One down, many to go

July 9, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, Blogs, Websites 

It’s been a busy week around here.

In addition to working to bring a new site online (that won’t have any affiliate ads and very few Adsense ads), I’ve been busy rebuilding one of my oldest websites, JohnDilbeck.com.

That’s the site where I really started to learn affiliate marketing and online marketing, in general. It’s where I sold my steel roses and started making real money with Amazon.com.

Sadly, however, it had suffered years of neglect and looked like an abandoned flower garden that once was beautiful, but eventually became clogged with weeds and overgrown bushes.

I’ve been intending to rebuild JohnDilbeck.com for some time, but — at over 1,500 pages — the task was daunting and I never seemed to find the time to tackle it.

Over the years, I’ve tested lots of things on that site, and some of the pages looked horrible, when I looked at them with fresh eyes.

Mitch and I talked about that on a previous post where we were talking about Site Build It and I mentioned JohnDilbeck.com as an example of a site that more than earned its way. He mistakenly thought it was powered by SBI, but it isn’t. It’s just a standard Linux-hosted static website. Most pages are plain HTML, but a few are PHP so I can do some things that could not be done on a standard HTML page.

Well over 600 pages of the site were built specifically to bring in Amazon.com commissions. Now that Amazon has terminated my association because I live in North Carolina, I didn’t want to be sending anyone their way at my expense with no hope of generating any revenue from it.

That was the incentive to tackle the project.

Fortunately, I build my large static sites using a programmable database, and each major section has a template through which I process each page. That means that it’s probably easier than it sounds at first. Still it was a big task.

Part of the task was made easier when I would look at a major section and decide that it just wasn’t worth updating everything. As a result, instead of rebuilding hundreds of pages, I deleted them.

This will probably play havoc with my rankings in the search engines, but it will probably be easier on anyone who happens to visit the site.

I had Amazon.com ads on just about every page on the site, and now I think there are none, or only a few. There may still be pages where I recommended a specific book using a text link.

Eventually, I want to get back to that site and try to build it back to its former place of importance in my marketing efforts.

At least, now, it’s prettier and maybe easier to use.

I’m prejudiced, because I love that site. I don’t think I can really see it with fresh eyes after editing it for about 10 years.

I lost a lot of good information in the process, and killed what was one of my longest-running blogs. I did save lots of information in the database, so some of the information I didn’t have time to update now may make its way back onto the site in the future.

We’ll see.

So, that’s one site (mostly) cleaned up, and many more to go.

Sigh.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Is the Firefox NoScript addon affecting your online marketing?

July 31, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 1 Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Aweber Autoresponders, Blogs, Soaring4Traffic 

If you’re involved in online marketing, you’ve probably seen dozens of promotions for Sunny Sugg’s AllAboutAddons site.

I didn’t think much about it, because I don’t use but two or three addons with Firefox and one I don’t use is NoScript. So, I didn’t bother looking into it.

Then, I was reading Ray White’s Soaring4Traffic blog and his post about NoScript Revisited caught my attention.

I’m doing a lot of work lately building email series with Aweber for promoting the products and services I represent, and I use Aweber to broadcast new posts to this blog to anyone who subscribes using the form on the top-right of most pages, below my photo.

Aweber makes it easy to publish subscribe forms on your sites and you have the choice of using a javascript form (which is easier) or an HTML form (which doesn’t take any more work, but you can’t update what it says from your Aweber account).

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Aweber this week and I really didn’t want to lose that result because millions of people are using Firefox with the NoScript addon installed.

So, I’ve made sure that I’m using the HTML version of the subscription form in most places.

Do I think this is required? I really don’t know. I’m sure many people are using other browsers and many of the people using Firefox don’t have NoScript installed, like me.

Plus, some portion of the people who like NoScript have trained it to see what they want on a site, but I don’t know if they’d want to see my subscription form or not. I would like for them to see it, however.

So, I’m not trying to be alarming, but if you’re involved in affiliate marketing or building websites, you should probably be aware of the situation.

I am not an AllAboutAddons affliate, but Ray White is. You can visit the site by clicking the link in his NoScript Revisited article.

Even if you’re not interested in Sunny’s site, you should read what Ray has to say about his experiences with trying NoScript.

Act on your dream!

JD

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How to build a tribe

May 3, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogs, Business Networking, Communities, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses 

Seth Godin wrote a very interesting article in the SquidBlog, entitled Squidoo two point oh! that talks about where Squidoo has come from and gives some hints about where it’s heading.

That isn’t the part of the article that caught my attention, however.

Towards the bottom of the article is a section called How to build a tribe and it describes succinctly some of what I’ve been trying to do over the last few months.

I’m going to take the liberty to quote from this section, and I heartily recommend that you go and read Squidoo two point oh!

Here’s what Seth said about building a tribe:

How to Build a Tribe

If you want a tribe, you need to earn one. You earn one by being the best in the world at what you do, by sharing generously, by being clear and clean and transparent and easy to work with. The masterpiece lenses on Squidoo have organically generated a following. You can too.

The only way we can make that happen, all of it, is to be open, to give you tools and to trust you. The current generation of the best Squidoo pages–the ones that rank high, get traffic and generate income–are the sort of thing that you want to visit, follow, and be part of.

It’s not particularly difficult to imagine the benefits that you’ll get when you have a tribe of people who like each other and trust you. When you have a blog and a Squidoo lens and a Facebook group and a network of people waiting to hear from you. That’s your tribe. You–and your ideas–are the glue, the magnetic attraction, the purpose. Now it’s time to sync them all up.

So that’s where we are, and that’s where we’re going.

If you run a small business or a charity or work on a major brand or are a stay at home mom, your entire world changes once you have a tribe to lead. A group of people who want to interact with each other and with you to discover new ideas and to contribute what they know.

I’m doing my best to follow this model and look forward to seeing how it all comes together over time.

Thanks for the mental image of building a tribe, Seth.

Act on your dream!

JD

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21st Century Marketing Tools: new links added

March 31, 2006 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Article Marketing, Blogs, Musings, Webhosting 

I just added three new links to my Marketing Tools directory.

You can read about them on my 21st Century Marketing Tools blog.

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