Changing blog themes may have unintentional consequences

August 22, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, WordPress 

A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted my blog themes to be simpler and cleaner, so I switched from the theme I was using on two of my blogs to the one I’m now using on this one and on John Dilbeck And Friends. Currently, I’m using the Revolution Code Blue theme by Brian Gardner. If you’re interested, there’s a link in the footer to the theme.

I decided that I wanted the content in a large left column and the widgets in the right column. Since I put a lot of stuff in the right column (recent posts, recent comments, top commentator, links to affiliate sites, links to other blogs, several RSS feeds, and a few more things), I decided to have two right columns.

I still haven’t decided if I like how it’s set-up yet, or not. I may be changing things in the next few days.

Installing and activating the theme was easy, but then I had to spend a couple of hours adjusting the widgets to where I wanted them and modifying a few of them.

I think blogs are inherently difficult to navigate, so I wanted to make sure I had easy-to-find links to the pages, recent posts, and recent comments. That took only a few moments to set up.

Then, I left to do other things that really needed doing, like resting and taking naps.

In the interim, I was talking to a friend on Facebook about his new blog and how I thought it was hard to navigate. The only way to find other posts was to go to the home page and scroll down.

I wrote and suggested that he add at least the recent posts and comments, especially if he wanted to foster conversations on what he wrote via comments. I also suggested that he have “breadcrumbs” at the top and bottom of his posts that would point to previous and next posts.

Today, I came back and looked at both blogs where I’d changed the theme and noticed that they no longer had the breadcrumb navigation links. That’s when I realized that they were part of the coding of the previous theme I’d been using and it wasn’t included in this one.

So, I did some digging on another blog that still uses the previous theme and found the code to add the breadcrumbs to this and the other blog.

When I did it, it looked horrible. There was overlapping between the navigation links and the Title of the blog post. So, I had to spend some time modifying the CSS code so everything would look okay.

While I was at it, I decided to put the Adsense ads back at the top and bottom of each post. I’ll give it a month or so and see how it produces. If it’s profitable on these blogs, I’ll leave them. If not, poof, they’ll be deleted.

So, while it took only a few minutes to change the theme, it has taken five or six hours of tweaking and adjusting to get it to what I want, and I’ve only seen them in Safari on Macs, so far.

I had some good reasons for changing the themes, but I really didn’t expect it to take this much work to get them back to where I wanted them.

Just as I was about to call it completed for now, I noticed that the new theme was showing all the pages on this blog in a horizontal navigation bar right below the header, and then obscuring most of them. I didn’t like how that looked and I didn’t like that it showed some of the pages that weren’t the most important right below the header.

So, I took a few minutes and removed the code that automatically generated the list of pages and replaced it with hard links to what I consider to be the most important pages that should be shown in that part of the navigation menu. It was easy to do, but I almost didn’t see it.

I wonder what else I haven’t noticed, yet.

Have you had any interesting experiences when changing the theme of your blog(s)? Are you using free or premium themes? Do you have any advice to offer your fellow bloggers?

Act on your dream!

JD

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That was not my last post to 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

August 20, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 9 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Facebook, John Dilbeck, Musings 

Surprise! I’m back. (grin)

Apparently, the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated, and it looks like that applies to this blog, too.

I came close to dying back in March, and things weren’t looking too good in May, either.

I’m happy to tell you that I’m getting better. I have a long way to go before I’m fully recovered, but I’m making substantial progress.

I wrote what I thought would be the last post to this blog in the middle of May, 2010. Since then, there have been some significant events in my life.

On April 1, 2010, my friend and surgeon resected my intestines, removed my gall bladder, and removed an 8-lb colon cancer. He was surprised to find the tumor in one large contained mass, rather than spread throughout my abdomen. That was a very lucky break.

Other, relatively minor surgeries followed.

A PET scan showed that I had suspicious spots in both thyroid glands and in the right lobe of my liver.

A biopsy of each thryoid gland showed that the growths were benign, not cancer. Happy dance!

A biopsy of the tumor in my liver showed it was benign. Happy dance!

However, a radiologist on the oncology team that would be doing the procedure on my liver called me at home from his vacation and said the biopsy report on my liver had to be wrong. He had seen the scans (two of them) and knew from the look and the growth that it was cancer. He didn’t want to rain on my parade, but he said — emphatically — that I should get the biopsy redone, and he would do it himself, if I wanted. I talked it over with my daughter and decided to have the biopsy redone. Dr. Moore did it using a slightly different technique and was right. It was colon cancer that had metastasized to my liver. At least, we knew it was something that had to be dealt with, as soon as possible.

In July, 2010, I went to Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC, and Dr. Moore performed a radio frequency ablation of the tumor in my liver. It is good that I was a good candidate for this, because traditional surgery on the right lobe of the liver is a very serious operation. Basically, what he did was this: insert three needles (that are connected to a radio frequency generator) into my liver so that they surround the tumor. Turn on the generator to cook the tumor (think of this as a microwave oven).

Because of the size of the tumor, he had to use three needles and the results looked good on the ultrasound right after the procedure.

I went for a CT scan and checkup with Dr. Moore earlier this week and got the good news. There is no sign of cancer in my liver, the “cooked” portion completely enveloped the tumor and some surrounding tissue, and there are no signs of bleeding complications. Very good news, indeed.

So, now the surgical interventions are all done and I’m on my second round (of 24 total) of chemotherapy treatments.

Now, instead of expecting to die from this (as it looked back in March), we’re working together to cure it. That’s a huge change in expectations and perspective in only three months.

I’m a long way from being my old self. I’m tired all the time and have trouble thinking straight, but I’m definitely improving.

So, instead of closing this blog, I’ve updated it to the latest version of WordPress, changed the theme, and spruced it up for another few years of talking about affiliate marketing.

I will not be posting as often as I did previously, but this blog is not going to just sit here, either. I will definitely be putting more effort into building evergreen, content-rich, hierarchically-organized websites than I will into blogging, but both have a part to play in my marketing plans.

I want to thank everyone who sent me their encouragement and support in the comments here, on my Facebook profile, and in email and phone calls. It meant a lot, and still does. I think your outpouring of support, encouragement, and prayers is one of the major reasons that I’m looking forward to conquering this cancer, instead of being its victim.

So, that’s enough about me. Let’s get back to talking about affiliate marketing.

(Now, I have to remember how I added that subscribe via email form on this blog. Scratching head…)

Act on your dream!

JD

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This is my last post to 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

May 14, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 17 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, John Dilbeck, Marketing, Success and Failure 

Before I say anything else, I want to thank all of you who have been regular readers and who have made this blog better by sharing your thoughts and comments with all of us. You know who you are.

This is the last post to this blog and I will be shutting it down in the next few days or weeks, as I have the time and energy. I’m closing my marketing business and I’m out of affiliate marketing.

It’s amazing how much of a difference two months can make in one’s life.

Two months ago, I went to the emergency room because I could not get out of bed. After 7 units of blood, I felt a bit stronger, but that lead to the discovery of colon cancer, which was followed shortly after with intestinal surgery, gall bladder removal, and today I learned that I need surgery for cancer in my liver and a biopsy for possible cancer in one of my thyroid glands.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll be putting my energy into kicking these cancers’ butts. I don’t intend to let them beat me, but you never know.

I don’t know for sure what will happen to this domain name. If you’re a regular reader and contributor to this blog, I’m willing to listen to your ideas.

It’s been a wild ride for the last several years, and I’m sad to see the ride coming to an end.

I plan to continue posting (now and then) to JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com and to my Facebook account at facebook.com/johndilbeck .

Thanks for reading, contributing, and making affiliate marketing just a bit more interesting as we shared ideas and thoughts about the subject.

Continued success to you.

All the best,

JD

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Building a serious business website that gets results

March 17, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Attracting Visitors, Sitesell and Site Build It, Web Services, Webhosting 

I have people asking me all the time how I get so many people to visit my websites every month, and I think most of them think I have some kind of magic trick up my sleeve. That’s not it at all.

The secret?

Hard work, lots of content that people want to read, pages optimized on particular keywords and phrases to help the search engines know what they are about, and continually updating the information as it ages and things change. That’s all it takes.

No tricks. No fancy SEO techniques. Just simple HTML pages (on my big static sites) that are each built around a particular topic that fits within the site’s main topic.

As you may know by now, if you read my blogs or sites regularly, I learned what I know about this (over a decade ago) by studying Ken Evoy’s Make Your Site Sell ebook and putting into practice what I learned.

In the interim, millions of people have visited my sites and many of those visitors have made purchases based on my recommendations for what I think were worthy products and services. That’s how I’ve earned my living for the last decade or so.

I have one website that attracts thousands of visitors per month and remains a profitable site, even though it hasn’t been updated in over a year. It remains my top-earning site for Adsense income and it is a basic HTML-only static site built on the principles I learned from Ken Evoy’s ebook way back in the 20th century.

Since then, I’ve built many websites, most of which failed, using a variety of content management systems (CMS) and blogging software.

There is a lure that’s hard to resist when it comes to blogging and using a CMS system. They are easy to install and start. You get a big rush from registering a domain name and putting up new information in a few hours or days.

The problem is that the rush you get from starting the site isn’t enough to keep up the enthusiasm for continuing to build the site, and there probably was not enough good planning and research put into the topic of the site to see if it was going to be profitable or not before starting it.

At least, that has been my experience.

I’m learning that the same thing can be true when hiring someone else to build a site for you.

I’ve talked to quite a few small business owners who have wasted thousands of dollars and years of their time because they hired someone to build their website who knew how to build it but had no clue about how to attract free traffic from the search engines.

A nice site with no visitors will never be successful. A large and growing number of visitors each month is the lifeblood of selling anything on the Internet.

So, what are you to do if you know nothing, or very little, about websites, but you need one that will help you generate income and not just be a constant money drain?

You could do what I did and spend ten or more years of your life reading and studying everything you could get your eyes on and building dozens of sites to test what you learned, or you could hire someone with the experience and tools to do the job right the first time — while you concentrate on running your business and satisfying your customers.

How much would you be willing to pay to have a website that attracts serious visitors — potential customers — every month for years to come?

As a serious business owner, you probably would not throw out a number at this point, because you’d want to know more. How many visitors? How much income? What are the initial costs? How much does it cost to maintain it? Who’s going to do the work? What are the monthly hosting fees? How much trouble will it be to modify the information on the site when things change?

There are a lot of things to consider and most of them have nothing to do with HTML, CSS, FTP, and all the other alphabet-soup of acronyms associated with the technical side of building a site.

(You might be surprised at the number of websites I’ve looked at in the last couple of years that did not immediately tell what the owner was offering and why you would be better off buying from him or her. People on the web have short attention spans and they are generally in skimming mode when they first visit a website. You only have a few seconds to state your case and give them a reason that will benefit them in order to get them to slow down and actually read what you have to say. Don’t waste your visitors’ time with non-essentials — give them a reason to consider buying from you so you’ll have time to persuade them. Of course, how you do this differs with the type of site you have — sales, informational, and so forth — and the type of business you run.)

One of the things I’ve learned about most of the small business owners I’ve talked to is that the most prosperous of them are not “do it yourselfers.” They don’t have the time, energy, or desire to take on more tasks and responsibilities, because they are already doing all they have time for just running their business.

Most of them depend on others who specialize in things they need.

If they want legal advice, they hire a lawyer, or have one on retainer — they don’t go to law school at night for several years just to learn how to write their own contracts or deal with litigation.

Most of them hire an accountant and/or bookkeeper to keep their business on track and help with financial issues and taxes — they don’t become a CPA just to do it themselves.

Most of the small business owners I know who have survived the recent economic downturn have learned the hard way that there are times when it just makes sense to hire someone with experience and expertise to get the job done quickly, efficiently, and right the first time.

Perhaps you’re one of those successful small business owners who knows how to prosper by running your own business, but who feels clueless when it comes to evaluating people who claim to be experts at building websites. After all, every town has people who claim to be able to build good business websites, and some of them really do know what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately, most of them don’t.

You don’t have the time and money to pay someone to learn what they’re doing at your expense.

How do you separate the experts from the want-to-be herd?

That’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

This can be especially difficult when you don’t have the experience to know whether what they tell you sounds reasonable, or not.

One way to separate the experts from the herd is that they tend to spend more time asking you questions about your business and the results you want from your website than they do telling you how good they are at building them.

Another way is to talk to someone who has already been vetted by others who do have the experience and expertise to know.

That’s why I’m personally recommending Sitesell Services to you.

Sitesell is the company that Ken Evoy founded and which has grown into a top-notch service over the years. The Services part of the business is for business owners like you who want to hire someone to build an effective business website that is custom-tailored to market your business around the clock.

The people at Sitesell hire only experts with demonstrated ability and experience, and they help you select the right person to build your site for you.

Here’s a short video about how they can help you…


Once one of these experts is working for you, they follow a time-tested system to build a custom site that will market your products and services to people who are looking for what you have to offer, and these are the hottest prospects.

Is Sitesell Services for everyone? Obviously, the answer is no.

Is it appropriate for every business? Again, no.

But, you’ll never know if it could be a good match for your business unless you learn more about it and contact them.

Of course, there is no obligation.

If you’re interested in hiring someone to help you build your business online, watch the video and see what they offer.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can download a free copy of Make Your Site Sell! and learn more about what I’m talking about, or you can learn about SBI version 2.0 and see if it offers the tools you want to build and host your own site. I use SBI to build and manage some of my sites and it is easily my tool of choice for any new business sites I may build.

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Lemons or Lemonade?

February 5, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Opinions, Success and Failure 

If you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you know that my attitude changed last year when everything seemed to turn against me.

I bitched and moaned about it for several months and I’m not going to do any of that now.

Last month, I turned the corner and feel like I’ve finished a dark chapter in my life’s story and now I’ve opened a new, brighter chapter filled with hope, opportunity, and challenges I’m looking forward to meeting.

You know the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog and found a very short post that linked to the movie Lemonade.

I took a half-hour and watched that movie and it was inspirational. I want to share it with you, if you haven’t seen it.

Here are several people who were fired or laid off and took the opportunity to do something they really loved, instead of just working to earn a paycheck.

The last year or so has been rough for a lot of people. Maybe you.

Have you considered that maybe this is your opportunity to do something you love?

Act on your dream!

JD

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iPad is incredible – Apple has done it again!

January 28, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 16 Comments
Filed under: Apple Computer, Opinions 

I’ve been a fan of Apple and the Macintosh for a long, long time.

But, I’m not much of a fan of mobile computers, devices, or phones.

I don’t have a cell phone and don’t want one.

I like listening to music on my Mac using iTunes, but I’ve never wanted an iPod. In fact, when I won an iPod years ago, I gave it to my grandkids.

So, with that in mind, I haven’t been paying much attention to all the hype about the new Apple tablet computer that was going to be introduced.

I didn’t even pay much attention yesterday when it was announced.

Today, however, I had some free time and decided to learn something about the new Apple iPad.

I watched the Keynote Speech where Steve Jobs introduced the iPad and I was hooked.

This is the first time I’ve been excited about a new product in a long, long time.

The last time I felt this way was when I was given a sneak peek at the original Macintosh. This was back when all computers were basically text oriented and I saw how easy it was to create and include graphics in documents.

My first thought was, “I gotta get me one of these!”

So, I ordered my first Macintosh about two weeks before they were introduced and got one of the first ones that was shipped to Arizona, where I was living at the time.

Over the years, I have bought several Macs and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. I know, without a doubt, that I made the right choice when I took the Macintosh route.

I haven’t felt that feeling of excitement and admiration again until a few minutes ago.

After watching the keynote speech and the iPad video, I have that same feeling, “I gotta get me one of these!”

Most of my daily work involves browsing the web and dealing with email. The iPad looks like it will handle both of those tasks with ease and panache.

However, even though the touch-screen keyboard (in horizontal mode) looks like it would be usable, I’m so used to touch typing on a keyboard that I just don’t think I would be interested in doing much typing that way.

When I saw the keyboard dock for the iPad, that made a huge difference.

I’ll still do most of my typing on my desktop Mac, but I think that keyboard dock will make the iPad much more usable for a variety of people.

What clinched the deal was the price.

The base model iPad will be introduced in a couple of months for only $499 and it comes with 16 GB of flash memory. Two other models are available for $599 (32 GB) and $699 (64 GB).

There will be three models that have 3G included, but I’m not interested in those. The base models with WiFi will do all I would be interested in doing.

The iPad will run most of the 140,000 applications that have been developed for the iPhone and IPod Touch, but there are advantages for users that will entice developers to modify their apps or build new ones using the iPad SDK.

Personally, I’m not interested in most of those applications and never will be. I do the majority of my work using a web browser and email client, and the rest is graphics, working with photos, accounting, spreadsheets, and word processing. The new iWork versions of Numbers and Pages look great (especially since they only cost $9.99), so I’m sure I’ll buy and use them.

Many years ago, I decided to quit living on the bleeding edge of technology where you take risks with hardware and software with undiscovered bugs, high introductory prices, and other disadvantages. Since then, I’ve never bought a 1.0 version of any product and my life has been easier.

This time, however, I really want to get my hands on a brand new iPad as soon as I can.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited about a new product, and it has taken me completely by surprise. I did not expect to be interested, at all, in the iPad.

What about you?

Have you watched the video and/or keynote speech? What do you think about the iPad. Is this something you would be interested in owning and using?

Act on your dream!

JD

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New to Zazzle and liking what I see

January 20, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 11 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, CafePress, Zazzle 

Selling my own designs on CafePress

I have been selling products in my CafePress shop for several years and there are many things I like about it.

I enjoy selling my designs and earning commissions on a regular basis, but I’m not much of a graphic designer and there are many things I like that I don’t have either the time or the talent to create and sell.

Promoting designs created by others on CafePress

At one point, I was doing well with earning commissions through the CafePress affiliate program, but that dropped to almost nothing when they went from a private affiliate program to using Commission Junction.

CafePress changed the pricing model for products sold through their marketplace

Last year, CafePress made some changes and when one of my designs sells in their marketplace, I earn a smaller commission than when the same product with the same design sells in my shop.

Most of my sales in November and December were through the CafePress marketplace, so my earnings were smaller than they would have been if they were made through my shop.

On top of that, I didn’t earn any affiliate commissions.

Getting started with Zazzle

So, I decided today to look into Zazzle and see if it was something I wanted to try.

I have a lot of friends who have either moved from CafePress to Zazzle, or they have shops at both of them.

Getting started with Zazzle is very easy

I set up my account and opened my brand new Zazzle shop today.

There’s not much in it, yet.

Basically, I’ve chosen a theme, entered a bit about me on my profile page, uploaded my standard profile photo, and set up some of the optional stuff for promotions.

Adding designs and products to Zazzle

Now, it’s time to modify some of my best-selling designs and add them to products at Zazzle. That’s going to take some time and will be an ongoing process. My goal is to have most of my best selling designs on both CafePress and Zazzle before October, so they’ll be ready to promote in time for the massive November-December buying season.

I’ll start later this week with one of my best selling designs on CafePress and see what it takes to add it to multiple products on Zazzle. I’m sure there will be differences and I may run into obstacles as a result of my experience with CafePress and being so new to Zazzle. We’ll see if these are serious obstacles or just speed bumps.

Zazzle has their own private affiliate program

in addition to selling my own designs, I’m looking forward to trying their affiliate program and selling designs created by other people that I find and like.

For instance, when browsing through their marketplace, this afternoon, I found a design that cleverly combines two things that speak to me, and possibly to you, with a bit of humor.

I’m a huge Star Trek and Star Wars fan and I was really angry last year with the bailout of banks and financial institutions that were considered too big to fail.

That’s why I laughed when I saw this design:

Death Star: Too Big to Fail shirt
Death Star: Too Big to Fail by starwars
Browse more Death T-Shirts

A lot of people use the abbreviation, “lol,” to say that they laughed out loud when seeing something. I don’t make a habit of that, but I really did laugh out loud when I saw that design.

I like it better than my own Too Big To Fail design.

The nice thing is, if someone sees this and buys either a product with my design or the more clever death star product then I’ll earn a commission.

I enjoy earning a commission.

Really.

The more, the better!

Even though I don’t have a single product in my Zazzle shop, yet, I can still earn by promoting other people’s designs, and I like that.

When I have products in my shop, then I can benefit from any other Zazzle shop owners who choose to promote my products.

A sale of one of my designs through someone else’s affiliate link slightly reduces my earnings, but that’s more than made up for by their promotional efforts, so I’m happy to share part of the profits with them.

There are significant differences between CafePress and Zazzle

So, I still have a lot to learn about Zazzle, but I’m liking what I’ve seen and learned up to this point.

Another difference between CafePress and Zazzle is that you have to pay for a premium shop on CafePress in order to have multiple designs in your store, but on Zazzle, it’s totally free.

Even though it only costs about $7 per month for a premium shop on CafePress, this ought to appeal to you if you don’t want to pay anything and still have a way to earn money through online marketing.

Discussing Zazzle on Squidoo Marketing

I’ve started a discussion in the Zazzle Group on my Squidoo Marketing community for discussing opening a Zazzle shop, creating designs, adding them to products, and promoting them.

Since I’m a complete newbie on Zazzle, I’ll use myself as a guinea pig and talk about some of the things I do to create the products and market them.

I’m sure I’ll make some mistakes and I may have some ideas you never thought of, so I’m hoping it will be a useful discussion. You can see it here:

I am a newbie to Zazzle – do you have any advice?

That discussion is primarily for people who enjoy using Squidoo to market their products, but we’ll also be discussing other avenues of promotion and sales. You’re welcome to come and join us there, if you want.

In conclusion…

I like what I see so far at Zazzle and I’m looking forward to exercising what they offer and promoting designs I find that were created by other people, too.

I’m looking forward to seeing if I can develop a new, reliable, and growing income stream with Zazzle.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts about CafePress, Zazzle, or either of their affiliate programs?

Act on your dream!

JD

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SBI eLearning introductory price expires the end of January

January 16, 2010 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It 

I want to preface this post by saying that I learn much better when I teach myself or learn from an individual than I do when I’m in a classroom. I don’t know if I’m in the minority or the majority in that respect, but I know that all of us learn differently.

I prefer to read and learn. Perhaps you enjoy interacting and learning.

Do you learn better in a classroom setting?

One of the things that Sitesell offers that I haven’t talked about very much is their eLearning course. This is an online version of the course that is taught at a number of universities and colleges around the world.

Since the eLearning course was first introduced, you could enroll in the course at a discounted introductory price. That price expires on January 31, 2010 and the normal price takes effect on February 1, 2010.

If you are one of the people who learns better in a classroom setting – in the comfort of your own home, no less – then you may want to look into what the SBI eLearning course offers.

Here’s a brief video that explains it in just under ten minutes:

Perhaps you’re a self-learner

On the other hand, if you’re a self-learner, like me, then you may be more interested in the standard SBI Version 2.0 subscription. It offers much of the same training and support without having to attend a class.

Would you rather hire someone to help you build your online business?

Maybe you’re one of those people who has more time than money and you’d rather hire someone to build your online business for you, or at least to help you get it started.

Sitesell Services will work with anyone who wants them to “do it for me.” That doesn’t mean you won’t be involved, however. The webmaster who builds your initial site will consult closely with you to make sure it meets your needs.

Three great ways to get started with building a real online business

Now, Sitesell offers a great way to get started with building your online business regardless of your learning style or business preferences. You can do it yourself, learn in an online class, or hire someone to do it for you.

If you’re seriously interested in building a profitable online business, you owe it to yourself to quit flitting around from this to that and focus on building a business that you can enjoy working and promoting.

This is not get rich quick! It will take an investment of time, effort, creativity, and money to build a real business.

Don’t forget.

The introductory pricing for the eLearning course goes up in just two weeks.

If you want to take the class and save money, don’t delay.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Broadband makes a huge difference!

January 16, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 22 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Broadband, CafePress, Opinions, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Marketing 

If you’ve been reading my blogs or sites for any length of time, you know I live in an area where only dial-up Internet access is currently available, and it’s also an area with old, copper phone lines so that means I’ve been connecting at much slower speeds than my equipment is capable of.

This wasn’t much of a problem a few years ago.

Now, however, it has become a much bigger problem, especially for someone who earns his living from online marketing.

For the last week or so, I’ve had access to high-speed broadband and it has made all the difference in how I perceive what I and some of my friends are doing online.

For example, I’m a huge fan of Mitch Mitchell’s I’m Just Sharing blog and Aussie Sire’s Wassup blog.

As much as I enjoy both of their blogs, sometimes it has been frustrating trying to get them to load. Many times, I would have to load a blog post two or three times before the entire page would load.

This week, however, they load the first time, every time and do it quickly. That has made it much easier and more enjoyable to read what they have to say. The same holds true for quite a few other blogs I read on a regular basis.

The benefit to me is that I’m less frustrated and can read more in much less time. That increases my motivation to participate and also decreases the amount of time I spend waiting — and playing solitaire while the pages load. (In fact, I’ve only played two games of solitaire in the last week, and there were many times in the past few years when I would play several games while waiting on one page to load, so that’s a huge difference.)

Broadband makes it much easier to edit my sites

Truthfully, it hasn’t made much of a difference in editing my own blogs and sites, because I tend to do a lot of low-bandwidth things on them and intend to continue with that approach. Still, high-speed broadband opens the door to working with video in the future, especially when promoting local small businesses on Murphy Gold. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and I’m looking forward to it.

I can view and edit my Squidoo lenses, now

Where it has made a huge difference is being able to once-again edit my Squidoo lenses reliably and easily.

I was having a problem even seeing my own Squidoo lenses the last year or two. Editing them was even more problematic, especially some of the larger lenses such as my Site Build It lens.

The result of my problem with loading the lenses with slow dial-up was that I became more frustrated and less prone to update the lenses when people added sites to the voting Plexo modules.

The benefit of high-speed broadband is that I find it easy to view the lenses and edit them. Now, instead of being frustrated when I receive an email telling me that someone has added something to a Plexo module, I look forward to seeing what it is.

Usually, unfortunately, it’s some lame-brained spammer trying to spam their totally off-topic link on my site, but there are some nuggets in all the mud where people are suggesting excellent sites and lenses that I’m happy to add.

Publishing the lenses is much faster and much more reliable with a fast Internet connection, too.

The result is, over the last week, I’ve updated more lenses than I did in the last several months combined.

I can see my CafePress store much better now

Over the last couple of years, it seems that it has become harder and harder (and much slower) to edit my CafePress store and do all the things that are necessary to keep it up-to-date and to add new designs. As a result, I just stopped updating it.

We all know that makes a great recipe for stagnation, fewer sales, and loss of income. It’s exactly what happened.

Now, however, I can load the store in seconds, as opposed to sometimes taking ten minutes or more for pages with lots of products.

I’ve only tested editing a couple of pages, but I was able to make changes in five minutes or less that would have taken over an hour with my dial-up connection — if it were possible to successfully complete them at all.

A lot of people don’t care for my designs, and that’s okay. The good news is that I’ve sold a lot of products through my CafePress store and look forward to selling lots more. I have over 100 designs that I’ve never added to my store because it just wasn’t worth the time and effort.

I’ll be adding quite a few of them in the coming days and I’ll be promoting my CafePress store much more actively in the future.

In fact, I’ll probably be opening more stores that are focused entirely on a single niche and I’ll be promoting them heavily on several sites.

Will that increase sales? I’m sure it will. I’ll know for sure a year from now.

One of the things I’m sure will increase sales is lowering the prices.

In the past, I’ve used a premium pricing strategy for my CafePress shop. I expected few sales, so I raised the markup I’d receive on each sale.

Now that I have reliable, fast access to editing my shop, again, I’m changing the strategy.

I just lowered the prices on all the products in my store to reflect a moderate pricing strategy. I’ll earn quite a bit less per sale, but I expect that to increase the number of sales.

So, just a few minutes ago, while writing this post, I lowered the prices of every product in my shop, some of them substantially.

A fast broadband connection even makes Site Build It better

I intentionally design both of my sites that are powered by Site Build It to be low-bandwidth friendly.

I want people with slow connections to be able to read what I write and I want those pages to snap on the screen for people with faster connections.

I’m not going to make many changes in that regard, with the exception of adding a few videos.

I’ve known for some time that the popularity of video on the web has been exploding, but it was a waste of time and effort to even try to view them with my slow connection. This week, however, I’ve found how easy it is to watch video in real time with a fast connection and I know that video is more interesting to lots of people than pure text.

I still remain a text-oriented person, but I recognize an opportunity when I see it.

Another very interesting thing occurred to me this week. For all the years that I’ve been a Site Build It subscriber, I’ve always read the Action Guide and never even tried to view the video version of it.

That changed this week. For the first time ever, I watched the entire video version of the Action Guide and I have to admit that hearing someone speak while watching animation that was used to illustrate some of the processes really did make some of it more understandable. In fact, I’m going to watch the Days 2 and 3 videos again this evening.

Even though I have a good understanding of the three-tier structure of a successful website, the new tier-structure video made it much more understandable and I’ll be implementing some changes to both of my SBI sites over the coming days, as a result.

A fast connection doesn’t lessen the work, but it does make my efforts more efficient

I don’t know of anything that is reliable and honest that reduces the amount of work that it takes to be a successful online marketer, but I do know that a fast broadband connection makes a world of difference in improving efficiency.

Of course, that makes sense, but it has been a real eye-opener for me.

Back when I was a Systems Administrator for a local ISP I had direct access to a fast broadband pipe and it was nice, but that was before so many sites relied upon javascript, java, audio, video, and other things that benefit from high-speed pipes.

So, I was able to do just about anything I needed to do from home on dial-up almost as efficiently as I could do from the office using broadband.

But, that was a decade ago and things have changed drastically.

Now, there is a world of difference between slow dial-up access and high-speed broadband. That difference is much bigger and more important than I realized, and it is a very important difference for anyone aspiring to make money online from affiliate marketing or just about any other form of marketing.

Now, I’m wondering what other things I’m going to discover that will make my online marketing more effective.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts or opinions about the differences between slow and fast Internet connections and the effectiveness of your online affiliate marketing efforts?

I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you planning for more success in 2010? How?

December 28, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

I’ve done my share of whining about how hard 2009 has been, and frankly I’m done with that and I’m looking for this year to come to a close in a few days.

I wrote about it on my Act On Your Dream! site:

I survived 2009 and I think that was a success!

(If you have any interest in doing so, you’re welcome to comment on that page. Although you can’t use HTML in your comments, if I recognize you as a regular commenter here on this blog, I’ll be happy to make an active link back to you in your comment. Just post the full URL you want me to link to and I’ll take care of it. Of course, it has to be a link to one of your sites, not an affiliate link or anything inappropriate.)

So, as I said, I’m done with whining and I’m done with 2009. I still have a few more days to generate a little more income before the year is over and then I’m turning all my attention towards the future.

I expect 2010 to be a much better year.

I’m doing things differently next year.

For the last few years, I’ve tested a lot of things and most of them didn’t work at all, or had limited success. I don’t know if all of that was wasted time and effort, or if it was just a necessary part of testing the options and learning what works best for me.

Since I depend upon the revenue I earn from my online marketing, that’s what I use to evaluate if something has been valuable and successful for me. However, even the things that did not produce any appreciable income had other aspects that were very successful.

For instance, I’ve met lots of great people that I may never have met otherwise and I value that.

But that doesn’t pay the bills!

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time blogging and I’ve learned a lot. Even though it has not been successful as a way of generating income, I believe it has been a valuable learning experience and it has helped me spread my brand to a much wider audience.

I’ll be doing much less blogging in 2010, but I’m not going to abandon it entirely.

I built a number of portals over the last few years using Mamba and PHP-Nuke. Every single one of them was hacked and I finally got tired of rebuilding them. All of them are closed.

The only thing I learned from that experience is that it was wasted effort and there are serious security holes in open source scripts. I won’t be going that route again.

I’ve had good and bad experiences with forums (fora?) over the years.

I’ve met lots of great people and I would be worse off if I had not participated in them.

I have had better results from participating in forums than I have in building my own. That’s a lesson I’ll remember.

I have two forums that are still open at AYearFromNowForum.com and WesternNorthCarolinaForum.com, but I’ll be shutting them down in January, after I’ve had the time to find any content that can be repurposed on my static sites. Then, they’ll be gone forever.

Social networking has been a lot of work, but it has been satisfying in several respects. Although I can’t attribute any specific revenue to social networking, I do believe it has contributed by widening my readership to people who may not have found me otherwise.

It’s also been a great way to interact with lots of different people. That’s very important to me, because I live alone and work at home. There are times when I go several days without seeing another person in real life, and the interaction on the social networks has been very important to me.

I’ll be narrowing my social networking to just a few sites and don’t feel the need to be on nearly as many as I’ve tried over the last few years.

Things have changed and my focus in social networking has changed, too.

For example, I used to be very active on Ryze.com, but I hardly ever go there anymore. They fell behind the times when they didn’t implement RSS and they missed the boat when they required their community leaders to be upgraded members.

I was enjoying MySpace.com for awhile, but they jumped the shark when they started redirecting external links from our profiles to their own home page. As soon as they did that, I jumped ship.

I’m still enjoying Facebook.com, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. One of the most annoying things about Facebook, for me, is the plethora of applications and the ease with which my “friends” can spam me with them. I don’t know how many of those applications I’ve blocked, but I still block several more every time I go there.

My two favorite social networking sites are communities I’ve built on the Ning.com platform. I created and manage Squidoo Marketing and Murphy Connections, and I intend to do much more with each of them in the coming year.

I’m not earning any money (well, not much money) from either of them, but now that I have sponsors for each community at least they’re not expenses out of my own pocket. I’ll be working hard to make sure the sponsors get their money’s worth, too.

I have mixed feelings about Squidoo.com and HubPages.com. I’ve earned some money from Squidoo every month for the last several years, but that income continues to decrease. If the lenses I have there weren’t already built and attracting some readership, I probably would not make the effort to build them, now.

On the other hand, sometimes building a lens at Squidoo.com about one of my other sites is a good way to get the free traffic started both through referrals from the lens as well as free traffic from the search engines.

When I started Murphy Gold this year, I built several lenses for the site and for my first several clients. By syndicating the RSS feed from Murphy Gold through the Squidoo lenses, it attracted more visitors initially and continues to bring new people to the site.

However, now I’m getting many more visitors from Google, Yahoo, and Bing than from Squidoo, so it isn’t as important to me now as it was initially.

I have never really understood article marketing and I don’t think I have given it a fair trial, yet. To learn more about it, I opened and managed 21st Century Articles for over a year. I put a lot of work into that site and met a few good authors, but most of what was contributed was drivel and I deleted at least 95% of all the contributions.

It was built using a popular article directory script and was hacked several times. Eventually, it was no longer worth recovering the site and continuing.

I learned that there are some good authors writing quality content, but they are in the minority. I also learned that it takes a lot of time to manage an article directory, if you’re interested in quality. Since I moderated every submission, I believe I had a high-quality directory, but it would never have been a top-tier article directory, so closing it down was not a hard decision, in the end. Also, even with thousands of pages of content — all with Adsense ads on them — it generated only a few dollars a month and that certainly was not enough to pay me for my time and effort.

So, what have I learned about online marketing over these last few years?

I’ve learned that you can invest a lot of time and effort into something that never produces the results you want. It is very easy to do.

I’ve learned that every time you try something new, it takes you away from other things that are working for you, so you need to be careful and keep your focus. I believe that it’s always good to learn something new, but not to the point where it impacts your business negatively.

So, I’m happy that I learned how to use lots of different scripts for building portals, my article directory, and blogs, but I’m not happy that they did not produce any significant revenue.

What has worked for me?

Now, I know that what works for me, may not work for you, and vice versa. So, just as successful bloggers recommend blogging, I’m going to recommend building static niche-oriented websites.

I have a couple of large websites that I built over the last few years, and even though they are pretty much running on automatic now, with just the occasional addition or modification, they consistently produce revenue from several sources. Over time, their popularity rises and falls, but they are getting more readers and page views now than they were when I was actively building them.

The problem with them is that they don’t provide a way of getting easy feedback from their readers or to engage in any online conversations. I’ve tried using blogs and forums for each of these sites, but that really didn’t produce the results I wanted.

So, now, they just sit there and serve pages to people who are interested in the subjects, with very little input from me.

Most of my effort in 2010 will be building my two static sites that are powered by Site Build It!

Now, up until this year, it was appropriate to consider them static sites, but that has changed with the introduction of SBI version 2.

With the introduction of Content 2.0 as a standard part of SBI sites, now we can take advantage of some of the web 2.0 features that allow interaction with the readers without having to deal with all the insecurities of open source software.

So, I’ve been working hard over the last couple of weeks to update and revise my Act On Your Dream! site and to get it ready for lots more work in 2010.

I’ve added several pages that invite readers to submit their stories or articles and once they are accepted and published on the site, we can comment and/or rank them.

In some ways, this is similar to blogging, because we can carry on conversations in the comments. It is different from blogging, because it doesn’t just make it easy for the webmaster to add content, it also invites the readers to add content.

Yes, it’s similar to blogging, but different. Only time and experience will tell if it is better or worse, for me, than blogging has been.

Many people consider all the plug-ins that are available for WordPress to be one of its primary benefits. I’ve come to consider them to be drawbacks that waste my time at least as much as they help me.

With SBI version 2, there are no plug-ins. I don’t have to do anything to deal with security updates, plug-in updates, or anything else. I just use it and let the propeller-heads at Sitesell manage all the technical stuff for me. I like that. It allows me to concentrate on producing more content and not on just keeping the sites running.

From a blogger’s point of view, especially those who believe that commenters and do-follow links are important, there may be some drawbacks.

For example, this blog, and many others, use the CommentLuv plug-in which makes it easy to link back to a commenter’s blog via their RSS feed. That’s a nice feature, but I’m not personally convinced that it is valuable economically.

Contrary to what some bloggers believe, I have not seen any correlation between the number of comments on a blog and the income it generates, but I’m not even nearly an A-list blogger, so what do I know?

Yes, leaving comments on others’ blogs brings more readers to my own blog, but I believe that most of those readers, especially the ones who leave comments, are primarily motivated to bring other readers to their sites. This isn’t a particularly bad thing to do, but I do believe that it is unproductive in terms of generating revenue, if that is your primary motivation.

Having said that, I value a number of people who read this blog and some of my others and regularly comment on what I have to say, no matter how bone-headed I might be now and then.

I enjoy the conversations and I’m happy to link back to their blog posts. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

But, it doesn’t help me pay the bills, and until I get that firmly under control, that’s going to be my primary motivation.

It is my belief, in most instances, that bloggers are sellers, not buyers. We’re interested in promoting products and making sales through affiliate links. Or, we’re interested in selling advertising to generate revenue. Perhaps we have sponsors who cover the costs. For most of us, we want to either supplement our income or generate all of it from our online marketing.

So, increased readership from other bloggers may be satisfying on several levels, but I have no statistics that show that it adds to my bottom line. Some bloggers are generating six and seven figures a year in income, but they are rare, and they don’t include me.

So, as I’ve said previously, I’m going back to what has worked for me for about a decade.

In 2009, my income, such as it was, was generated primarily from three sites. Two of them produced affiliate income and Adsense ads revenue, primarily. One of them generated direct advertising revenue from paid clients. The latter one produced several times the revenue the two others did.

But, all three of them consistently bring in money and are easy to maintain and expand, so I’m going to focus on them primarily in the first six months of 2010.

To put other things in perspective, any one of those three sites brought in more revenue than all my other websites, blogs, forums, and social networks — combined!

But, I don’t think they would do as well in total isolation. So, I believe that blogging and social networking has brought more readers to those sites and helped them. The syndication of their RSS feeds on a variety of sites brings in readers, because I can see the referral numbers in my statistics.

So, I’ll continue to maintain quite a few sites that will not be my primary focus, but which add to the funnel that brings readers to the sites that I will be focusing on. Fortunately, most of the work in building that infrastructure is completed and just needs a little maintenance work now and then.

Even though I totally lost focus on my Act On Your Dream! site over the last three years, now that I’ve almost completed rebuilding the site, updating all the pages, and adding some pages that hopefully will lead to more interaction with the readers, I’m once-again looking forward to helping others identify their dream(s), setting goals, and working to achieve them. I enjoy helping others get what they want. I may not be able to do a lot to help, but I’m happy to do what I can.

Perhaps you would like to be a part of that process.

To get started, I have a couple of pages that I’d like to invite you to visit. Each of them has a form where you can contribute a story or article, and all submissions are moderated. Even though the form says otherwise (which is something I can’t change, yet), you must use your name and location when submitting something, or I won’t accept it.

To put it bluntly, submissions from anonymous people or from anyone who uses keywords as their name will be summarily rejected and trashed.

On the other hand, quality submissions from real people are welcome and I look forward to publishing them on the site and maybe in my ezine.

You are invited to visit and submit your entries to the following list of pages. They are new and may not have any, or many, submissions yet, so you can be a trend-setter!

Reader submitted entries are listed below the forms, so even if you don’t want to submit anything, you can scroll down below the form and see what has been published already.

Your comments and ratings on the items are welcome, but please use your real name. As with the submissions themselves, I don’t accept anonymous comments.

Do you have a dream? (I’m talking about something you aspire to achieve or acquire, not a sleeping dream.) You’re invited to share it with us at Your Dream.

Do you have a success story you’d like to share? Successes come in all sizes, so it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster, runaway success to be valuable to our readers. Share Your Success Story.

How do you Define Success?

Do you have an original article that you’ve written about success, failure, time management, goal setting, making your dream come true, the law of attraction, or similar topics? If you do, you’re invited to Submit Your Article.

(I turned off article submissions in early November, because I was being bombarded by off-topic, spammy submissions every day. Now, I’m trying a different approach and look forward to publishing your quality original articles on topics related to the Act On Your Dream! site.)

I’ll be adding more pages to the site and asking for your participation. In the next couple of days, I’ll add a new page that lists all these pages where you are invited to submit your thoughts, opinions, stories, and articles. I’m not sure what I’ll call it, however. I’m leaning towards “Your Thoughts,” but I’d welcome any suggestions for a better title.

So, those are my plans for the first half of 2010 and I’m looking forward to working on them.

What about you?

What are you going to be focusing on in 2010?

Act on your dream!

JD

BTW, while I’m thinking about it, the SBI version 2 two-for-one holiday special has been extended until Monday, January 4, 2010. This will be your last chance until next Christmas to get two SBI subscriptions for the price of one.

Of course, you don’t have to buy two, even if the second one is free, if you don’t want to. The choice is yours.

As long as we’re thinking about our futures, I think SBI, and all it includes, is an excellent investment, and, yes, I get a commission if you buy from my link. More importantly, however, I know from experience that my investments in SBI have produced very good returns. It’s not magic, but it is a time-tested process and set of tools that has produced great results for a lot of others, too.

As with all things of any value, it takes work, effort, time, and money to succeed. If you want overnight success without working for it, don’t bother trying anything. It won’t work for you. Go play another video game or watch some more TV.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to devote some time to building your online business, and you’re willing to follow a guide that has helped thousands succeed, then maybe SBI is right for you. If you try it and don’t like it, you can get a full refund in the first 30 days and a prorated refund after that, so there’s very little risk in trying SBI to see for yourself what you think of it.

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