Daily Internet Marketing Blog

I’ve bought a few books from Amazon a couple of months ago some of which I like to comment on.

Getting Things Done - David Allen

I was quite excited about this book since I’m the programmer of the open source script at bookmark-manager.com and wanted to learn more. This book created so much hype that I decided to buy it. However after reading the first chapters I was more confused and bored by all the weird jargon. Most of that stuff is common sense anyway. There is a good comment on this book on Amazon so no need to go on about this book any longer.

E-Myth - Michael Gerber

Another book I’ve read was the E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. A book which I liked even though at times the author became “too spiritual” for my taste. Sometimes the book seemed to be a long sales letter for his company and I missed the fact that he didn’t go into the nitty gritty enough. One of his ideas is to track everything in your business and to write down your business strategy. So basically his message is be organized. Hmm.. great.

Finally I’ve read “How To Make Millions With Your Ideas” by Dan S. Kennedy and “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David J. Schwartz. Both are very good. Dan’s book has got a lot of “nitty gritty”.

By the way there’s one thing I noticed. If you don’t want to buy a book just read the comments. They often give away the gist of the book. Most books could be summarised to a few pages anyway. So this strategy means you can get a lot of ideas in a short time without spending a lot of money and time. Clever, ey?

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I’ve been out today and since I pay more attention to marketing techniques I’ve noticed a few things.

First I went to a milkshake shop, had a look at the the available drinks and waited. There was only one employee who was busy preparing a milkshake and a couple of waiting customers. I waited about 2 minutes more before I left, because I wasn’t really in the mood of waiting and not that determined to get a milkshake. Now I’m not blaming the girl working there since she was busy preparing a milkshake, but wouldn’t it have been much smarter to stop her work and immediately ask me what I want and “secure the cash”? That way I would have been forced to wait for my shake and wouldn’t have left. I guess the problem was that she hasn’t been trained to think in that way and that she just thought along the lines of “doing her job”. But then again she will lose her job if this new and fragile business goes down the dumps.

The next stop was when I went to the hairdresser. I asked if they have time now and they said yes, I was offered a fair price and served immediately. Then the hairdresser talked to me about all kinds of things and thus build a relationship with me. Finally when I left the woman told me that next time I get 2 Pounds off and wrote it on the business card she gave me. All very smart, because I don’t have to queue, I get a fair price, they build a relationship with me and next time its even cheaper. There are heaps of hairdressers in this little town I live in, so do something to stand out.

Afterwards I passed by a small cafe, they have a big banner there say “Clotted Cream Tea”. I already passed by that a couple of times always wondering what exactly is “Clotted Cream Tea”. Since the weather was nice and I was curious about it, I finally ordered one. The lesson here is make some noise about a specific product and give it an unusual name which makes you curious. People like to try new things.

Anyway just a few lessons here. Not really internet marketing related but still you can learn something from it.

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I haven’t written any blog entries since I have been quite busy. For instance I have moved most of my sites to a new webhost called ServInt
and so far I’m really happy with them. I’ve been with all kinds of shared hosts but have finally come to the conclusion that I have to invest more money and get a VPS server. Its a bit more expensive but with a VPS (Virtual Private Server) you get a virtually dedicated server. If other sites on my server have problems it won’t really affect me that much since the are separate units. The support guys at Servint are really amazing, you get consistently an answer within 5 minutes, plus they are in business for some years and have big customers like Steve Pavlina. There’s even a funny website which pays tribute to ServInt. Anyway if you think your business is worth 49 USD per month check them out.

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I’ve been interested in Internet Marketing every since I’ve bought Michael Cheney’s Adsense Videos. Ever since I’ve been reading a lot about it. However after a year or so I can’t help but notice that the so-called gurus keep repeating themselves. They mostly teach basics or so it seems to me at least. For instance I bought Michael Cheney’s 11 Days To List Profits recently and was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t much new to me, considering that the price tag is higher than his other products. Don’t get me wrong, Michael’s stuff is great if you are new to this field but if you are an advanced learner I wouldn’t buy it.

Granted I’ve been doing Internet stuff full time for the last 10 years but I kind of miss an internet marketer who dares to teach more advanced techniques. I suspect that most gurus don’t do that because this would undermine their position. I guess its like with those Kung Fu masters who teach their students the basics but keep some advanced knowledge to themselves. Thus over generations more and more knowledge about Kung Fu got lost - at least thats what I’ve been told. The alternative is that there isn’t really any “secret stuff” out there, that Internet Marketing is basically very simple. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in-between. And as long as you can make good money with teaching basics not much will change. Another problem is that many gurus don’t really have a sound technical background and thus don’t have a choice. In fact some gurus even boast that they’ve been failures before they’ve made it big in Internet Marketing, and thus basically saying if I can do it so can you. So I’m wondering if anybody can recommend a marketer who specialices on advanced techniques. I’m seriously considering to buy stuff from Randy Baustert who is a real programmer like me and who is doing now IM. He has also been very helpful to me in his forums and made a logo for me. Anyway thats just my 2 cents, let me know your thoughts in the comment section.

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Here’s a video from Michael Cheney about Capturing your information that you learn. He recommends that you summarize every book that you read and review it regularly.

Michael Cheney releases a new personal development video almost daily.

If you are looking for a digital solution to organize and capture your information check out my free online organizer.

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The other day I was thinking about the differences of American and European buyers. The more I get to know how Americans tick the more I think there are fundamental differences which should influence your internet marketing copy. I’ve recently read a book from Bill Bryson called Notes from a Big Country which kind of triggered this realization. I highly recommend this book, its not a marketing book but you can learn a lot about America. I think one difference from America and Europe is that in America they are more likely to expect the “magic bullet, cure all, change your life” solution. [Read more →]

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A few weeks ago one of the gurus made a video about this eBay seller who sells a guide on how to sell Barbecue food out of a trailer. Apparently he has been doing this for quite some time and is making some serious cash. Since its a digital product he doesn’t have to do a lot of work anymore, most of the whole process is automated. [Read more →]

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Since I’m quite fascinated how effective viral internet marketing is I was pondering the other day how smart religion is using the same viral techniques. Think about it, religion has been around for millennia and keeps spawning new religions like Scientology. Why is that one might ask. The reason is simple, religion is very viral. It gets passed down from generation to generation. Parents teach their children about God, and these children will do the same to their children, and so on. When you are young its relatively easy to make you believe in religious concepts, especially if you are threaten with eternal hell if you don’t. So you have both the system in place to spread the believe plus a two-pronged motivation. Heaven if you believe, and hell if you don’t. If thats not a reason to believe in God then I don’t know what will. However some people seem to believe that the Internet and the easy access to information will have a negative impact on people believing in God unconditionally. You can browse YouTube you will be surprised how many atheist videos there are, also there are countless websites about atheism.

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I’ve tested both Nucleaus CMS and Wordpress for a few days now. While Wordpress is even known among non-techies and has a lot of plugins, one shouldn’t ignore Nucleus CMS. One really cool feature is that you can maintain more than one blog within one installation. If you’ve got plenty of blogs you will really appreciate this kind of convenience. By default Wordpress doesn’t offer this. However in terms of SEO friendly URLs Wordpress has the upper hand. But there is a plugin for Nucleus to get them too so I guess you can be happy with both blog solutions. Another pro for Nucleus CMS is that their forum seems to be more friendly, in the Wordpress forum you seem to get easily no or even a rude answer.

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Since two people recommended Hostmonster and I was a bit unhappy about the performance of Site5 at that time I thought I’d give them a try. The signup is pretty quick, no need to wait a whole day like I had to with Dreamhost. The control panel was pretty cool, still cpanel but they made it their own. For instance there was a search function for the various cpanel functions. If you type in “cron” at the search box it would pop up the cronjob link in cpanel. You can also drag and drop the cpanel elements and customize the “cpanel desktop”.

However after I uploaded my first site I got a server error when trying to load the index page. After talking to the support I found out that this happened because of the permissions. For some reasons newly uploaded files didn’t have the usual 644 permissions but 664. Until now I don’t know why this happened. I tried CuteFTP, Filezilla and CoreFTP but the same problem. The file permission was 644 if I didn’t upload in sFTP but normal unencrypted FTP. PenguiNet is the exception here, where I can upload with SCP (secure copy) without the permission problem. I still don’t know what the problem is since Site5 doesn’t have that problem, I can use secure FTP without the permission problem. After emailing the helpful “CuteFTP guys” they hinted that maybe Pure-FTPd might be the problem, since a few other CuteFTP customers had problem with this server.

I’ve used Hostmonster for a few days now and the server seems to be quite stable yet not perfect. The database was down for about 20 minutes but support was helpful and fixed it.

Hostmonster offers the all-important Shell access but one drawback is that you can’t have outbound FTP from the shell, only inbound. If you pay for a dedicated IP you can use “nonstandard ports for SCP” according to the live support. A dedicated IP costs 2.50 USD per month. The reason I wanted outbound FTP was to upload mysql dumps to Site5 for daily backup.

They also have a 50 emails per hour limit, but after talking to support they’ve increased it to 200 emails per hour. I liked the fact that they actually tell you that you’ve exceeded the limit not just ignore further emails.

All in all I like Hostmonster, obviously I still need more time to form an opinion but for the price of 6.95 / 5.95 USD is a good deal.

I’ve also tested Kiosk.ws for a few days. A few things I’ve noticed was that they seem to have a limit of 2000 files per directory (they are not the only host with that limit). Since I’ve got a lot of sound files and pictures (for eBay) this wouldn’t work for me. I’ve tried to sort this out with support but didn’t get anywhere. I also noticed that sometimes it takes them a couple of hours to answer my emails which is a bit slow for a relatively expensive host. A really cool feature is their Live Conference Room - called HotConference - where you can get support through talking to them with a microphone or textchat. Sometimes no support guy was there to provide help and suddenly other customer asked me for help because they didn’t realize I was a customer as well which was quite funny. You can also listen to the conversations when other customers ask for help. At one point a guy entered the room and was really upset that something wasn’t working and that this wasn’t good for his business. I haven’t really been with Kiosk.ws long enough to judge them properly but probably won’t continue after the 1 Dollar trial for one month.

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