You’ve probably seen the craze of $7 reports recently. They’re all over the place. I’m sure it’s the usual mix of the occasional really great report and a bunch of really, really terrible ones. That just tends to be how these things go.

But rather than jump on that bandwagon, I have a free report here on this site you can take a look at for how to write short reports and use them to build your business. You don’t even have to give me your email address to get it.

Is it trying to sell you something? Of course! But the information has given me some inspiration to work with without buying anything. Once I get started I’ll decide whether or not to make the purchase recommended in the report. But I might be able to get away without it. We’ll just have to see.

The report gets into how you can write very short reports, in the 7-15 page range, sell them and upsell to those customers. Something that short is very much within most people’s writing abilities. You just have to give it a solid try and do your research.

Some of the advice goes against the popular advice right now. Think picking a tight niche is absolutely the best way to go? You may want to think again.

Download and read this report today. It’s 24 pages, including the title and other non-report pages, and the information is quite useable. I think you’ll enjoy it. And if not, what will you have lost? A little reading time.

Download now!

Technorati Tags: 5 steps report, easy report writing, niche marketing

I can almost hear the snickering down there in Florida, and I’m all the way over in California! But they’ve announced that they’re going to have an announcement soon, and have asked the Posties to speculate as to what it is, just to see what sort of rumors people start.

Do we really want to know?

PayPerPost has been up to a lot lately. They’ve added in segmentation, to both the delight and dismay of bloggers. They’re planning a PostieCon.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with PayPerPost on my blogs. I’m a little picky, which is why you don’t see paid posts from me every day. Too much of a pain trying to fit some topics in, at least on my currently approved blogs.

Yes, I am sitting here, typing, trying to come up with a really hilarious rumor. Hard to do because I’m tired from my son’s birthday party, which we just finished. You parents out there know how tiring that is. Read the rest of this entry »

I got inspired to write this from the article on Wordtracker’s site: Stop the Slaughter of Innocent Copy! For those of you who are somehow not familiar with how wonderful Wordtracker can be for any kind of online marketing, go try the free trial now! And if you really want to go at it, try it for a day or a week. You’ll be amazed at what you can dig up with it.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using your keyword phrases too much in your copy. If you read on webmaster forums, it isn’t at all unusual to see people arguing about what percentage of the text should be a particular keyphrase. You’ll also see people saying it doesn’t really matter all that much.

There certainly is an advantage to having your targeted phrases on the page you are trying to attract traffic to. There’s no doubt about that. It’s one of the factors that can attract search engines.

Unfortunately, the abuse of keywords rapidly drives customers away. Read the rest of this entry »

Or at least it is more friendly to women than when it started out. Just take a look at this article over on Grokdotcom on the Feminization of the Web.

They make some really good points. Just think about the things that are recommended to market your websites. Join forums. Be helpful. Be a part of the community. All very much things more classically associated with women.

As they say, it’s more a right brain thing than a female thing, but it’s still pretty nice that the web is so much nicer for women to use than it was originally.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing

I wrote last week about challenging myself to comment on blogs every Tuesday. Last week I did 24 comments total. Did better this week. I set a goal of a minimum of 10 comments each relevant to 3 of my blogs, plus at least 10 more relevant to other blogs.

The random factor allowed me to cope with the fact that when you go through blogs on a given topic, sometimes you will find something that better matches a blog other than the one you are thinking about.

I think I’ll stick with this formula. I managed 40 comments, a very nice mixture, but some good emphasis on the blogs I wanted to emphasize this week. I think it went well overall. Took hours, but hopefully quite worthwhile.

Technorati Tags: blog comments, commenting, tuesday challenge, blog marketing

MyBlogLog is a pretty neat service, but it has been suffering from some growing pains. However, I must say they’re doing good job of coping with them quickly.

Like thousands of other members, the other day I got an email from someone in Belguim asking me to be a coauthor on his blog. I thought that was really weird, obviously. Turns out they were taking advantage of an exploit, which I read about on ShoeMoney’s blog.

Basically this turkey found a way to force people who clicked on his link to become coauthors on his blog, so that his blog appeared on other people’s profiles.

Yes, very devious. MyBlogLog has also closed that exploit, so don’t bother worrying about it or trying it. They also rolled back the coauthors for the past several days, so that anyone caught by has to worry about it.

They’ve also added a Terms of Service, which they for some reason had neglected before. I don’t know how you neglect that, but they did. Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’ll be using this on some of my posts. Not all of them, but at least occasionally.

PayPerPost has a new feature to their affiliate program. I can add a link for you to review my post, which gives people who want to do it a $7.50 opportunity through PayPerPost to review one of my blog posts on their blog. I also get $7.50 for signing you up, and of course that link from your site. With any luck that can help to generate traffic.

I’ve been watching what other people think of this. Some are jumpy, but things have settled down pretty well I think. There’s been some work involved in getting things to run smoothly for this, of course. Everyone wants to know how much trouble it will be for the new bloggers to be approved, for example. Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging is hot. If you’ve been reading about it for a while you may remember the big fuss over tag and ping. That can still be a pretty good strategy, but there are many other things you can do.

I’ll sum up the basics of tag and ping just for those who aren’t familiar with it. Technorati and some other sites allow you to add tags to your posts to indicate the topics. People who search Technorati for those tags may then find your site. You use a ping function (included in Wordpress) or go to a site to ping whenever youd do a new post.

There are tactics to this. There are ebooks such as Tagging Secrets that can help you with that in more detail than I can go into right now.

But there’s more to do. Sites such as MyBlogLog and SpicyPage are also showing great promise. You add your blog to these, and your fellow users may discover you there. They’re pretty interesting.

But you should also make sure your feeds are easily accessible. You can use Feedburner if you want stats and don’t want to have to figure out how to add all the chicklets for the various services. Read the rest of this entry »