It’s great being a newbie! when you find something exciting to help in your business, it matters not if it’s eons old, you can just get giddy like you’ve just opened a christmas gift as a kid!

That’s how I felt when I stumbled onto Lucia’s LinkyLove. What this neat WordPress plugin does is remove the no-follow facility so that anyone who comments on your blog posts will create a backlink to your blog and you reciprocate! It encourages readers to comment!

So, when you see a ‘U Follow I Follow’ icon, go ahead and comment away as you’re gonna get backlinks to your blog as well! Is that cool or what??

Credit to Lucia .. Big Bucks Blogger
Go check out her blog, she’s got great content about blogs!

Make it a Great Day!

Bob Kimball

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I’m sitting here at my computer, sipping my first cup of coffee, and wondering what I’m gonna write about that would be of interest to readers of my blog. I’m thinking about all the facets of Internet Marketing: product creation, list-building, copywrighting, follow-up message writing, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, traffic generation techniques, niche marketing, keyword research, ppc,joint-venturing, give-aways, and seemingly the list could ramble on ad-infinitum! How can a person possibly get one’s head wrapped around all this stuff sufficiently enough to take the first step into this alluring, yet crazy world of Internet Marketing?? It’s no wonder 95% is the failure rate!

After a year of buying up everything I could afford to buy, lurking in dozens of forums and reading so many blog posts I’ve lost count, I’m just beginning to see the “Battle Fog” begin to lift!

What’s interesting is where all that ‘Fog’ came from. Innocently, I subscribed to a couple of Give-Away events about one year ago. I perused the ‘free’ offers of promises of ‘internet marketing greatness and massive wealth with my product’. Each time I succumbed to a good sale page, I freely gave my name and email address in exchange for the purported “Golden Nugget”. But as an uninitiated ‘Newbie’ I didn’t really understand what I was actually doing. I was commiting myself to the first stages of a massive avalance of endless ‘ the-greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread’ offers one could imagine! The feeding frenzy had begun. In the days and months to follow, dozens of hyped emails filled my inbox with offers for products that were making each sender a friggin’ fortune! That’s the ‘Fog’ to which I previously referred! The dust stirred up by the relentless pounding of incoming rounds of awesome offers had my vision and focus so clouded I strayed aimlessly, with wallet open, for several months! I spent lots, read a ton, realizing I was often reading rehased, out-dated garbage. After 6 months I was officially ” Information Overloaded”!

At that point, with gigabytes of product, some valuable, most trash, I realized I was doing exactly what scores of marketing ‘Gurus’ hoped I would do….buy everything that promised success. I then decided to take control of my destiny. I began to catalog all of the ‘product’ I had accumulated. Then, with a vengence, I began assessing each product. With a plan in hand, I gleefully began deleting. A tremendous feeling of euphoria began to envelope my very existence! Somehow, once I decided a product to be a ‘waste of my time and money’, the act of pressing the DELETE key made me feel more in control of my life again! A clarity of purpose arose and for the first time I believed, no…I KNEW I could do this business.

Presently, with more patience and a clear mission, the ‘Fog’ has completely cleared! Soon I will be productive! The real purpose of documenting my experience here is to ask you, the reader, to share your beginning experience in hopes other readers can benefit. So, I simply ask that you leave your comments on this post and let’s begin a meaningful dialog that might help others avoid these traps.

Make it a Great Day!

Bob

Did you know that according to the World Internet Usage and Population Data that as of there were approximately 1,262,032,697 online as of November 2007? How many more do you think have found
the Internet in 2008?

Stop and think about those numbers for a minute! There are more than 2 billion people online right now…that’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?

Now think about this for a minute…of those more than two billion people, how many of them have stopped at your Website and/or purchased one of your products or services?

Pretty depressing, right?

But don’t let it get you down – because if you take the time to put together an Internet Marketing campaign, you’ll stand a much better chance of making connections with a few more of them!

Let’s start by looking at the four different stages visitors to your Website go through when they’re online. Although they’ve been classified in different ways, the four basic stages can be described as:

Just looking

Thinking about buying

Ready to buy

Let’s start with the first one: Just Looking

People who are in this stage have something on their minds. They want something – usually information – and they’re probably not thinking about systematic keywords, or features of a particular product or service. They’re probably using very general one or two word searches to get more information about the niche or topic.

The best way to reach a visitor to your Website at this point in the game is simply to provide them with lots and lots of general information. Some ways of doing that would be:

* Writing articles about the topic

* Reviewing different products or services and posting them to your Blog

* Offering a free, informative newsletter about the niche topic

* Doing weekly or monthly Podcasts

* Doing free teleseminars and interviewing experts in the industry, or arranging to be interviewed.

The main thing to remember is to provide lots of broad information. The more questions you can answer for your visitor right now – the more they’re going to remember you as they move through the buying cycle – and the more they’re gong to perceive YOU as the expert in your industry or niche.

The Second Stage: Thinking about Buying

People who are in this stage of the buying cycle have the information they were looking for. They understand the basics, and now they’re starting to look for reasons to justify their purchase – they want to be convinced that they need it!

Something to keep in mind is that the larger and more expensive the purchase is, the more logical reasons you’ll need to be able to give them.

So to engage visitors who are thinking about buying, you’ll want to provide easy access to all the features of your product or service. If you’re selling cameras for example, this is where you’ll want to have lots of customer reviews, descriptions of the different benefits and features of the product and answer all the “how to” information.

For example, you’ll want to make it easy for someone to find out how they can buy your product or service, how you ship it, how much shipping costs and what your guarantee and return policy is.

You’ll want to give them the logical reasons for justifying the purchase at this point. (But don’t forget that you need to keep showing them what your product or service is going to do for them at the same time – so be subtle, but push the benefits here too.)

By answering their “how” questions, you’ll not only continue moving them through the buying cycle, you’ll also help to guarantee that you’re the one they’re going to want to do business with, because you’ve shown them how easy – and secure – you’ve made the buying process.

The Third Stage: Ready to Buy

If you’ve done your job right, the people who are ready to buy will move quickly and smoothly through your sales process – and come out on the other end as something completely new – your customer!

Here’s how to attract visitors who are ready to pull out their credit cards:

You’ve answered their “what” and “how” questions and they’re feeling safe about making an informed decision. So now you want to appeal to your visitor’s “emotional” side.

Here’s where you start piling on all the benefits and goodies and feelings of urgency!

Make sure you’re giving visitors “future pictures” to get them thinking about what your product or service is going to do for them, and how it’s going to make them feel.

Here are a couple of concrete examples: If you’re selling lawn services, for example, you’re not really selling a greener lawn. You’re selling pride in yourself, in your home. Becoming the envy of all your neighbors because of your beautiful yard!
Or if you’re selling tooth whitener, you’re really not selling whiter teeth. You’re selling sex appeal, and beauty and being instantly more attractive to the opposite sex. You’re appealing to the person’s needs to look nice and to have people think that they care about the way they look and feel.

See how easy that is?

When you’re piling on the benefits, don’t forget to take all the risk off the buyer’s shoulders. Offer a rock-solid guarantee – and be very clear about exactly what your guarantee is.

You’ll want to add a sense of urgency to the offer – something needs to be time – or quantity-limited. (People hate thinking that they’re going to miss out on a bargain.) And add enough – relevant – benefits that your visitor feels like they’d be a complete idiot to miss out on your deal.
That’s really all there is to it. By following these simple steps, you’ll be able to turn those low-down, internet marketing blues into a “Happy Happy Joy Joy!” song as you watch visitors to your Website – and your sales – hit the high notes!

As blogging and, in particular, blogging for profit becomes ever more popular amongst online entrepreneurs, we’re seeing new tools developed to assist in this process being released, what seems like every week.

In this post I’m going to talk about one such tool, Firepow Blogging Software,because I believe it might just be a cut above the rest in terms of it’s flexibility of use, and overall effectiveness in accomplishing the three primary aims of blogging – creating a blog, managing it or maintaining it, and getting traffic to it.

It was hard to know where to start with this post because there are so many individual features of this software that could be mentioned.

To give you a brief overview of how it works…

Firepow is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’ve used WordPress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get LOST in all the plugins and potential feature additions that CAN be made.

The first thing great about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work for you. The best 50 or so plugins from around the web have been programmed into the software so as to be automatically installed when your blog is.

That’s a good feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more – the software actually does that part for you too – so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added – VERY time saving!

The “Create” part of the process is also helped by the ability to create your own custom wordpress theme completely from scratch, with more functionality than we’ve seen from free theme generators EVER before – not to mention the ability to create your own categories from scratch, automatically create the perfect permalink
structure for SEO, and more.

Before even getting into the WordPress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search rankings of all your sites, and a task manager
that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when.

I dare say though that the best things happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have crazy abilities to make your post content better, easily being able to add relevant images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically building backlinks to your site) to your posts… and even that’s leaving alot out.

OR the crazy abilities to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and more still.

I feel like I’m getting too salesy in this post to you but I can assure even with everything you’ve read here, I haven’t even really touched the surface of what’s going on inside this thing called Firepow – heck we didn’t even get to the promotional tools.

The best thing I can probably do is tell you go to look at the darn thing yourself:

Firepow

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

I hope you’ve found the information here valuable, and don’t hesitate to leave your comments on Firepow here to share with others.

Here’s another free software program for my readers. It’s called Ultra Track and does a good job of tracking your campaigns, etc.

Visit this link to get your copy. You’ll need an unzipper to decompress it.

Enjoy!

Bob