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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I will be moving away from blogging in 2010

December 19, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Sitesell and Site Build It 

I enjoy blogging and I’ve been doing this for a long time, back before the words weblog and blog were even coined.

This is the last year where blogging will be part of my marketing plan, however.

The plain truth is that blogging hasn’t been worth the time and effort in terms of receiving an income from all I’ve done. So, since I’m going to be concentrating on increasing my revenue next year, I’m going to focus almost entirely on what works for me and I’m dropping what hasn’t been fruitful.

There is a good chance that this blog won’t be here a year from now.

I’m turning my attention back to what does work for me – what pays the bills – and another thing I enjoy, which is building static, hierarchical websites focused on particular topics.

I’ve been building websites since shortly after the introduction of the world wide web and I have used lots of different tools to build sites that attract visitors and earn money from sponsorships, advertising, affiliate sales, and in other ways.

One site, that I’ve sadly neglected because of health issues that have interfered, still earns more in one month than all my blogs earn in an entire year — and I haven’t done much to that site at all in the last year.

That should be a lesson to me. Concentrate on what’s working and stop playing with all the shiny red balls that bounce by.

I enjoy blogging

I enjoy blogging and the social aspects of commenting on other blogs. These discussions have been fun and I’ve met some great people around the world as a result.

But, let’s face it. We talk to each other, but we don’t buy from each other. You don’t buy from me and I don’t buy from you. That’s the bottom line when it comes to a marketing business.

I’m still going to follow blogs and bloggers that I like and I’ll still have something to say now and then when Mitch or AussieSire, or several others I enjoy reading, writes something of interest, but I’m not going to spend nearly the time and effort that I have in the past on my own blogs.

I don’t like being poor

My goal in having an online marketing business is to earn a good living at it, not just barely get by.

This has been an unusually hard year for me, but that’s the way life happens. I’m hoping that it was just the bottom of a bad cycle and that things will start moving upwards, soon.

That’s another reason to concentrate on what’s working.

The majority of my income this year has been from a brand new site I started back in July when I had to replace the affiliate income I lost.

I’ve been playing around with promoting my adopted home town and the people and organizations here, but I turned that into a business this year when I launched Murphy Gold and its companion social networking site at Murphy Connections.

This is a more-traditional business structure.

Local business owners pay me to promote them and I write about the products and services they offer and other things they do throughout the year, such as special events.

Over time, even in a small town like Murphy, NC, this can be profitable.

Now that I have all the infrastructure in place, it’s time to hunker down and focus on that.

So, you’ll see less of me here. I’ll still drop in on your blogs now and then and I’m following some of them in email and RSS, but I won’t be saying much, unless you write something that really captures my interest and I think my comment may add value to what you’re saying.

This answers my question: WordPress or SBI?

I can clearly show on my profit and loss statement that SBI delivers much more income and more visitors who actually buy something than all of my blogs put together.

SBI takes less work, doesn’t have to be updated every time I turn around, and now with Content 2 being available to all of us who power our sites with Site Build It, it gives me an easy way to let others write pages for the site and comment on them.

That adds the social aspect to SBI sites that I’ve enjoyed on blogs.

So, there you have it.

I’ve been promoting SBI for years and telling you how much I love it, so I’m going to go back to using it and rebuilding my online marketing business.

Blogging has been a fun experiment.

Act on your dream!

JD

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How will Google Personalized Search affect affiliate marketing?

December 8, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 17 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Attracting Visitors 

How much do you know about Google’s personalized search feature?

For some time now, if you were signed in to Google (through any of the accounts you may have there), your search results were subject to being personalized.

I first realized how important this was when I was doing some search engine optimization and promotion for a client. I told my daughter that we were already getting page one placement for that client and she said she didn’t see it.

That’s when I remembered that I was logged in to Google. When I logged out, and did the search again, the results were different. My client was not on page one and these new results were consistent with what my daughter saw when she did the same search.

So, after that, when I was testing search results, I had to remember to log out of Google.

Last Friday, however, Google rolled out personalized search results for everyone and you’ve been opted-in by them automatically, whether you are aware of it or not.

Here’s their announcement…

Personalized Search for everyone

Now, personally, I think this has potential for real differences in how people see search results and I think it’s going to get more different over time.

How good or bad it is would depend upon how you’re using the search engines – Google, specifically.

As a marketer, I’m not much in favor of it and won’t be until I see how it affects traffic flow in the future. I’ve worked hard for many years to rank well for some search terms and this has the potential to destroy all that effort. I don’t know that it will, but it might, so I’m going to try to watch and see what happens.

As a user, it may have its benefits, but, again, only time will tell. I am not happy that Google opted me into this with no say on my part, however. I want a way to turn it on and off, and at this time, I don’t know if that’s possible. I’m still learning about it.

Danny Sullivan wrote an excellent post on the topic…

Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention

Danny knows a lot more about all this than I do and I’ll be watching to see what else he has to say on this topic.

So, what do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Long-tail keyword searches increase in 2009

November 27, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 9 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing 

I’ve been seeing a trend of longer keyword searches in my sites’ statistics this year.

While most of the keyword searches that find something I write still are mostly 3 to 4 words long, I’m seeing lots more this year that are five or more words long.

I have been noticing this trend for a few months and wondered if it was due to the increasing sophistication of the people who normally read what I write or if it was a sign of average Internet users learning how to use the search engines more effectively.

Today, I found confirmation of this trend in an article on MarketingCharts.com:

Longer Searches Increase 3% in October 2009

At the end of the brief article, they bring up the possibility that longer search phrases may now be required to find what the searcher is looking for amid all the web clutter.

I hadn’t thought of that possibility.

I don’t have any facts to back it up, but I think that more people are learning that they can find what they want by using longer search phrases and that’s something we should think about when we’re doing our keyword research and writing our blogs, websites, articles, and anything else.

What do you think?

Have you noticed this trend in your site’s statistics?

Act on your dream!

JD

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How do the new FTC guidelines affect affiliate marketing?

October 6, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Opinions 

Yesterday, October 5, 2009, the FTC published their final guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials. This ruling will affect celebrities, bloggers, testimonial advertisements, and probably more.

The press release is here:

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

The actual guidelines are in a pdf file that I have tried to download several times, but, so far, have only been able to get a portion of it.

The actual guidelines are described as:

16 C.F.R. Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising: Notice Announcing Adoption of Revised Guides

They are available as a pdf file:

Text of the Federal Register notice

As I said, previously, I have not been able to read these new rules, yet, so I’m just wondering out loud at the moment.

How does this affect affiliate marketers?

Are blog posts with affiliate links covered under these new guidelines? How?

(Disclaimer: I am not now or ever have been a lawyer. I do not give legal advice. I don’t even play a lawyer on TV or the Internet.)

I can read from the press release that anyone who is posting sponsored articles to their blog will be affected. Since I don’t do that, I haven’t given the ramifications much thought.

I almost never receive a freebie in return for writing a review, but I have no problem disclosing that fact when it happens.

Most of us would never fall under the label of “celebrity” and never get paid huge sums of money to endorse a product on a talk show or in social media, but if you do, now you have to disclose that fact.

Still, how does this affect bloggers who are affiliate marketers?

Does every link have to be disclosed as a possible money-making link?

Will it be enough to add a few lines to our disclosures page?

Are we even covered by the new guidelines?

What about you?

Will these new FTC guidelines affect how you run your business and how you advertise and market products and services?

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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New website to go live this week

July 5, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It, Western North Carolina 

This is only tangentially about affiliate marketing, so you may or may not be interested in reading it.

I know of quite a few people who regularly post about how much, or how little, they earn from affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, and other related advertising and marketing methods.

I’m not going to name any names and I’m not trying to embarrass or put anyone down. That’s not at all the point of this post.

What I want to do is to offer an alternative viewpoint, for a change. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe you won’t, but I welcome your comments.

I am not loving affiliate marketing right now.

I’ve stated previously that I live in North Carolina and that Amazon.com dropped me as an affiliate a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going to talk about that here – see my recent posts if you’re interested.

What I am going to talk about is how many people are putting in a lot of work for dismal returns. I’ve done it myself, in some cases.

Yes, the opportunity to earn an excellent income from affiliate marketing exists, but most people do not achieve it. Some people earn tens of thousands of dollars per year, and others earn pocket change.

I’ve been fortunate to do okay with affiliate marketing over the years. I never got rich, but I could pay the bills and afford to stay home and take care of Mom when she needed it.

After she died last November, I’ve been re-evaluating my affiliate marketing business.

For the last six months, I’ve been brainstorming and planning a new set of websites for promoting select local brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC.

The cornerstone site will go live this week, but it will take several months of hard work to reach its potential.

I have to thank affiliate marketing for the skills that I’ve learned over the years that will make this new site successful. In some respects I won’t be doing much different than I’ve been doing over the last decade.

However, in one particular respect, it will be very different.

I’m getting paid up front.

For years, I built websites, communities, forums, and blogs to talk about a variety of things, with the goal of monetizing them through potential affiliate marketing commissions.

I did all the work, posted the links, and paid for everything – all for free.

Then, I hoped someone would find the sites, be persuaded that something was what they were looking for, and then purchase through one of my links.

As a result of all this work, I would receive a commission on the sale of the product.

Maybe.

Sometimes.

Not always.

Still, I earned enough to keep going – but I’m a frugal kind of guy.

Earlier this year, I realized that my circumstances had changed. Expenses were going up, income was coming down and that’s never a good pair of trends.

When your outgo exceeds your income,
your upkeep will be your downfall.

I cut my expenses to the bone and started looking for a new business model.

Now, I’m almost ready to go live with the new site.

What is significant is that in the month of June 2009, alone, I earned more from the new site than I did from affiliate marketing for the past several months combined. In fact, if I leave out commission checks from Sitesell for commissions on sales and renewals of Site Build It!, I earned more last month from this new site than I did from affiliate marketing all year.

(Google Adsense ads also played a significant part in my revenue this year, but that’s not affiliate marketing.)

Based on some testing I’ve been doing, I know that I can help these local brick and mortar businesses attract more customers and I’m going to help one of them in each business category. I’m not going to work with national chains or franchises, only with locally owned small businesses.

One of the things that drives our local economy is real estate sales and it is by far the most hotly contested and competitive environment in online marketing for our town.

Last week, I agreed to work with one local real estate agent and I won’t work with any more. Remember, only one business per category.

Some people think I’m cutting my own throat, but I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing.

Several other business owners signed up, too.

So, with no live site, and working with only a mockup, my new sales rep generated more income in one month than I have from all my other sites combined, some of which have been online for over a decade.

That’s the beauty of getting paid up front.

I don’t know if I’ll abandon affiliate marketing

I haven’t made this decision. I know that I’m dropping underperforming merchants and Amazon.com dropped me. I expect others to drop me because I live in NC.

Depending upon how things go over the next several months, I may decide to concentrate entirely on promoting local businesses in the small mountain town that is near where I live.

There are two thoughts on this.

One: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your income streams.

Two: put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket! I believe it was Thomas Edison or Andrew Carnegie who gave this advice.

I’m not entirely sure which direction I’ll be going on this.

I’m tired of working for free or nearly nothing

I do know that I’m tired of spending all my time and creative energy working for companies that don’t pay me for the work I’ve done.

Most limit the length of the cookie, the size of the commission, and have all kinds of loopholes to make sure I don’t get paid – and that’s if other affiliates aren’t stealing the commissions that are rightfully mine.

I’m tired of it.

With the single exception of Sitesell. They go out of their way to make sure that anyone who purchases from me remains a lifetime customer and I get paid in the future for every renewal and additional purchase they make.

It is the only affiliate marketing relationship I have that has increased in revenue over the last several years, including this year when I saw dramatic drops in my income since September 2008.

There’s a reason. Whether you like to hear me say it or not, Site Build It! works, when we follow the guidelines and take the time to build our sites properly.

Some say that it’s crazy to pay $300 per year for all that SBI offers when I can put up a WordPress blog for practically nothing. But, I’m disagreeing more and more with this.

That’s why I’m powering this new site with Site Build It!

It offers everything I need at a very reasonable price of less than a dollar per day.

You see, I intend to build a real business, not a hobby.

And, to do that, I’m going to help other real businesses attract new customers, bring back existing customers, and earn more money.

In the long-run, what they pay me will be a bargain.

And, to top it off, without even having a website yet, while working from a mockup I created, my new sales rep was able to generate more than enough income in June, alone, to pay for a subscription to Site Build It! several times over.

I don’t give actual numbers for my traffic or income, so don’t bother to ask. That’s between nobody but me and the IRS.

Will it work?

Only time will tell.

I’ll go live with the site this week, but it will take several months of hard work to make it – and the offline marketing that will go along with it – as successful as I’m hoping it will become.

I’m confident, however, that this is going to be effective and that we’ll have local business owners happy to renew over and over again. I’m looking for long-term relationships with them that build over the years, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen.

I’ve learned something very important from Ken Evoy. Plan your business and then implement it over time. Always under-promise and over-deliver.

This is the very opposite of all the breathless, excited hype that is all-too-prevalent in many areas of Internet marketing.

What’s the future of this blog?

I don’t know.

It’s not looking very bright, though. And neither is the future of several other blogs and websites that are devoted to my affiliate marketing business. I already know that several will be shut down as soon as I can get to it, because it isn’t worth the time and effort to repurpose them.

This blog may survive, but only time will tell.

What do you think?

Is affiliate marketing going to play a big part in your business plans for the rest of this year and into 2010?

Do you feel like you’re getting adequate compensation for the work you put into it?

Act on your dream!

JD

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FTC plans to monitor blogs for compliance

June 29, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Network Marketing 

Previously, I linked to an article that Lynn Terry wrote about this subject. Today, I found an article on The Washington Post…

FTC plans to monitor blogs for claims, payments

I’m all for this monitoring and oversight by the FTC. I think it’s time that bloggers and others be held accountable for the veracity of their claims. We need more truth in advertising – especially as it relates to the GRQ (“get rich quick”) crowd.

But, what worries me about this, is how will the FTC go about doing this? What will trigger warnings and what will trigger lawsuits.

Done right, it can help clean up the blogosphere. Done wrong, it can hurt innocent people who haven’t done anything wrong.

I’d love to see the FTC jump all over the websites, and their owners, who knowingly make claims that are not true. We don’t need that trash confusing people.

On the other hand, I’d hate to see someone who earns a few dollars by linking to an affiliated merchant be hurt because they didn’t adequately disclose that they earn an income from someone who purchases from one of their affiliate links – or when someone clicks on their Adsense ads.

What will the FTC require?

Right now, I don’t know. If you find something about this from an official source, please share it with us.

Will a single page on a site that discloses how we earn income from the site be sufficient (probably not), or will we need to post a notice on every page or near every link from which we may earn income?

For those of you who are receiving coupons, special offers, and/or payment from advertisers, how will you be required to disclose that when you post your review and/or talk about your experiences with a particular company or product?

Dammit Jim, I’m a marketer – not a journalist!

I try to make it clear that I am not a journalist. I don’t pretend to write objective news articles.

I’m a marketer. I earn my living from affiliate marketing, and a smaller amount from Google Adsense Ads (although I’ve removed them from this blog).

Some links are direct links to companies and/or products and I don’t earn anything if you follow those links and purchase something.

Most, however, are affiliate links and I’ll earn a few dollars (or a few cents) if you purchase as a direct result of following my link.

Do I have to disclose that for every single link?

Will I be grandfathered in, or will I have to go back and find every affiliate link on all of my sites and inform readers that I may (but probably won’t) earn something if they click the link and then purchase?

Will affiliate links be considered advertising or endorsements?

Many blogs receive compensation for advertising, either through Adsense ads, something similar, or privately-sold advertising. How will these be seen by the FTC review.

If I tell you that you should purchase something, will that be considered a personal endorsement? What are the differences in responsibility between paid ads and personal endorsements?

I think these are important questions, and I’ll be following this issue closely.

In the meantime, I want to make it clear to you that I earn my living by selling products and services to you, if you click on my affiliate links and purchase.

Does that mean that I’ll promote everything that earns me a buck? No, it doesn’t. The longer I work in affiliate marketing – and marketing, in general – the pickier I become concerning the products and services I recommend.

What do you think?

Are these legitimate concerns, or not?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Lynn Terry blogs about the FTC and Social Media Marketing

May 20, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 24 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Social Networking 

For the first time in several weeks, I fired up my newsreader and started catching up on what my friends have been blogging about recently.

One of the first things that caught my eye was Lynn Terry’s post, FTC to Regulate Social Media Marketing.

She did a good job linking to information about this, so I won’t repeat what she said. Click the link, above, to read her post; it will open in a new window.

I think it’s about time that the FTC started to crack down on deceptive advertising and claims, and the new emphasis on “atypical results” is a good thing, too.

Although I can’t show you specific statistics to back up what I’m about to say, it’s common knowledge that over 90% of affiliate marketers never earn anything, or at least earn very little.

Yet, there are people and websites out there that claim that it’s the easiest thing in the world to join a few affiliate programs, set up a blog, and start earning thousands of dollars.

This claim is simply not true.

Yes, there are a few people who earn thousands of dollars every month through affiliate marketing, but they are the exceptions – they are the people who enjoy “atypical results.”

Perhaps it was a matter of timing. Maybe they got in at the right time.

Maybe they had more experience in marketing and advertising than most of us.

Who knows why they were successful.

Online marketing is still not as easy as some would paint it.

So, I’m hoping that the FTC does crack down on all the hype and scams that are floating around.

On the other hand, it worries me a bit that they may go too far.

Some of us try very hard to have a good knowledge of what we recommend. I am a satisfied customer of the products and services I recommend the most, but I can’t be 100% sure that I haven’t said something, somewhere, sometime, that may come back to bite me.

What about you?

Have you ever taken someone else’s word about a product and recommended it with little or no personal experience?

I don’t think you want to open yourself up to all the problems that will arise when the FTC cracks down on blogs and social networking sites.

I am far from getting rich, and my affiliate marketing income has dropped dramatically since last September, but I’m in this for the long haul and look forward to the months ahead when my revenue will rise, again.

I feel that I’ve been ethical and honest about the things I promote, but I look back and see that some things I liked a few years ago no longer look as good as they did then.

Does this mean that I have to find all my websites and everything I’ve ever published and see if they need to be modified and/or deleted?

I really don’t know.

Lynn’s post has given me something to seriously think about now that I’m getting back to work.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Get a free marketing site at Linkscout

March 26, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 17 Comments
Filed under: Advertising, Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Downline Builders, Marketing 

I’ve been going through some pretty major changes this year and real life has interfered with some of my marketing activities.

Fortunately, I have some marketing systems that run on automatic, even when I’m tied up doing something else.

Linkscout, created by Paul Antonevich Jr., is one of those automatic systems that has worked well for me for over four years.

Unfortunately, when I resurfaced about a month ago, I found that Linkscout was down for a complete redesign, and I’d been promoting it rather broadly.

So, I’ve been watching the site pretty closely since I learned it was down. The projected date for reopening kept slipping, but I can understand that. I’m sure there’s a lot of work involved in a site that does as much as Linkscout.

Yesterday, I checked, and my marketing page at Linkscout was active, again.

It looks very different than it did the last time I saw it, but the old familiar features are there.

Unfortunately, when looking at it with fresh eyes, I realized I was still promoting a number of affiliate programs and other sites that I no longer want to promote.

So, I spent a couple of hours this morning making some changes.

I deleted some of the websites I promote – well, that’s not accurate. As with any major change, there are always bugs to be found and squashed.

Deleting websites and sponsor boxes are two things that aren’t working this morning.

I did not find a workaround for the sponsor boxes, but I did find that I could hide a website without deleting it. This worked well. So, now, I’m just showing the websites I still want to promote in 2009.

One of the beauties of Linkscout is that you can promote as many websites as you want on one page, and you can even do it for free if that’s what you want.

If you don’t already have an account at Linkscout, you can sign up for one today, at no cost.

In addition to marketing your websites, there is an affiliate marketing downline builder, where you can add your affiliate codes to the existing affiliate programs you want to promote.

I noticed that there were a couple I wanted to add, but the add affiliate programs function is not working currently. Hopefully, Paul will get that working soon.

One of the problems I noticed is that there are a lot of affiliate programs in that list that I have tested and decided not to promote, some because I tried them and found no value and some that just look like obvious wastes of time without even trying.

But, I guess that’s to be expected with most downline builders.

All I can say is be careful of what you join and promote. Your reputation is on the line.

I noticed that I was promoting 66 affiliate programs, but I cut that down to 18 this morning.

One of my mantras in 2009 is “focus.”

I find that Linkscout is an okay system for free members, but it is a much better deal for upgraded pro members.

Paul calls the pro membership an Associate or Gold account.

We all know that free services are somehow subsidized by paying members, right?

If you are a free member, your site will show some of the links of the paying member who sponsored you. With the new redesign, I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I’ll be watching it to learn more.

So, what does an Associate member get for your money?

First of all, you get a lot of advertising points that can be used to bid on keywords for your websites. That makes it easier to get your pages shown when others search by keyword.

I bid relatively highly on terms like “affiliate marketing,” “internet marketing,” and other relevant terms for what I do.

I’m happy to pay for my Associate membership on Linkscout, and, if you’re serious about marketing, I think you’ll find it to be a good value, too.

You can upgrade to an Associate membership easily.

While I can honestly say that I really like Linkscout and am happy with the results that I get, it is not perfect. Like all other systems, it has a few warts and things different individuals may not like.

On the whole, however, I like it much more than I dislike a couple of features, and I get good results.

Have you tried Linkscout? What’s your opinion?

Act on your dream!

JD

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