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Thursday, April 21, 2005 |
Over the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of work testing blogs and RSS feeds. As part of that research, I've been building some test websites to see how the tools work together.
At 21st Century Small Business, I've been experimenting with the Webmax Studio site builder and I like it a lot. Even on this old slow Macintosh, it works great. I believe that even a beginner can put together a great website using their services. You can get a free 10-day trial (information on the bottom of every page of the site).
I've been working on that site to integrate RSS feeds from PRweb.com and other sites. I'll be adding integrated feeds from some of my blogs, blogs I recommend, news feeds, and other resources in the near future.
On 21st Century Webhosting, I've been working with the new version of WordPress (1.5) that can create both blog entries and stand-alone pages out of the blog chronological structure. I've been creating a number of pages targeted at specific subjects related to modern webhosting and I'm bringing in information from Amazon.com, Yahoo!, About.com, WikiPedia, and other sites. Most of the pages have a lot of dynamic content built using PHP and various feed processors. It's been an interesting experiment and I'm looking forward to building this site with more information as I have time.
On 21st Century Marketing Tools, I've been experimenting with using WordPress and a links program I licensed to store links to sites that I recommend and use in my marketing efforts. I'm not interested in exchanging links on this site -- the directory will be hand-built to point to sites I want to use myself and which may be useful to you, too.
Over the last half-year, or so, I've been working with PHP-Nuke on A Portal for Cherokee County, NC and on Dilbeck Communications. Because of all the time I've been devoting to experimenting with the new tools, I've fallen behind on updating all the sites -- and being sick for a few days and having to get my taxes together last week didn't help, either.
I like PHP-Nuke, but it can be intimidating to beginners and even experienced webmasters. It helps if you have a very good grounding in both HTML and PHP before customizing and extending PHP-Nuke, but I like the sites and the tools they offer and look forward to extending them in the future.
I've added an RSS newsfeed to my Forum on JohnDilbeck.com and I'll be syndicating it over several sites in the coming weeks. You can see an example of this syndication on the home page of JohnDilbeck.com. I'm looking forward to more conversations there and hope this will help introduce new visitors to the forum.
As much as I like PHP-Nuke, it doesn't do everything I want to do, so I've started a new site at Residual Income Gazette where I'll be talking only about creating residual income through online marketing. I've yet to finish customizing the installation, but I'm getting close. I look forward to adding content to the site over the coming months and I invite you to drop in and take a look around.
Between illness, thunderstorms, and probably too much experimentation on new websites for my own good, I've gotten behind on some of my correspondence, and I'm looking forward to catching up on all of that soon.
One of my primary goals for May and June is to add a considerable amount of content to A Year From Now -- Act on Your Dreams!. I have some good ideas on expanding the site in a new direction and I've been talking to an experienced editor and writer to take over the newsletter duties so we can participate more with our valued visitors. Even though the site has been neglected for a couple of months, it's attracting hundreds of new visitors every month and I look forward to working with Dennis to make the site grow into what we've been imagining and discussing.
In the meantime, I've signed up for over a dozen new blogging services and I like some of them and don't like others. When I have some time, I'm going to talk about them and then I'll discontinue the ones I don't like.
I've started at least two dozen blogs over the last few months so I could quickly get some experience with them, and more and more I'm liking WordPress over all the others. I'll probably be cancelling all but a half-dozen or so blogs so I can concentrate on writing about what I'm learning rather than spreading out so wide and learning as much as I can in a short period.
While I like WordPress more than the others I've tried, I also like Blogger and I'll continue developing several blogs there. Some, such as John Dilbeck Musings are hosted on Google's site, blogspot.com. Some, such as MurphyNC28906.com are managed by blogger, but the actual pages are FTPed to one of the servers I use for several of my other sites so that it's actually hosted on one of my domains. I'm doing this for several reasons, one of which is to see whether I get better natural search results using my own domain or letting Google host them for me for free. The jury's still out on this at this time.
One thing I've already noticed is that I get better search results on Yahoo and MSN than I do on Google when searching for keywords I use a lot on my blogs, such as "Murphy NC" (without the quotes in the search). I'm getting first page results on Yahoo, MSN, and Ixquick, but not always on Google. I'm not sure why, but I am very happy to see Yahoo and MSN giving Google come competition.
If you have any comments on any of this, I'd love to hear from you.
Context Tag: websites
7:41:09 AM 
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In a recent press release, Yahoo announced:
Yahoo! Inc. a leading global Internet company, today announced a new feature on Yahoo! Local that provides free Web sites for small businesses. This free and easy-to-use feature builds upon Yahoo!'s leadership position as the number one online destination for local information and small business services. Small businesses can quickly and easily establish an online presence and connect with the increasing number of consumers using the Internet to find comprehensive local products and services. The service is available in beta at local.yahoo.com/freesite.
"As more and more consumers rely on the Internet for information about their neighborhood [~] from finding restaurants to plumbers to dry cleaners [~] local businesses are realizing the value of reaching potential customers online," said Paul Levine, general manager, Yahoo! Local. "By providing small businesses with free Web sites, we are not only helping them leverage the Internet, but also adding depth and comprehensiveness to our local product for consumers."
According to The Kelsey Group, over 50 percent of the more than 20 million small businesses in the U.S. do not yet have a Web site. With the launch of this new service, Yahoo! now enables these businesses to establish an online presence by providing a simple interface and template that allows them to create a site in minutes. These new Web sites are automatically integrated into Yahoo! Local, extending businesses' reach to consumers who use search engines to find information about local products and services.
The free service complements other innovative merchant offerings in Yahoo! Local, including Free Basic Listings and Enhanced Listings. These tools give merchants the power to add and edit content about their business on Yahoo! Local. A small business may extend its Internet presence over time as their online needs grow with award winning services from Yahoo! Small Business such as: domain name, e-mail, enhanced Web hosting and e-commerce solutions.
"By bringing together our leadership in essential small business services, our vast consumer reach, and our local and search expertise, Yahoo! is uniquely able to help small businesses get started and be successful online," said Rich Riley, vice president and general manager, Yahoo! Small Business. "This new service complements our industry leading suite of online services that help small businesses get online, sell online and market online."
Context Tag: websites
(For a sample of one Yahoo! Local biz site, see the one I created for Dilbeck Marketing: nc.local.yahoo.biz/dilbeckmarketing.)
5:52:03 AM
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Saturday, March 12, 2005 |
I knew it had to happen sooner or later, and Allen Says has been doing it for several months before I even learned of it. One of my friends in Texas told me about it a few days ago and I stopped what I was doing and immediately went to look and see what Allen was doing.
What is it?
I knew someone would find a way to incorporate pass-through affiliate links in a blog, and I'm not surprised that it was Allen Says who did it.
Don't know about Allen Says?
He's the one who created the Internet Warriors several years ago, and he knows marketing and affiliate programs.
Now, he's created a way for you to send visitors to his Instant Guru Blog and pass through your affiliate link so you get paid when your referred visitors make a purchase from his blog.
Plus, he's promoting at least five other affiliate programs with more to come.
I recommend his blog for its own sake. You'll learn a lot. Sign up for his mailing list so you'll be notified when he adds content to his blog.
If you want to make the most of it, however, you'll go one step further and sign up for his affiliate program and start promoting his blog using your affiliate link.
To sign up for his affiliate program, click on the large graphic in the left column of his blog that says, "Make Money From Blogging Without Writing A Single Word".
Then tell everyone you know who is interested in online marketing to follow your affiliate link and read his blog on a regular basis.
If you're not interested in affiliate marketing, please refer your friends to instant-guru-blog.LinkToDetails.com.
8:29:14 AM
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Tuesday, March 8, 2005 |
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Wednesday, January 19, 2005 |
I'm going to be writing a series of articles about what I've come to call customized replicated websites, for lack of a better term. I'm sure there is a particular name for this, but I'm not aware of it at this time.
An example of this kind of site is Affiliate Showcase. I've been a free member of this site for a couple of years and I'm just now coming to understand how these sites work.
I'm a pretty bright guy, but I've failed to understand the bigger picture until recently.
Basically, as I understand it now, someone creates a site -- in this case an affiliate directory that lists thousands of affiliate programs. Then, they offer a free site to anyone who signs up. This free member can modify any affiliate programs to which they belong so that the link has their affiliate code in it. Anyone who purchases from that link earns the free member a commission. Anyone who signs up for an affiliate showcase of their own will inherit the links from the person who refers them.
This means that, assuming I'm the first one to sign up, my free site will inherit all the links from the site owner, which I'll call the top-level.
I can change as many links as I want and I can join as many of the programs as appeal to me. I can also suggest new affiliate programs and they'll go into the database with my affiliate code, if accepted. This means that some of the links on my page are second-level (the ones I modify) or top-level (the ones I add).
(Please note: This has changed since the last time I checked a few months ago. Now, only paid executive members can add links to new programs.)
If you follow my link and get a free site of your own, your pages will inherit the top-level links of the site owner, the top-level links of the programs I'm first to suggest, and the second-level links that I modified.
Thus, I, and you, are free to customize our replicated sites with our own links. We are free to suggest new programs that are not in the database.
But, any links that aren't modified or added, inherit the top-level links from the site owner/creator. I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing. In fact, I think it's proper for the creator/maintainer of the site to be compensated for the work done to create the system and to market it. That's what affiliate programs are all about.
Since I'm free to modify the links I want to, and I'm free to join any of the affiliate programs that appeal to me, then I can get into the compensation chain. When you sign up below me, you can modify and/or join any of the programs you want and insert yourself into the compensation chain.
And so it goes. Someone signs up under you and someone under that person, and so on. Each replicated site inherits a mix of your links and links modified or created by your upline.
By advertising your page, you are marketing for not just yourself, but for those who are in the upline -- and this is normal, too. Some programs don't let you build downlines. Some offer two-level downlines. Others offer multi-level downlines. By advertising one page, you can market a wide range of programs, some of which you'll earn from, and others your upline will earn from.
Obviously, the individuals or team that create the site and hold the top-level positions are in line to earn the most commissions. But, generally, that's not the only income stream. Most of these sites, including Affiliate Showcase, offer paid membership subscriptions. Some offer two or more different paid subscriptions with varying features.
With Affiliate Showcase, you can upgrade to Pro or Executive levels, and each offers more customization of the featured ads on the home page of the site. If you are a free member, you can't modify the most prominent ads, so your upline (all the way back to the first paid member who placed the ads) are the only ones who can earn from transactions initiated by those ads. If you want to replace the ads, you must upgrade to paid status.
Since it's an affiliate program, the person who referred you will earn a percentage of your upgrade payment as a commission. Paid members earn a higher percentage than free members.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with this, it's just not obvious the first time you are exposed to the site -- at least, it wasn't obvious to me.
Since the large ads on the home page are the ones most likely to grab your attention, I would think they would be the ones that earn the most. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm considering upgrading my membership to see how well it works.
Two years ago, when I signed up, I had no traffic to my sites, not much experience with affiliate programs, no experience with multilevel or network marketing, and not enough money to upgrade to paid status, so I never really marketed the Affiliate Showcase site.
Now, I'm going to advertise it and see what happens. Since I've joined several hundred affiliate programs during the learning phase of my online marketing business, I'll search for those and upgrade my links. I probably won't add many programs if they're not already in the database.
As an experiment, I'd like to invite you to follow the link and sign up for your free Affiliate Showcase site. Sign up for any of the affiliate programs that strike your fancy, and be sure to modify the link by clicking on the edit link and adding your affiliate code.
Let's see how many levels deep we can build this network in the next six months. Let's also see if we earn enough income from our experiment to make it worthwhile to upgrade to pro status. This is especially useful if you are an affiliate with SFI Marketing Group or Cognigen, both of which are in the database. Search for the program and edit your link so that anyone who signs up under you will inherit your link code.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be talking about other sites that I've found that follow this or a similar system, and we can see how they work, too.
At this point, I'm not asking anyone to upgrade to paid status, unless you can afford it and feel it is worth the risk. In that case, it's up to you.
I'm mainly wondering what happens as we get more people signing up for the free sites and then promoting them.
I'll report back as I see any results.
Over the next few days, I'll be introducing sites that are designed to increase traffic to your sites, build downlines, offer free advertising, and more, and some of these programs are already listed in the Affiliate Showcase.
At this point, I'm not entirely sure it's worth the effort, but I've been talking to a couple of people who swear by it.
My main strategy is still to build sites and blogs with good content and optimize each page for good search engine placement. But, I can see the benefit of trying some of the customized replicated sites, too.
Feel free to tell me your experiences with these types of sites and what you think about them.
11:14:32 AM
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Wednesday, January 5, 2005 |
It looks like I picked the right year to focus on adding more blogs and more RSS (also known as XML) feeds to my sites!
From the Pew Internet & American Life Project site:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
If you're one of the 62% who don't know what a blog is or what RSS is all about, let me recommend the following sites to start learning about them.
RSS was co-developed by Dave Winer and you should read about Radio Userland, the product I use to manage this blog and nearly 5,000 pages on several websites. Also, be sure to read All about RSS.
Another good resource, and one that keeps getting better, is written by Ken Evoy. One of Ken's claims to fame is presiding over the company that developed Site Build It!, which I think is the best web design, hosting, and promotion service on the planet. I am one very happy customer. The product just keeps getting better. Visit the Site Build It! link first so you can see where he's coming from. Then, go read the information he wrote about RSS: Really Simple Syndication for his Site Build It! customers.
I spent several months in late 2004 developing my blogging infrastructure and staking my claim on several blogs at blogger.com. Now that the development work is mostly done, I can pass along newsworthy information to a wider audience faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Also, from the other side of the story, I use Radio Userland to read others' RSS feeds using the news aggregator that is built in. I subscribe to a little over 50 feeds and read them on a more-or-less daily basis. It's a lot easier to read the RSS feed and then click on a link that interests me than it is to remember to go to all 50 of those sites and try to find the new information.
I'm to the point now that I'd rather get newsletters and site updates in an RSS feed than in an email message or newsletter.
I have commented on quite a few blogs and I always meet an interesting person on the other end when he or she responds to my comments.
One of the most interesting recent developments -- for me at least -- has been the addition of RSS feeds to the Site Build It! customer forums. Now, instead of having to go to the forum every day, I added the RSS feed and I can easily read down the list of posts to see which ones I want to read and perhaps respond to. This is a very busy forum, and the addition of the RSS feed has shaved a couple of hours off my forum reading time every day.
I think we'll be seeing much more about blogs (also known as weblogs or journals), RSS, XML, and similar topics this year.
If you have a business with information that changes on a regular basis, you should look into blogs and RSS syndication.
2:38:11 AM
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Friday, December 31, 2004 |
After working hard this year on building a variety of websites and blogs, it's gratifying to see the work start paying off.
My brother, David Dilbeck, owns GeorgiaDragRacing.com and I manage most of the site. For the first time, we had over a million page views, but that's a bit misleading because we moved many of the new photos to Webshots.com and the news is now hosted on his weblog at gdrn.blogspot.com, so the actual number of page views is probably substantially higher.
There were over 174,000 unique visitors at JohnDilbeck.com who looked at over 885,000 pages. I'm always surprised by this because this is a site where I experiment to see what works and what doesn't and it has no discernible theme, other than things that tickle this big brain of mine.
I was researching search engine placements for some keywords on all the major search engines and I'm happy to see that we continue to get more and more top 10 positions on hundreds of key words and phrases -- so we're obviously doing something right.
I've been working the last three months or so to target the keywords "Cherokee County, NC Business" and "Murphy, NC Business" and I'm happy to see these new sites rising in the search engines. It is my goal to help people in my home county promote their organizations and activities more effectively on the Internet by providing either free or inexpensive advertising and promotion venues. Working together, we achieve better results than working alone. I'll prove that in 2005.
Because I'm interested in so many things, I'm going to take the parts of JohnDilbeck.com that are theme-related and move, or duplicate, them on smaller themed sites. We'll see if that results in higher traffic and better conversions or whether I'll just waste some time experimenting.
Also, to further segment my interests, I've created quite a few new blogs and they will be associated with new websites. I think it will be better in the long run, but it's more work now. Also, while I'm in development mode, I don't get as much real writing and promotion done, but that should improve by March, 2005, giving me all the rest of 2005 to put my promotional plans to work.
I'll be putting a full list of all my blogs at http://JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/ and all my websites at http://JohnDilbeck.com/websites/ so I can keep track of all of them! As of yesterday, all of my blogs have been upgraded to make it easy for you to subscribe to the RSS feeds, and I'll be moving more and more towards RSS in the coming months.
I appreciate your visiting my site(s) and I hope we're providing information you find interesting and useful.
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Happy New Years, y'all.
6:56:20 AM
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Sunday, December 19, 2004 |
I've been telling you for a long time how much I like Site Build It! and how much the tools included with this outstanding website design, hosting, and promotion service have helped me earn more with my sites.
From now until midnight on Christmas Day, you can buy one SBI account and get a second one free. That's an outstanding bargain and I just wish I had the time and energy to take advantage of it.
If you are looking for a way to build a site that attracts targeted visitors instead of sitting there and growing cobwebs, this is your opportunity.
You can get both sites for the price of one -- or you can keep one and give it to a friend, relative, or colleague to help them build their business, too.
I host my Act On Your Dream! site using Site Build It! and I couldn't be happier. I haven't had the time to build that site to where I want it, but that will be one of my major priorities in January and February.
I can tell you, however, that I've been using the tools that are included with an SBI site to help me on all my other websites, even though they are hosted on other services.
If I were starting all over from scratch and if I were only going to build a few websites, there is no doubt in my mind that I'd use Site Build It! to do it.
If you want to build your business and promote it online, don't pass up this opportunity! If you wait just one second after midnight on December 26, you'll miss the special sale. Don't delay.
7:19:36 AM
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Friday, November 5, 2004 |
As I wrote back on July 20th, I was sick for some time and just wasn't able to get anything done.
Boy, did that change!
Between then and now, I've been adding to websits and blogs every day.
New websites: A Year From Now -- Act on Your Dream!, Dilbeck Communications, and Cherokee County, North Carolina.
AYearFromNow.com is hosted on what I think is the best web design, webhosting, and website promotion service available on the planet: Site Build It!. I haven't had the time to really flesh out this site yet, but that is planned for this winter. Are you interested in telling your success story?
DilbeckCommunications.com is hosted by Hosting With Us and this is a great webhosting service that offers quality hosting, outstanding support, and good prices. To build this site, I had to learn PHP-Nuke and PHP programming, but now that I know how to do it, the site is coming along nicely.
CherokeeCountyNC.com is a portal for residents of, and visitors to, Cherokee County, North Carolina, where I live. I've been thinking about building this site for about a year and after I learned PHP-Nuke it seemed to be just what I wanted to build the site. It, too, is hosted by Hosting With Us. I'll probably be putting most of my efforts into expanding and maintaining this site.
With email getting so bogged down by spam and spam filters, I've decided to look into other ways to communicate and I've been looking at options for building blogs and syndicating the content.
Now, I know that I've been blogging ever since I started my subdomain on EditThisPage.com and Dave Winer and Userland were on the bleeding edge of blogging, even before it had a name. I've been using Radio Userland for years to build my static sites and to maintain this blog. Over the years, many others have joined in and there are now many tools for blogging. I've been experimenting with Blogger.com and running my feeds through FeedBurner.com to parse the Atom files that Blogger uses, instead of the more-common RSS. I've managed to get syndication working for all my blogs and you can see this at work at JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/.
I'm also experimenting with using Blogger to build static pages on CherokeeCountyNC.com, so, a couple of days ago, I changed the settings so that Blogger.com will FTP the Cherokee County, North Carolina Blog to blog.cherokeecountync.com. My thinking is that this will build new static pages on the site, in addition to the dynamic pages built by PHP-Nuke. I believe that the search engines will index the static pages better than the dynamic pages, but I don't know this for sure, and that's why I'm testing it.
It's been a wild couple of months, but a lot of progress has been made. Feedburner.com was a great find and I heartily endorse their products. Blogger.com was also a great find and I endorse their product as well.
After the hacker problems I had on GeorgiaDragRacing.com, I've been removing almost all the scripts from my static sites and moving towards other services that I can integrate into my sites using FTP and/or javascript.
Some work better and some not as well. So far, I'm not sure which I think is the best. Still testing.
At this point, I don't have any plans to build any more sites over the next three months, but I have some ideas for new sites this spring. Over the next few weeks, I'll be updating my sites and fleshing out the new ones. You're invited to visit!
5:39:01 AM
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Monday, June 7, 2004 |
Over the last few weeks, Cognigen has introduced four new services related to long distance phone calling, domain registration, webhosting, and wireless service.
PNG Power 3000 -- Flat rate long distance service with 3000 anytime minutes for $29.95 per month. No need to switch long distance...
HostingWithUs Web Hosting Service -- Quality web hosting from $5.95 per month! No setup fee nor a 3, 6, or 12 month prepay to get our low prices. Be sure to check out the features and low prices on bulk reseller hosting which is ideal for online marketers who have many websites. (I know I'll be getting one of these accounts later this month.)
DomainsWithUs Domain Name Registration -- A domain name of your choice, registered at $9.75 per year. Search all the extensions. All popular features are included.
FonCentral Specializing in T-Mobile -- Great personal and family plans, get a free phone with up to a $100 cash back. Cellular portability available!
These are the four newest products available from Cognigen. You can see all our services at my Cognigen sales site.
In addition to the products listed above, we offer services from some of the best telecommunications businesses in the world. You can choose from long distance calling services, bundled local and long distance, 800 toll-free services, high-speed Internet access (including DSL, T1, T3 and higher), phone calling cards, dial-up Internet access, broadband phone (VoIP), dial-around long distance, conference calling, voice messaging, web services, wireless cell phones, satellite TV, computers and more. Many of these services are available to both residential and business customers -- often at the same price!
All products are not available at all locations. The web page for each product will help you determine what is available at your home or office.
I appreciate your business!
12:09:09 PM
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Over the last couple of weeks, I've been redesigning my 21st Century Sales site. I'm busily expanding it to offer great resources for people who want to build profitable home businesses.
While there are many types of home businesses, this site is targeted towards online marketing and sales, with an emphasis on earning income by marketing affiliate programs. I've found this to be an excellent way to build extra streams of income without having to invest a lot of money.
Of course, as with any business, it takes time, effort and some money to build a business to the point where it starts returning a profit. Normally, I expect to put in three to five years and a lot of time and money before I start earning a profit. This has gone faster than any other business I've ever started or helped to start.
In the past, I've had to invest many thousands of dollars up-front and then put in the time and effort to make things work.
With this business -- my home-based online marketing business -- I've been able to invest as little as three or four dollars every day (around $100 per month) and I'm already earning a growing profit all without incurring any debt. It's not financed by loans or credit cards, and that's a first for me. I love being out of debt.
Now that it has reached the breakeven point, I don't even have to invest the small amount I was spending out of pocket each month. Overhead, advertising, and promotional expenses are now coming out of revenue, and as I reinvest a substantial portion of that revenue, I look forward to watching the business grow even faster.
You, my customer, have made this possible and I appreciate it. I'll continue to offer the best opportunities I can find along with tips and advice based on my continuing research.
I appreciate your business. Thank you!
21st Century Sales is one site in my growing network of Dilbeck Marketing websites. There are several more on the drawing board and I'll be introducing them over the next several months.
11:03:16 AM
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Tuesday, June 1, 2004 |
Recently, Google.com and WordTracker.com joined forces to
create a site that makes it simple to do quick research for
finding niches that may be profitable for your website.
You can test it at NicheBot.com.
It's easy to use. If you need more detailed research, they
refer you directly to WordTracker.com.
Last October, I wrote an article on building web traffic,
and I updated it earlier today. You can learn more about
finding niches and building traffic to your site there.
I recommend several tools that I use on my sites.
The updated article is:
Building Website Traffic.
Finding a niche and building a site with real, helpful
content is the only way that I know of to compete with the
big companies that have much more time and more people than
we'll ever have. They can control the general keywords and
can afford to spend thousands of dollars in advertising
every month.
For those of us with smaller budgets and less resources,
we have to be more agile and look for treasure in the
niches.
If you can identify a niche and build a website that has
great content, you can build traffic and eventually
monetize that traffic by selling your products, services,
or recommending products for sale through affiliate
programs or arranging to get finders fees for sending
targeted leads to other companies.
You can learn a lot more about this from Ken Evoy.
He teaches you how to find profitable niches in his
Affiliate Masters Course which you can download free. It's in PDF format.
6:04:43 AM
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Sunday, May 2, 2004 |
The May 1, 2004 edition of my Home Business Tips newsletter has been posted.
Congratulations to my SFI sales team for growing their businesses in April!
6:11:00 PM
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Monday, April 26, 2004 |
Dilbeck Marketing has slashed the prices on all our custom printed business promotion products to celebrate the arrival of spring.
In addition to large discounts, we've added many new products that you can use to promote your business, organization, or cause. Our entire selection of business cards, stationery, labels, buttons, magnets, bumperstickers, rubber stamps, and many other items are now on sale. All prices have been dramatically lowered for a limited time.
Our prices have always been competitive, and now they are even better.
Not only have we lowered our prices, we've added hundreds of new items:
* Have you been looking for short run commercial print items? We have 'em! Buy small quantities of custom designed announcements, bookmarks, full-color letterhead, greeting cards, and post cards. They're printed digitally for fast delivery and outstanding quality and price.
* We've added a new class of stock business documents including mailers, LazerStock, VersaSeal, HCFA forms, and integrated products for all your business document needs.
* This is an election year and everyone should vote for the candidate of their choice! You can get the word out with a wide range of affordable election labels that include bumper stickers, lapel labels, name badges, and bend and peel business cards.
We continue to offer a full line of patriotic labels and American flags -- now on sale.
Don't delay! Take advantage of our dramatically lowered prices while they last.
dilbeckmarketing.clickprint.com -- A service of Dilbeck Marketing in association with Clickprint.com.
Thanks!
12:26:07 AM
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 |
Whether you're an advertiser using pay per click ads on Google or you're a webmaster hosting Adsense ads on your websites, you'll want to know about the new Adsense updates that Google recently released.
Rather than writing about it myself, I'm going to refer you to Ken Evoy's explanation of Adsense and how these changes can be beneficial to you, especially from the viewpoint of a webmaster using these ads to add another stream of income.
Adsense is an important part of my strategy for monetizing my website traffic. If you have a site with any significant traffic, I'd urge you to learn more about Adsense and see if it makes sense to use it to add another stream of income from your site.
The new features make it even better than it already was.
Google has added several things we've been wanting since Adsense was first introduced.
3:27:57 PM
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3:10:07 PM
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Saturday, March 20, 2004 |
I'm sitting here this morning sipping from a steaming mug of PurJava coffee and thinking about how you can most easily get started in marketing affiliate programs on the Internet.
Perhaps you're just getting started and are looking for a way to get your message out without having to learn how to build a website and build traffic to your site.
Maybe a good starting point would be to create and maintain a blog on a regular basis. As you probably know, a blog (short for web log) is an online journal or diary that is displayed in reverse chronological order (last item shown first) and can be as easy to create and maintain as sending email or participating in an online discussion forum. If you can write clearly and put text into a box on your browser, then you can maintain a blog.
I truly believe in blogs for business and personal purposes. Currently, I maintain about a half-dozen blogs. Search engines tend to like them and, if you post quality content, you'll attract a group of regular readers.
For the blog newbie, I believe blogger.com offers the easiest introduction and the simplest software. It's easy to set up and easy to update. When you learn more, you can customize the look of the site and add links to other sites. Be sure to turn on the syndication feature.
The last time I checked, you could have as many blogs as you want at blogger.com. I tend to write about anything that interests me, and it is usually business related, but sometimes I get a burr under my saddle and just want to rant about something!
I think my last rant was either about spam or about people who don't protect their systems from viruses, thus making it more difficult for all of us.
You can see my blogger.com blog at johndilbeck.blogspot.com.
Next up on the list, and my personal favorite is Radio UserLand, which costs $40 per year. It's a more powerful blogging system and you can have multiple categories so that, if you -- like me -- have many different interests, the computer will automatically sort them for you by simply selecting a check box for each category for which you want a message to be routed. You can choose one or more categories for each posting. Dave Winer, founder of UserLand and one of the chief architexts of Clay Basket, which became Frontier and Manila, which then became Radio Userland, created one of the first content management systems for the Internet that was affordable. He was a co-creator of RSS, and had one of the very first blogs.
Radio Userland is more powerful than Blogger.com, has an annual fee, and takes longer to learn. Unlike Blogger.com, RU is a downloadable program that runs on your computer. It's available for several platforms including Windows and Mac. You can download it and use it for a month for free to try it out.
Part of your $40 annual fee pays for up to 40 MB of webhosting on a public server. You can see my RU blog at radio.weblogs.com/0133364/.
I started out a long time ago with Clay Basket, which was the first content manager I ever encountered that was reasonably priced. It was free! It took a long time to wrap my tired old brain around the concept, however.
As the next couple of years progressed, Dave and his team introduced Frontier and Manila, which were, and still are, very powerful content managers. Frontier ran on a particular machine as a user application and Manila was designed for servers and could even allow multiple authors to publish to the same site under the control of one or more editors.
My first weblog is still hosted on one of the first publicly-available Manila servers at EditThisPage.com, but they no longer offer hosting services. You can get a free 14-day trial of using Manila to see what it's all about if you like. At this time, I'm not aware of any commercial Manila hosting services, but the program can be licensed for about $900 per year and you can host as many sites as you'd care on your own server, if you find that of interest.
My Manila website is at johndilbeck.editthispage.com and I update it on a semi-regular basis.
If I only had access to one blog service or software, I'd choose Radio UserLand without a second thought. It has all the power and features I need for blogging, and I also generate all of my static websites using its advanced website building tools. I'm currently managing over 4,000 web pages on a dozen sites and all of them are stored in the Radio UserLand database. It's like no other web management system I've ever encountered. Nothing else even comes close for the sites I like to build.
(Now, if you're just going to concentrate on building one website, I'd have to steer you to Site Build It! or Host4Profit. They don't provide blogging services, but you could have Coranto (discussed below) installed at Host4Profit.)
I have used a program called NewsPro in the past on several sites to maintain a blog, but the lead developer disappeared and the program fell into limbo. This program is a set of PERL scripts that may be hosted on any commercial webhosting service that supports PERL.
You can see one of these blogs on my brother's news page at GeorgiaDragRacing.com/news/.
Since the demise of NewsPro, which was very popular, a team of developers around the world extended it into a new program called Coranto that has much more capability -- at the cost of being more difficult to install and configure. I spent the month of December getting it to run on a couple of my sites, including my main site. It has the capability of generating a static web page for each message I post, and Google loves blogs. The more I post, the more little strands I leave out on the web for people to find me. This will work for you, too.
You can learn more about Coranto at the unofficial site at coranto.gweilo.org.
I really like Coranto, but it took me about a month to really get the hang of it and to learn to configure it to take advantage of just some of its power. You can see some of my Coranto blogs at JohnDilbeck.com/news/, DilbeckConsulting.com/news/, and DetailsNow.com/news/. I'll be installing this script on more sites as I have time.
Even now, though, it takes me most of a day to install and configure Coranto, even for a basic blog.
On JohnDilbeck.com, I went a step further and used the advanced feature of not only including each posting into the normal blog and archives, but also of creating a single stand-alone static page with specific keywords for that story. This is just like creating a normal web page with all the meta tags that make it easy for the search engines to find and index it. You can see this in action by going to JohnDilbeck.com/news/ and clicking one of the headlines in the left column. On my other sites using Coranto, it will take you to the story in the weblog or the archives, but on JohnDilbeck.com, it will take you to the stand alone page for that story, which is also included in the archives. One example is at Cognigen introduces new products.
Once installed and configured, Coranto provides outstanding features and excellent quality. It's a free product and may be too technical for many people to install on their websites. If you go to coranto.gweilo.org you can find the links to the support forum, and you can probably find someone there who will be happy to install and configure it for your site -- for a reasonable fee. If you're really trying to build traffic to your site, I recommend Coranto configured to create stand-alone static pages for every article you post.
(Please don't contact me to help you with this. I just don't have the time.)
Another possibility is DK3.com - Webmasters Resources which offers several things of interest -- both free or ad-free paid services -- including a complete Web Portal, webhosting, discussion groups, mailing list and more. The Web Portal offers the most power, but also takes the most effort to learn and use. I have a free portal that I've played around with and later this year plan to develop a site based around SFI and its opportunity and products.
I haven't done much with the portal I have there, but I'm surprised at how well it ranks in a couple of the search engines with practically no effort on my part, so far. You can see it at John Dilbeck Recommends. It is more complicated than a blog, and provides many of the same services as Dave Winer's Manila. This portal is open-source software and you can find it by searching for PHP-Nuke.
Eventually, I'll be using this site to recommend books, services, tools, and so forth to help folks build their home businesses.
When I was just getting started a few years ago and had no money to spend on this, I made extensive use of the free tools offered by Bravenet.com and even though I'm not using their tools these days, I recommend them highly. They've been around forever and look as if they are a good choice, especially when you're just getting started.
I may still have a free site hosted by them. Let's see. Nope. It's gone. So, let's see what it takes to rebuild it from scratch starting at 11:32 AM. First, go register for the free hosting. Then check out the free and paid templates -- no need to design it from scratch.
(Let me say this about free templates: be very careful. I've researched a dozen or more sources of free templates, and I found many of them to have javascript attached to the links so that no matter what you think you're linking to, it's going to link to what they have pre-programmed. If you use a free template, be sure to get it from a reputable source, and Bravenet.com is as reputable as they come.)
Ok, since I like simple blue designs for my websites, I found a template on the first page that I liked. I moved it to my favorites page and clicked on the button to upload it to my new free website at free site hosted by them. It took only a couple of minutes from clicking the button to upload the template to being able to view the new site. Not bad.
Now, let's go to the hosting manager and see what I can do to spruce it up and link to a few of my sites. The Visual Editor didn't work on my Mac, but to be fair that may be because I have a lot of options turned off in my browser. I limit what javascript can do and don't run java. If you use a Windows machine, it will probably work just fine for you. (But, I don't know that for sure.)
So, let's try the Text Editor.... Nope, didn't work for me, either. This isn't unusual since most sites ignore Mac users when programming custom tools.
So, let's download the file, edit it locally and re-upload it. How do I do that? Let's try the File Manager.... Nope.
OK. What happens if I enable Java and try the editor, again?
Well, it's been an hour. Enabling Java didn't make any difference. It's not working on my Macintosh. So, enough of that. Let me know if it works for you using your PC, OK? Feel free to discuss it in the appropriate section of my forum.
In addition to free webhosting, they have a new service they call their web journal, which is a cross between a blog and a portal. It looks like it will do everything you can do with blogger.com and some of the things you could do with a portal from DK3.com.
Yesterday morning, after writing the message on a discussion forum that became this article, today, I created my Bravenet.com-hosted web journal at johndilbeck.bravejournal.com and I'm happy with how easy it was to set up and how well it works -- even with a Macintosh.
I find that I get good results from my various blogs, discussion groups, mailing lists, and websites. Blogs are the easiest to maintain, and can be used to start building your mailing list -- which in the long run will become your most valuable asset. I'll save discussion of this topic for another article.
I'm very interested in this topic and have been blogging since before there was a word for it.
I'm sure there are other excellent blog services and tools available. The main thing I would look for is whether they are well-indexed by Google and/or Yahoo before I invested a lot of time or effort into creating and maintaining my blog.
Anyone who doesn't have at least one blog is missing a very good opportunity for marketing on the Internet. As long as you update it on a fairly regular basis and write something interesting with truly useful information, it will be indexed regularly by the search engines and your visitors will come back. The more you can get them to interact, the better the whole system will work.
Give quality content first, build traffic, PREsell your offers, and then monetize it.
All the best,
JD
(Ordinary people are making extraordinary money working from home on the Internet! Go to 21stCenturySales.com and sign up for my newsletter. Do it today!)
2:11:35 PM
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© Copyright 2005 John L. Dilbeck.
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