Archive for the 'Internet Marketing' category
Bookmarks a mess? Get Powermarks
January 31, 2006One of my favorite programs for organizing bookmarks is Powermarks, by Kaylon Technologies, described as a “Bookmark Manager and Personal Search Engine for the Internet”.
Before I discovered Powermarks, I wrestled with Internet Explorer bookmarks, always trying to use it one way, but being forced to use it another way. I tried other bookmark organizers but always had the same problem - I wanted an easy way to find a bookmark, one that didn’t require me to know the URL. I mean, if I knew the URL I would go directly there. Or you had to put them in folders, then try to remember which folder you put it in. Ridiculous.
No, I wanted to search by whatever it was I could remember about the site, an idea, or the person who recommended it, or a project I was working on. That’s how I remember things. So when I found Powermarks I was like “Yes! This is it!”
Whenever I want to remember a site, I click on the little plus sign in my system tray and a little box pops
up with the URL of the site. Click ‘Fetch’, it will grab the site name and keywords if the web page includes this information. Otherwise you have to fill it in.
But you can also add keywords that are meaningful to you, such as who told you about the site, or what you were looking for when you stumbled upon it. Anything that you associate with the site so that when you want to find it again, you can search for the term.
To me, this is the most powerful feature about Powermarks. No more trying to remember which folder you put it in, or scrolling through a long list of URLS searching for the right one.
Just start entering a search term and the system starts to eliminate URLS that don’t match until you’re left with matching ones…or a blank screen, meaning none of them match. It’s great!
I was going to give Powermarks 4 stars because it didn’t work with Firefox but while writing this review, I discovered Kaylon had developed a Firefox plugin and it works! So Powermarks gets 5 stars.
I have 3524 bookmarks and searching them is a snap, thanks to Powermarks. Powermarks
Finding Deleted Expired AVAILABLE Domain Names
January 17, 2006Looking for Keywords? Try Google Suggest
January 13, 2006Google is always coming up with something new (have you tried Google Analytics—amazing!).
The cool thing is, whatever the product or service, it’s usually free and a thousand times better than the paid products that do the same thing.
Google Suggest is no exception. As of today it’s still in Beta, but I was playing around with it last night and it’s great. It works like browsers and cell phones in that, as soon as you start typing something, a menu pops up with suggestions of what words to search for.
This works for phrases as well, and the suggestions seem to be based on information Google has saved from previous searches. In other words, these are words and phrases that people ae actually looking for. The results seem to be in order of number of searches, so if one of the results has a low number of competing pages, well that means it’s not getting much competition.
Here’s a search I did on the term “public domain”:
Then if I zero in on “public domain music” I get this:
Hmmm. Are you seeing the power of this? If you aren’t, think harder! Better still try it out…
If it’s not there, it may be out of Beta – just do a Google search for “Google Suggest”, you’ll find it.
You Can Make Your Living Online
January 9, 2006The Silent Sales Machine Hiding on eBay
December 24, 2005
This is a very clever book. Millions of people buy and sell on eBay – the site gets millions of hits a month! If you’ve read my book, you know how I feel about auctions—they’re goldmines for small local business!
But even I had never thought of eBay as a silent sales machine. Find out:
- How to harness the hits that your auction gets – even if people don’t bid.
- How to make a great profit even if nobody bids on your auction at all.
- How to put in place easy money making ‘machines’ that work for you 24/7.
Jim Cockrum’s ideas are simply brilliant, but not complicated. They’re simple in fact, and even a complete novice can quickly jump in and get started. Check it out—it’s eBay with a twist you won’t soon forget.
InfoGoRound Private Label Content
December 8, 2005My rating: 5 out of 5
I first heard of InfoGoRound last summer and was immediately intrigued with the idea. I’d heard of private label rights articles, and it made sense to me to use them instead of articles written by other people. For one thing, I don’t like sending people away from my site if I can help it.But the biggest thing for me—some of those free articles are terrible! Bad grammar, bad formatting, misspelling, ugh. Haven’t these people heard of using a spellchecker? Also, if you think about it, most of those outgoing links lead directly to competitors. Good for them, not good for you.
So private label articles make sense, and it’s the direction I want to go. Anyway, I was coming to that conclusion when I stumbled across InfoGoRound. What made their offering different from other PLR sites was their “Cash For Content” program, where you could potentially get a rebate for the $24.95 monthly fee.
I hate monthly fees, and will avoid them whenever possible, so this immediately caught my eye. I signed up for their mailing list and received some free sample articles. That was a nice touch—it gave me an idea of what’s behind the gate. They did a good job of staying in touch and making offers.
When I finally decided to get serious about building niche portals, I thought about IGR and took a closer look at their program. I decided to sign up and check it out, reasoning that if I didn’t like it, I could unsub. I hadn’t really thought about grabbing a bunch of content then unsubbing, but in case anyone thinks about doing that, be prepared to pay $67 if you want to continue using any content after you leave.
The way the Cash for Content program works is this: you write an article and other members rate it on a scale from 1 to 5, 5 being best. If you get a good rating (4 I think), then you get a rebate on that month’s article. So you still pay, but somewhere down the line you get a rebate. If you don’t submit an article, well you paid a small price for a lot of great articles that you can now load up into an autoresponder or post on your website.
Of course I put off writing my first article until the very last minute, and considering the amount of time it takes me to write an article, I probably would have been better off just paying the fee. But I wanted to try it at least once, so one day before my first month’s billing period was up, I fired up Microsoft Word and banged out an article on—what else?— local business and the Internet. That’s where I started, it’s a subject I know well and I find it easy to write about it. So I wrote, spell checked, set it aside, then decided it was up to my standards and logged in to submit it.
That’s when we had our first tiff—I couldn’t cut and paste the article into the editor! I couldn’t figure it out, so I went to read the directions (something I never do unless forced) and that’s when I found out that you’re supposed to type the article into the little box manually. I guess that’s their way of making sure it’s an original article, not published anywhere before, written just for IGR? Dunno. Makes no sense to me—if you’re determined to plagiarize or use pre-written content, you can very easily just type it into the box while reading it from a piece of paper.
By now I had spent much too long messing around with this article and was in no mood to TYPE it into the box. Time is money and by my calculations, I had lost quite a bit while trying to recoup my $25 fee. So I fired off an email to the IGR guy, complaining about having to type my article into the little bix, then pasted the article into my email. I knew it was a damn good article, and apparently he felt the same because he placed it into my publishing area for me, but told me to be sure and use the online editor next time. Fair enough. Next time I know to actually write the darn thing online—you can save articles in draft mode and get them just right before publishing them.
So I published it and the article has been rated a 4. If you get 2 or 3 articles with good ratings, apparently you get “special” privileges that will allow you to cut and paste. We’ll see. The membership fee is so cheap that I think my time is better spent on other things, so I’m not sure I’ll write another one.
If you want to see the article I wrote, check out my GeoLocal Blog —even though it has my name on it, you may see it anywhere online with someone else’s name on it. That’s okay, because there’s a lot of content that will be posted across many of my websites that won’t have any author’s name on it—and that’s the beauty of private label content.
Another pleasant surprise were the niche article packs—25 or 50 articles on a subject such as gardening, dating, or gambling. There was even an ebook on dating, which could be used as a giveaway to get the email address. There are about 5 or 6 of these article packs in the member area, along with the searchable article database. I was pleasantly surprised by the interface, the quality control and all the extras. InfoGoRound has thought of everything. I think I’ll stick around.
Visit InfoGoRound
Rich Jerk - Laugh and Learn
November 23, 2005
I first heard about this book when someone sent me a note telling about some guy giving away a TON of info at a ridiculously low price, blah blah blah.
I’m pretty immune to that of kind of email, having spent more than I care to admit on so-called “infoproducts” that turned out to be rubbish.
I was just about to reach for the delete key when something caught my eye:
“By the way- I do NOT endorse everything this guy tells you to do, but I have to admit he’s compelling and I like his ‘tell-it-like-it-is’, no BS style.”
I thought “sounds like my kind of guy”—and clicked on over to the site.
First I laughed. Then I read the entire site…every word on every page.
I thought then and I do that that if you have any interest at all in copywriting, marketing, or the power of words, please read it. It’s truly a work of art.
- First of all it’s controversial, and controversy sells.
- Second, it’s compelling. He gives proof of his claims.
- Third, it’s funny. He entertains you.
- Finally, it appeals to our greed, our desire to make money easily. In other words he gives us hope
So I bought it. Being an Internet Veteran I already knew most of what was in it. And there are some black hat SEO strategies in there that I definitely do not recommend. BUT, there are a couple of truly brilliant ideas within these pages that make it a very worthwhile purchase. Usually If I get just one idea from a book that helps me make money, I’m satisfied.
I gave the Rich Jerk 4 stars. He wrote the most entertaining direct response sales site I’ve read in a long time and he gave me not one but two great ideas that I’ve already implemented on several websites. I would have given him 5 stars, but I don’t like all the black hat stuff, and face it, he is a little obnoxious.
p.s. Remember, controversy sells…laugh and learn from The Rich Jerk.
