Sitesell reaches 10,000 fans milestone on Facebook

March 27, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Facebook, Sitesell and Site Build It, Social Networking 

On Friday, March 25, 2011, at close to 9:00 pm (Eastern), Sitesell reached a big milestone on their Facebook page.

I was among the crowd of Sitesell fans who were watching as the fan counter approached and exceeded the 10,000 mark.

It was an interesting achievement.

The folks at Sitesell didn’t think there was a need for a Facebook page for the company, but they decided to give it a try.

At first, only a couple of fans were posting regularly, but — in less than nine months — Sitesell went from no fans on Facebook, to over 10,000. I believe that’s a real achievement.

It’s interesting in another way, too.

Now, with the privatizing of the Sitesell Forums, I think the Sitesell Facebook page will be the best way for people who don’t subscribe to SBI (and therefore can’t gain entrance to the private forum) to get a glimmer of the camaraderie shared by many who build our sites with SBI (we refer to ourselves as SBIers).

Wow! Did I really write that sentence! I gotta sit down and try it again. Let’s see…

With the forum closed to non-subscribers, I think the Facebook page is the best way for people who aren’t Sitesell customers to get acquainted with what’s going on there and to meet some of the people who are involved with Sitesell and SBI.

Subscribers (SBIers) post regularly, and quite a few of the people who work for Sitesell do, too. And that includes Ken Evoy, the Founder and Chairman of Sitesell, who visits now and then.

It’s also a place for people who don’t use SBI to ask questions and get real answers from people who know what they’re talking about.

Plus, it’s a lot of fun. Some of the Sitesell fans have a great sense of humor.

The growth in the number of “fans” is similar to what we see in the number of visitors to a well-researched and well-constructed website. It starts slowly and builds. At some point, the “snowball starts rolling” and we see real growth in the number of people who visit our sites.

Now, the snowball is rolling at Sitesell’s Facebook page.

I can’t wait to see the celebration when the count passes 20,000 fans.

Let’s celebrate!

As part of the celebration, Sitesell is having their first ever buy-one-get-one-free sale that isn’t occurring at Christmas. The sale will last a limited time — 72 hours — and then it’s gone. It will be over at 9:00 pm (EDT) on Monday, March 28, 2011. I doubt there will be any extensions to this sale’s timing.

You can’t take advantage of that sale price at the normal order page. You have to find the “secret” link on the Facebook page to get the discount. (It shouldn’t be hard for you to find.)

Go to Sitesell’s Facebook page and click the “Like” button at the top of the page, and then look for the link. Hint: Go to the welcome page, if you’re not already there.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to everyone involved with the achievement of this milestone. It was fun to be there watching the fan counter reach and exceed 10,000 fans.

I’m looking forward to being there when the 20,000th fan joins in.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags:

Question about links to online marketing scams

March 26, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 12 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Opinions 

I have a quick question…

Do you allow links from commenters to obvious get rich quick scams?

I’m not talking about links in the comment, I’m talking about links from the author’s name, or their last blog post, or both, to a site that either is a scam site or promotes one.

I’m not going to name any names or mention any sites (this time), but I have a pending comment that links to a site with which I do not want to be associated. The problem is this: it’s a good comment otherwise.

I can’t tell if the person is sincere, or just trying to get a “do follow” link to the site.

It bothers me.

In the past, during my early days of affiliate marketing, I joined and promoted some things I would never do, now. I don’t want to do anything to lead anyone else along those paths.

I can’t prove it’s a scam, but a lot of folks are saying that it is, and I recognize the look of a scam. It’s one of those very long sales pages, with lots of bonuses, claims of income that can’t be verified, great sales copy that sounds too good to be true, testimonials from people who can’t be located (including J. Smith!), and so forth.

I know you recognize the type of site of which I speak.

I don’t have anything in my comments policy that pertains to this, yet I don’t want to trash the comment or edit the link without giving this question serious consideration.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,

Simple Truths Sells Inspirational Gifts

March 25, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 13 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Favorite Quotations, Movies 

Today, for a change of pace, I want to get back to the original topic of this blog and talk about affiliate marketing.

(Applause!)

I’ve been looking for a good business with an affiliate program that would be a good fit for my Act On Your Dream! site. The majority of the revenue from that site dried up when Amazon.com canceled me, and all the other affiliates in NC, a couple of years ago.

I’ve tried a couple of others, but they do not convert well. Adsense ads bring in only a little revenue, because there are few good ads for the topic of the site.

A couple of days ago, I found Simple Truths and looked over their products and affiliate program. I liked what I saw in both cases.

They offer quality products full of inspiration and motivation and I look forward to promoting those products on several of my sites.

I’ve already implemented links to a couple of their free movies on my Success Quotes page. The movie at the top of the page better fits the subject of that page, but I find the movie at the bottom to be more inspirational.

Here’s a link to the second movie:

In just a couple of minutes, I want to know more about Marty and why he is called the richest man in town.

I’ve been looking at several of their movies, as I slowly work my way through all of them — part of the getting acquainted process.

I like this one that addresses some of the problems related to to-do lists, goals, and procrastination…

Eat That Frog!

And, I’ll share one more in this post.

Have you read or heard this quote?…

“Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass…
it’s about learning how to dance in the rain!” — Vivian Greene

That’s one of my favorite quotes, and it’s one I thought of frequently the last three years as I battled cancer. There were days that I had to dig deep inside to find ways to dance in the particular (metaphorical) rain I was experiencing.

So, I really enjoyed this short movie when I watched it last night…

Learning to Dance In The Rain Movie

Over the coming months, I’ll be buying some of these products to read for myself and then I’ll pass them along as gifts to people I think will benefit from them.

At this point, I have not bought nor read any of their products, so this post is based on an initial gut feeling I have about them, based on the high quality of the free movies. I’ll know more later, from experience, and I’ll follow up on this company in the future.

They have an attractive affiliate program (link on the bottom of their website) and it is managed through ShareASale.

I joined ShareASale a long time ago, but at the time I didn’t find anything I wanted to promote and I basically forgot about them.

When I tried to join a couple of days ago, it said that my preferred username was already taken, so I was pretty sure that meant I’d been accepted some time ago.

I searched through my records and found my username and password and tried to login. I was told my account had been deactivated due to inactivity. I sent an email and asked for it to be reactivated, and that was done within 24 hours. Another request to reset my email address, because I no longer had access to the one they had on file — yes it was THAT long ago, was also handled quickly.

So, I’m back to business with ShareASale.

If you would like to promote the products from Simple Truths, you can apply in your ShareASale account.

If you’re not a member of ShareASale, you can remedy that easily…

Find a sponsor for your web site. Get paid for your great content. shareasale.com.

As I start to generate income, I’ll know more about ShareASale and I’ll review them in the future. I checked with some friends who are experienced affiliate marketers and each of them had good things to say about the company.

I like what I’m seeing in their affiliate center, so far. It’s easy to find companies to consider and finding links and generating the code has been flawless and intuitive.

I’m looking forward to working with both ShareASale and Simple Truths.

Do you have any experience with either company?

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. It feels very good to be able to do some new affiliate marketing, for a change.

Tags: , , , , ,

My love affair with WordPress is slowly dying

March 20, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, WordPress 

At one point, several years ago, I fell in love with WordPress and converted all my blogs (at least those I chose to keep active) from various other blogging platforms to self-hosted blogs on my own domains.

I don’t remember how many weeks I spent on that project. It took awhile.

Now, the three blogs I intend to keep active are hosted on my domains and are powered by WordPress. You may be doing the same thing.

Over the intervening months, I’ve looked at a lot of plug-ins for my blogs and have tested a few. Now, I’ve settled into using about a dozen.

I’m still not thinking clearly enough to tackle real projects, but today I decided to update the plug-ins I’m using. All of them have been well-behaved in the past and I had few, or no, problems with them. That’s why they’ve survived the cut.

It’s been bugging me lately whenever I log into my dashboard and see plug-ins that need updating. Today, when I sat down to write a new blog post (on a topic that I have completely forgotten about now), I saw that nine plug-ins needed updating.

In a fit of uncharacteristic trust that computers and software can be modified without any side-effects, I updated all of them at the same time. After 30 years of programming and using computers, you would think I’d know better.

I was actually going to write about the topic of this blog — affiliate marketing — and that was shot down.

After the system did its thing and updated the nine plug-ins, my blog immediately started loading pages incredibly slowly. The pages have been taking two or three seconds to load, but all of a sudden, it was taking half-a-minute, if they even loaded completely.

So, I turned off all my active plug-ins. (At least, I was thinking clearly enough to stop, pull out a pen and paper, and write a list of all the plug-ins that were activated. I have about as many that are not activated, but which I want to test when I’m up to it.)

The pages loaded very quickly, on the order of a second or two.

So, over the next hour, I activated each plug-in separately and observed the load time of the home page and a long blog post. With each plug-in that I activated, the load time slowed.

I tried prioritizing them. I deactivated the lowest priority and activated those at the top of the list. Still too slow.

Eventually, I found a mix that more-or-less works. In the process, I lost some functionality I wanted, but have a blog that is functional and not too slow. It’s slower than I want, but it’s workable.

I know better.

Really, I do.

Did I back everything up before updating.

No.

Silly me.

Did I set aside a few hours, in case I ran into problems?

No.

Did I do the updates on an impulse, knowing I had to leave home and run some errands?

Yes.

Did I get the blog post written that I originally set out to write?

No.

Is it the fault of WordPress? Partially.

Is it the fault of the plug-in programmers? Partially.

Is it my fault? Partially, but I accept full responsibility for making and implementing the decision.

It is a never-ending cycle of upgrading WordPress and the plug-ins I choose to use. It is getting tiresome. I don’t find it interesting these days.

It’s getting in the way of getting real work done.

After a couple of hours of working through this, I’m actually a couple of steps behind where I was before I started. In other words, I took a couple of steps backwards today.

That will not get me closer to achieving my goals.

I didn’t write the post I set out to write. That won’t get me any closer to earning more money.

It has been a wasted opportunity.

Sigh.

Tags: , , ,

Quick review of my comments policy

March 18, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Policies 

If you are new to this site, you may not be aware of my comments policy.

Please read it before you submit any comments.

I have not made any changes recently, so any readers who have been here awhile already know its contents.

I have been getting a lot of comments that are marginal, and a very few good comments. I would have approved the latter, if you had followed the rules I’ve established for this site.

I will not approve any comments that don’t have your name listed as the author. Any comment, no matter how good it is, will be deleted if you use keywords, a business name, a website URL, or anything other than a name. That’s final.

This site is for PEOPLE talking to PEOPLE. Anything else is unacceptable.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,

Sitesell is making more of their tools private

March 12, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It 

For years, Sitesell has made quite a bit of the information related to SBI free and available to the public.

Very valuable information is found in the Sitesell Forum and the Action Guide. The tool known as Search It! makes it easy to find information related to building and maintaining an online business.

Sitesell Forum

The Forum has been semi-private. To get full read/write access, you have to be an SBI subscriber. I find the information and support in this forum to be worth the price of an annual SBI subscription.

In the past, there were several ways that a non-subscriber could read the posts in the forum. Members were allowed to invite guests into the forum. These guests could read the forum, but could not post there.

Sitesell affiliates could read the entire forum, but could post to the affiliates sub-forum, only.

Now, however, that is changing. The guest access has been closed (or will be in the very near future). Only current SBI subscribers will have access to the forum once it is closed.

Some of the best forum posts will be available in publicly-accessible format. These will not be made private. They are copies of selected forum posts and are intentionally made public (with the consent of the original poster). Compared to the tens of thousands of threads in the Sitesell Forum, these selected posts show only a tiny glimpse into this outstanding forum. I’ve joined and participated in dozens of online forums over the years, and the Sitesell Forum continues to be the most helpful, friendly, and supportive of all of them.

In the very near future, the Sitesell affiliate forum will be split off from the SBI member forum. Affiliates will no longer have free access to the member forum, but will have a forum of their own.

SBI Action Guide

The Action Guide is one of the most valuable parts of SBI. There are several versions available, including a written version, video version, and condensed version. All of these will be made private, soon.

I’ve often wondered why they were made available to the public in the first place. It takes a lot of time and effort for the folks at Sitesell to continually improve, rewrite, and update the Action Guide. I never understood why it was made freely available.

On the other hand, even with the Action Guide, it would be very difficult to build an online business without all the tools included with SBI. Now, without the Action Guide, it will be even harder.

Even without all the tools that are included with SBI, I would be happy to pay $30 per month to get access to the forum and action guide. It would be a no-brainer for me.

I start every morning at the Sitesell Forum and usually end each day there. It’s the first thing I do (second only to coffee!) in the morning, even before email and Facebook.

Now that I’m recovering from my nearly-fatal bout with cancer last year, I’ll be working through the Action Guide, again, and applying what I re-learn there to my SBI sites. Every time I read the Action Guide or watch the videos, there is something new to learn, because they are continually updated as things change.

(I started not to link to the Action Guide, because it will be made private soon and I don’t know what will show on the page this link goes to. But, I wanted to give you one last chance to see for yourself how valuable this guide to building an online business really is — before it is no longer public. Of course, you can continue having access to it — plus all the other tools — by subscribing to SBI. It’s only $30 per month or $300 per year. That’s a bargain. They should charge a lot more, but I’m happy they don’t.)

Search It!

Search It! is a tool that I have used extensively in the past, but not too much the last two years, while I was unable to work on my sites. I was looking at it a couple of minutes ago and noticed that — like all other SBI tools — it has much more than it did the last time I used it to search for things on the Internet. It keeps getting better.

I’ve used the searches to research site ideas, product ideas, competitors, and legalities; to find people copying my original content; and much more.

I’m very handy when it comes to searching on Google and know how to use many of the optional parameters, but Search It! makes remembering all these things unnecessary — and the searches are revised when necessary.

In the near future, this tool will be made private and will be accessible only from within the SBI Site Central (the “dashboard” for accessing all the SBI tools). Search It! has been accessible there since its introduction, and, soon, that will be the only access.

I’ll be clear about this. Search It! is not a deal breaker for me. I would not purchase SBI just to get access to it, but I’m happy that it’s included at no additional cost.

The Sitesell Forum and/or the Action Guide, however, would be deal breakers. Without either of them, the value of SBI would be greatly diminished. Fortunately, we’re not facing that issue.

Better value for subscribers

I had to think about this for awhile.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that privatizing these resources is a very good thing. It’s in the best interests of Sitesell and its over-40,000 subscribers, one of whom is me.

Anyone who has been getting a free ride using any of these tools and resources will now have to pony up the very small fee (less than a dollar a day!) to have access to them, once they are privatized. If they (you) aren’t willing to do that, you don’t deserve access.

Someone has to keep all these resources current, accurate, and reliable, and that costs money.

I think that the management of Sitesell has made the right decision.

Not all will be private

There are some very useful ebooks that will remain free, and contain valuable information for anyone who is willing to read them and put the information they contain to work.

The following ebooks will remain freely available:

If you truly can’t afford a subscription to SBI, you can still learn a lot about building an online business by downloading and studying one or more of those free ebooks. They were valuable enough that I bought them back when they weren’t free.

These are valuable resources for SBI subscribers, too. There are many threads in the forum related to information in these free ebooks. It’s a great example of members helping and being helped by other members.

Sitesell YouTube Channel

Sitesell has a YouTube channel with useful and educational videos that, of course, are free to watch.

The SBI E-Business Series of videos contains a condensed version of some of the information in the Action Guide.

Free Masters Courses

There are several free masters courses related to building an online business that are available from Sitesell — and you don’t even have to give your email address to download them. You will NOT be put on a mailing list.

Originally, some of these courses were delivered via email over a period of several days. Now, they are PDF ebooks that you can download and study.

Lots of free information is still available

Even with the decision to privatize the forum, action guide, and Search It!, Sitesell still provides lots of free information.

Their free information is better than most of what I have purchased from other sources, and I’ve bought and studied quite a few courses and ebooks over the last decade and a half that I’ve had an online business.

Of course, non of that information is worth anything if you don’t study it — and then put what you’ve learned into practice. Knowledge alone has some value, but it blossoms when put into action.

If you start now, in as little as a year from now you’ll be well on your way to building your own online business based on something in which you have a passionate interest.

I remain thankful for the day I found Ken Evoy, Sitesell, and the original Make Your Site Sell ebook. It changed my life.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , ,