Sunday, May 13, 2007

What Internet Gurus Don't Want You To Know

You have been searching for ways to make money & you have come to the wonderful world of Affiliate/Internet Marketing. You are excited, pumped & raring to go, huh? Well, I am here to tell you what the Gurus don't want you to know in plain & hard facts. You have been at this for awhile, you are probably wondering why you aren't converting & what the heck the deal is. The deal is you are following a lead that is specified by your affiliate manager, who'd that be? The person who created the material for you to go out & market for them. Have you ever noticed after you signed up with a product that you find interesting enough to sell, looks like it has potential. They give you all the tools that you supposedly need but why is it the photos of these supposed great great keywords being blacked out? They seem to leave the most important stuff out such as without quotations, the keywords are seriously overplayed.

They expect you to follow their lead because remember they are showing the proof in the pudding with those snapshots, you'll see the numbers but most won't see that there is a black spot there. They try to tell you they can't show you because something or another will happen. I see Google getting blamed for it alot. Do you really expect them to give you the secret to their success so that you can just go out there & make money like none other? If they showed you everything they know, in turn, you'd make them bucket fulls of money. Yet their fear is that you'll take it & run with it, go make your own formula to success. Reminder, you shouldn't all be selling the same thing. There is plenty of stuff to find & promote.

Have you ever researched those "great" keywords that they gave you? They produce alot of results back huh? I remember when I finally caught on to that, I was like well then how in the heck am I supposed to get on the first page with that crap??? Now I personally suggest organic searching where I put the quotations in around the words that I am using, it helps me really decipher what is there & what is really saturated. It sounds pretty repetitive huh? Well it is but wait, weren't you trying to make money on the internet?

I know this sounds like a lot of work but in the long run, you'll benefit from it like none other. You remember back in high school when it was super boring & unfair when you got a B and maybe Mandy Sue got an A & you had worked your rear off? Well Mandy Sue, probably put in 10 extra minutes to ensure that she got a decent grade. You can do this too with Internet/Affiliate Marketing. You'll be more happier because you'll see the product of your work when green paper starts flooding your bank account.

I don't claim to be a genius on the whole IM/Affiliate Marketing stuff, but I like to think I am pretty smart & I enjoy watching others succeed. I don't recommend anything that I haven't personally tried myself.

With this said, Good Luck!

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Thursday, March 15, 2007

Email, ISP, and the Headaches

Recently I received a support call from a customer who was not receiving mail from one of her partners. After some lengthy troubleshooting, we found that the partner's Internet Service Provider (ISP) was listed on some of the public SPAM blacklists. This actually came as a shock to us since the ISP is a very large telecommunications provider in the South.

Since customer service is our focus, we did not leave the issue as someone else's problem, we attempted to work with the ISP to resolve their problem. Try to imagine our shock when the ISP told us that they were aware of the issue, had no intention of resolving it, and were sorry for the "Inconvenience".

I tell this story because it brings to light one of the major problems with ISP's and their free add-on email services, but the story gets better.

We decided to use a pay for SMTP email service (SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transmission Protocol and is the electronic language used to move email throughout the Internet). We signed up with the service and configured the email clients to send mail to the new service. Once again we got shot down. The ISP was blocking all SMTP traffic through their connection that did not go to their server.

We finally resolved the client's problem with both a short term and a long term solution that did not require them to host their own email server internally.

What this has shown us is that even the biggest ISP's sometimes take the easy path instead of the right path to solutions and that sometimes free add-on email services are not the right solution for a business that considers email to be a vital business tool.

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