AndrewStark.com

As you know I recently read CrushIt where basically you create a blog about something that you’re passionate about.

So to help make this happen I bought Rob Benwell’s latest edition of blogging to the bank 2010

Now I’m going to be totally honest with you, and this is probably the strangest recommendation that you’ll read in the world of internet marketing.

When you visit the site close the window and click cancel so that you can buy the ebook for $27. You will then be presented with an offer for step by step video training with recurring billing of $29.95 per month. I’ve watched the first 2, and it’s really helped me identify a niche, pick keywords, and this niche has some great clickbank products that are massive sellers.

Now this coaching is the only reason to buy Rob’s product, if I’d just bought the ebook I would have been asking for a refund – remember this is clickbank and getting full refunds is super easy!

I found it to be a bit too generic with no real actionable points, the strategy outlined in crushit is probably better, and at $10.99 it’s more than half the price – and importantly it’s much easier to read about a physical blogging book whilst on the bog!

If you find this review useful remember to use the sexy bookmarks at the bottom, or be brave and leave a comment.

Hopefully I’ll be able to share what I learn from looking over Rob’s shoulder rather than trying to second guess it from reading the ebook. I’m really looking forward to the plug-ins he recommends, the traffic generation stratagies, buying and selling “short term blogs”, and how to outsource the article writing.

Happy Blogging

Andrew

p.s. here’s the download page for the free report that I’m going to be using for my listbuilding, it may give you a little hint about the niche that I’m going to be targeting.

So you made an amazing auto-responder email series, you wrote tons of brilliant articles, and you have an extremely catchy landing page that sucks in the leads. Yet somehow you’re getting almost no sells and you don’t understand why. Sound familiar? I know this is a pretty common problem, but it’s unfortunate that people still haven’t figured out what’s causing it.

I’ll try to explain a little of what’s happening to your sales throughout this article. Contrary to what you might be thinking – it is completely possible that your sales funnel is making tons of sales, but you’re not seeing any of the commission. Obviously this is a pretty big problem that you’ll want to take care of as soon as possible.

Basically what’s happening is this: the user is changing your affiliate ID to their own, or spyware on their computer is doing it. Both of these will stop you from getting credit for the sale even though you’re the one who made it. There’s no way that you can stop them from doing that, unless you cloak your link.

Link cloaking is when you program a redirect on your website that hides affiliate ID’s and makes it impossible for spyware or users to stop you from getting sales.

I hope you realize the difference this could make, you could be giving someone else all of your sales already. Instead of making money from your sales funnel you might be just handing it off to someone else.

Even if you make sales all the time without problems, some of them might still be stolen. It shouldn’t hurt anything to start cloaking your links so you lock in the sales. The problem is that it can be hard to make a good link cloak, unless you’re a programmer (or something of that nature).

Instead you can use one of the many link cloaking services on the internet, but I wouldn’t suggest you just use the first one that you find. Many of these will actually mess up the tracking cookies and you STILL won’t get credit for the sale. You need to make sure that you’re using a cloaking service designed for affiliate marketing – and there aren’t nearly as many of those.

I have heard horror stories of people who used redirection services such as TinyURL and Bit.ly – apparently they are notorious for often screwing up affiliate links and not giving you credit for any sales. Most other link shortening services will have these problems as well.

The best link cloaker is one that you can put on your own site so you don’t have to worry about anything breaking down or not working properly. As I mentioned earlier though, this can be difficult to make if you aren’t a programmer – or willing to pay one.

I recommend you go here and get this free report about link cloaking and the best services for affiliate marketers. I don’t know of any better place to learn what works, and what doesn’t.

Discover more about link cloaking in the free Cloak and Dagger Affiliate Secrets report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

So earlier this week I told you about a new service from my friends Matt & Tahir that helps you build up a massive twitter following.

To show you typical results I’m setting up the system on my test account – the image below shows you this account only has 2 followers!

I’ll post again with details of followers, and also more importantly details of the traffic I’ve generated.

Just so you know this current you will see that the Apple ipad is still dominating the trends, and I do think the name is rather unfortunate given what american women call their sanitory towels.

So I won a copy of “Crush It” from my twitter buddie AlanWho and although I’d seen the buzz on twitter when it came out it wasn’t something that made me go order a copy. Long story short this is a cracking little book, that everyone with a passion should read asap and embrace the world of social media.

Now I’m going to make my passion squeezepages, I was able to think of at least a dozen good headlines for blog posts, so I’ll be starting a new blog later this year to really drive traffic to my sites and share the many different ways of setting up profitable squeezepages for loads of different niche markets.

Please let me know what you’re passionate about, and if you leave a link to your opt-in page within the comment I’ll try to do a video critique for you to help you get better conversion, and make more cash.

Andrew

This married life is really hectic, but the plan for this year is to send you more content and quality offers rather than just hitting you all the time with offers for “shiney new things” where my commission is more important than if the product is any good.

BTW if you want more info on the reasons behind this paradigm shift then perhaps you should read Yaro Starak’s blog post (link opens in a new window)

I have made a video walk through of surfing ThumbVu, but thought I’d also give you the 5 reasons in writing in case I didn’t cover them in the video.

1. It’s all about the branding, not only do you get your pages seen, but you can really build up your social media profiles at the same time.
2. Watch out for the thumbnails with the border, these people are paying to get their pages seen, so start following them and do some proper networking.
3. If you have a smart phone you can be generating traffic to your site without being at your computer. Great if you have to spend time waiting about for the kids!
4. List building, having your opt-in form on the surfbar is brilliant, but I don’t think this option is available for free members.
5. Last but probably most importantly – Results! I’ve been looking at my TEtoolbox stats, and not only is ThumbVu delivering the traffic, it’s currently got the highest conversions, so please think long and hard about the upgrade – I took the 2nd option of $17 per month.

Hope this honest review will make you see the value in traffic exchange advertising.

Happy surfing

Andrew

p.s. I’ve installed sexy bookmarks, and it you like this video please give me a digg, and I’ll follow you back.

Developing content has always been a slow laborious process. It is not the writing that takes time it is doing the research. With so much material now being available at the touch of a button, the writer is swamped with search results. Wading through innumerable pages to find what you need and then organizing it in a useable manner takes hours. In fact, most of the time spent on content creation goes into the research.

It seemed that there was no way to escape this manual search for the huge amount of information that the internet presents. At least until now. Instant Article Wizard is a program that automates all this and does in a few minutes what previously took hours. This surprisingly inexpensive and easy to use program provides the content developer with all the material he or she needs to produce high quality content in next to no time. All the writer has to do is enter the article keywords and these with a few mouse clicks the program will locate the material that is needed, organize it into the opening paragraphs, the sub topics and the conclusion. All this material is then transferred to the word processor where the writer can make whatever changes and edits are needed to produce a complete high quality ready to use article.

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Instant Article Wizard will change the way website owners and content developers work. By freeing them of the drudgery of the research, it will allow for both a greater focus on the quality of the work as well as reducing the production time. The improved quality means that websites using this content will attract more viewers. And the time saving will allow website owners to devote more time to other aspects to their business and for writers who sell their articles to increase their output and income many times over. That’s a winning situation for everyone.

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For the last 2 weeks I’ve had no access to the internet, as the video shows I was in the Highlands getting married.

After 1 day back at work I’ve now got a couple of “snow days” as the 6 inches of snow mean that all the schools have shut – unlike Scotland cheshire council seem to just hope for the best and haven’t got any snowplough’s capable of clearing the roads!

Anyway enough ranting, I hope that you had a great christmas / hogmany and look forward to a profitable 2010.

Andrew

p.s. I just installed the sexybookmark plugin, so feel free to use it.