Get Response

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I recently had someone ask me what software I use for my email marketing. The answer is Get Response.

I have been using Get Response for over a year and have had absolutely no problem with it what-so-ever. Not one single thing has made me consider changing to another provider.

I started off running my email campaigns using the autoresponder service that comes with my DreamHost webhosting account. That was OK to experiment with, but was a bit clunky and had a very DIY feel to it.

The great thing was that when I started up with Get Response, I could just import all the email addresses and names and send a broadcast email to my old list telling everyone to shift across.

Also, autoresponders that come with webhosting are pretty basic and just don’t cut it when it comes to doing some more advanced techniques with email marketing – such as sending out scheduled emails and other cool things.

One of the coolest things you can do with Get Response is set up scheduled emails like e-courses. This is how it works:

  1. Visitor signs up for you email newsletter.
  2. Visitor gets confirmation request email. Clicks it to confirm that they want YOU to tell them more about stuff they can spend their money on.
  3. You have a whole bunch of emails full of valuable content set up in Get Response that are triggered to be sent out to new subscribers every few days.
  4. Visitors come back to your site even though they may have forgotten all about it.
  5. They buy products you are affiliated with, or click AdSense .. or do something else that is profitable for you.
  6. This pays you monthly Get Response fee several times over each day :)

Do You Need an Autoresponder?

Well if you have a website (or a few niche websites) and are making money from them, then YES you definitely need an autoresponder like Get Response. If you are passing up the opportunity to collect email addresses from people who want to hear more about the information you have on your website, then you are passing up the opportunity to increase your bottom line.

We are not talking about email spamming here. Let me say this again:

If you are passing up the opportunity to collect email addresses from people who want to hear more about the information you have on your website, then you are passing up the opportunity to increase your bottom line.

People who end up on your list will have volunteered their email address, and then confirmed that they want to hear more from you. They would have to click on a confirmation link in their inbox before you can send them anything.

People who want to hear from you, about a niche product, generally have money to spend on those products.

Is An Autoresponder Expensive

No. If you have website content that is allready making you money, then if you can’t decide whether or not you want to spend just $15 a month on your Get Response Autoresponder, then you are fooling yourself.

Honestly, if you have money making content, you can sign up with Get Response right now and spin that content into an e-mail course, set up an opt in form and start getting repeat visitors (who WANT MORE OF YOUR CONTENT) to come back and make you more money.

Also, whenever there is a hot new product in your niche, you will be the first to let you subscibers know about it, and you will pick up the commissions.

I believe they have a 100% money back guarantee, and I think they may even have a free trial.

And while I’m on the topic, I can highly recommend Inside The List as a top notch blueprint for making a living with Autoresponders and Email Marketing.

Now go and get started and leave a comment if you would like to ask anything.

Ideas Festival

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Gary Burton has just launched his newest website Ideas Festival.

If you already follow Gary, Oli and Daves blog, then you will know that you will definitely want to check out Ideas Festival.

Gary is going to give away ebooks that will be about creating and running your online business.

The first one is called Big Business on a Shoestring Budget, and is a pretty good one to start with as most people seem to start an online business with a minimum investment.

The book will walk you through the basics of buying a domain name, getting some website hosting, building a website, setting up and autoresponder, creating and info product and then marketing the product to make money. All while spending as little money as possible.

Squidoo Gets A Google Slap

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There’s a fair bit of information flying around about Squidoo getting penalized by Google for publishing spam. So that’s why mine are getting less traffic!

It’s been no secret that it is super simple to rank for just about anything by creating a Squidoo lens with your keywords and sending your hapless visitors off through your affiliate links.

I’ve been using it for some time with great results and have found ways to knock other lenses off the top spots and secure double listings on page 1 of Google.

However all good things must come to an end and Squidoo is taking steps to weed out the spammers.

Which is great news. Now all the bottom feeders will bugger off to find another great thing to spam and the rest of us can get smart and find ways to stay in Squidoo and snap up all the great lens titles that will become available.

Here are some ways to stay in Squidoo:

  1. Write good content. You will just have to bite the bullet and write a good Squidoo lens. It will take a little longer, but remember that it should stay there for ever making you money and traffic.
  2. Don’t put blatant affiliate links in the lens. Buy a domain and send your visitors there – and then off to the merchant site.
  3. Make more than 3 modules .. or you won’t be published. Well that’s not too tricky.
  4. Proxy Servers – Squidoo will be monitoring IP addresses to identify multiple accounts. If you must create heaps of lenses, then you may want to consider using proxy servers when creating and logging into your accounts.

Of course, if Squidoo gets totally booted out of the Google index then all of this will be useless, since you are relying on search traffic for visitors.

And remember, Squidoo is not the only website that can be used for this sort of thing. Little gems can be found all over the place when you are doing your keyword research and competitor analysis.

For more information on the Squidoo Slap, visit the following websites:

Google acting against Squidoo due to spam.
Google Filters Squidoo Lenses?.
The Squidoo Slap.

Blogging To The Bank 2

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Blogging To The Bank 2Rob Benwell has released Blogging To The Bank 2. I have the original Blogging To The Bank, and allthough there was nothing ground breaking in it – at least nothing that can’t be learned from a few of the better forums and blogs, I did think that it threw a few interesting ideas around.

Since Blogging To The Bank 2 is only costs $47, I though I would give it a whirl and write up a review here.

First off, the information in Blogging To The Bank 2 is not rocket science. So, if you are already making money from blogging, I would say that you do not need to buy this book.

However, I myself make my money from blogging, and am always on the lookout for new or variations on money making ideas that I use in my blogging – which is the reason that I bought it. And Blogging To The Bank 2 has enough information on this so that I am not going to request a refund :)

There are also some reasonable bonus items that attracted me to purchase it – namely the Article Submitter software, some PLR articles (always handy) and Blog Announcer Pro (not entirely sure what this is, but it looks interesting).

Ok. If you are fairly new to affiliate marketing, and you are able to follow through on using somebody elses strategy, then I can pretty much assure you that you will make money using the techniques outlined in this book. I know because I have several blogs that I have not even touched for a year and they continue to make money day after day. This is what Blogging To The Bank 2 is pretty much about. If you can get a blog earning money, then it is just a case of rinsing and repeating until you are making as much money as you need or want.

Blogging To The Bank 2 shows you how to:

  1. Set up your webhosting
  2. Install wordpress
  3. Do your market research – getting keywords etc.
  4. Creating and aquiring content for your blog
  5. Marketing and promoting your blog to get traffic
  6. Some basic WordPress SEO techniques

Like I said before, none of this is especially advanced. But if you are an affiliate marketing newbie, it could take you several weeks to get this info from forums and blogs (And thats why I read E-books).

So take a look at Blogging To The Bank 2 and check it out further.

5 Steps To Increase Your PPC ROI With My Free PPC ROI Calculator

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5 Ways To Increase PPC ROIHere are 5 ways that I use my Online PPC ROI Calculator to help increase the ROI of my PPC campaigns with Pay Per Click advertising such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing. Incidentally, this article is my submission for the ProBlogger Top 5 Group Writing Project.

The first thing that we need to do is select a product to advertise for our PPC Campaign. Since this is about PPC, I’ll use Keyword Elite as the product.

  1. Find out the variables for the product. We need to get the amount we will earn per sale and the conversion rate. In the case of Keyword Elite, we will be earning $97 per sale. But we don’t have access to the conversion rate, so let’s err on the side of caution and say that it is 1%. This means that for every 100 visitors to the sales page, we will sell 1 copy of Keyword Elite. We can now enter 97.00 into the Amount Earned per Conversion field and 1 into the Conversion Rate field of the calculator.
  2. Next complete the Number of Clicks and CPC (Cost per Click). Let’s say that we are going to test that 1% conversion rate by buying 100 clicks at $0.50 per click. Now push the Calculate PPC ROI button to get the results. For data we have entered we get a ROI of 86%. This means that for every dollar that we put into our PPC campaign, we get $1.86 back. Which is not too bad really.
  3. Now lets find what the break even investment amount is. To do this you need to tweak the CPC (Cost per Click) field until you get a ROI of 0%. To save you time, I will tell you know that the break even CPC for this case is $0.93. So that means that you can safely bid up to 93c and in theory you will not lose any money.
  4. You can now start getting creative with your numbers. If you can increase the conversion rate by 1% by improving your ad copy, you will see that for CPC of $0.50 your ROI is going to increase to 272% – i.e. for every dollar you spend on advertising, you will get back $2.72 or an net profit of $136.00 on a spend of just $50.00. So that shows us that we should definitely be working on our ad copy!
  5. The next step is to test, test, test with different configurations of variables. Use the calculator to help you construct your ad campaigns, find products that are worth promoting and avoid products that are going to send you bankrupt.

Finally, please leave a comment to let me know if the calculator is not working properly or whether you can think of any enhancements to make it more useful for you. Now go out and make your fortune with PPC Affiliate Marketing!

Online PPC ROI Calculator

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I have just uploaded my Online PPC ROI Calculator. It’s origin is from a spreadsheet that I use when planning my PPC campaigns, to work out how high I can bid on keywords.

It works on the basis that you know the following variables:

  1. The amount you will earn from a sale.
  2. The projected conversion rate of the product. You can often get this from the merchant.
  3. The number of clicks you are going to buy.
  4. How much you will pay for a click.

In return for this data, the calculator will give you:

  1. The gross earnings from your sales.
  2. The total amount spent on clicks.
  3. How much money you profited or lost.
  4. Your return on investment.

It’s pretty basic at the moment. If anyone would like me to develop it a bit more, then leave a comment with what you reckon would be useful.

Likewise, I’d be keen to hear any feedback as to whether it is working properly (or not).

Search Engine Optimization With PHP

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Search Engine Optimization With PHPThis was an exciting week because I received my review copy of Search Engine Optimization With PHP by Jaimie Sirovich and Christian Darie. SEO Egghead (aka Jaimie Sirovich) mentioned a couple of months ago that he wanted to hear from people who were interested in reviewing the book, so I immediately sent him my request. And I was super happy to receive the book shaped package in my mailbox from the USA as he mentioned that the publisher may not dispatch overseas.

Anyway, the book gets a big thumbs up from me. I could not have arrived at a better time as I was needing to do some SEO friendly URL rewriting in the .htaccess file. There is a whole chapter devoted to this and it managed to turn a previously seemingly impossible to learn task into something that took me just 15 minutes to implement. I think I’m starting to get regular expressions sorted out too thanks to the book.

So far I have got through the following chapters:

  • Provocative SE Friendly URLs – Very handy explanation of how to implement dynamic URL rewriting with regular expressions and htaccess – and I started implementing these straight out of the book.
  • Duplicate Content – Very handy information on how to avoid it. If you are implementing database driven website, then you really need to take a good look at whether you are creating duplicate content.
  • Black Hat SEO – I always like reading about Black Hat SEO. However, this chapter is more about how to avoid it or fall victim to it. However, How-not-to-do-it guides are often the most informative :evil:
  • Link Bait – This is really cool if you are a PHP programmer and not a master copywriter. Most of the resources I have read about link bait involve being creative with your pen. This has useful tips about how you can create some cool stuff with PHP to attract the link love.
  • Cloaking, Geo-Targeting, and IP Delivery – Another great chapter on what is sometimes considered part of the dark arts. Including lots of useful code to get started.
  • Simple Regular Expressions – This is actually an appendix to the book, but very handy none-the-less.

That probably covers just 1/4 of the book.

If you are a PHP programmer and are wanting to develop SE friendly websites, then you should really consider getting this book.

One thing that would have been handy is a disk with the source code for the extensive coding examples in the book. I’m not sure if this is because mine is a review copy so was not shipped with a CD. I’ll dig around and see what I can find.

Get Search Engine Optimization With PHP here.

Who Loves Money

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Who Loves MoneyI have just bought the Who Loves Money eBook and am reading it now and will post a review ASAP.

Who Loves Money is written by Kyle and Carson, the same guys who did Beating Adwords and Inside The List. I like both of these products and regularly refer back to them for information. On that basis, I pretty much bought Who Loves Money on the strength of these 2 books.

Like I said, I have just started reading Who Loves Money, so drop back soon if you want to see what I think of it.

In the meantime, check out the Who Loves Money website and see what you think.

You can also see my Beating Adwords and Inside The List reviews here too if you like.

Linking Up

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Thunderbird 2 is go. FAB.

Darren interviews Gina Trapani, who incidentally, notified me (via lifehacker) that Thunderbird 2 was released.

John talks about the Next Big Thing. Read it if you are thinking of developing any Web 2.0 stuff in the near future.

Burt has launched WP Blog Announcer. I developed something similar for personal use that autoposts to blogs with content from affiliate data feeds. Hmm … I’m wondering if I should package it up and sell it?

Jeck shows how to improve your neck rotation in less than 30 seconds. I tried it and I think it works. PS. Jeck, you should get a site map for your blog :)