When the bottom drops out of your online business.

As you find the floor you're trying to stand on needs replacing...

photocredit: http://tripwow.tripadvisor.com

You may have run into this already - as your business is going along, you suddenly find out that some tool you've been using, or a method you've studied is actually just a gimmick. There are too many of these out there - they work for a very short time (usually only for the very early adopters, and no one after that) and you may have paid good money for it - but the results aren't there.

The next step is to pick yourself up and learn from that misstep.

Meanwhile, you find yourself trying to balance on the floor joists, because nothing else is under you.

I've done this more that once. I get all behind a certain company, building content and backlinks and so on in order to get the search engines sending me traffic - only to find out that the company or its products were never worth following. No, I never got that money back. I did get a lot of experience. But as I continue on, I find out not to spend a lot to get started. The intro versions will usually tell you if something is worth it.

Conversely, that is your own marketing as well. Be completely transparent and honest from the beginning. Give great value from the outset. Tell people exactly how everything works. Give away the core ideas and sell the tools to help them get implemented.

Perry Marshall, and others, long ago said that people don't want to buy a drill, they want a hole. So you tell them that holes are great things to want, very useful. And the best way to go about getting the hole they want is by using a drill - not just any drill, but this particular drill. So they buy your drill to get their hole. Even if they only use it once.

When you have found out that you were hoodwinked - you wanted to earn extra income online and you were sold a system, but it never produced for you - then back track your own wants and needs to more closely define exactly what it is that you wanted to begin with.

If you can recognize your own yearnings (much as Robert Cialdini did with his book "Influence") then you can proof yourself up against the scammers out there. (Or get the rest of this data and get scam free for good.)

Taking that further, you can then help your clients even more - by explaining how your services help them and why they are buying it. Be completely transparent (one marketer calls this "getting buck naked") in front of your clients.

Openhanded help is another way of stating it.

Your life-long clients will appreciate your honesty and candor. They know they can always go to you for the straight scoop.

And so, they'll return over and over.

This is how you build your own honest online business. Floor by floor.

Day 30 - Help pay it forward

How can I help you? How can we help each other?

Of course, you probably knew this was coming.

It's not the end, it's the beginning.

You now have a window into my soul, as it were. And into the soul of the universe, if this rings true for you.

The universe is built on open-handed help.

As you give, you will receive - but giving happens first.

And if you want more income from your own online activities, it is just logical that you would work to help as many people as you can to become successful and profitable with their own online activities.

You have my email. I'll answer any questions you have, as long as you have them. If I don't know, I'll work to find out for you. After all, learning is a 2-way street - the teacher is learning as he teaches.

I'm not telling you what to do, but I've given enough hints already that it should be a little obvious.

What I would suggest you do is to start over and read The Online Sunshine Plan again. Then study each day of this blog again.

Once it clicks for you, then so should all life.

And success will be unstoppable, whatever you attempt.

So I wish you the very best at anything and everything you attempt.

Good Hunting!

Robert

Day 29 - Wrap Up and Review

Well, here we are - the next-to-last post in this series.

Bittersweet and all that.

So we are going to summarize what has been talked about.

Summary - it's all logical

Online promotion follows a few very basic and very simple rules.

The Internet is built and continues to expand based on valuable content and speed. The increasing social use of it has only built and expanded those two principles.

In order to earn income online, in this model, you need to be able to regularly produce fresh content. So the idea is that you've been writing or commenting daily as we've been going along. (And I've set an example of how this can actually be done. Sure I started a couple of days ahead, but if you try this yourself, you'll see how much discipline it takes.)

You need to know your passion and/or purpose in order to succeed at anything. And this can be found by simply narrowing down to what keeps you fascinated, what makes you happy (brings you peace) and/or you could talk about endlessly as long as someone would listen.

Whether its a blog or a site, the point is to have a platform where you can add valuable, original content regularly. This is your base, your Hub.

Most people dread market research because they aren't following their own purpose line and don't have the needed tools. Try Market Samurai, or their free Domain Samurai as a starter.

Sales Funnels are used to provide a valuable channel of products to the lead, customer, and client. They start off small (or free) and eventually wind up at big-ticket items, preferably those which are consumable or subscription-based.

Search Engines, at their bottom line, depend on what words you describe your pages with. Google has a SEO Starter Guide (a free download) which tells you exactly what they are looking for. There are just a few (5) online SEO points to take care of, mainly.

While there are many forms of content Google now provides, it's not all that difficult to create all of them. There are 3 basic types of writing styles required for Internet marketing and promotion to the 3 basic types of Internet users.

I recommend affiliate programs when you are just starting out, as you can learn the ropes without an immediate huge investment. I also give you a list of criteria you can use to evaluate any you find that may align to your core purpose.

The biggest effort in marketing is in building a list so you can send out sequential emails with an autoresponder. This is as more people use email than surf the Internet. Email is also a personal and captive audience (as long as you keep them interested enough to not opt-out.)

Writing a web page is simple - you write like you talk. It's key that you know the 3 types of writing and post these where they will be accepted.

Social media isn't for backlinks. It's to show the authority and trust your backlinks have. Understand this and avoid the "Google Slap".

Set up your Google profile and a badge on your main site/hub. Share links to your hub on your Google+ profile. Create a Google+ page for each main product or service you offer. Plug in Google Analytics and Webmaster tools to every site and social property you create. The more you connect with Google, the easier it will be to rank well.

You can publish one essay several ways on the Internet so it can show up in several places on page 1 of Google.

A key point is using Slideshare and videos from that same content.

I don't recommend Squidoo or Hubpages, or even article directories, unless you really know how to get your time investment back in leads.

Building mini-nets from free/remote blogs and similar social properties (videos, pdf hosting, podcast hosting) and then bookmarking and pinging those bookmark profile RSS feeds it the simply and effective secret sauce which prompted this series.

It's possible to get Article Directories to work if you effectively spin the content (by hand) and use Article Demon to publish them to several hundred (or more) AD's. It will still take hours initially, but the program takes the mind-numbing repetition out of it.

You need to be using ranktracking and analytics to have definitive understanding of how effective you are - and where you still need to improve.

Network marketing is a logical extension of Affiliate marketing and providing you have a good program with lots of upline support, you can build extensive residual income from downline sales. I list several places to train in this area.

Ebay and Craigslist can be key sources of ready buyers if approached effectively.

The Natural Laws of Marketing are the same which pervade all of Life's activities on this planet. Knowing this can markedly assist your success from here on out - in any field you attempt.

I give you a list of tools and courses for use and reference. (All in addition to the numerous freebies you've received daily...)

- - - -

As I can (I'm pre-loading these and so don't have all the links), I'll come back to give you the daily links to these summary paragraphs.

Good luck with all this.

See you one last time, tomorrow.

Day 27 - Natural Laws of Marketing (but you always knew...)

Just as there is gravity, so are there Natural Laws of Marketing.

Probably no one has ever specifically talked about these before - but they exist, nonetheless.

Of course it would take someone with 20 years of experience as a counselor and a Masters in Metaphysics to make this leap.

While this isn't in The Online Sunshine Plan directly, I've already given you one of the freebies which heads down this path: The Power of Creative Selling, by Prevette.

Another would be Wallace Wattle's "Science of Getting Rich", in addition to Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich." Their underlying text would be Charles Haanel's "Master Key System". And we could trace this back to Indian and Egyptian texts, right back to Polynesian Huna (who's legends say they helped build the Pyramids and establish the early Egyptian social order). [Now of course, you can find all these in various versions - I'm giving you my Lulu links as an example of how its possible to take public domain works and possibly earn extra income online.]

When we say Natural Laws, we mean to say that there are regular recurrences and explanations for things. These are Laws which cross over from one application to others, are present in all "sciences" and studies. So it's not so surprising that they show up in Marketing.

Now, in no particular order, let's see what we can find:

Golden Rule

I've mentioned this one before. As you treat others is how you can expect them to treat you.  This is found in every major religion and philosophy in one form or another.

This is based on probably the most basic Huna principle, which is why it works:
"The world is what you think it is. "
Or, paraphrased, the world around you is as you consider it to be - or as you create it. This also hinges on the 2nd principle:
"There are no limits." 
Meaning that there is nothing separating any of us. So when you treat someone else well, you are treating yourself well, also.
It's the third principle which is distinctively applied to marketing:
"Energy flows where attention goes."
You can see this as the key theme of "Think and Grow Rich". Hill says to get a "BURNING DESIRE" about what you want to accomplish and then you will get the inspiration to do what you need to in order to help it show up. The other 12 parts of this philosophy just contribute to this one point. And this is the secret of having a "vision" or Covey's "7 Habits" and his emphasis on a company's mission statement. Wallace Wattles also goes into this, which book is what started Rhonda Byrne in her quest for data that produced "The Secret" DVD.

The Law of Attraction

Is more or less the same thing, or a consolidation of the above. Whatever you hold in your mind is what will show up for you. This law also shows up in both Testaments of the Bible and all through various philosophies as well - though not as well documented as the Golden Rule. Because those Huna principles actually cover a great deal of territory.

Here's the complete Huna list:

1. IKE - our ideas create our reality.
2. KALA - there are no limits.
3. MAKIA - energy flows where attention goes.
4. MANAWA - now is the moment of power.
5. ALOHA - to love is to be happy with.
6. MANA - all power comes from within.
7. PONO - effectiveness is the measure of truth.

 The fullest definition of these is by Serge Kahili King, as quoted on one of my sites.

And I've found that they explain how other Natural Laws work - although I expect you to simply test them out for yourself.

Inner Peace - "Feel Good"

I've earlier brought up the point of asking yourself, "Does this bring me greater peace - or make my life simpler?"

Of course, you can trace this back to that 5th principle above: "To Love is to be happy with."

During the course of these 30 days, and the stresses I created for myself, I was using my usual tools of Releasing and meditative review (See my "Freedom Is - (period.)" book-lessons and book.)

And what came up is that the primary and underlying common purpose the vast majority of us share is to always "feel good." And we could go into quite a discussion of how to remove artificial emotions from your life, which are not actually feelings per se. (Just read that book above.) You could also find this through all the lessons of "Get Your Self Scam Free" (or buy your own copy of the book...) This is where you would see that the main drive we all have it toward pleasure and away from pain.

If you understand that the purpose of Love is actually creative, then you can know that all which is bad that is happening to you is simply a lack of creation on your part. It does no good to be critical of others (and yes, I'm still working on this point myself), as this just makes you feel bad - as we are all connected.

And if someone around you is being critical, you simply have to let that go - as nothing to do with you. (And how to release or "let go" is covered in the "Freedom Is" book linked above.)

Real-Life Applications

The next point is to work constantly to improve the lives of others. Because if you want something better for yourself, it's obvious that you need to work at helping others find it first. This is paying it forward in advance. A simple, logical extension of the above.

When you focus on something you want to improve in your environment (Vision) and then work to help others find that (Law of Attraction), you then will find it showing up in your own life - or an inspiration of how to make it so (Golden Rule).

This of course explains my complete effort to "data dump" all the knowledge I have to you. Even though I don't necessarily apply all of this to my own online business efforts, it is perhaps because I have been too busy researching this all out in order to leave a path others could follow. (Or I just need to get busy with earning my own extra income online...)

As well, I mentioned I have another completely different path coming up. So I simply couldn't sit on all this data that would help others - it would affect my being able to get help in the immediate future, wouldn't it?

And so this rather different approach to marketing: finding your own purpose, finding the community which matches it, selecting or creating products which help that community, marketing them so others can find and use them to improve their lives, promoting them with regular fresh content which the search engines and social media can use.

In short, marketing by the concept of win-win-win. Everyone wins.

This of course brings you greater peace - and makes you feel good.

- - - -

A final freebie is one of these compilations I've created to have all the vital references in a single spot. But with today's essay, I think you could more readily use this to improve your efforts in earning extra income online.

It's named "Conceive, Believe, Achieve" and has James Allen's "As a Man Thinketh", Wallace Wattles' "Science of Getting Rich" and Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" - all in one volume of almost 600 pages.

Any assignment today would be to consider if the above laws apply to your operation and whether they might be able to improve what you are doing so you are more profitable to yourself and others. As usual, reject what I say completely until and if you can prove that it works for you in improving your own life.

Next: The (In)Complete List of Tools and Courses

Day 18 - Spreading the Content Around

(Secret Sauce sub-series 04)
As much as people (myself included) deride the idiosyncrasies of the free blogs, they do serve a valuable purpose - besides making money for their hosts. They allow you to republish content to different communities.

The weirdest thing, perhaps, is how useful I've found these since I published The Online Sunshine Plan. Yet nothing about them particularly shows up in that book, except as parenthetical examples.

So - no pre-reading assignment, again.

Let's get right into these...

The reason you want a lot of free blogs re-publishing your content...

This seems illogical on the outset. If Google is penalizing duplicate content and giving special tags to show who authored it first, why would you want to re-publish your content to someone else's site?

Two reasons:

• backlinks
• out-creating your competitors

We have to lay one old urban legend to rest here: duplicate content penalties.

The old-school SEO boys wrap themselves around a pole on this one. Duplicate content isn't "removed" from the rankings, it's just moved down to the "omitted results" section. I gave you at least one link where Charles Heflin shows how there really isn't any competition. And if you look up any long-tail phrase, you'll see that for exact phrases, the links Google shows usually fall apart after the 2nd page (20 rankings).

So Google is really trying to produce the best possible page results. Stuff that has the exact same content is just shuffled lower (below 750-800, as linked above.) It doesn't take them out of the standings entirely, if they still have your backlinks, then they are still contributing to your site staying on top.

Duplicate content mostly hit the free sites like blogs and article directories, which suddenly found themselves with not very many pages ranking - because they weren't policing their own content. (And so now they do, with a vengeance.) However, it doesn't mean that you can't also rank for several different sites with the same content.

How blogs do this is rather interesting. You see, they sort by date, tag, and perhaps feature new material as it's released. Tumblr.com is one which pretty routinely shows up on page 2 or 3 according to their tag pages, which sorts in a different order, so has "different content" than sites which just present them according to last first. Wordpress.com has a nice feature page, which will get a lot of new posts on their front page (handy for search engines to find new content), and if people visit it, it will stay there for awhile, as this is all a popularity contest and entertainment.

Another point is that these freebie blogs all have different templates and have different content showing up. (We'll go into this later about how you can help this with sidebar widgets) So it's mostly, but not exactly, the same content. If there isn't much content around with these keywords, then your re-published content has a good chance of showing up.

Now, yes, if they all had completely different (or at least 40-70% different content) then they'd all rank for the keywords. However, it's a different scene when you are spinning several versions of that material with all that time invested. (We will go over spinning content toward the end of this 30-day program, however. In theory it could be useful - and would help out article directories.)

What we've seen by utilizing these freebie/remote blogs and tracking their ranks from week to week, is that the free blogs will show up and maybe even outrank your main site for a few days or weeks, then slowly drop down the rankings, while your main site (which they link to) starts to increase it's rank. Even though they were posted the same day, within minutes of each other (and I'll tell you how to do this on a later day.)

The top remote blogs

We'll refer to them as remote blogs from here on out, as they have your content in remote locations. ("Free" describes a lot of things these days...except perhaps beer, meals, and money.) If you visit http://knowem.com and do a search, you'll find the top blogs on their main page of social sites. They are listed below.

Blogger.com
This was bought by Google a long time ago. And this year has been getting overdue updates which allow it to rank better. Main point of use is that they don't care if you heavily push affiliate sites and you can have dozens (one lady has hundreds, per report) of different blogs to separate out your content.

Wordpress.com
Finicky about anything that sells anything - unless you have a paid hosting with them. So you can get banned and never figure out why. This ranges from dropping your site to dropping your login. I've even experienced accidentally violating their rules and having my login dropped, but leaving my blogs up - orphaned. So two things you have to do with them: 1) only link to an innocuous "review" page and not to direct affiliate links, 2) have multiple administrators for every page - you can sign up several times with different emails to make additional accounts. You're also allowed almost unlimited number of extra blogs, but once you give it up, neither you nor anyone else can get it again. Wordpress.com blogs tend to show up and sink like July rockets, settling down at the lower pages of rankings.

Tumblr.com
Quite a popular blog site. And while they have a few "bad words" which they ban almost automatically (like "work from home" and "make money online"), otherwise they pretty much leave you alone. Also lets you have numerous extra blogs. Noted as above for ranking well according to its tag pages.

Posterous.com
Almost a newbie on the scene. It was first known for allowing you to post by email. (Now all of the above, and most others, allow you do do this.) However, it's becoming more popular as a blogging platform on its own and the guess is that mainly because it allows you to post to other blogs and social platforms with a copy of your post - which will link back to that posterous blog for any default. So yes, it's giving itself all the backlinks it can find.

There are a few others like Livejournal and Xanga which we won't cover here. Mainly because you can't auto-post to them, which is a hint of what we'll cover later. Sad, really, because they have active communities. Xanga did this in response to spammers, which IMHO was a shot in their own foot. LJ does it by neglect - it's supposed so, but is wonky that way.

Other remote blogs of interest

Anything that can be remote-posted to is useful. However, if it's hosted on someone else's dime, then you can get quite a community built up.

I've already covered how you can build Wordpress blogs on your own site. But that can give you server issues, which (twice-burnt) I don't recommend as a platform. Other free blogs can be set up. And you can also set them up as subdomains, so practically you can build up as many as you have space and bandwidth for. Main problem: they are on the same IP address, so they can appear to be spam-blogs (or splogs). And is why the free/remote blogs are nice - you can have other IP's backlinking to your main site.

There uses to be several free blog hosting sites. (And you can look up free hosting and set up blogs there, but most require a lot of attention in order to retain the free status. Leave one alone for awhile and your account gets cancelled. Content means traffic means ad sales - no content means canceled account.) However, most weren't able to keep sufficient profit to survive, so they've mostly gone by the buy. Wordpress-based free blogs were the rage once...

Blog.com
One of the survivors. Wordpress based and ranks well overall. You do have to turn on remote posting, however.

Blogetery.com
Another Wordpress survivor. Went through some wierd hosting problems a couple years ago - some terrorist-related individuals were hosting with them, and their host shut all their blogs down. But they're back and other than being a bit slow at times, it's a great little community of bloggers.

Typepad.com
They are finicky about getting set up and only allow you one free blog per login/email address. And make it hard to find how to set up a free blog (I've lost that page more than once.) Otherwise, a nice little remote blog. They are their own scene and have built up a nice non-WP platform as a standard.

Again, there might be a handful of others which would fit in this. I've literally spent days searching for WP-based blogs and "free blog hosting", but keep dropping back to these few above. There are still some around, but mostly they have closed off free sign-ups, or are based in a foreign language (non-English), which gives you problems.

Tricks and Details on setting remote blogs up

Generally, these just run as a few:

• Fill out your profile so it looks like a real person. Photo, some interests and definitely your main site as a backlink.
• Unless you like a lot of email (another reason to get a[n additional] gmail account), ensure that you simply have to approve every comment. Most of these long tail blogs, in my experience, only attract fools trying to backlink to their site with comments. It's not that you can't do this, or that it doesn't work. But it's labor intensive and most of these guys are rank amateurs - they don't really contribute to any ongoing conversation.
• On some (blog.com, blogetery.com) make sure that you can remote post to them.
• Put your main site RSS feed in the sidebar to get more backlinks. When you update your main site, it will auto-update (and auto-backlink) on the remote blogs.
• A news feed sidebar with your keyword as a search term is a nice touch. Gives another hint of authority.
• Vary the theme and put a different one up than given. Takes a few minutes, but you generally wan them all to look different.
• Follow some other blogs, especially if you have others of your own on that platform.

Some (tumblr, typepad) don't have customizable sidebars. Their loss. And they might have changed things since I wrote this or last visited their site to set one up.

Isn't this a bit, well, callous?

Well, no. The reasoning goes like this: You are one of a handful who are providing new and fresh content for the Internet. Posting to remote blogs is simply a way of reaching more people with that content. These sites are mostly (-ahem-) content pimps. They (especially Wordpress.com) don't want you to earn income from your content, they just want you to post your content to their site so they can.

So you help them, and they help you.

If you keep your sales/landing pages, review pages, and infotainment pages separate (infotainment goes on the remote blogs, review pages go on your site, and sales pages are either separate pages on your own, or hosted by that affiliate product you are pushing) - then you and the remote blogs can have an amicable, cross-beneficial publishing arrangement.

There's also the point that this doesn't mean you quit contributing to your communities that you've found, just because one of them exists on one of these platforms. You keep contributing - but no one said you couldn't also have an additional blog or two to host your additional content, did they? Especially if the profile is different from your personal one... (Someone recently told me that they'd seen I hadn't been blogging much - but they don't know all the "alternate identities" I use in order to get my research done... Rest assured, I'm as over-prolific as usual - "don't try this at home", and "use only under adult supervision") ;)

- - - -

OK, another couple of freebies. But I'm not apologizing for these guys' lack of taste or professionalism. They will give you some additional pointers we haven't gone over. But it's up to you to test them. Some are dated, some never worked. But the common sense ones you should be able to spot right off.

Blogger's Guide to Profits
Building a Blog Empire for Profit

And your assignment is to check out these free platforms above and see what you find there.

Day 16 - Where SEO and Social Media Meet (?)

(Secret Sauce - part 2)

Practically, SEO and Social Media don't meet. SEO had to change in order to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.

Welcome to the second day of our Secret Sauce sub-series. We will have probably 8-10 in this series of just telling you the somewhat revolutionary, but very definitely effective ways of getting your content to rank well so you can then potentially earn extra income online - enough for your goals anyway...

Practically, if you look at it, this whole site and Online Sunshine Plan book is revolutionary. Even though it's old school.

The more interesting point to me is that the more I study this stuff up, the more I've found that it's been out there for awhile and what I considered something a trade secret, has already been promoted on several sites.

What keeps people from seeing these (myself included) is their own self-built blinders.

- - - -

OK, from our last lesson, we covered that social media can be boiled down into 3 categories. These are from their function, not their communities or content-type. And we are naming these in order to simply make sense of how to earn income online by getting and keeping top rankings in the search engines.

Social Media Types: 

1. Bookmarking
2. Status Updates
3. Networking

This doesn't cover everything, but it covers what we need to know. (If you want to spend days and months covering this material, you can - I have, and it doesn't necessarily increase your income, although you are well-entertained.)

Your first steps are, just to recap:

• Find your own purpose
• Find the community which bests matches it
• Study that community to find out what solutions you can provide to their problems
• Create content to offer the service(s) or product(s) which will best help them (and you).
• Optimize your content so the search engines can make best use of that content and rank it well.

But a funny thing happens at this point. You'll see it if you use Market Samurai to dig into who is actually on top. You'll find that some of these sites have no real reason for being there. They don't have as many backlinks as the people they beat out, and also they aren't necessarily optimized for search engines as well as others.

What we've covered so far is really "old school" and based on very traditional models. And if you SEO your main site properly, you will eventually wind up in one of the top 5 spots and stay there. But that's just on-site SEO, mainly.

What will happen if you don't continue to add fresh, optimized content to your site is that it will drift lower. If more people find your site and backlink to it, then it will come up some. But Google and others bring in fresh content and float it at the top of their rankings to see how people like it. Good performing sites stick around. (Even though Google's second test is to then drop it like a rock to see if people still find it useful - if they do, it slowly rises again.)

But that doesn't explain all the weird things you can find happening on the rankings.

Social media does start to explain these.

Search engines were caught unaware when the flood of social media sites started up. And then these sites matured and started their own internal search functions, which then took traffic away from Google and the others. So now they are playing catch up (and have been for years).

In and among the 200-some factors Google uses to figure out how a site has "authority", they throw in some social factors as well. Not just popularity, but the amount of people who recommend (thumbs up, like, plus-1, leave comments, etc.) any site shows how people trust it. And trust shows valuable information.

(A scam scene I knew had to finally give up and accept the fact that forums exposing their scam were going to rank right along with them, regardless how many people they paid to remove their negative comments or take down their sites. Before, they owned the top 10 or so spots so could point to these as how great they were...)

Bookmarking

Search engine spammers (and others) first tried to understand bookmark collections as ways to get backlinks. Yahoo, in fact, was built originally on huge collections of bookmarks by several college students - who started a company based on having access to those bookmark collections.

Unfortunately, they didn't work that way. (Yes, I was one of those deluded "others".) Studying the effect of bookmarks was mystifying. You could get tons of bookmarks created for your site, but they all wouldn't show up on the search engines as backlinks. And the more popular bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, etc.) tended to not show up as well. But bookmarking did make the targeted sites improve in rank.

Bookmarking is an indicator of value and trust. And if you simply bookmark your own sites and have a few friends bookmark them, it still doesn't mean as much as a site where lots of people bookmarked it.

The other problem with bookmarks is that they aren't created by everyone on the Internet. So while they were wildly effective for raising rank a few years ago, they are more or less just an additive today (even if still a very potent additive.)

Status Updates

Twitter isn't the only rodeo out there. If you want a great overview of how prolifically these have spread, check out http://knowem.com - which deals ostensibly in "branding" by helping people to grab social media real estate for their name on the web. If you dig into their back pages, they have sorted out social media into several different categories. Status updates is huge (as are many others). But do a search from the front page and you'll have their list of key ones. You'll see some of every type, but status updates are present - and are also part of several of these, no matter how they are categorized. (Myspace, Facebook, and Google+ are all built on this, regardless of what else you can share.)

It was simply noted by Google that these status updates also showed what content people found interesting and trustworthy. So they are another factor. And while you can search for these, they don't particularly show up in Google for main sites - as they are transitory.

Networking

We are going to approach this from blogging. Every "free" blog out there is part of some community, whether they participate in them much or not. These free blogs make their money from included ads, and so promote the various new content so they can keep viewers interested and entertained.

The search engines know this, and keep tight tabs on them to find new and fresh content they can rank.

A lot of people say Facebook, LinkedIn and some others are networking social media. And it's true that they were formed to facilitate networking functions which people normally have. But both of those IPO's also shoot themselves in the foot regularly. Main point is that they don't provide content, or keep making it hard to add good, fresh stuff. Their main use, really, is in status updates. (Facebook even deletes anything older than 30 days, and doesn't like Google searching what it has.)

Our use in defining Networking sites from a blogging view is to give it some relevance from a content approach. Obviously, a site which doesn't like Google won't have much content ranking well, and so won't get the click-through's found in organic search results.

Sidebar:

Facebook is called a "walled garden" for good reason. And while you can work to involve people in your "brand"  and several people sell various ways to use chat and other means in order to get leads - it's incredibly time-consuming. The most effective strategy I've found is to concentrate on content and always link your content into Facebook, but as an invitation to leave. If you look up my profile there, you'll find that I don't stick around much - but I do post regularly, on a via. Most of my stuff is posted first to Google+ (which we'll cover later.)

This book and site follows the principle that the Internet was built on freely accessible content. And the observed response that search engines reward fresh, original content which is regularly provided.

The pragmatic workouts follow this, and say that your best approach is to simply optimize your content for the search engines to get the best ranking and click-throughs.

So our over-arching approach in all of this is to follow what the search engines observe about their users, and duplicate so we can help them understand our content best - and so get the best ranking possible.

By creating blogs, you will be contributing to the search engines finding your material and being able to rank your stuff well. And then you only have to have some way to convert viewers to leads and leads to clients. (Like that is "all" you have to do. Well, I didn't say this was easy, only that I could explain it simply...) ;)

Summary:

While I've covered a great deal in a short space today, we've still gone on longer than is wise. You are going to be using (or at least studying about) these three types of social media in order to further your search engine optimization and both attain and preserve high rankings and volume click-through's.

- - - -

Freebies and study assignment:

Social Networking Exposed! makes more sense if you don't take it too seriously. This PDF does give you another viewpoint than what I've said. The key point is to give you a good overview of how to set up social media, as well as pitfalls to avoid. Note that the date of this shows how much social media has already changed in just a few years.

WAHM Masters Course - another great book from SBI! for work-at-home-mons will give you a lot more options about how to build your business. But I'm also giving this to you now in order for you to get a thorough overview of how to build a business to earn income online. It's not all that social, but does build on their concept of having an Information Site which pre-sells the viewer into becoming a lead (and later, client).

Day 15 - Secret Sauce and Social Media

So finally begins the Secret Sauce section. The "secrets" (all readily available if you know where to look) are those which have really quick SEO results and what's driven the creation of this series. This is also where it all gets exciting.

What we are covering today is the last section of The Online Sunshine Plan book, where the social media are explored.

But only partially. So this will start bringing you up to date on practical applications.

Social media is a catch-phrase for sites which people don't much understand. They operate more on word-of-mouth than anything else. And are taken to just mean "popularity contest".

Better is to think of them as a modernized "good old boy network". The word Network is key here. It's who you know and who you follow (trust) and who follows (trusts) you.

These sites mainly survive by selling advertising, which is mostly ignored by their users. However, there are enough click-through's in general to support those businesses who are addicted enough to buying advertising that they won't really check their bottom line. (It's a government-sponsored activity, BTW - tax credits for spending in this area abound.)

And those social media which can't get people to click-through on advertising ultimately implode due to lack of support.

Many of the older social media sites have moved to a different model, or were bought up by a larger corporation as a loss-leader (or like Google's Blogger and YouTube, are used to aggregate information about viewer habits - so they can sell more advertising)

The (False) Legends of Backlinking

Why social media is important these days is that Google is monitoring social media in order to see what people consider is valuable. So they can deliver the most appropriate content in their searches.

Spammers follow Google, and have jumped into social media to get their product in the top rankings. (Since the top five get about 85% of the clicks.)

And so the game continues, as Google then changes values for these. Search Engine Whack-a-Mole.

Most SEO guru's out there don't really get social media. They will tell you what you need to do is to get a lot of high-quality backlinks to your site. And they're stuck on this concept to the point where there have been some major "Google slaps" (devaluations) where some foolhardy entrepreneurs have cobbled together sets of "older" domains and addresses which they then allow people to link back to under the guise of "social media" - which is so apparently worthless that Google catches on to their game, then overnight devalues all the rankings based on those artificial creations. (Hope they invested their fast profits in real estate..)

We've covered this before. Google follows the people it services. If you are consistently producing fresh, high-quality content that is useful and considered valuable - then Google will reward you with high-rankings.

If you are after high-rankings just so you can get click-through's to your site and hopefully convert that traffic to sales - Google is going to sooner or later send your pages down to plus-100 rankings, if not outright eliminate you from their rankings completely.

Social media isn't for backlinks, although these sometimes happen. However, Google and others use it for analyzing whether other people think your content is any good - to determine its relative value compared to other material out there.

Social media means Community

And that is the basic approach which starts making sense of this scene.

We've covered community. It's what creates business models. People have a need or want and someone recognizes this, and creates a solution which people are willing to exchange something valuable for. And until someone does, there will be all this talk and whining and so on about the problem area.

This has given rise to forums, wiki's, blogs, and social networking sites like Facebook and anything that has "groups" in it.

Another need is to be able to share what you are doing, pictures of your kids and pets, and really stupid moves and all sorts of things. And this is served by Facebook and a few other sites, where you can find all about the details of their dog's diet (both ends - TMI) and who said what to whom. This is the old backyard gossip fence or neighborhood barbecue, converted to Internet versions.

The general advice I've encountered on this (and I wasted enough time in these social media sites to generally prove their consensus as workable...) - is that you pick only 2 or 3 good communities to do all your interacting with. This is where you keep your ear to the ground to find out what you need to know in order to deliver what people consider valuable. There are as many communities out there as there are scratches to itch. And more are splitting off and joining with each other every day. So you find our niche and you'll find a community there (or one will form around you pretty quick.)

And corporations have found that when they have people who simply park on Twitter and their Facebook page to deal with upsets their customers have, they can turn bad PR scenes over faulty products or service situations into a "hero riding out of the dawn to save the day" scene.

All this fiction about corporate "branding" is just that. And is why Facebook and most social media never convert in terms of "Return on Investment". Businesses already have communities around their product - they just have to join in on the conversation which they are already part of.  But buying ads in these areas is really just paying for someone to run an online service for them to help the community.

When General Motors and others pull their ads because they don't see any return in terms of improved customer consumption - they simply don't get it. Ford has a single person who is engaged all the time in just taking the pulse of various communities which Ford services with their products. Name is Scott Monty. Great guy. Look him up and follow him. He's figured this stuff out, even if Ford still hasn't. But they are closer than the other car manufacturers internationally (IMHO.) But that discussion takes us away from where we want to keep focused on...

3 types of social media

• Bookmarking
• Status Updates
• Networking

Others may disagree, saying that social media can also be categorized by type of content and how its shared. True enough.

Our focus has come in through creative content and SEO in order to figure out how to earn extra income online. So through that tunnel-vision, we can see that all these other forms of content are just that - and we can publish our vision and inspiration a thousand different ways through the Internet. But it won't change the fact that the top five spots on Google will always get the lion's share of clicks. Even the fact that Google is now tracking and presenting more than a half-dozen different ways people can produce and share their content.

And while I can (and will) continue with more of this explanation, it next goes into how to apply it.

So we'll leave you today with more freebies so you can start figuring this out on your own, testing what I say above (and as always) before/if you adopt it for your own use.

(These freebies are also your assignment today - yes, it's way more reading than you even had to do in college. But that's the way it is on this site - a data dump.)

1. This online course from SiteBuildIt! is ostensibly about writing, but says a lot about what we are talking about here. Cherry-pick it and then come back to study it thoroughly. NetwritingMasters.pdf

2. Brian Solis has been writing about the online world for years, with a few bestselling books. This is a simple article of his: Redefining the Echo Chamber.

3. As much as I recommend Marketing Samurai, there is also the fact that they deal in a great deal of education, even if its around their own product for examples. Market Samurai BlackBook.pdf

- - - -

OK, now I've pushed you over the edge. Absorb what you can. It might or might not get easier in the next few days. Because I only want to do this once, and get it as right as I can - since my next project takes me into territory which I won't have any reason to come back and refine this. So I trust you to help me make sure we build this bridge correctly so that not only you, but all you help can make this transition simply and safely as well.

Until tomorrow...

Day 14 - What the heck is Value?

This question comes up from a conversation (online, of course) which one of you inspired.

An essay in The Online Sunshine Plan covers this somewhat - "Adding Value" pages 193-200.

Value, commercially, is measured by price.

Price, as Robert Kiyosaki and others define it, is the agreement between the buyer and seller. In other words, it's something both sides feel is a workable truth for them.

The ancient Polynesians (Huna) had this as one of their 7 Principles: "Effectiveness is the measure of truth."

Which of course means that something is useful to you if you consider it helpful. It also means that philosophers and engineers are two side of the same coin - they both appreciate things that work.

This comes up at this point - my last lesson (promise) before I start the "Secret Sauce" series - because it's a stone we haven't turned over yet.

Money roughly means "value", but that is a poor translation. Money is just a symbol which means whatever people consider it means. And so governments make money mean different things all the time. To their mind, inflation is a good thing, because people are "making more money" every year. (The only people who make money are the printers.) And what means "poor" in this country really just means the minimum level for handouts keeps rising above even inflation.

Salaries roughly state the value a person brings to that company. Very roughly.

An example of value: a person I knew for awhile said he was able to pay for several fishing trips to Alaska by running a little classified ad in hunting journals (a few decades ago) about how to save money on razors to make them last longer. It was a single sheet of paper he mailed back to them. (Solution: put the blade into mineral oil after use - it was the oxidizing that dulled the blade.)  By getting a few bucks each time, these added up.

And maybe that wouldn't work today as people throw away everything.

What's valuable is between you and the other person you are exchanging with.

So this is the same point of tuning into your community in order to find out what they are interested in and what their problems are. At that point you are able to figure out what is probably valuable that you can offer. And "price points" are monetary equivalents of the rough value. Too high and they think you are full of it. Too low and they think something is wrong with it.

Give value in excess.

The point of this may seem obvious by this point. You want to give more away than you take in. This almost guarantees your success in the future. Always give a baker's dozen, or add in a sampler of a similar product to try. Give an over full portion than asked for.  And ensure that the quality of what you produce is extremely high, much greater than advertised or promoted.

You can work this back from the Golden Rule, but you already know that if you were given much in excess of what you agreed to buy, you'd come back to that person again for more. If this happened every time, you would certainly tell all your friends about that person and his wonderful products. If you then were given a check for every friend who signed up, then of course you would be inclined to tell more people about that valuable product.

And so it has always been through the ages.

Such is the exact reason I took up this study and  am writing this today. There are natural laws at work, far beyond the judgment of mere governments and their lawyers. They are immutable. If followed, they will give you success. If ignored - failure.

Part of the market research you do is to find exactly what and how much of that is considered to be valuable. What solutions are better than others and will give you more return? What does the community talk about and how can you help them solve it?

Keywords is the tip of the iceberg for marketing research. That only tells you where to look. Listen to the forums (or ghost them) and read what goes on. In this, you will find your community's concerns - and hints about the valuable solution(s) you can offer to help that community grow.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump: "Value is as value does." Be valuable and give only extreme value with everything you do. Make this your next habit to acquire. And also work to associate mostly or only with people who have this as their own lifelong habit.

Once this becomes second-nature, then life will become even easier and more rewarding.

- - - -

The real point to this is that you are improving everything you touch - which is so rewarding it lifts your heart every time. And that is the key to all of this - creating.

And why I discount "competition" or "attacking" or any of these approaches to viewing life. Marketers who want to "dominate" are in this same channel. They all consider that everyone out there is somehow different from them - they are someone to beat or to win against.

Inherent in that idea is that someone out there is a lesser being than you and you should profit at their expense. This is patently false - since the Golden Rule (and even more ancient philosophies) state that we only win by helping others.

Help - Create - Love. These are all terms which are so close to each other as to be synonyms. So "Love your neighbor as yourself" takes the "conventional" ideas of Internet Marketing to different levels. Consider that you are here to help as many people as possible. And that these people in turn will help you. You exchange valuable items with each other.

And that is marketing. If you look it over, this matches all the definitions I or anyone else has laid out for this.

Once you get the real concept of value - and work out for yourself what is the best way you can personally contribute true value to everyone around you - then your life becomes blissful and your smile shows the honest care you have for everyone you meet. And this is no matter how they treat you.

Whatever you think of Jesus' sayings, you have to admit he was right on the money with a lot of things. Like that "turn the other cheek" concept fits how to meet with others and treat potential clients. If your solution doesn't match their problem, perhaps you can learn from this and either improve your solution, or develop another one. But getting "upset" with their apparent attitude toward you or life won't improve your or their lives. So let it go and see the worth that's actually within them.

Yes, there's deep and thick philosophy behind everything I do - and I hope to help you find some very basic truths while you learn about how to earn income online.

Because I'm only here to help.

- - - -

Today's freebie is "The Golden Rules of Acquiring Wealth" - which is based on P.T. Barnum's "The Art of Money Getting."

Your assignment is to go shopping - window shopping:

a. Look at all types of stores - expensive, high-end ones as well as discount houses.
b. Look over things which appeal to you, for any reason.
c. Review in your own mind what value these thing have for you and how they would improve what part of your life.
d. Repeat this in store after store until you can quickly see the apparent value in the objects you see.
e. If you then want to review online stores, then do the same thing. Also look at ebooks and info-products. See what value they are apparently offering and whether you think the price is worth it.

Day 13 - Your Luck has it: Writing a Web Page

Here is one subject that has been made incredibly complex.

Yes, there are a lot of parts to it, but you can hardly do this wrong. However, if you take care to do each bit exactly right, then you'll wind up with some better-than-average results for your effort.

We bring this up here as now you are ready to put some things together. And like a song, there are notes, melody, lyrics, and timing to produce something better sounding than a tortured alley cat in heat. ;)

Writing to Your Heart's Content

For all the boobytraps people have laid down about writing (producing content) - it's not all that hard. However, you do have to listen to your heart and act on what you find.

Writing is simple: "Write like you talk."

Imagine someone in front of you who is just dying to hear what you think about something. All ears and expectant. And then you simply write to hold their interest.

Now there are some details like spelling, but that is what spell-checkers are for. Get something like the free OpenOffice (LibreOffice) or MS Word (if it came with your computer) and it will do a fair job of keeping your words spelled right. (And then note how they are spelled and learn - this will actually save you time in the long haul - not having to stop and correct.)

Once you learn that the inspired "voice in your head" (or however it appears to you) is an unending torrent of content, then it's simply the work of getting it all down on the page.

Of course you can study books like Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" to shortcut improving your writing quality by leaps and bounds. Most English books are tedious and filled with non-sensical rules that are dead-ended in government-supported Academia. People don't write that way and haven't for years. Read a lot and write like the people you like to read. Especially if you want to make your prose more entertaining and interesting.

Research

Of course, you have to do your research about a topic. And that is simply asking yourself, "Can I answer anyone's questions about what I'm going to tell them?" If you hold to this idea that you are working to keep your audience's interest, then it will be easy to simply stop and look it up. Once you have all the data, it will make sense to you and then you can resume telling your story.

Some people talk it out, and then ship it off to a service to transcribe their spoken words into text. That takes a fee, though. And you do get better with typing as you practice.

The main point is to be certain about what you are talking about.

One person's content is another person's spam.

There are 3 types of content on the Internet, with untold variations.

1. Pure information
2. Softsell
3. Hardsell

People put pure information out there to scratch an itch of telling someone what they just found out. And you also have this where people are simply using the Web to download their lives onto it. A personal outlet.

And that is all fine and useful. In these cases, like Wikipedia, it has it's own value and is the purest form of content. An example of open-handed giving.

In softsell, which is useful everywhere else,  people are writing "link bait" which is interesting and entertaining and gets a person to click on a link in that page in order to go to a sales page - or another page which is linking to somewhere they can buy the product.

Affiliate marketing will ship them off the the product or service's sales site to buy. (And as Michel Campbell points out, if they have a lousy sales page, you might need to write your own and then link right to their payment backend.)

Sales pages and landing pages are Hard Sell. We haven't talked much about these. Mainly because they are "disliked" by people who run social services and so on. This goes back to the point that 97% or more of everyone out there is only existing to be entertained. Hardsell pieces aren't entertainment. It's like eating a double-chocolate 5 layer cake and washing it all down with a super-sweet energy drink. You don't want to do this as a steady diet.

But they have their places. A handful want to buy and are looking for just these type of pages to help them make their decision. Your usual place for this is to follow up someone who clicks on a classified ad or auction entry. Or as above, linked into a softsell page.

3-2-1

Wordpress.com and others have made selling on the Internet an interesting place. It's now several layers deep. WP.com is protecting their own (domain-and add-on-selling) profits by telling spammers that they need to take their efforts somewhere else. Unfortunately, they have specious ideas of what spamming is. If your softsell content is linking to sales pages, that's "spamming" and your site and probably login as well will disappear with no notice. (And other free blog sites follow this as well.) Accidentally posting the same content several times to different blogs on their site will also get you banned.

So to get the lookie-loo's turned into possible buyers, you have these pages nested about 3 deep.

• A general information piece links to 
• A softsell page with links to 
• Hardsell pages. 

And that makes the whole subject more difficult, as each of these pages is a drop-off point where a person can go somewhere else or do one of these "look - a butterfly!" moments.

So some people simply concentrate on hardsell pages and writing good classified ads. Which is fine, as the conversions are better in this area.

And there is a mix when you are writing email newsletters. Because you can weed out people who are only their for freebies or to be entertained. Everyone else expects that you are going to give them something and expect something in return. Like visiting your blog in order to start the sales cycle again.

Writing a web page

You start with your purpose, of course, and exactly how you want to help that unseen viewer today.

You have a set of keywords in mind which you want to rank well on the search engines. The main keyword will wind up in the title and 1st paragraph, plus the titles and alt-tags of your images. Everything else are related words which Google uses to know what you are talking about. (Tiger Woods vs. Bengal Tiger).

Then you simply spill out your content about whatever product you want to tell a story about. And, depending on where this is going to end up, you either link to a sales page  or to another "review" page.

Once you have your story all written out and the links embedded, then you come back and write or tweak your headline. Keywords should be closer to the front in your headlines.

Now some say that Google doesn't value headlines like it used to. And this makes sense, as people use headlines to attract readers and "excite interest" (get the person to actually read the page).

And a page will be crafted to help a person get through it.

Most of us have developed the technique of scanning a page. And so a good page is crafted with images, sub-headings, bulleted text, indented text, italics, bold - all sorts of ways to mix it up and keep it from simply being a long set of boring text.

As you write, simply keep Google's guidelines in place.

If you get books by Jacob Neilsen or visit Copyblogger, then you'll see people who study people's usage and will tell you what works and what doesn't.

Again, the key point is entertainment.

Sequence is the key

You write your main site page first, which links to affiliate or other sales pages directly.

Then you post content around the web which links to your main pages.

Of course, your own site is built like this as well. You can have sales pages on your site, which are linked to by review pages, which are linked to by informational pages. And then put up social posts and so on which link to these various site pages directly.

We will go into this subject of a mini-net later (that "Special Sauce" I keep referring to) and as well how and where to post elsewhere on the web.

But generally, you work this backward as you build. And after creating a few dozen pages, a pattern will start showing up. Then you simply evaluate that pattern for it's success or "opportunities for improvement" and learn from your experience. The go and write a few dozen more. Rinse and repeat.

We'll go into analytics later which will help you with all this. Your own gut reaction to your own writing will tell you most, however.

It's not "build it and they will come", it's more - "Build it Right and They will Click Through" to your sales pages and buy.

The object of the web pages you write is not having popular pages with lots of traffic - it's having pages which get a lot of people who want to buy whatever you are talking about, and do so.

The web isn't a popularity contest. It's a shooting gallery. The most attractive targets get shot at - and the winner gets the prize. (Meanwhile, you are the one selling the tickets and making the profits from the shooters.)

Okay?

- - - -

Today's freebie is several. These are classics which people have been referring others to for years.

Hopkins - Scientific Advertising
Scott - The Psychology of Advertising
Prevette - The Power of Creative Selling

Don't be thrown off by the terms "advertising" and "selling" - it's all just words which describe getting people to act.

And you can also refer to "Get Your Self Scam Free" in order to study Maslow and Cialdini for understanding of how and why we are programmed to buy stuff.

Assignment:

Review what you've been writing recently and see how you could possibly improve it to make it more interesting.

Then pick up some popular novels (even classics like O. Henry, Louis LaMour, Jack London) and see how they keep a reader riveted.

Now write some more content with these in mind.

Day 12 - Review: the Pause that Refreshes

About this point, I want to do a quick review of what we've covered.

No, I haven't started running thin on material by a long shot.

But I wanted to put this material in order so it makes sense. Because I want to ensure that you have the basics down before we move into the "Special Sauce" section, which can be confusing.

Basics, however, are basics.

1. First we covered that you needed to know what is most interesting to you and you like to do the most. Somewhere around in all that is your basic purpose. (Or at the very least, a more fun way of doing life.)

2. The Internet runs on content - fresh, original, search-engine-optimized content. Almost no one creates this stuff, so someone who can routinely create content focused on a single (remunerative) theme can pretty much ensure that they can earn extra income.

3. The whole point of marketing is to find where there is a problem and offer a valuable solution. People who express interest in your solution are called "leads" and converting them to buyers is the trick.

4. In order to find this problem area, you can start by "scratching your own itch" - meaning that you consult what you are interested in, and search through related communities to find something they want or need that you can provide. This can be your own product or someone else's which you offer as an affiliate ("Hey, I know someone who has some of these for sale - just like what you're talking about...")

5. The search engines make it simpler to do market research, as there are well-used keyword phrases that people use to find what they are looking for. If you carefully look these over - and find those which have good "commerciality" (people pay good money to advertise products with them), then the chance is good that if you put your target in front of where people are aiming, you can get this traffic to your web pages. To do that, you simply create content which has those keyword phrases describing it, or in it.

6. Content doesn't have to be all written - but it does have descriptions about it, and that is where you artfully place the keyword phrases (and links to your other content - like your main website) so the search engines can send traffic your way.

7. Search engine optimization is quite simple. You simply find what Google has been saying for years about what a "good" website consists of. And then follow their instructions to the letter.

8. The ideal is to offer several products, preferably those which have to be renewed, or replaced after they are consumed. If you are offering someone else's products, then you can work at getting affiliate commissions for those continuing purchases. This can make your income more or less on "autopilot" if the clients are treated well. Another possible point is to get in with multiple-tier affiliate programs or even "network marketing".

9. I've given you a longish list of very good affiliate programs and why I consider them good - but that doesn't mean they are right for you. Consult your own purpose and see if they will make your life simpler and/or bring you greater peace.

10. The other advantage to offering someone else's products is that these commissions you receive can give you income while you continue learning and improving on your marketing skills. As well, if you are developing your own product, it can pay for your R&D while you do.

And that's the 10 basic points from what we've covered.  I didn't mention some points like auto-responders, but that's because it's a "how", not a basic "why".

At this point you are ready to read something with a critical view. Stone Evans wrote a substantial book called "DotComology" years ago - and it has been passed around for free ever since. A great example of true value. Now some of it is dated (and ignore the stuff about reciprocal linking, which I'll cover in the "Secret Sauce" lessons upcoming) but now you know enough to have a critical view of how things fit together and when someone is blowing smoke (or smoking something odd.)

See you tomorrow...

Day 11 - Email Lists and Autoresonders

Right off, let me apologize. The subject of auto-responders hasn't been segregated out properly in The Online Sunshine Plan.

Best introduction to this broad area is in  Section IV - Your Sales Funnel. It's part of "Collecting up your eggs into baskets." (pages 182, 183)

And the rest of the book just talks like that is all you need to know about it.

Well, it is pretty simple. But, as usual, those who market themselves as "experts" have made it pretty over-hyped and complex.

Now the term "auto-responder" is short for "sequential automatic email response mailer." It sends out emails in a sequence automatically in response to someone mailing it. The incoming mail to it is usually by a form-based script running on your own web page.

The reason people talk so much about having and growing your email lists is that people still prefer email over the Internet. More people use email than use the Internet. Yes, it's true.

So marketers hit on this way to get people to use search engines to find your site and then give away (or otherwise entice) you to exchange your email address for something valuable.

People find your site, opt-in to your email series, and then get some emails from you on a regular or irregular basis which continue to be valuable (or not) and thanks to our incredible "friends" in Washington with their CAN-SPAM act (which doesn't, of course), we now have to double-opt-in and have a little link where anyone can and must be opt-ed out on their choice.

Penalties for violating this can get you immediately kicked off your server with no recourse.

Needless to say, I suggest getting a service to do this - which has their own polished scripts to handle compliance. Too much at risk otherwise.

Now, while all auto-responder services have their own affiliate programs, I am only recommending one to you today: SimplyCast.

Reason being is that it is both a free service to start with and as you grow your business you can then expand into their paid service. Plus, it gives a healthy first payment for affiliate sales (70%) and also continuing payments (30%).

Yes, that's a nice one. 

Unfortunately, their marketing seems over-thought. Difficult to simply find text links. Here's a link to their free and nifty little handbook.

This link is supposed to help you sign up as an affiliate. However, it doesn't work for me. (I've got a request into their support, so I'll leave it here for now until I can come back and fix it.)

But the simple link so you can sign up does.

Freebies

Now, today is a day of downloads. Fortunately, there are a handful of "special reports" which cover auto-responders and building email lists. I have compiled these into a single PDF for you.

And they will simply tell you more than you need to know about autoresponders.

With that, I'll let you go for today.

Day 10 - Tools, their Care and Use in Marketing

I was all set to get into yet another subject today, which would be leading us down into more material and tools - when I stopped suddenly and realized a fault that The Online Sunshine Plan and its precursor all had embedded.

This is something ingrained in my own make-up which I've had to come to grips with.

Here's the solution, then I'll tell you more about the problem:

Surround yourself with only those items which make your life more peaceful, simpler, or both.

Today's lesson is fairly short, as most go. Just to emphasize that point above.

Learning Internet Marketing is like paying a garbage truck to empty it's complete content on your lawn so you can sort through it to find the great stuff people threw out.

Remember, you paid the guy to do this to your lawn.

The point is that there is a lot of stuff out there. Capital S-t-u-f-f.

And you may recall that I said from the get-go that the bulk (97% or better) of the material that's been published on Internet Marketing (which includes my own books and this blog) are just crap, BS, shinola, garbage, nonsense.

The reason I said this and included my own material in that statement - was to get you to look at what you are studying.

It's worthless unless you can make it work for you.

There is no sense in compiling a bunch of stuff onto your hard-drive and then leaving it sit there. Or in filling your mind with a lot of useless facts that help no one else (unless you can win trivia-game prizes to entertain others.)

So a couple of very smart people each gave me one piece of that advice up there.

And they work together, as they are related.

I work constantly to boil down data into the underlying system they are based on. Once you know the rules, you can work out a strategy to win any and all games.

And is why I worked so long with my "Go Thunk Yourself" series. All self-help is based on Natural Laws. When you know them, you can get unlimited personal ability and anything/everything else you could possibly want or need. True.

So while you are working at learning this stuff called Internet Marketing, take some time to throw stuff away occasionally. (Or throw it away to begin with and then take it back only when you've proved it's useful and effective for you.)

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Does using this make my life simpler?
2. Does using this may my life more peaceful?

And when you get this down to a second-nature habitual reflection, then your life will become even easier and more direct.

I've worked to give all this to you in a format which can be rejected easily and is also logically laid out - so that you can accept the logic or refute it.

So take the time to day to reflect a bit and review what we've gone over. See if all of this stuff works for you. Check to see if you've tested everything for yourself. Throw out anything that doesn't work or is too complicated to use.

And tell me what you find.

- - - -

Today's Freebie - another useful reference - "Conversations with Millionaires"

Day 09 - Affiliate Programs: Good, Bad, and Remunerative

Hello again.

Today's topic is Affiliate programs. Figured it's about time we tackled this by the horns.

I went through the entire book and see that this is an omitted section. It's touched on, but not worked up directly. So - relief is yours - no chapter to study today as preps.

When and Why Affiliates?

The purpose of affliates is to get additional sales people to pitch your products/services. They can cover more ground than your own two hands and feed can. They use their resources to promote your product, in return for some percentage of your price.  So affiliates come with an overhead - but they are getting you sales you wouldn't normally have.

The other side of this coin is that you can build up some income by finding and pushing an affiliate product which is valuable. This is how you can get paid while you learn.

The logic of this is simple:

• You are producing content anyway to forward your own purpose of delivering value to people.
• You might as well get paid for telling people about a good product or service which aligns with your purpose.
• And you can meanwhile learn from any effective affiliate marketing program, as the good ones will regularly be sending you special offers which you can promote.
• So you learn while you get paid for producing content.
• As you get better producing content, then you get paid more.
• Ultimately, you've both had the time to perfect your own product or service and also learned how to enable others to do affiliate sales for you (or signed up with some company that does - like writing ebooks for Smashwords).

Now while you are just starting out, you'll probably want to get into product- or service-lines which give you the maximal leverage for your time and money. Best return on your investment.

To get this best return, you want 2 things:

1. Offer services or products which people must renew, restock, or re-supply.
2. Offer services or products which enable others to sell under you, where you also can get paid for their work.
   

In this, there are a few - "evergreen markets", they are called:

• Food (and food supplements, medicines fall into this)
  
• Clothing
• Housing

- - - -

• Children's items
• Pet items
• Insurance

- - - -

• Entertainment
• Education
• Enlightenment
  

The above lists are roughly in order of how people will pay for and buy stuff. They also are in the order of greatest return.  As you can get people to subscribe on a continuing basis (such as Insurance), then you can earn a "piece of the action" on a continuing basis.

One sale gives potentially a lifetime of income. Get several of these and you have what is called "autopilot" income. You'll also see this in simple things, such as where a person continually re-news his domain name and his ISP hosting. (As in Domain Samurai - which has a good affiliate program.)

If you can become an affiliate on that chain, you'll get a piece of that action as long as that person continues to renew these services. And is why people who sell Insurance (and who own Insurance companies) become very well off indeed.

While fashions and food needs change, children grow up, and pets get older - people will usually stay with their same Insurance companies for years - and will often expand their coverage to include other items they own. (No, I haven't researched Insurance companies to find out which has a good affiliate program - but thanks for asking. Now this starts to make sense, yes?)

By supporting companies which have affiliate programs, you can get people funneled through your site and link to buy these programs. And then you get a continuing income based on those sales.

Oh No -- Not "Network Marketing"....

And this is where "Network Marketing" comes in. Regardless of the bad press it gets, the principle is to have people selling under you which gives you a piece of their action as well as your own sales. You would prefer to get programs which are at least 2-tier affiliate programs - meaning you can sign up people and get commissions from their sales as well, and they in turn can sign up a person under them for their own commissions, and so on. (And yes, Insurance Companies utilize this same principle from top to bottom in their organizations, as well as any sales company or sales section. People get paid by their production, but also take a piece of the pie of those salespeople under them who are producing.)

My book, Online Sunshine Plan (OSP) deals with making an "online" living in general terms. The underlying basic is that the Internet is built on information and usable content. The search engines are evolved from helping people find out what they want by constantly studying what people want and how they want it presented to them.

What ranks on the search engine findings are simply the content which best answers the question being asked. Google published guidelines for these years ago and simply following their outline gets the best results.
You find problems people have, then find an affiliate program which solves those problems. Providing content in a way that the search engines can use - you get a large number of people to visit your site and click on those links to visit those affiliate programs. When they buy, you get credit for the sale and a commission payment (or in Amazon's parlance - advertising fees.)

All that work in OSP deals with the Internet as a content-driven scene. However, it's only one of several ways to get visitors to opt-in to your program or someone else's (which you are writing/blogging/videoing about.)

There are  5 main ways to earn income online:

1. Organic SEO - being at the top of the rankings and so getting search engine traffic to your page
2. Classified Ads - driving to a landing page for conversion to sales.
3. PPC - also driving to a landing page for conversion to sales.
4. Email - biggest app on the Internet, you develop a stable of readers and provide them good content and opportunities.
5. Social Networking - Facebook is a prime example right now. Engaging in chats can lead to off-line conversations where you can personally pitch your offer. (Takes considerable time-investment.)

All of these have minimal finances invested if you know what you are doing. Mostly you are investing time. And as you get better at writing and posting online, you'll get improved results (income).

The reason affiliate programs are easier to get started than developing your own product is that these companies are doing the research to create effective landing pages. (Nothing like spending years perfecting a product or service which wasn't ever an item people really need in their lives.)

Affiliate Products of Mention

The programs I recommend all have affiliate links and can give you some income, although it's been spotty for me as I'd rather do research than promote their products all the time. Pushing any of the 6 that I lay out below will give you some regular on-going income, plus the ability to put affiliates under you and increase your income from their sales. (Win-win-win.)

Here's the short list, though I'll tell you more of why these work below (and note all the affiliate links, as well as how they are set up):

Top of the list right now: Shaklee (http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/us/en/whyshaklee.html) and a fairly complete set of pages for you to do your due diligence on this company - with lots of videos: http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/us/en/about.html
SBI - http://affiliates.sitesell.com/limited_offer0.html - they have an incredible amount of training offered, which push their time-proved site-building services.

Synnd - Social Media Marketing - http://socialmediascience.com/affiliates/?p=worstell&w=afflink - these guys are a leader in this area for serious SEO users.

Silva Life Systems (plus other self-help/enlightenment programs) - http://mindvalley.hasoffers.com/signup/1081 - lots of programs an regular new releases for people.

Peak Potentials - Millionaire Mind Intensive / T. Harv Eker - http://peakstrategicalliancetools.com/cmd.php?af=mmi8806&p=1 - their Millionaire Mind Intensive or http://www.peakambassador.com/cmd.php?af=mmi8806&p=fbw-speedwealth -Their current Facebook webinar, which is a good informative deal on its own. Sign up as an affiliate at peakpotentials.com, but you'll want to get on their mailing list to see how they do things.

And here's an odd little one I just recently found, which is a good study of how network marketing works: Magnetic Sponsoring - http://robertworstell.magneticsponsoringonline.com - once you buy one of their products (about $30), then you are automatically in on their affiliate scene. And they give 7 free video lessons on how network marketing works in general. And the ongoing emails from them are a hoot - entertaining and educational as to what good copywriting (mostly) consists of (though my own style wouldn't be so brash - or so frequent.)

Another, found only a few days ago, is Domain Samurai, as I've told you about before. 2-tier affiliate, but no real work at promoting their product - so it's not rated well on the scale below.

In most of these cases above, I've given you the straight affiliate sign-up link if they have one. But do look around their sites and see what you can find out - sign up for newsletters and so on (you can always opt-out.)

- - - -

10 Ways to Accurately Pick Affilate Programs That Do Earn You Extra Income Online

Yes, this is opening a can of worms. People who have been burned by affiliate schemes in the past - not to mention Network- and what passes for "Internet" Marketing - will be heading toward the door or hitting their browser's back button right about now.

Because about 97% of all the programs out there are utter crap. Worthless. Shinola. Scams.

True. And you know it.


So what makes a good one? And which ones should you invest your hard-earned money and valuable spare time into?

Let's look at what you would want to buy as a product - if you were the customer (an acid test):

1. Does it actually have a valuable product which solves  some problem you have?

2. Does it actually give more in return than you expected?

3. Is it ethical - does it actually improve the culture you live in? (Could you easily tell your mother or partner what you just emptied your savings account for?)

4. Is this product or service you can keep buying for the rest of your life - because it keeps helping you? (Like food, vitamins, insurance...)

5. Has the company been in business for a long time and doing well even during recessions?

Now, given that this is a product which is high-quality and useful, and you'd tell your friends, family, and anyone else who asks you about it - let's now look at how you could earn extra income doing just that. Is it worth becoming an affiliate sales outlet?

6. Does this company have an affiliate program which pays a substantial return?

7. Does this company enable you to put 2nd tier, or even more sales people under you who can in turn sell (and make you even more commissions)?

8. Does this company put out regular helpful marketing material which helps you get these offers out to people who are looking for this solution?

9. Does this company offer substantial training to help you succeed in selling their program?

10. Does this company take care of product delivery and returns? Has effective online presence and converting landing pages?

Those 10 points will tell you everything about whether that company is a fly-by-night scene, or will give you effective return on your investment of both time and money. Obviously, we don't want to get into something which will tie up either time or money which we can't get a decent return out of.

(One scam I was suckered into had a fee of about 1/4 year's salary, and some 20 hours a week going through their training - and when it failed, they would say you didn't put enough time and effort into it. Not "their fault" you failed. Actual success rate was around 1 in 10,000...)

Just to keep a regular job you are already putting more than 40 hours in - not counting commutes, which is a sizable hidden drain on your take-home pay just in fuel prices alone.  Having a regular job is often the worst example of how something cannot be leveraged, isn't something you'd recruit other people to join, and isn't something you'd want to do for the rest of your life.

I've found maybe 6 product lines which are effective and rank highly on this scale above.

Company	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Shaklee - health supplements	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
SiteBuildIt! - site building, online marketing	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
Synnd - social media marketing	*	*	*		*	*	*		*	*
Silva Life Systems - meditation and clearing	*	*	*		*	*	*			*
Peak Potentials - Millionaire Mind Intensive	*	*	*			*		*	*	*
Magnetic Sponsoring - network marketing training	*	*	*				*	*	*	*

The results:

10 stars - Shaklee, SiteBuildIt!
8 stars - Synnd
7 stars - Silva Life Systems, Peak Potentials, Magnetic Sponsoring


This doesn't say these are the last word in affiliate products you can try. This does give you a sensible 10-point approach to figuring out which ones are the best. Practically, you can find affiliate programs in almost every product line. Just type in [product line phrase] and then the word "affiliate" after it. The checklist above helps you with finding programs which are more than just "making money online". 

They give you the chance to find real products which you can enjoy putting content online to promote - because you are helping people improve their lives with every purchase. In some of these, just reading the materials alone can give them a life-changing experience. And really good programs, in my experience, offer substantial free material which shows their value and excites interest in purchasing the full product.

Additional note is that the best affiliate programs have a substantial library of data you can use to educate yourself on how to promote, how to convert leads, how to keep yourself enthusiastic - lots of free training. Because their success is based on how well you succeed...
 

- - - -

Assignment:

1. Go over the evergreen product lines above - with a modern popular (or tabloid) magazine to hand (or study the ads on TV or in Internet sidebars for awhile). Which do you find represented?

2. Visit http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ and search around for various affiliate products. Note those which have multi-tier affiliate structures as well as those with continuing payments. Do some rough calculations to see how many sales of what you would need to make your own income goals.

Freebie:

This week it's Inside the Mind of Winners - a nice little inspirational essay collection which should be a nice reference to come back to now and again. (Or even offer as a giveaway on your own site...)