Why do some forums thrive and others just seem to wilt?

August 24, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 21 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Communities, Forums, Social Networking 

I have several forums that I manage and I don’t know the answer to what appears to be a simple question.

Why do some of them thrive and grow while others just wilt?

Two that are thriving are actually social networking communities hosted on Ning.com, but they feel very much like a forum to me.

My Squidoo Marketing community continues to grow very well and the membership is approaching 200 members. I join in the conversations when I have something to say, watch out for spam, and check in two or three times per day, but the majority of the activity comes from the members interacting with each other.

Murphy Connections is growing, too, but a bit more slowly. That’s understandable since it’s geographically targeted to a small town in the mountains of western North Carolina. Yet, even though it draws from a smaller target group, it is growing and the participation is pretty good.

On the other hand, my A Year From Now Forum, which is tied in with my Act On Your Dream! website just isn’t doing anything. Part of the fault is mine, because I really neglected it over much of the last couple of years when I wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved. Still, it’s getting an average of 50 visitors per day, yet practically none of them are joining and participating. It’s obvious that the posts are getting read, but replies and new threads are practically non-existent.

Is it the subject matter? Am I reaching the wrong audience? Is the forum just not worth joining and participating?

I don’t have much ego involved in this, so please feel free to be honest with your comments. Just remember that honest doesn’t mean the same thing as brutal.

I’m hoping your fresh eyes on the subject will help me learn what I can do differently to improve.

I’m hoping you can offer some advice to help me.

Act on your dream!

JD

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I just learned how to enjoy Facebook more

August 24, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 12 Comments
Filed under: Facebook, Friends and Family, Social Networking 

I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, but I do go there two or three times per week to see what my friends are doing.

I’m not one of those people who goes “friend crazy” on Facebook. I have just under 300 friends there.

Lately, I’ve been getting tired of going to the Facebook home page, because I just wasn’t interested in what I was seeing most of the time.

But, this evening, based on a chance comment I read somewhere yesterday, Facebook got a lot more enjoyable for me.

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs over the weekend and someone — I don’t remember who — said something about Facebook friend lists in passing. He or she didn’t go into any depth to explain it, but it stuck in my mind, somehow.

This evening, when I went to Facebook, I went to their help center and found out what friend lists are.

Over the last few weeks (months?) I’ve seen the “Add to list” link when someone requests to become my friend, but I never thought about it.

Tonight, I learned that I can create multiple lists to segment all of my friends into smaller, more useful groups.

I went to the Friends tab on Facebook and waited for the drop-down menu to appear and then I chose the All Friends link.

Then I went through all my friends there and added many of them to one or more lists. I created a list for close friends, another for family, another for bloggers, one for Squidoo friends, one for marketing, and so forth. I may go back and add other lists, but I’m pretty happy with what I accomplished this evening in a surprisingly short time.

I was also a bit surprised when I realized I had not a single clue who some of the people were who I had accepted as friends. I don’t remember ever seeing some of their names. Over the next few weeks, I’ll visit the profiles of the ones I don’t remember. Unless there is a good reason to keep them, I’ll be removing them from my friends.

After all, how much of a friend can they be if I don’t even remember who they are?

So, after doing all of this, I still didn’t see how it would be useful to me.

I went to the Facebook home page and still saw the same old mish-mash of updates that weren’t very interesting to me.

Then, I looked into the left column and saw some links. At the bottom of the short list was the link labeled “more.” I clicked it and there were my brand new friend lists.

I clicked on the Family link and a few seconds later all the updates were from my family members on Facebook. Now, that was interesting and useful!

After reading that, I clicked on the Close Friends list and read what they were up to.

Next I clicked on the Marketing list and enjoyed reading their updates – for the most part. It turns out that some of the updates really weren’t all that interesting. I may be removing some of the people in that list from my friends.

In the next few minutes, I clicked on each new list, in turn, and really enjoyed reading updates that were more or less grouped by people in categories in which I was interested.

I can already tell that I’ll spend more time on my Family and Close Friends lists as I continue to use Facebook.

Several people are on multiple lists.

It was interesting that I chose to add some people I know in real life as Close Friends and a few people I’ve never met in person, but who feel like close friends, anyway.

Maybe you already know all about this and you’ve been doing it forever and wonder how I could be so dense. That’s okay. Sometimes it just takes me awhile to learn to use the features each tool offers.

I know for certain that I’ll be using friend lists on Facebook from here on out.

What about you?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Have you listed your business at Brownbook.net?

August 21, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Directories, Promote Yourself 

Brownbook.net is a directory where you can list your business for free.

Before today, though, if you wanted to claim your listing, so that only you could edit it, and add more information to it, you’d have to pay a fee.

As of today, however, Brownbook is now TOTALLY FREE.

I recently learned of Brownbook and added a listing for Dilbeck Marketing a few days ago. Today, I claimed the business and started adding more content to the page.

It’s another link to your business and shows up pretty well in the search engines.

Act on your dream!

JD

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I no longer open email with subjects that include certain words

August 20, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Musings, Opinions, Writing, email marketing 

I was going through several hundred emails this morning and the more I looked at the subjects, the more I got annoyed by some of them.

Now, this has taken years to start bothering me, but today, I think I reached my limit.

I posted a tweet on Twitter that said, “I no longer open email with subjects that include words like sneaky, exclusive, tricks, secrets, hurry, and so on.”

Others quickly agreed, aj1996 said, “Wish people would do the same with Lens titles & NOT inc words like “secrets” !!!!!!”

I agree with that, too. The same goes for books, ebooks, reports, and everything else.

Brian D. Hawkins said, “Hi John, many email clients spam emails with words like that automatically.”

That’s where I got confused.

I know that some of the emails I receive with those words are spam, but some come from real people.

I’ve read all sorts of books about copywriting and writing headlines, and most of them suggest using “power words” and words that create urgency and excitement.

I think that’s fine and good for headlines in print ads and in real snail mail letters, but it’s overkill when you see dozens of emails in one morning that use those same words.

Folks, there are no secrets to marketing success. It’s a matter of finding the best products and services and promoting them honestly.

Now and then, someone will come up with a new idea that will be popular and soon everyone else (the people I call “me, too” marketers) will run it into the ground and ruin the effectiveness.

For example, a year or two ago, someone started using “The Death of…” to sell an ebook. (My memory is hazy on this, since I wasn’t interested in the product.)

Before you could turn around a couple of times, I started getting emails about the death of this and the death of that and it became pitiful in a week or two.

Today, I really became annoyed when I saw all those email subject lines. I looked at the subject and then at who was sending the email to me. I opened not a single one of them — poof, right into the trash.

So, what do you think about this?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Deleting old bookmarks on Delicious.com

August 18, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Musings, Web Services 

For the last several days, I have been diligently working to update and rebuild all of my Act On Your Dream! website.

This is one of my favorite sites and I was dismayed to see how much I’ve neglected updating and adding new information to the site. That’s something I plan to remedy in the coming weeks.

This morning, I was editing the Delicious Tag Cloud page and noticed that there were tags for things I’m no longer interested in and others that I no longer promote.

It’s been awhile since I’ve really worked with Delicious.com (used to be del.icio.us) and I realized that I had several dozen bookmarks that I needed to delete and others that needed to be edited to remove tags that were no longer appropriate.

It was a fairly easy process and I was reminded why I like Delicious.com more than the other bookmarking sites.

Do you use bookmarking sites to share your bookmarks with others? When is the last time you took a look to see if you’re showing what you want to share, now?

It took maybe an hour to update over 200 bookmarks and to winnow them down to less than 200. They make it easy.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Making progress by going backwards

August 10, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, Marketing, Musings, Squidoo Lenses 

The last six weeks have seen a very interesting change in my affiliate marketing strategy — well, interesting to me and possibly to you.

Part of this was not part of my ongoing plan — getting canceled by Amazon.com, for instance.

Part of it was finally having time to update some websites that had been neglected for most of the last two years as more and more of my time was devoted to caring for Mom and then working on settling her estate.

Part of it was reevaluating products and services that I’ve recommended over the last few years and deleting links to many of them. While I still feel that almost all of them were good products and worth what they cost, I’m no longer comfortable recommending them.

And, if I’m no longer comfortable doing it, why should I continue?

So, I spent a lot of time this morning removing and redirecting affiliate links for a variety of products.

I’ve been working day and night undoing what I spent years doing — finding and linking to affiliated products on a variety of websites, blogs, Squidoo lenses, and other places on the web. I don’t know how long it will take to find and delete all of them, or if that’s even possible, but I’m working on it diligently.

So far, I’ve deleted nearly a thousand pages on my various sites and at least that part is done.

Progress is not a continuous upwards curve

No matter how much we would like to have continuous, unbroken progress in our businesses, it just doesn’t happen that way.

There are always downturns, obstacles that must be overcome, and changes that must be dealt with.

Yes, it feels like that takes us away from getting our work done, but the truth is that it IS our work.

So, even though I’ve been undoing a lot lately, I feel like I’m finally making some progress by clearing out the old chaff so I can concentrate on growing new wheat.

(No, I’m not a farmer. That’s a metaphor.)

It’s a strange idea, possibly, but I really feel like I’m making progress even though most of what I’ve been doing has been going backwards.

On the positive side, my new website for promoting select locally-owned brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC is doing well and I’ll be devoting more and more time to building and promoting Murphy Gold over the coming months.

What part will affiliate marketing play in my future?

More and more, I’m asking myself that question, and I’m unsure of the answer.

As I get pickier about what I recommend to you and have to deal with unexpected things like changes in the NC tax code that got me dropped from several affiliate programs, I find it harder and harder to recommend products and services to you.

Of course, I’ll continue to recommend Site Build It! and I’ll continue using it for my new static sites. At this time, I don’t have any plans to create any new sites and may still decide to delete a few more, but the new sites I build will be powered by SBI.

What do you think?

Those are some of my thoughts about online marketing on a hot summer afternoon.

What do you think? How’s your affiliate marketing business progressing — or not?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Goodbye SFI Marketing Group

August 10, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Network Marketing, Nice Offers, Private Success Team, SFI Marketing Group, Squidoo Lenses 

This has been a difficult decision to make and I’ve been wrestling with it for months, but the time has come to say goodbye to SFI Marketing Group.

I’ve gone back through the posts I made to the SFI category and deleted all my affiliate links, but that’s just a start. I’ve been promoting SFI far and wide for over six years, so I don’t know how long it will take to find and remove all the affiliate links to their sites.

Fortunately, many of them are redirects and top-level domain names, so I’m going to redirect them to this blog post.

If you’ve come here thinking you were going to see a product sold by SFI, I hope you won’t be too confused.

I like many of SFI’s products

As I’ve said before, I really like many of their products and I’ll continue to buy them, but from someone else’s affiliate links in the future.

Not getting the results I expected

After six years of seriously promoting SFI Marketing Group and their products, I expected to see a larger return on my investment of time and effort.

Too many changes

Just last week, SFI introduced a whole new approach to their program and I think I’m just too old and tired to learn another completely new system. What is this? I think this is the third or fourth major change in their affiliate program in the last few years, and I haven’t seen any positive results from it — at least not in terms of income.

Getting off the treadmill

I admit that I have not taken the time to fully study and learn the new VersaPoints system, and I won’t be doing so.

My initial impression, however, is that affiliates may be more active, but much of that activity will be running in place on the treadmill to acquire points every month.

No, thanks.

Trying to Opt Out of SFI

I had a heck of a time finding a link for opting out of being an SFI Marketing Group affiliate. After looking at the pages for my account, the FAQ help file, the complete help index, and other pages, I finally put “opt out” in the search box and found the page for leaving SFI.

I’m sure there used to be a direct link on the menu, but maybe that was overlooked with all the major changes they made this month. I don’t know.

Canceling my standing order

There was a warning on the opt-out page that this would not cancel any standing orders I may have with SFI.

I canceled my standing order a couple of months ago, but I clicked the link just to check and be sure.

I’m a little concerned that it showed my standing order was still active, even though I’m pretty sure that I was not charged for it last month. I’ll double check my records to be sure.

Either way, I canceled my standing order (again).

Then I went back to the opt-out page.

There’s one last step to do. I need to check my email and click the verification link to complete opting out. That should do it.

Goodbye, SFI.

Act on your dream!

JD

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