- - - - - Sponsor - - - - -
Rick Butts (yeh that's his real name) has 11 videos showing how to blog for profits. Using a secret "pinging" method, which Rick shows in the videos, he can get Yahoo to spider within hours. Google comes in a day or so.
If you want to be "master of your domain" and have the search engines come running like calling a puppy, this video series is for you.
Ready to create a blog & go blogging? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/rbv
But wait... that's not all! Once you have your site up and running, you can now blog and ping automatically. Programmer Jonathan Leger took Rick's videos and created a super tool to spider your site, blog your pages, ping them, submit them to Google, and send you a detailed progress report automatically. Now you can get your entire site crawled in just a couple of days, without having to do any of the work.
Want to blog and ping automatically? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/rbb
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News, Views and Clues
Writing a newsletter is a lot like creating a sculpture. First lop off the big pieces. Then chisel in the detail. Sand down the round parts. Then get super fine grit sandpaper into the tiny holes. Usually it takes the better part of a week...Today's newsletter is not like that, it's more like a quick sketch on a napkin of what the statue would have looked like... if I had time to carve it. But I simply ran out of time. I've been swamped with work.
So you'll probably notice this issue doesn't flow as smoothly, as I'm blasting it off in less than a couple of hours. And then I have to get back to "work." Ok, on with the show...
Combustion Hosting Out Of the Business
As many off you heard, Combustion Hosting got out of the hosting business, affecting me and several friends. Dang! Not again!
I seem to have the worst luck with hosting companies. Seems the life expectancy for the ones I select have been about one year. Although this isn't the topic of this newsletter, it does serve to illustrate a point later on.
About a week before the end of the month, I received a "follow up" phone call from my hosting company. They asked if I had received their email last month. The one saying they were "getting out of the hosting business."
Notice they're not going "out" of business, they changed their business model and decided to get out of the ultra competitive hosting business by the end of the month. Looking at the calendar, that gave me exactly one week to research and find a new host for all my marketing sites, back up and transfer all data, set up new control panels, pointing the DNS servers and everything else.
Not fun or pretty, and I don't like it when things happen beyond my control. It's one of those "life" things like going to the dentist for a broken filling, or having the car breakdown (yea, both of which also happened). You just weather the storm the best you can, and do what you need to do.
What bugs me though, is that they notified everyone by email. I don't know about you, but I don't rely on email for "important" communications. When someone "changes their business model" and creates two weeks of work for me... I consider that important. Needless to say, pretty much everything else had to be put on hold during that time.
On top of that, my backup drive died and I had to get a new one and transfer all my sites, files, writing and data. I'm happy to say my original Mac drive continues to work flawlessly even though it's over four years old. The "third party" external backup drives seem to last about two years, as this is my third.
Lesson being... back up everything. You never know when your hard drive will toast itself. It's not a matter of "if" it's definitely a "when" issue. Backup on CD, DVD, another drive, I don't care how you do it... just be sure it gets done daily... ok?
Clickin it Rich 3.0 Upgrade Includes "Action Plan"
The other thing that kept me busy over the last month was rewriting Clickin' it Rich from the ground up. CIR has always had a lot of ideas, but the only thing missing was an actionable strategy.
In other words, people wanted to know, if I was starting from scratch tomorrow, with what I know now (over ten years experience on the web) tell us exactly step-by-step what you would do.
I'm happy to say I've done just that, with the new Clickin' it Rich Action Plan. I clearly detail three actionable strategies or "Tracks" you can follow. Here's what you get in the package:
Clickin' it Rich 3.0 - Completely rewritten, revised and expanded with 27% more content.
Bonus #1 - The new 30 page Action Plan, follow Fast Track #1 and you could be making money online in as little as five hours.
Bonus #2 - Keyword Hotlist - These motivated searchers are looking for immediate solutions to their problems. (Hint: Sell them the solution using Fast Track #1)
Bonus #3 - The Top 25 Markets, a list of the hottest product and service categories for 2005.
Bonus #4 - The original Clickin' it Rich MP3 audio interview.
Bonus #5 - How to Write a Profitable Newsletter
Bonus #6 - Quick & Easy eBook Publishing
If you purchased Clickin' it Rich "within the last three months," you get the upgrade absolutely free of charge. Just reply to this newsletter with your Clickbank receipt number and I'll send you the new download page, username and password.
If you purchased Clickin' it Rich "prior to three months ago," I do have an upgrade path for $19.95. Just reply to this newsletter with your Clickbank receipt number and I'll send you complete upgrade information. But hurry, the upgrade price will be going up as well, once I get the last two bonuses done.
If you've "never" purchased Clickin' it Rich, now is the perfect time. Early testimonials tell me the "Action Plan" alone is worth far more than the purchase price. And I just got permission from Clickbank to sell this course for $100... so get it for $49.95 while you can, and you'll get the other bonuses as soon as they're ready.
Want to be Clickin' Rich? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/cir
I am NiceBOT... Please Insert Keyword
Remember NicheBOT, the fun keyword research tool? It's the free "little brother" version of the mighty Nichetracker. Guess what? It's not so "little" anymore.
Jim and Chayden have added whole slew of additional research features, like a Thesaurus, Lateralus, Keyword Live, and best of all... Google Research, which shows the top 15 listed sites for any keyword phrase, along with Page Rank, total backlinks and total number of pages from the site, that Google has indexed. And believe it or not, all of these tools are free.
NicheBOT Keyword Research Tool ==> http://www.cdzn.com/nbt
The Keyword Live is a lot of fun. You can watch what other people are searching for in real time. It can help jumpstart some ideas, but after staring at it for 10 minutes, it dawned on me that most people don't have a freakin' clue when it comes to keyword research. Their brains are stuck on products rather than identifying problems and selling the solutions.
(The first section of my new "Action Plan" shows exactly how to do keyword research using NicheBOT or Nichetracker, and identify which "motivational" keywords lead to quick profits.)
The final tool they added to NicheBOT was the Google AdSense Tracker. This one is not free but very affordable and pays for itself within hours. So who's it for? Anyone with AdSense ads on their pages. Especially if you have a lot of them.
With the AdSense Tracker, you'll know which ads are earning the most money. It tracks every click on every domain, so you know exactly how your AdSense ads are performing, and it helps you truly gage the success of each AdSense design that you test. Is that cool or what?
Find out more about NicheBOT's AdSense Tracker here: ==> http://www.cdzn.com/ast
- - Adv - -
RSS
Made Easy
Want spiders to visit your website daily or even several times per day? Would you like your content to spread all over the world in a flash? Want other sites linking to you like crazy, without linking back? Want to get listed in Yahoo's directory for free?
If you've been putting off learning about blogging and RSS tools, then you need RSS Made Easy. It will show you how some my friends are getting tons of traffic and incoming links, not within months... but just a few days.
Ready for easy to learn blogging and RSS? ==> http://www.cdzn.com/rme
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Affiliate Marketers Handbook 2005
James Martell finally upgraded his Affiliate Marketers Handbook 2002 to a new 2005 version. That makes me really happy and comes as a bit of a surprise, as last time I talked with James' office no update was in the works. Perhaps they were keeping it a secret. ;-)
In case you haven't heard about this course, it's a PDF ebook on how to create giant sites with hundreds of pages. It allows you to compete in ultra competitive keyword categories.
It offers good advice on how to find and join good affiliate programs. And it explains how to link hundreds of article pages to increase your website’s link popularity.
Affiliate Marketers Handbook 2005 ==> http://www.cdzn.com/amh
Acrobat Reader 7.0
Adobe has upgraded Acrobat Professional and the Reader software to version seven. Having owned Acrobat since it first came out, I upgraded right away.
Free download Acrobat Reader 7.0 ==> http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
Probably the most useful thing is being able to highlight and markup ebooks, even if they've been password protected by the author. It even allows you to save the "markup" changes you made, making it easier to find important bits later on.
Firefox is on Fire
Open Source browsers almost hit the 20% mark of all visitors to my sites last month (Firefox + Mozilla + Netscape = 19.8%). This means you must proof all your work in an Open Source browser, or else you risk alienating a large and growing percentage of web users.
Like it or not, Explorer usage is falling like a rock. If you want to get rid of that old bloat and see what all the fuss is about, I suggest you download the Firefox browser.
Free download Firefox web browser. ==> http://www.mozilla.org
Once you start using it, you'll never go back to Ex plo der... er, I mean Explorer ever again.
Explorer Fails to Render CSS if DTD Missing
Speaking of Exploder... heh, heh, heh ;-) According to David McFarland, author of Dreamweaver MX 2004 (published by O'Reilly), "Every web page should begin with the proper doctype, DTD or document type declaration." Sound familiar?
(Remember back to last issue of this newsletter when I told you - how by adding the required DTD to my pages, 27% more of them got spidered and indexed, plus positioning in the search engines went up 5 to 8% as well?)
Here's another reason to use a DTD. David writes, "Many web browsers change the way they display a page based on the doctype. For example, without a proper doctype, Windows Explorer 6 falls into what's called quirks-mode, abandoning the correct display of CSS in favor of the quirky behavior of earlier Microsoft browsers."
So next time your beautiful HTML or CSS looks like a train wreck (graphics overlapping text, exploded formatting, etc) in Explorer and you can't figure out why, you might just need to add the DTD as the first line of code on your web page. David emphasizes, "If you include just one space before the doctype, some browsers revert to quirks-mode."
So now it's more important than ever to validate your HTML, not just for the search engines or your mental health, but for the user experience as well. Here's the free url to push button validate your pages:
Push button validate your web pages. ==> http://validator.w3.org/file-upload.html
Niche Site Confessions Revealed
And finally in the news, Codrut Turcanu released his second compilation style ebook called, "Niche Site Confessions Revealed." Yes, it's a corny title, a little tired and overused, but the info inside certainly isn't.
Internet marketing veteran Phil Wiley - even though he's not mentioned in the sales letter - wrote 32 pages for this ebook. For those of you who don't know Phil, he's got one of the longest running newsletters and knows more about niche marketing than just about anyone else online.
In fact, Phil's "Monthly Letter" is one of the few "marketing" newsletters that I still read. You can subscribe to Phil's newsletter here: http://www.ozemedia.com
Phil gives an exact account of how he finds niche markets and satisfies their demands with matching niche products. Even though I've been around a long time, I picked up more than just a few things.
Phil surprised me with the amount of detail he provided, along with all the tools and web sites he uses in his research. He also talks about staying out of trouble with Google AdSense and how he monetizes all his sites. Pretty juicy stuff if you ask me.
Along with the purchase of the Niche Site ebook, you also get Codrut's first compilation "Super Affiliates Confessions Revealed" featuring other big internet names.
So if you want to learn niche marketing from experts who have been there, done that, and are still "wearing" the t-shirt, pick up your own copy of Niche Site Confessions Revealed.
Niche Site Confessions ==> http://www.cdzn.com/nsc
- - Adv - -
Can raw beginners get top listings in Google?
Sure... you bet they can, and I have proof. Here's how beginners or anyone else, can get top 10 rankings, with no hype, or BS, even if you don't know anything about the internet, or making web pages.
Let SEO Website Builder do all the work for you. ==> http://www.cdzn.com/wsb
- - /Adv - -
Just how much email is not getting through?
Remember back to the beginning of this issue and the email notice from my hosting company getting lost? That brings me to the point of this issue. Just how much email getting filtered. Just how much email is not getting through?
It happens every day. People ask me why I didn't respond to their emails... what email? I never got it. Not even from my sister. Turns out you can't say the word "am@zing" not even in a family birthday invitation. It's worth three spam points.
But set aside spam for just a moment. How much email just gets lost, returned to sender, trapped, zapped or just bounces around the internet forever?
According to computer specialist Alan Zisman, a recent Australian University study set up a broad range of email addresses on several services and proceeded to send out hundreds of short - nearly contentless - email. They discovered that an average of 1.6% of email messages don't make it to their intended recipients.
Most services even failed to notify the sender, that the email never made it. One service failed to deliver an incredible 10% of all email. Note that this is not due to spam filtering, this is just email that fails to get delivered.
According to a study of 16 internet service providers by Return Path, an average of 19% of all legitimate email gets tagged as spam and tossed into junk folders, which rarely get looked at. When they do, most people select all and delete.
So if between 1 and 10% doesn't get delivered. And an additional 19% gets filtered, nearly 30% of all email has the potential of not getting delivered.
Sadly, a lot of these legitimate emails getting tagged as spam, are indeed transactions, orders, opt-in requests, confirmations, invitations, autoresponder courses, newsletters and other communications requested by the recipient.
I've learned that some .coms filter out every newsletter I send. Filters by Semantic and MXLogic stopped several of my recent newsletters from reaching subscribers. Another filter wiped out most of my Russian subscribers. Pretty much everyone at mail.ru is toast.
According to Aweber (the software I use to deliver newsletters), "In today's fight against spam, many ISP's filter emails using a technique called "content filtering". This filtering looks at the words, website links, and images that appear in messages and try to make a determination if that message is probably spam.
If they believe it is, that ISP may block the message from being delivered to the subscriber. A message that is incorrectly filtered is called a "false positive". This occurs when a subscriber has specifically requested this information but the ISP's filtering program mistakenly classifies it as spam."
They go on further to suggest "You should contact the ISP by email at: postmaster@domain.com. Uh yea... that would be like saying phone the government... well, at least they tried to help :-)
Sheesh, so what's a person to do? There are filters on the main internet service providers, my cable modem account and finally in my mail program. That's a lot of filtering going on. What's scary is that a domain renewal was almost missed, because all notices got filtered out.
I quickly set up some new email accounts. One for customers. One for family and friends. And a super important one to handle things like domain name renewals, hosting, money transfers, billing, banking and the like.
So with so much filtering going on, we decided to set up our own unscientific series of tests. We set up email accounts on all the usual suspects like Hotmail, AOL, MAC and a ton of other services. We sent two email, one with a 7 on the SpamAssasin scale, the other a lowly 3 on the same scale. (Anything under 5 is considered fairly safe.)
The result? The spammy one got filtered out somewhere along the many internet hops an average of 27.8%. That's pretty high. Turns out you can't say everyday things like: f.ree, am@zing, m0ney, what are y0u w@iting for, here's h0w y0u can.
I hope you figured them out, because I can't even say them or you wouldn't receive this newsletter. What's really ridiculous, is that there's even a one point spam penalty for the most traditional opening of "Dear Somebody." How sad is it when you can't even call someone "dear."
With the normal - low spam - email, still a very high average of 5.3% of email sent didn't make it through. Again, how sad is that... I wanted to send it, the recipient wanted to get it... but somewhere, some filter, set up by somebody in one of the hops along the way, decided "for me" the communication was spam.
Finally I decided to send the most recent issue of my newsletter to the email accounts I had set up for the experiment. I made sure my SpamAssassin score was a super low 0.2 (which is way less than 1.0) and considered extremely safe.
At first I was very happy, as a very low 3.2 % of my email didn't go through. But on the other hand I thought... hey wait a minute, if you have 35,000 readers, that's over 1,100 people that will never see the newsletter.
So I decided to set up another test. I'd look at the newsletters I'm subscribed to, and see which ones made to my inbox over the past couple of months. Here is how often they - and the internet - are successful in getting them to me...
Allan not so good at 60%
Phil nearly perfect at 95%
Ros dismal at 30%
Andy a hardy 85%
Ralph a mere 45%
Jim stopped cold at 0%
ClickZ a whopping 100%
Planet Ocean 100%
Ok, so obviously a lot of newsletters are not making it through. So why the differences? What people can do? What are the solutions?
As a publisher, you can start by using a reputable mailing system like Aweber. They usually include tools like SpamAssassin to calculate your total spam score before you send out the newsletter. It also highlights the offending bits making them easy to find and fix. One final check and you're usually good to send.
AWeber ==> http://www.cdzn.com/aws
Publishers can also send out a short notice, once the html version of their newsletter has been posted. So in the case of Ros and Andy, even though I miss a large portion of their newsletters by email, I still get the reminder 100% of the time and can read their newsletters online.
With Jim, there's obviously a filter along the way that's nuking everything from him, much like when I try to send email to Russia. When I noticed Jim's newsletter was missing, I subscribed under a different email address and then forwarded it to my main email address. This solved the problem, but unfortunately, Jim has no way of knowing I was having a problem.
Finally there are some alternative methods. ClickZ and Planet Ocean get 100% delivery because they don't send the actual newsletter. It's just a little bit of text and links which lead to web pages containing the full stories.
Last of all, you can migrate to other technologies like some publishers. They've all but given up on email, and have started information feeds with RSS tools, created Blogs and switched to alternate methods like subscription based software that pushes its content to readers.
The conclusion? All in all, email "usually" still works for newsletters and casual communications. And it's not going away any time soon. But as you can see from my experiments, it's far from being reliable.
So do me and everyone else a favor. Next time if it's really important, like shutting off hosting, a delivery notice, or a birthday party... pick up the phone!
So let me ask you, how come you never answered my email? ;-)
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That's it for this issue my friend. Thank you for reading. We'll chat again soon. Until then, here's wishing you all the best for online success.
Michael Campbell
President & CEO Dynamic Media Corporation#108 - 383 East 37th Avenue Vancouver BC Canada
Providing successful marketing strategies since 1988.
For internet marketing advice phone +1 604 874-6655
Author of...
Revenge of the Mininet... Advanced linking diagrams and strategies for higher search engine positioning and increased revenue from affiliate programs.
Clickin' it Rich... The complete work from home business training system. Follow Fast Track #1 in the Action Plan and you could be making money online in as little as five hours.
Nothing but 'Net... From zero to $750,000 in less than a year, with virtually no advertising costs. This internet marketing strategy is now a free downloadable ebook.
Internet Marketing Secrets Newsletter... Learn how to harness the money making power of multiple internet revenue streams like search engines, affiliate programs, paid advertising, opt-in email, newsletters, ebooks and lot more in internet marketing secrets. Subscribe now and get a free lifetime membership.
Legal stuff... Copyright 2005 Dynamic Media Corporation. All rights reserved world wide. All trademarks and servicemarks are property of their respective owners. The information contained in this newsletter is the opinion of the author based on his personal observations and years of experience. Neither Michael Campbell or Dynamic Media Corporation assume any liability whatsoever for the use of or inability to use any or all of the information contained in this publication. Use this information at your own risk.