Promote Your CafePress store on Squidoo

December 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 19 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, CafePress, Marketing, Poll, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing 

I was just updating my Promote Your CafePress Store lens on Squidoo and started wondering why someone would add a link to their shop, but would neglect to reload the page and vote for their own shop so it would rise closer to the top of the list.

What would be a valid reason for this behavior?

Could it be a basic lack of understanding of how the Squidoo Plexo modules work? On most of my lenses with a Plexo module, I have it set to add the link right away and send me an email message. When I get time, I go through those messages and look at what has been added to my lenses. If something is off-topic, I delete it.

Usually, I click on the link to see what was added. If I like it, I’ll click the up-arrow on my lens and vote for it.

The more up-votes, the higher the link will appear in that list.

Now, I’ve been remiss in looking through the CafePress shops in this lens, but I’m going to rectify that omission in the next few days by visiting those shops and voting for the ones I like.

I made some changes to the lens this evening. Instead of showing just the top 25 lenses (based on vote count), the lens is now showing all of them. I also removed the option to vote down a store in the list.

Still, I wonder why someone would build a store at CafePress, want to sell their merchandise, would add a link to their store on my lens, but would neglect the simple act of voting for their store and asking their friends to do the same.

Lack of understanding? Being too scattered in what they’re doing? Lazy?

I’m not going to make that mistake.

If you visit my Promote Your CafePress Store lens, I hope you’ll take the time to click the up-arrow next to my store, John Dilbeck – Shirts, Mugs, and Hats : CafePress.com. Currently, it’s at the top of the list with only two votes! Hopefully, after writing about it, my store will stay at the top of the list, or at least near the top.

If it doesn’t, that’s okay, too. I created the list with the anticipation that CafePress shop owners would list their store, and ask their friends to vote for it. I’m hoping other visitors to the lens will look at the stores in the list and vote for their favorites. Maybe the best stores will rise to the top, eventually.

Helping my friends promote their shops

Originally, I created the lens because I had friends with CafePress shops who were not selling their merchandise. Some of them had some high-quality designs, so the lack of sales must have been due to the lack of proper marketing.

Now, I know that one link on a lens will not create an overwhelming rush of customers to your store with their credit cards outstretched as they join in a mad frenzy of shopping, but it is a start.

Promote your shop

Have you taken that first step? If you have a CafePress shop, have you added a link to your store on this lens? Don’t forget to reload the page and vote for your shop.

Have you promoted your shop anywhere online? How are you attracting visitors to your shop so they’ll buy products with your designs?

Squidoo Marketing Community

A few months ago, I started the Squidoo Marketing Community so my fellow lensmasters could share ideas, help each other, and do a better job of marketing using their Squidoo lenses. There’s even a CafePress Shops group there so we can focus on discussing ways to promote our CafePress designs.

CafePress Affiliate Marketing Program

Did you know that CafePress has an affiliate marketing program managed through CommissionJunction.com? They do, and it pays pretty good commissions.

As a shop owner, I welcome sales by affiliates and I’m happy to provide part of my profits to them for any sales they make.

As an affiliate, I’m happy to accept a commission for helping to sell someone else’s items through my marketing efforts.

As you may know, my CafePress shop is located at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com and I welcome anyone who would like to purchase my designs and/or any affiliates who would like to earn a commission by marketing my designs to your readers.

Do you have a CafePress shop?

What are you doing to promote it?

If you don’t have one, did you know that you can open your own shop for free?

An even better deal is opening your shop and upgrading it to a premium shop. You’ll be able to do much more with it. Considering all that CafePress provides, the low monthly fee for a premium shop is a real bargain.

How satisfied are you with your CafePress store?

I know everyone isn’t as satisfied with CafePress as I am.

So, what’s your experience?

What do you think?

Tell us about your CafePress shop and what you are doing to promote it.

I’m interested in your experiences with CafePress, learning more about your shops and the designs you sell, and how you’re marketing your products via CafePress.

How can we work together to help each other increase our sales and make more profits from our CafePress stores?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Do you like the new Squidoo Workshop editor?

December 18, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Poll, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Lenses 

In the last day or so – I don’t know exactly when – Squidoo released a new Workshop editor for editing lenses.

I didn’t know about it until I was editing a couple of lenses yesterday and there it was. Everything looked totally different, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to do.

So, I did what I normally do. I started poking around to see what would happen when I clicked on things.

In just a few minutes, I felt pretty comfortable with the new editor and started liking it.

Many things are much faster. It looks like they’re using more AJAX to speed things up.

Although I haven’t tried adding a module or changing the order of the modules on a lens, it looks like the new system will be faster. I’m going to try that later today.

Well, why wait? Hang on a second while I go edit a lens and republish it…

I have a lens about Ken Evoy that hasn’t been updated in a long time. So, let’s update it.

Ken’s role at Sitesell changed in 2008, so I wanted to add a text module for updates.

With the old Workshop, I’d have to click on the Add Modules link, go to a completely different page, add the modules I wanted, drag them to the correct order, and then go back to the editor. That took some time, especially for people on dialup connections.

With the new Workshop, I just went to the right column and clicked the plus sign next to Text module. At the bottom of the list, I clicked Add. That’s it. I wanted to change the position of the module, so I went to the next section in the right column, Reorder Modules, and dragged the title of the new text module to where I wanted it. When I clicked the Apply button, the page reloaded with the new module right where I wanted it. This was much faster than the previous method.

Once I had the new text module where I wanted, it was just a matter of writing the content and visiting a couple of sites to get the proper URLs.

Done.

Publishing the lens worked as expected and it’s now live in its updated form: Ken Evoy.

Everything that I tried worked great, but there is one thing that is a bit irritating.

I’m using a Mac and Firefox 2.

At the top of the new Workshop, there is a gray section across the top that has links to several things related to the lens, including the Publish button.

For some reason, that section deactivates the scroll bar and the scroll up button. Now, I’m an old dinosaur and I prefer the scroll arrows on each end of the scrollbar, and not next to each other. As a result of the changes in the new Workshop, I can’t scroll up by using the up arrow. This really bugged me, at first. Then I found a workaround. All I have to do is click in the scroll down part of the bar until the scroll button (what used to be called the Thumb) is below that gray section. Then, I can drag the thumb back up to find the part of the page I want to see. It’s a bit annoying, but easy enough to work around.

All things considered, I like the new Workshop. I’m sure they’ll get the bugs worked out in the next few days.

So, what do you think?

I’m looking forward to your thoughts and comments.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Is Squidoo a part of your marketing mix?

December 17, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 34 Comments
Filed under: CafePress, Communities, Lenses, Marketing, Poll, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing 

I am a huge fan of Squidoo and use it as a major part of my marketing mix.

I recommend Squidoo for a number of reasons. The lenses are easy to build and you can always go back and modify them whenever you want. It’s free to use. They even pay you to use their free service – how’s that for a deal!

Why do they call it a lens?

Squidoo calls it a lens, actually one page on their site, because you can focus the page on a particular topic. Not every lensmaster does this, but the more successful ones tightly focus a lens on just one subject. If you want to cover multiple subjects, you can always create new lenses, and Squidoo offers several ways to help you cross-promote your related lenses.

Are you a Squidoo lensmaster?

I am happy to be a squidoo lensmaster and I currently have about 70 lenses. I had more, but had to delete almost 50 of them when one of the companies I was promoting changed direction. It’s time to start creating new lenses about the topics in which I’m interested.

Here’s my profile page: John Dilbeck, Squidoo Lensmaster.

If you examine this page, you’ll see that in addition to listing all my lenses, I can customize the page to link to other sites, including this blog, my Cafepress store, my Lulu store (which needs lots of work next year), my profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and more.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to follow me on Twitter and become my friend on Facebook.

I think you can see at a glance that your Squidoo lensmaster page is a good way to link to other sites that are important to you.

If you get serious about Squidoo, you may want to create your own lensography to list your lenses in whatever way you want to present them. Here’s my main lensography (you can have more than one): Who is John Dilbeck?

Now, remember that you don’t have to build a lensography about yourself, although it is recommended to keep track of all your lenses and to present them however you want. You can build multiple lensographies.

Let’s say that you are promoting a particular product or service and you want to have multiple lenses, each of which discusses a major feature or benefit. You can create a lens about the main topic and then link to each of the sub-lenses. Even though each page is totally separate on Squidoo, you can present them organized logically and all together. That gives you a lot of flexibility.

Do you have a blog?

If so, you need to create a lens about it.

Why? Because you can tell people about your blog, syndicate your RSS feed, and get the benefit of Squidoo’s high rankings in the search engines.

For instance, I have a lens for this 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog.

Do you have a CafePress shop?

How would you like to promote not only your store and the products within it, but also be able to promote other products sold on Cafepress – and earn some money doing it?

CafePress has an affiliate program on Commission Junction, and it pays a nice commission when you sell other people’s products. However, just by building a Squidoo lens, you can promote products without having to join at CJ.

But, you’ll make more money if you sell your own products from your lenses.

I have a CafePress shop at Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com and sell products just about every day.

I created a lens, John Dilbeck’s Shirts, Mugs, and Hats, where I link to the store and some of my best-selling items. There’s also a section where you can add a link to your Cafepress store, and I show random products from searches farther down the lens. I earn money on every sale, and you can do the same thing. It just takes a little time and creativity.

I even created a lens mainly designed to help you promote your CafePress shop. Several dozen shop owners have taken advantage of this, but few have gone back after adding their shops and voted them up higher in the list. Always remember to reload the page after adding something to a Plexo list so you can vote for it.

Come and Promote Your CafePress Store.

By the way, did you know that you can open a CafePress shop for free? Once you’re serious about it, you may want to upgrade to a pro shop. I did, and it’s basically free for me since my first couple of sales every month pays the fee and the rest of my sales are all profit. Not a bad deal.

Learn how to get started at CafePress and Make Your Own T-Shirts.

Promote Your Favorite Products and Services at Squidoo

As you may already be aware, one of the services I enjoy promoting the most is Site Build It! I’m both a satisfied customer and a very happy affiliate.

I have several lenses where I promote Site Build It!.

One of my most popular lenses is Site Build It, a revolution in website design, hosting, and promotion and I invite you to visit the lens, if you’re interested.

I think one reason this lens is popular is because I help other fellow SBIers promote their sites and lenses there. If you are an SBIer and have a website powered by Site Build It!, you are welcome to submit your site to the appropriate module on that lens. If you have lenses about SBI, there is a place you can add it, too.

You’ll note that I even welcome affiliate lenses from competing 5 Pillar affiliates.

As I have time, and as more services are announced at SBI, I’ll be adding more lenses discussing the benefits of those services.

Hint: I can’t tell you any more right now, but Sitesell will be announcing an exciting new educational service in about three weeks. Stay tuned for more information. I was on a conference call about it, just this afternoon, and I think there will be people who will want to take advantage of this new service. That’s all I can say, right now.

Squidoo offers much more

There are many modules that can be added to lenses to help you promote what you’re doing and help people find what you’ve written.

They offer a Twitter module where you can show your latest tweets.

Lijit.com has a special module so people can search your content via their search engine. When you add it to a lens, you can specify which lenses to include in the search results.

By going directly to Lijit.com, you can get code to add their search to your blogs and sites, too. You can see it in action in the right column of this blog.

Want to sell products from Amazon? There are modules designed to make it easy to do just that.

It would take a lot of blog posts to cover all that Squidoo offers to help you accomplish what you want, so I’m going to stop here.

How do you become a lensmaster

It’s easy to start building lenses on Squidoo. Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it. Do it now, while you are thinking about it.

Remember, you can start simply and then expand your lens(es) whenever you want. I edited three of my lenses and republished them while I was writing this. It’s pretty easy once you learn how to do it.

Learn more from other Squidoo marketers

I would like to invite you to join us on the Squidoo Marketers community.

Come and learn from people who are using Squidoo in their marketing mix. Share what you know. Tell us about your lenses. Promote your CafePress shops.

It’s a friendly little community, and I’m looking forward to you joining us and participating there.

What’s your opinion?

So, what’s your opinion of using Squidoo as part of your marketing mix? I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts, opinions, and comments about your experiences with, or lack thereof, using Squidoo.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Instant Banner Creator Review

December 14, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Advertising, Poll, Traffic Exchanges, Web Services 

Right at the start, I want to say that I absolutely hate all the hype and commotion surrounding product launches in the Internet marketing field. I subscribe to lots of blogs, mailing lists, and follow quite a few marketers on Twitter. Today, I’ve been inundated with messages for Instant Banner Creator.

To be honest, I was prepared not to like it, but I thought I should check it out to see for myself.

The main reason I chose to do this, instead of just ignoring it, is because I respect the owners, John Merrick and Soren Jordansen. Soren has gone out of his way to answer questions I had a few years ago and he has always been responsive to my questions and suggestions. I’ve earned a bit of money promoting his traffic exchange, Dragon Surf, over the years, too.

Instant Banner Creator Review

Yes, you can use Instant Banner Creator for free, but there are some advantages to upgrading. When you first sign up, you’ll see several OTO pages (one-time offers). The first offers a life-time membership (at a pretty good price if you’re going to be using this tool a lot). The others offer discounted memberships.

Once you get inside the site, everything is well laid out and easy to use.

Tutorials

Instant Banner Creator offers two sets of tutorials. You can choose to watch video tutorials or download a written tutorial with screenshots in PDF format.

I did not watch or read either tutorial before starting, but I’ll download the PDF version right after posting this review.

Creating a banner

As you may know, I live in an area where I’m surrounded by broadband Internet access about three or four miles away, but I’m still on a very slow dialup connection. I was expecting a frustrating experience.

When I clicked the link to create a banner, I got what I was expecting.

The first time, I had to endure an excruciatingly-slow download of the available banner templates. I’m sure it is much faster if you have broadband, but I went and did something else for 10 or 15 minutes while the graphics loaded.

Once they were cached in my browser, however, the system was nice and responsive.

On many sites, when I’m downloading lots of graphics, the servers time out and the pages don’t load. There were no timeouts nor errors when using this tool.

I was disappointed with the quality of the banner templates. Most of them are dull and uninspiring, even most of the templates that can only be used by upgraded members.

Another thing that I did not like was the fact that the graphics don’t show their exact height and width, something that I think would be very important.

I didn’t find a banner template that I liked, so I went into the do it yourself section and created a simple two-toned gradient graphic template and used that as the basis for creating my first banner using this system.

I didn’t see any clipart I liked, so all I did was add some text to the banner.

The text editor offers lots of fonts, and you can easily select the size and color of the text you want to use.

If you don’t have the tools for working with graphics and/or you don’t have the talent and experience, I think you’ll find this tool to be pretty easy to use.

For my first banner, I used a large font to show the name of the product, and a smaller font for the call to action.

When adding the text to the graphic, I did not see any tools to help space things properly on the template, i.e., I didn’t see any tools for centering one on the other. So, i just eyeballed it and centered them approximately.

The programs I normally use (Photoshop and TypeStyler) offer precise alignment tools, but perhaps for most uses you really don’t have to be that accurate.

After placing the text on the template, I could drag it around until I was satisfied with the placement and then click a button to have it added to the graphic. There is one level of undo if you don’t like it.

When I was done, I saved the new banner. At that point, the system told me the link I’d need to use to show the banner somewhere. Graphics can be stored on their site or downloaded to your computer and uploaded to wherever you want to store them. The benefit of storing them on their system is you don’t have to FTP the files around or pay for the bandwidth.

I chose to leave the banner on their site.

The system then gives the option of linking to a target destination, and, since they offer an affiliate program, I chose to link to my affiliate page. When I entered the URL and clicked the appropriate button, their system gave the complete link for showing the graphic and linking to the destination page.

I choose to open off-site links in a new window or tab, so I added the target code to the HTML they provided.

Now, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting that code anywhere I can put HTML.

Like so:

I think you’ll agree that I’m no artist. Even though I have the professional tools and have been doing graphics for over 20 years, I don’t have the artistic and design talent to make the eye-popping graphics that a professional artist can produce.

Still, in just a few minutes, I think I have a serviceable banner and it is hosted and ready to go.

The banner graphic they host on their site after I saved it does not look like the banner shown above. On their site, the text is centered more-or-less and not truncated on the right as it shows here. I downloaded the graphic and it still looks right. Hmmm. I wonder if this is a problem with the CSS design for this blog. I don’t think it is, because the other banner shown a few paragraphs lower looks fine. Let me test that. I’ll get back to this later, in the comments. This center column should be wide enough for a standard 468×60 banner.

I think anyone with a modicum of talent can produce banners that get the point across, but if you want the best, hire an artist to create them for you.

While I’m unimpressed with the banner templates, I give the system for creating and hosting them a big thumbs up. I think just about anyone can work with this system and create banners you can use just about anywhere.

Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface of what this system can do. You can upload your own templates and clip art and use the system to create a new banner with different text. So, even free members aren’t limited by what’s available.

I decided to try creating a button.

Creating a button

Again, there was a very long wait while the template graphics loaded in my browser window. Once they were cached, everything sped up, again.

This time, I liked some of the graphics, especially some of the templates that are available only to upgraded members.

I’ve already described the process for banners, and it works pretty much the same for buttons.

Here’s a button I put together in a few minutes. It’s hosted on their system.

It’s not great, but it’s not bad, either.

Again, an artist could do much better, and many talented amateurs could, too. Here’s an example of one of the banners an artist designed for promoting the site:



For the rest of us, Instant Banner Creator does a good job of creating and hosting the graphics we need.

I’m giving the button creator a big thumbs up, too.

Headers and Footers

I didn’t have much more time for looking at this and decided to see what the header graphics look like. These header (and footer) graphics can be used as part of your template for creating websites, and I’m sure they can be used on most blogs, too.

Again, there was an excruciatingly long wait as the header graphics loaded. Once, again, however, when they were cached, everything sped right back up.

I played with a header, but didn’t save one.

One thing that is a big difference between the banners and the headers is that I loved most of the headers. They are beautiful. I think that’s one of the best parts of the system, out of the parts I had time to look at.

Even the free headers were very nice.

If all you want to do is create a header and footer for a new website, that would be reason enough to join and use this system.

Animated Banners and Peel Away Ads

I did not try the animated banner or peel away ad creators.

While finishing this review, I did start loading the large peel away templates, and most of the ones I looked at are beautiful, in stark contrast to the very low-quality banner templates.

I do plan to give the peel away ads a try when I have more time. When I do, I’ll talk about it in the comments to this post.

Conclusion: Thumbs Up

Yes, there was a lot of hype about this all day, and yes there are several OTO pages to go through, but I believe this system is sound and very useful. Toss in free hosting and bandwidth, and what do you have to lose?

If you plan to use this system a lot, pay close attention to the OTOs, because you can save a lot of money over what you’d have to pay with a regular monthly subscription.

Of course, I’m using my affiliate links to link to the Instant Banner Creator and I’ll earn a commission should you decide to upgrade. You can, too.

Unlike many of the tools I’ve looked at over the last few years, I feel good about recommending this service to you. Free or upgraded, it offers a valuable service to its members, and the owners are honorable, reliable, and helpful.

I have no doubt that Soren and John will be adding more features to this site over the coming months.

Hopefully, they’ll add some better banner templates, especially since that’s part of the site’s name.

Give Instant Banner Creator a try and let me know what you think.

Do you like it, dislike it, or prefer another tool or software?

Act on your dream!

JD

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SFI announces opening date for new store

December 13, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing, Network Marketing, Poll, Private Success Team, SFI Marketing Group 

In this week’s SFI Marketing Group affiliate newsletter, the grand opening date for the much-anticipated SFI store has been announced:

OFFICIAL LAUNCH DATE FOR NEW SFI STORE ANNOUNCED!

An official launch date has now been finalized. The brand new SFI store will be unveiled at 11 AM CST on MONDAY, JANUARY 5TH.

Also launching on January 5th will be an array of major, new SFI system enhancements, including:

* Dramatic simplification for getting started, becoming an EA, and more
* New training program for new affiliates
* Tons of new marketing and business-building aids
* More “internationalization”
* New and improved EyeEarn
* An improved compensation plan with five exciting new bonuses
* More incentives for becoming an EA and maintaining EA status
* More incentives for advancing through all the Team Leader ranks
* A more powerful and lucrative Executive Bonus
* Affiliate Center facelift (new, simpler navigation and menus, etc.)
* MUCH, MUCH MORE!

Stay tuned for further updates and get ready for the new year and “SFI 3.0!”

So, it’s official. We now have just over four weeks to make our plans on what we want to do to promote SFI, the new store, and the other changes we’ll see in 2009.

For the latest information on the store, including FAQs and many screenshots, see:

https://www.sfimg.com/NewStoreUpdates.sfi

(The page, above, is only viewable by SFI affiliates. If you’re interested in what’s coming down the road and you’re not an affiliate, you can join for free and learn more about the features of the new store before it is announced to the public. This new store should help all of us earn more commissions, if it lives up to its potential.)

(Update August 2009: Affiliate links removed, as I no longer promote SFI Marketing Group.)

I’m not going to repeat what I’ve already written about SFI. You can see more of what I’ve said by browsing the SFI Marketing Group category on this blog.

I have mixed feelings about SFI. I believe it is a great company and that they’re trying to help us all earn more in an ever-changing environment. They’ve tested a number of things in the last few years and not all of them worked out as expected. The announcement of this new store and the new system enhancements offer hope for the future, but I’m not going to gush about it. I’ll wait until the store opens and the new site bugs are worked out before making a decision.

I think SFI offers some great training for people new to affiliate and network marketing, and you can get this training for free. That’s one of the best things about the company; they’re working hard to help their members succeed online.

Still, even though I’m earning ongoing commissions from my marketing efforts, it’s not as much as I’ve expected, based on the length of time and the amount of marketing I’ve been doing.

I’ve put SFI on my probation list, as I’ve previously discussed. I’m giving this new program until July 1, 2009, to prove itself. If I see a substantial increase in my commission checks – and if the promise of the store lives up to the expectations – I’ll continue with the company. If not, it will be time to move on.

I respect Gery Carson and all he does at SFI, but it’s time to see more return for my efforts.

In anticipation that the store may become a huge success, I’ve started a Squidoo lens for SFI Marketing Group Store where I’m posting a teaser for now and will add relevant information after the store opens in January. (That lens has been deleted.)

I haven’t decided exactly how I’m going to do it, but I’m planning on promoting the store on multiple sites and I’ll be helping all the affiliates in my downline who are EA and above by using their links in some of the ads.

What do you think? Select any of the choices in the poll, below, that apply to you, or add your own in the Other section, by typing it into the gray box at the bottom, above the Vote button. The answers appear all mixed up because the poll is set to randomize the answers in an attempt to reduce bias. You can select one or more of the answers; please check all that match your opinons.

What do you expect from SFI in the coming six months and what are your plans to promote the company and the new store?

I’m looking forward to your comments.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you chasing your tail?

December 12, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing, Poll, Success and Failure 

Introduction: The purpose of this post is to get all of us thinking about what we’re doing to build our businesses and what we’re doing that is just a complete waste of time. Caution, this post rambles even more than most of the other things I write. I want to solicit your opinions and hear about your experiences. I’ll ask more questions than I’ll answer. I hope you’ll think seriously about the questions I raise and join the conversation.

Now, on to the questions of the day…

If you look back on the last year – assuming you’ve been building your online business that long – have you been making progress or just chasing your tail?

You know what I mean.

We all love to watch a kitten or puppy chase its tail and run in circles until it falls over. It’s entertaining. It’s amusing. To us.

To the kitten or puppy, it’s frustrating.

If they don’t catch their tail, they get tired and quit. If they do catch it, they learn not to bite so hard the next time.

You’ve seen this and laughed. If not, do a search on YouTube. I’m sure you’ll find many hours of interesting pet videos that illustrate the point I’m making.

In fact, the very act of searching on YouTube and watching these videos is a good example of chasing your own tail. After spending minutes, or hours, doing this, what do you have to show for your time and effort? Not much.

The same principle applies to building your home business.

Are you making progress, or are you simply chasing your tail?

Are you running off, hither and yon, looking for the secret to Internet marketing success? How many websites have you visited? How many newsletters have you subscribed to? How many gurus have you followed? How many ebooks have you bought and downloaded? How many of those ebooks have you read? How many affiliate marketing programs have you joined? How many social networks have you joined? How often do you tweet on Twitter? How many friends are you trying to keep up with? How much email have you read?

Or, are you spending your time developing and promoting your marketing business?

If you’ve done your basic homework, you probably already know all you need to know to begin building your online business. There are no secrets. Much of what you need to know is available to you for free. For example, read Ken Evoy’s free ebooks, the Affiliate Masters Course or his best selling Make Your Site Sell!, which is now free to download.

But, if you don’t plan to study those books – or whatever guides you prefer – and put into action what you learn, what’s the point? If you don’t learn and act on what you learn, you’ll never build a business, no matter how busy you are.

Are you building your business or are you simply chasing your tail?

If you intend to earn a living from marketing, don’t you think it is time to learn how to build a marketing system that will work for you? A system that will help you focus on what works best and do more of it?

There are so many distractions and so many things are promoted as the best way to become successful with your online business, but most of them don’t work for most of us.

How do we stop chasing our tail and focus on what works best when we don’t yet know what works best for us?

It is especially frustrating when what works well for me may not work well for you, and vice versa.

Still, there have to be some basic marketing fundamentals that will apply to all of us, don’t you think?

Which is better? (A) Posting free classified ads on a dozen sites or (B) building your own focused marketing blog or website?

Which is better? (A) making 100 Squidoo lenses on assorted topics or (B) making 100 Squidoo lenses on different topics related to your marketing niche?

Which is better? (A) promoting a hundred different products and services or (B) promoting the top ten products for your particular niche?

Which is better? (A) talking about everything you think about or (B) focusing on your particular niche and branding yourself so others will think of you when that topic comes to mind?

Which is better? (A) promoting hither and yon hoping for one-time sales or (B) building a marketing funnel (or funnels) for your business and each of the products and services you recommend to your readers?

Which is better? (A) spending hours a day clicking on a traffic exchange or (B) spending a few days creating a new marketing funnel for a particular product, including writing a benefits-laden report about the product, creating an autoresponder series for it, writing a page about it on your website, blogging about it, creating a Squidoo lens about it, tweeting about it, and promoting everywhere that is appropriate, with the goal to get your readers to join your list and download the report you wrote.

I’m asking these questions just to get you to think about this. There are no right or wrong answers. Well, maybe some choices are more right than others, especially if you’re serious about building your online affiliate marketing business.

What do you want to accomplish at the end of the day, week, month, or next year? Do you want lots of visitors to your sites? Do you want good ratings on your lenses? Do you want lots of comments on your blog posts? Do you want lots of people to subscribe to your list(s) and download your report(s)? Do you want larger commission checks every month? What do you want to accomplish with the time, effort, and money you invest into your business?

Are you just chasing your own tail?

I’ve done a lot of that and I’m starting to realize how much time I’ve wasted, and time is much more valuable than money.

What do you want to earn as payment for the effort you put into your marketing efforts? Enough for a movie and dinner? Maybe make a car payment? Pay your rent or mortgage every month? Earn enough to quit your job? Build a business that enables you to thrive and not just survive? What is your time and effort worth?

I hope this post sparks a good conversation. What are we doing that gets us nowhere and how can we substitute better methods to build our businesses?

I know which way I’ll be going in 2009. Have you thought about what you are going to do?

What do you think will work best – for you – in 2009 as you work hard to define your niche, target your best customers, promote the best products and services they need, and increase your revenue?

I’m all ears.

Act on your dream!

JD

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What is your opinion of social networking?

November 15, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 13 Comments
Filed under: Attracting Visitors, Business Networking, Poll, Social Networking, Twitter 

Over the last couple of years, I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into using a variety of social networking sites to enlarge my circle of friends and associates on the web. I believe that it is working out well for me and I’m enjoying keeping in touch with my online friends.

Until today, I was showing a couple of widgets from MyBlogLog.com that showed the social networking sites I’m active on and some of the latest things I’ve written on a variety of the sites I frequent.

It turns out that those widgets were interfering with the appearance of polls I create using PollDaddy.com, so I moved both of the social networking widgets to a new social networking page, here on this blog.

That solved two problems I’ve been having.

One, it speeds up page loads a bit because it reduces calls to MyBlogLog.com from every page.

Two, it makes it possible to add polls to articles I write. I don’t know how many polls I’ll be creating, but I’m going to try a few to see what we can learn.

There is an art to creating polls that get reliable results. I am not a master of that art, yet. Therefore, I’m afraid that some of my polls will be worded incorrectly and may skew the results. Since nothing really important will be affected by these polls, I’m not going to worry much about it and I’ll just add polls when there is something I’d like to learn more about from the readers of this blog and other places I’ll show the polls.

You never have to participate in the polls, but I welcome your voting and your comments.

In the following poll, I’m asking your opinion of social networking. I realize that your opinion may not match my preconceived notions, so you can select multiple choices and add your own if it isn’t already there.

To add your own answer if it doesn’t match one of the choices next to the checkboxes, just enter it in the gray text bar between the last checkbox and the View Results link. (At least, that’s what I hope it will do.)

When you’ve made your selections or added your “other” opinion, don’t forget to click on the Vote button.

I look forward to your opinions and thoughts about social networking.

Act on your dream!

JD

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