I was going through some notes I’d made a little while back last night and came across a little golden nugget that was given to me by fellow marketer Simon Hodgkinson..

Simon’s a pretty smart marketer with a fairly impressive array of products, which you can check out on his Hodgkinson Publishing site, as well as his own book

Simon was checking his Gmail account while we were sat at the bar and mentioned another marketer (who’s name I can’t remember) who had his gmail account broken in to after accessing it on an unsecured network at a hotel, and subsequantly had many of his websites, servers and other business assets attacked!

The problem is that gmail is accessed via http instead of https (secure encrypted) as a default, so if you use Gmail I recommend you take a moment and go in to your “Settings” (from the top right hands side of the page when you’re logged in) and then scroll down the page to the bottom to find the option to change to logon via https as a default.

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It seems I must be doing something right with Twitter, even though I don’t twitter everyday, and sometimes even miss a week or two, my twitter followers count continues to climb…

It seems the automated BlogMyTweet.com plugin that I have added to my main blogs (like this one) does help to even bring in some traffic to the blogs as well, so it appears that I’m not just twittering away to myself, phew!

lol…

I’ve recently added a twitter “Follow Me on Twitter” graphical button to my blogs to see if they help to pick up even more new “followers” and it does seem to be helping.

Here’s three of the best sites I’ve found with free Twitter “follow me” buttons you can use: -

Free Twitter Buttons

Free Twitter Graphics

Free Twitter Follow Me Buttons

I’ve also added the TwitterCounter.com chicklet to display the number of followers I currently have, which seems to add a nice touch of social proof, encouraging people to go ahead an follow me.

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“Too many emails!”

that’s the most common comment I recieve from people who unsubscibe and it’s not surprising.

one of my subscribers mentioned recently that he’d had more than a dozen emails about Mike Filsaime’s Traffic Fusion on the launch day, which actually put him off.

I had to admit that I’d had around 3 times that many, but then I’m on just about every marketers list, including all my JV partners and adswaps partners, it helps to be able to spot the best stuff out there and find new JV/adswap partners, but it can get a bit much, even as a full time marketer who doesn’t have a full time job on top.

For anyone still juggling a “job” and their new internet marketing business it can be a killer…

In fact, receiving too many emails is also the best reason for unsubscribing from peoples lists, as With so many offers for the best new thing” flying around it’s very easy to get distracted and lose focus.

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If you’ve been in the Internet Marketing (IM) market for any length of time you’ll be familiar with the principle of a “One Time Offer” (OTO), where after signing up for a free offer (or a paid product) you will be be given a “special offer” for a product or service, usually at a discounted price, but will only get that price if you take the offer right then.

It’s a fairly standard marketing approach for professional online marketers (big and small) to make such an offer and can be very effective.

However, it can also cause confusion and irritation if people are not expecting it or haven’t come across it before, I recently recieved a support ticket accusing me of being a “con merchant” because of it…

I use AdSwaps as part of my list building process and it works very well, adding over 2,000 new subscribers to my newsletter in the last 24 days for example.

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Alex Goad released his new Affiliate Payload report today, you can find out what I think of it in my full review here: -

Affiliate Payload Review

There haven’t been as many bonuses on offer form other marketers as I’d expected, but I did spot four worth listing, so I thought I’d list them here as usual, along with my own of course.

 ~##~

I’m going to list mine first, but there are 3 other bonuses below, from Ben Shaffer, Ellery Coleman and Chris McNeeney respectively, just in case one of those is of more interest to you.

My Bonus Offer -

1. Two keyword targeted articles written for you for your first two cpa offers (value $14)

2. 400 keywords researched and analyzed for you, including search volumes, competition (kei) and ppc bid values (value $54).

Note: I’ve owned and run the TopKeywordlists.com private membership site for the last 3 years, so I know a thing or two about keyword research.

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Damn, I had no idea it would be so difficult to pick a winner, I think that’s why I’ve not been in a rush to close the competition, I wasn’t looking forward to trying to pick just one winner, there’s some excellent posts!

You can read the original post and the replies here: -

http://mattgarrett.com/jv-tips-100-prize/

There are a few bits especially that I’d like to highlight: -

All of Reed’s points are bang on, unsurprisingly, but meeting someone at a seminar shouldn’t be underestimated. Just one JV partner that I made at the last seminar I went to paid for the cost of the seminar for me…

Giving the person a testimonial for their product is also a great tip.

Ben mentioned that it’s a good idea to offer potential JV partners a review copy of your product, you shouldn’t really expect them to pay for it after all, and they’re not likely to promote it if they don’t get to check it out…

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Wow! What a weekend!

I don’t make it to many internet marketing “events”, but this weekend I had the chance to help out Tim Brocklehurst with one of his TheFreedomClass workshops.

The workshops are designed to get people totally up and running with their own MyViralSpiral3.com site, including a blog, their own info product and affiliate program and show them how to start getting traffic in to build their list virally.

So by the end of the weekend they’ve got everything in place to start building a REAL online business that will last.

I’ve had MVS3 for a while now as I recognised how powerful it is when I saw Tim present it at Robert Puddy’s BritPack seminar last year, but hadn’t had time to get to grips with it properly, so the weekend was also the ideal opportunity for me to do the same as the students, get it all up and running and building me a list virally.

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These are just a few of extra JV tips that I thought of while writing yesterdays post, but couldn’t work in to the flow of the post, details of the $100 competition are at the bottom: -

1. The simplest way to start a “relationship” with a potential JV partner is to get on their newsletter, read it for a while, and when something comes up that you don’t understand or that you could help them with (i.e. have a genuine reason, don’t just make one up), get in touch.

note: being on a marketers newsletter for a while will also give you an idea of the sort of things that they promote to their subscribers. Don’t waste your time (or theirs) getting in touch with someone who only promotes a particular type of product or service if your offer is totally unrelated to it, focus on those who are likely to be intrested in what you have.

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JV Partnerships are one of the most powerful tactics for getting traffic and building your list in internet marketing, but where do you start..?

If you’re just beginning and don’t have a list or product then that’s really where you need to start.

JV’s are usually based on a relationship that you’ve built up with the prospective JV partner, but you still need to be able to offer something of value, good JV partnerships are never “one sided”, and you want to make them as good an offer for your new partner as possible, as it should be seen as the start of a long term relationship/friendship, not just a “one off” thing…

Just writing an email saying “promote my product and you’ll make a bunch of money” is simply not going to work, unless you have something new and exceptional, which is rare, and it’s more likely to stop that potential JV partner from ever wanting to work with you.

So Step 1 of your plan should be to start building a subscriber list/newsletter.

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Discussion of twitter seems to be all the rage at the moment, so I thought I’d chip in, again.

I posted something a while back about “getting” twitter, and I have to say that whilst I am finding it worthwhile for myself, I can still understand why some people think it’s just another time sucking social black hole.

I now spend more time than I would prefer each day keeping an eye on my twitter feed, I use Twhirl.org, so it “beeps” me when there is something new, which does help.

Neil Shearing posted an “anti twitter” post recdently on his blog: -
http://www.neilshearing.com/2008/05/02/is-twitter-just-bird-chat-for-people-with-add/

and the ironic thing is that most of the replies he got to the post came from someone posting the link to his post on twitter…

Now Neil does fire of some fairly strong points about why and how twitter can be a waste of time, but if you read his post, and the replies you’ll notice that he actually mentions one of the reasons I enjoy twitter: -

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