Opportunities Are Everywhere If You Know Where To Look For Them

You need to be receptive to ideas from those around you who may not know as much as you do about marketing. I was recently contacted by my mortgage broker. I have used him for over 10 years to finance two homes and several consolidation loans. He's a great guy, very successful, but he does not understand all the ways the Net can be used. So we had lunch last week, and he presented me with an opportunity to generate leads for him. At first I was not interested because I am not a telemarketer and hate direct sales.

But when I explained the concept of online lead generation through squeeze pages, autoresponders, and newsletters, he became very interested. The next day I launched two squeeze page sites to help generate more leads for him:

http://www.besttulsamortgage.com
http://www.besttulsaloans.com

In the weeks ahead I will try to push these sites to the top of the search engines for the phrase "best Tulsa mortgage" and "best Tulsa loans". I'm doing this for nothing up-front to put my skills to the test, and for a lucrative backend commission structure. If it doesn't generate anything, no harm done since I am always trying to learn from my mistakes, but if does generate even one lead that turns into business, then the few hours I put into creating these squeeze pages will be well worth it.

So be open to sharing your marketing knowledge with others. You never know what will develop.

Marketing Cowboy - Killer Copywriter for Hire!

After years of writing copy in the corporate world, I’ve decided to throw my cowboy hat into the ring, and offer my copywriting services to the online world. The way I see it, there are two things you need to look for in a copywriter:

1. You need someone who knows a little something about writing.

I've been spinning stories since I was a kid. It's what I studied in college, it's what I've done for a living, and it's also how I relax. Writing is my passion. 

• My Bachelor's and Master's degrees are both in Creative Writing. 

• I received two awards from the City University of New York for my writing in 1982 and 1983 -- in poetry and fiction. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: what does poetry and fiction have to do with writing sales copy? Everything. Good sales copy understands line breaks and rhyme and rhythm as well as tells a story.

• I taught college writing for three years at Queens College (New York). I understand grammar and punctuation and spelling. You're not going to wind up with poorly written copy when you use my services.

• I've ghost-written books on multiple subjects, published my own series of ebooks, in 1983 Harper & Row published one of my essays right between the works of Stephen King and Woody Allen, and every week over 10,000 subscribers read my newsletters about marketing, mini sites and publishing.

• My network of over 100 web sites receive well over 1,000,000 hits a year, many of my sites appear in the top 10 on the major search engines, and my product reviews frequently appear in the top 3 positions across Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. I understand the art of online promotion.

2. You need someone who knows a little something about marketing.

I'm a 20 year marketing veteran with experience in traditional, Internet and cable television marketing. In the past, I have held the position of Director of Marketing for these three Fortune 500 companies:

• WilTel: I helped build the brand that turned this little Tulsa company into a $2.5 billion empire. From 1991 to 1995  I built and ran my own in-house advertising agency with a staff of 20 and was responsible for a $10 million annual marketing budget.

• WorldCom: From 1995-2000 I helped take this company from Jackson, Mississippi to the board rooms of Wall Street, and along the way I became a sales expert and automated the entire sales force of over 2000 sales reps and their managers across the country.

• Gemstar-TV Guide: Starting as a writer-producer, I executive produced multiple promotional spots for the nationally televised TV Guide Channel, and later became the director of marketing operations in 2003 over-seeing direct email campaigns, web promotion and much more.

None of my competitors have my credentials. To learn more about my background and services, and to take advantage of some very low introductory prices, please click here.

When Good Marketing Gurus Go Bad

Like most folks involved with Internet marketing, I subscribe to many newsletters published by folks who call themselves gurus. I’m not sure what qualifies someone to be called a guru. I’ve been involved with marketing for over 20 years, and I certainly do not feel like I know it all. However, folks with far less experience have made millions of dollars through their online marketing ventures, and they call themselves guru. I helped position the companies I worked for to make billions but I guess that doesn’t count.

Did you ever receive the same special email announcements from your favorite marketing gurus in one day? They all start the same: hyping some new product or service from another guru. Then they tell you to order through their affiliate link to receive some special “fast mover bonuses.” Often the list and purported value of these bonuses is far greater than the actual cost and value of the item they want you to buy. And so the focus is moved away from the product they want you to buy and all of the attention is shifted back to the guru and their incredible bonuses. This makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

What boggles the mind is that so many gurus send you similar emails with the release of every new product or service. Soon they are no longer teaching you anything about marketing, but rather are totally engaged with promoting the products of other pseudo-gurus. At this point, the guru’s newsletter no longer contain valuable content, but rather becomes an ongoing series of promotional emails about other guru’s products and services.

These emails come in many forms. Today I received a long email from JR who spent 75% of the email talking about how other gurus have blatantly cloned his marketing techniques. He also has a pretty good rant about gurus and what makes a guru and what separates the real gurus from the pseudo gurus. And then he shifts gears radically to tell you about the latest product that EVERYONE else is promoting and offers you a personal business analysis that could be worth $100,000.00, and it’s yours, if you just order the recommended product of the day through his affiliate link. This is coming from a man who is widely respected and testifies to earning millions of dollars per year. So why lower yourself by going down the same road as all the other gurus out there?

I’ve decided to stop subscribing to so many marketing newsletters published by the gurus. All of their newsletters are beginning to sound alike as they all blatantly go down the same affiliate/joint venture marketing path. I want to make money, too, but at least I try to impart some wisdom to my subscribers. I don’t take my subscribers, prospects and customers for granted. I know they have limited time and bandwidth. They expect quality content. A little commercial between content is expected, but when a newsletter becomes nothing more than a glorified commercial with little to no content, then it is no longer a newsletter.

The Butterfly Marketing Manuscript Comes Out Of Its Cocoon

After spending almost 10 years marketing online, and having purchased tons of marketing ebooks and software, I'm naturally somewhat skeptical and jaded when a new product is hyped by every Internet marketer in existence. I don't claim to know it all nor to have even seen it all, but there's a lot of garbage out there.

I first heard of Mike Filsaime about a year ago. I purchased an affiliate link tracking script that I could never get to work. Not his fault. I lacked the know-how and needed someone with more script experience to help me. Mike sensed my dissatisfaction and refunded my money without an argument. He even offered to install it on my web server at no cost, but I had already lost interest.

Then during the summer of 2006, when I started to receive dozens of emails from every top marketer on the planet about Mike's new Butterfly Marketing script, I once again prepared to tread lightly. The script purported to implement a new and improved marketing strategy that was capable of boosting your revenue and your affiliate base for a new product or service. When I found out the script cost $1500.00 I gasped.

Who would buy such an expensive script? I don't know, but Mike sold around $1 million worth of software in a matter of days. Somebody thought it was worth it.

Then sometime in August 2006, Mike Mograbi, the creator of VIP Profit Zone and IM Newswatch suggested I read the less expensive standalone Butterfly Marketing manuscript. I scoffed at the price, but when Mograbi offered to cover half the cost, I knew he must have had good reason to want me to read it. I took him up on his very generous offer, and imagine my surprise when I found myself reaching for a highlighter and then a pen and pad to make notes. This was good stuff -- better than I had imagined. Very powerful techniques he was teaching. He explained everything his $1500.00 script did, and how to implement it. He lifted the veil and what it revealed was nothing short of miraculous.

His manuscript is filled with credible examples of his butterfly techniques in action. And judging by the huge army of Internet marketers who have purchased his $1500.00 script and have created hundreds of sites using his automation, I must say I am impressed.

Whether I agree with all of the techniques covered in the Butterfly Marketing manuscript is relatively unimportant. Like popular business books such as Think and Grow Rich, the Butterfly Marketing is liable to become a necessary purchase for anyone seeking to do business online in the future.

All I can say is my thinking has been drastically changed, and I have begun to change the way I market my products and recruit new affiliates for them. I am certain the Butterfly Marketing manuscript will have a significant impact on my present and future projects. Click here to download a free chapter from the manuscript or here to visit the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript web site.

Sometimes People Amaze Me ...

People sign up for your newsletter, then they:

1. Never add your email address to their SPAM filter. So every time you send them an email, you receive a challenge email from Earthlink or AOL or some other SPAM filtering service that asks you to verify your email and type in stupid little numbers and letters that only the blind can read. And your message still remains unread because you have to go through this same process every week.

2. Send you a threatening email complaining that you are spamming them and that they never signed up for your stupid newsletter in the first place and if you don’t stop emailing them they are going to sue you for $1100 for every SPAM email received. Then you send them a copy of their original opt-in request — you do save those, don’t you? — and then they shut up and apologize.And they still don’t read your emails.

3. They never check their ISP email box and let it stay full and over quota all the time. Then the second you remove them, they re-subscribe under a new email address from another free ISP. And the problem goes on and on and on.

God, help us. And we want to use email for marketing? Even if you have a large list, and even if your autoresponder gets more email through than you can on your own, you still face the same problems. There has to be a better way to get your marketing message into the hands of your target audience.

But you can’t call them unless they provided that info when they opted in. And besides they would probably put you on the do not call list anyway.

Pony express anyone?

Ebook Cover Artist Debuts

Over the years, I have repeatedly stressed the importance of having a cover graphic for your book. It's like going to a job interview without any clothes on. You always want to put your best foot forward when trying to convince somebody to buy you or your work. People judge people by their appearance and they do judge a book by its cover.

I receive many inquiries about the best ways to create a cover --- hire someone or do it yourself. For the do it yourself crowd I send them to http://www.ebookcovercreator.com to read my reviews of the top graphics tools and to see samples of artwork created with them.

But now, for the folks who want to hire someone to design their cover for them, I have just launched a new site called http://www.EbookCoverArtist.com. After spending years working with authors and creating covers for their works available on EbookoMatic.com, I decided to create a site dedicated to providing graphic and web design services, too.

Please visit this site today to learn more.

http://www.ebookcoverartist.com

What Really Burns My Butt...

What really burns my butt are membership sites that place the Forgot Password link right after the password field instead of after the Submit button.

Why is this such a pain? Simple. If you are like most people, once you enter your login name and password, you hit Tab and then the Enter key. If the Forgot Password link is placed after the Password field, what usually happens is that you get prompted to change or retrieve your password. PayPal is a perfect example of this design error. Visit their site and look at their screen. This is not the way it should work.

Now look at one of my sites, EbookoMatic.com. I’ve placed the Forgot Password link after the Submit button so these types of accidents don’t happen.

It may not seem like much, but it’s my small contribution to help make the Internet a better place to visit.