I’ve been reading a book from my collection called The Light Stuff. It’s a book you won’t find too easily, except maybe online since a few Amazon sellers do have it. Being published in 1982 will do that to a book. The book has nothing to do with business, rather it is humor about the space program.

The quote comes from Wernher von Braun, one of the rocket scientists from the early days of the space program. And here it is:

Early to bed, early to rise
Work like hell - and advertise!

Rather good advice for any business, wouldn’t you say? Except that many of us would probably change that to late to bed and leave the rest as is.

Technorati Tags: quote, quotation, wernher von braun, advertise

No, not niches you want to sell on on eBay. Niches you want to create your own sites and find affiliate products for. I hadn’t given this one much thought until I read about The eBay Method.

Most especially, I had never checked eBay’s Pulse.

Pulse lets you see the most popular searches, and you can refine by category until you find searches that meet your criteria. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that people browsing on eBay are looking to buy, and while they may be looking for a bargain, their interest may well indicate interest from other people as well. People you can sell products to from an affiliate site. Read the rest of this entry »

Directory submissions are one of many ways people try to get traffic to their websites. It can be a lot of work, and is often more for the search engines than for visitors, as few directories are visited by humans looking for anything, and your link can be buried many pages deep.

Today I’m reviewing a new directory, Big Web Links Bid Directory, that has its own way of ranking links - by how much you pay. Very simple, very upfront that it’s about the money.

They have some challenges to face, being a new site. I show them as PR 0, which can make the cost of submitting a site to them a bit hard to deal with. There also aren’t many sites listed yet. However, both of these are problems common to any new directory, so they aren’t really bad indicators. In fact, that they’re going out to get reviews indicates a greater degree of seriousness about trying to build their directory. Read the rest of this entry »

I love to take opportunities to build my lists. It’s a great way to get more regular visitors and hopefully make sales.

There’s an Easter JV that is getting ready to start. If you have a free product you can offer, it’s a way to get yourself out in front of a new group of people. Most will be internet marketers, of course, so if you want to make a good impression your product will need to shine.

This one is kind of interesting. Visitors have the choice of buying access to the products without signing up for your newsletter, or subscribing to each newsletter for free access.

This means you want to be sure that your product will attract people to your site on its own. You can’t rely solely on newsletter subscriptions, although I would expect a lot of people to go the free route.

I’m signed up and have a product relating to one of my other sites, not this one. Product development, both free and paid, is something I need to spend more time on. Finding the time to do all of it can be pretty tricky. But it is on my priority list, just behind regular content creation and marketing efforts.

Sign up for the Easter JV today!

Technorati Tags: Easter JV, joint ventures, list building

Sorry, I’m not the one writing it. You can find When Knights of the Realm Climb on Their High Horses by following the link. For those who have even lightly followed the fuss being made over paid posting in general and PayPerPost in particular, it’s a good read.

If you’ve read much about this whole deal, you know that there are some A-list bloggers who just cannot stand that PayPerPost exists. They deem it deeply offensive and a perversion of the blogosphere. I happen to think that’s a load of bull, but as a Postie myself I suppose I could be biased. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have heard that people don’t read online. I just read a post today over at GrokDotCom that indicates otherwise.

They’re quoting results from an eyetrack study that actually show people read more of an article online than they do when reading a broadsheet newspaper or a tabloid. The statistics are pretty interesting.

Thinking about it, I deciced I wasn’t all that surprised. Why else are things like articles considered to be one of the best ways to market your home business? It is not just the search engines. Articles get people reading.

Then there are all the product reviews. Do you really think Amazon lets people do those just for fun? No, they encourage people to review products because they know people read them and it increases the odds of a sale. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon just keeps marching on offering tools for affiliates. Despite the somewhat low pay, they do seem determined to make themselves highly flexiible for affiliates. That’s certainly something to appreciate.

Their newest offering is Context Links Beta. You’ve probably seen other companies offer similar programs, where you create content and they add links to the text automatically. All you have to do is add the code to your pages.

For those of you concerned about the flexibility of this program, you may feel encouraged to read about how much you can customize: Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a few days ago about Google’s new pay per action program. Today I read a great post over on Shoemoney analyzing some of the potential issues Google may face. It’s very much worth the read, as are some of the comments.

CPA as a model has some issues, and Shoemoney points some of them out, such as fraud. Google has gotten pretty good at detecting click fraud - I wonder how well they’ll do on CPA fraud. Then there’s handling chargebacks, as well as other issues.

Perhaps the biggest issue may turn out to be how easy it is to get a site into Google AdSense, versus how hard it is to get a site into many CPA programs. If Google isn’t pickier about these things there could be some major issues. Read the rest of this entry »