If you’re a frequent visitor to my site, you’ll know that aside from affiliate marketing, my other gig is that of product creator – developing information products – books, reports, videos, courses – which are delivered digital. The majority of the online world calls these “e-book” or “ebooks”.
Information can be found all over the internet and begs the question “Why would anyone pay for something that can be found free on the internet?”
The simple reason is that if you’re merely repackaging a blog post, a wikipedia entry, a google news story or a mp3 download, you’re not adding value and you might as well give it away for free.
On the other hand, if you’re adding value to the process, by organizing information, providing advanced applications to a basic technique or providing a comprehensive case study AND your customer gets value out of the process, you are more than justified in charging for your products.
There’s been a recently trend among bloggers and internet marketers to jump on the “I want to build a list” bandwagon. A common incentive to get people to join a list is to say “I’ve written a report on (topic), get access to this report by joining my mailing list now!”
I’ve experimented in the last week joining a number of lists. In some cases, the promised report hasn’t shown up.
In many cases, the report has been nothing short of disappointing. Just because you can hammer out, copy 5 pages of text, convert it into a PDF and offer it online, does not make it a “report” or a “book”. That’s like saying you can buy a smashed-up race car and say you’re a Ferrari owner. It is technically correct, but just so wrong.
–
Here’s my take on the issue:
If you’re going to do anything (free or paid), do it (more…)
Talk to any marketer and chances are that they’ll have a stash of domain names for projects that may likely never materialize. Talk to the enthusiastic ones and they might have a couple of hundred domains registered at their domain name registrar.
I’ve just renewed another 7 of my current ones for another year at Namecheap, using the coupon code GOLDDEAL (good for renewals if you have more than 50 domains) which saves you a little under $1 in registration costs.
And I’ve picked up a new one using the Namecheap December 2008 coupon code THREEKINGS, saving about $1 too.
(If you’re looking for great value webhosting, check out Bluehost, which was my first shared webhosting account and I still keep it around, even though I have a dedicated server now).
The next step is to start planning and scheduling time for doing something with the domains. A couple of the partners I’m working with are going into a consolidation phase and weeding down the number of projects each person is working on – no more than 2 major projects – which will go a long way to maintain focus. It’s a great idea in my opinion.
At this time of the year with Christmas and New Year’s reducing the number of official work days in December, has your productivity been affected? Especially for those of us who are tethered to our computers, either because we’re:
- Working
- Hosting/calling in to a conference call
- Playing games
- Watching a movie
- Going through our business balance sheets
- Coordinating with our remote operations team
Or some other activity of your own choosing, I have found that I spend about 1.5 to twice as much time in front of my computer as I spend sleeping on my bed every day.
So do the holidays represent a boon or bane to the internet marketing continually building their business (especially during the holiday shopping season).
Specifically, Do the holidays disrupt your business momentum and do either you and/or your business suffer as a result?
With the 24×7 nature of the internet, it’s inevitable that there’ll be a number of casualties (direct or indirect) are suffered along the rush to be the first and #1, especially in a high stakes game where “Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.”
In the words of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington: “I haven’t died yet,†although he’s (more…)
It’s hard to imagine Kelly McCausey who’s well-established in the Work-At-Home Mom niche as struggling to pay her utility bills despite working full time as an office manager in 2002, but she’s certainly come a long way since then.
Her first attempts to promote her desktop publishing services over the internet did not take off as she’d expected, however, other opportunities came up that eventually led her to focus on the work-at-home mom (WAHM) niche.
Listen to how she got started and built her business up, including her current projects, such as Work At Home Moms Talk Radio and her new projects.
During the Friday Podcast, we talked about:
- How to plan for your success online
- Building your business from the first step and expanding it beyond
- How you can focus on a single market and maximize its profit potential
- Pitfalls you need to be aware of as you’re building your business
- Qualities to build a sustainable online business
Check out the Friday Podcast below:
You can find out more about Kelly at:
I saw Heather Paulson twitter about MrTweet yesterday and decided to check it out.
One of the potential pitfalls about Twitter is to make a snap judgement that the more followers you have, the better position you’re in. While this might be true in some cases, I think twitter followers are just like any other type of online traffic – quality massively outweighs quantity any day of the week.
That’s one of the reasons why the new Twitter tools which (more…)
Independent blog InsiderFacebook has recently mentioned that Facebook users have topped 140 million, up from an earlier 130 million at the start of the month.
With an estimated 700,000 new users joining the social network each day in recent weeks, it appears that Facebook has achieved critical mass.
Raw numbers don’t tell the entire picture though.
Anecdotal evidence from affiliates suggests that the FB Ad review team are working doubly hard to slap down new ad campaigns in response to user complaints. In particular a common refrain is that new campaigns which are similar to existing campaigns are being rejected.
This is happening while older ads which seem to violate (more…)
