spinning the “donut” most of the time. This is the sign that the operating system partition is extremely fragmented and the Master File Table (MFT) is reaching it capacities. This is known problem since Vista was in beta stage but now it is hitting my PC now.

I launched Disk Keeper Pro and it recommended me to do a boot-time defragmentation on the operating system partition. So I did and it went through the defragmentation of the operating system partition after a reboot. All seems to be fine and the MFT was being rebuilt into consecutive spaces and then the defragmentation complete. The system now rebooted another time and low and behold, the windows loader was missing! Without the loader the Vista partition cannot be booted up again so that Disk Keeper Pro can continue with it process.

It just so happen that I loan my Vista DVD to my niece for her to fix her PC on another problem so I could not do a startup repair immediately. Thinking that I will do it later and since I needed to read some Internet mail, I boot up my Windows 7 partition. That’s when the problem start since the Disk Keeper boot-time defragmentation process is not fully completed, Windows 7 operating system thinks that the Vista partition is corrupted and tried to recover that partition. Well since it started the recovery I can’t do much so I let it continue it run.

However half way through the recovery suddenly the PC just shut down. There is nothing in the monitor. Hitting the power button also doesn’t power on the PC. There is a slight burning smell coming from the power supply unit. Thinking this could be due to a blown power supply unit I took it out and went to the computer store to get a replacement. After fitting the new power supply unit it still doesn’t power on the PC. It looks like there is something else that is broken.

After some research from the Internet on similar cases, the recommendation is to remove each of the components from the PC and try to isolate the faulty component. After several attempt I found that after I removed the graphic card (a Gigabyte 9800 GT) the system is able to power on. Well look like it is either a “fried” PCIe slot on the motherboard or the graphic card is faulty.

This morning I took both the items to the computer store where I bought it from and now they are investigating which is the faulty part. I am writing this post using my wife’s notebook.

I am eagerly waiting for the computer store to call me to tell me the result. Without the PC as a proper tool, it would be just so difficult to continue to make a present on the Internet. Also most of tools I use are on the PC hard disk so it is essential that I get the PC back alive so that I can continue to monitor my blog. Also I will have a hard time trying to remember the userid and password to all the sites that I have joined which means I will have to take a lot of time going through my mails to find them.

I am hoping that everything will be resolved by tonight. I’ll keep you posted.

Welcome to My Online World

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:08:36 +0000

I have been in the IT line for a long time but my focus has always been in the Enterprise Computing environment. I have been surfing the Internet for a long time since I started work but mainly for searching of information. I still remember using BB bulletin board to reach out to the Internet using those green screen!

I have also been exposed to Internet Marketing for a long time, not as a seller but as a consumer. I have bought info products on self improvement, golf instructional materials and recently forex trading products. I must say that it didn’t occur to me that I should venture into online marketing to make money all these while.

Recently I lost my job with one of the largest software company in the world when they announced a redundancy program. It is unfortunate but I can’t do much about it as it is a corporate direction and those who are affected are compensated accordingly. I think long and hard for the last few months and have decided that I will not want to worl in the corporate world anymore. I wanted to venture into forex trading and I want to make the kind of money that many people dream of. However forex trading required skills and patient and I must say I lack both. I still dabble in forex trading but not full time anymore because I think what I need now is not trading experience but accumulation of capital.

To do that I need to look for other avenue and then I found Internet Marketing and given my IT background, I quickly managed to learn how to start up a blog and started to venture further into affiliate marketing and other network marketing programs.

Because I have plenty of time and I wanted to make money from online marketing, I started to blog full time and provided as much content as possible on my blog and try to drive traffic to it. However I fail to make any sale from my blog or online businesses. The three downfalls of me are:

1. I am afraid to sell and not sure what to sell and keep on looking for the niche that sell

2. I lack the motivation and spirit to drive traffic and collect leads consistently

3. I don’t know how to make use of the traffic generation system that I subscribed to

The worse thing happened when I tried to experiment more with trying to enhance my blog to attract attention, I make a silly mistake and lost all my blog contents! Sigh.

After a night of consolation and soul searching I decided that I need to start all over again. The main different now is that I have draw up a plan before I start blogging again. I realized my previous attempt to venture into online marketing has been haphazard without any proper planning being put in place.

I have also change my approach in this venture that I want to focus on really making money. I will be actively promoting products on my blog. In my previous blog I have been very subtle in my promotion and I must say that doesn’t work at all. If I do not post up products that I want to promote I will never make a single sale online and my previous attempt prove that the case. Therefore you will see me posting more products related to blogging to make money in this blog.

Another are that I will be focusing more is to collect leads from my blog. I will be putting up opt-in box all over my blogs to entice my reader sign in. You can expect to find a gift or bonus when you opt-in into my mailing lists.

The last area that I will be focusing is driving traffics to my blog. I know there are many ways to actually drive traffic online and I will be using two methods to get my blog going.

Thank you for reading my blog and I hope to create an online community where I can update you constantly with frequent updates and products.

Cheers
Nighto Chan