Monetize your site

First, what is the difference between a promoted list and an organic list?

• Promoted List

  That’s a list built with give-aways or other incentives. “You can have this e-book for free, if you subscribe to my list at least long enough to download your e-book.”

• Organic List

  An organic list is a “hidden treasure”, that people find through links and comments and endorsements, and sometimes also through search engines.

I probably don’t have to point out that promoted or incentivised lists don’t have much long term value. So, CAN you convert them to organic lists?

Rarely.

Keep in mind, when you appear on the scene as a reluctantly tolerated penalty for downloading something that MIGHT be interesting, but most likely will be shelved for a rainy day, you don’t have a lot of credibility.

You can slowly brand your name and URL by doing a lot of incentive stuff and hope for eventual name recognition. Beware that branding may take a long time.

So, how DO you get an organic list?
Unique content, referrals, and accessibility.
Does that sound too much like work for you?

Believe it or not, but unique content is actually the easiest.
Just pick a topic that YOU don’t know enough about, research it thoroughly, and write about it.

Referrals and links are more difficult. Sure, you can get your buddies in the same sand box to politely mention your list, but chances are that they have even less clout than you. Even though all the SEO goorons tell you that the number of links count, don’t fall for that! Large numbers of low power links smell like “Link Farm” and attempts to cheat on relevancy, and trigger Anti-SEO formulas, as soon as you reach a certain amount of traffic.

One or two links from high traffic sites will do a lot more for you. They will move you up. Tons of links from link farms, that link to anybody, will get you penalized. The relevancy ranking actually works very much like you would rank a directory. If you see a directory with five Million entries, then you know it is a waste of your time. But if you see one that has two hundred entries ranked by subscriber votes, then you know you have hit a gold mine. The same goes for the search engines.

A good example of one of those gold mines is the EzineFinder. Not my site, and not affiliated with it, and they are not a client either. They are a totally neutral site, and only subscriber VOTES count.
Even if you are at the bottom, the links from there DO count for a lot more than links from insignificant sites or from list-all sites. In addition to that, you get nice exposure to fresh eyeballs.

So, once you have a steady newsletter at least once a week, get listed at the Ezinefinder.

OK, enough for today.
In the next post I will write about accessabiity.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Your address says a lot about you.
Consider these examples, and what vision or emotion they provoke:

tbrvcmlq4682@aol.com Does she write in ALL CAPS?
What do most people see when you advertise for AOL?
Anonymous spammer / stalker who changes addresses the
moment the first refund request comes in, and will try to con
you again under a different name.


tweetie456@yahoo.com Lives in the alley behind the
Salvation Army? What are you ashamed of?


mommaathome8765@hotmail.com Stuck in a rut and can’t
afford AOL? Naive newbie, or pretending to be.


bigfanofmaxwellblingblingIII@gmail.com What’s he gonna be
when he grows up? Will he get a legitimate business address
soon, or go broke first?


Do I sound nastier than you?
Awwwww
And you won’t be that cynical for at least another month or two?
Awwwww


Keep in mind that your prospective clients ARE that cynical.


Think way ahead to where you want your business to be
in a year, in five years, in ten years, and project your address
to there!.

Do you want Millions of yahoos and AOLers give you a bad name,
and make you work extra to overcome the hard earned prejudices?

You can keep your yahoo address for cross dressed cyber dating,
or whatever you actually need a yahoo address for,
but for business, use the address you will be using as the CEO
of the megabucks company, that you are building!

Advertise YOUR company in the business address.
Don’t worry, you can keep smoochiepoo69@yahoo.com for
private stuff. Now we are just talking about your
BUSINESS
address.


That brings us to selecting a
domain name.

Look at my address: h@webby.com or the long one,
dearwebby@webby.com

(I’m not worried about spammers, I got MailWasher)


What does that address evoke?
Ohhh, nice, you say, easy to spell over the phone.
Must have gotten
onto the net when the good names were still
available.

"dearwebby@" sounds like a tech support address.

(It actually is the address I use for tech support,
and has been the tech support address for the last 14 years)

Use that as an example. What do YOU want to evoke with
YOUR address?


Forget a name that just promotes somebody else’s business.
That makes you look like a sidewalk pimp, and it’s easy
enough to get around your cloaking attempts.


If you don’t come up with a good name in a week,
brainstorm with your mentor. A good mentor won’t badger you
into using his suggestion, but will coax you into finding a good
solution. I have helped many hundreds of people find a good
domain name over the last dozen years. Quite often suggesting
a humorous and ridiculous alternative triggers the right solution.


A few things to keep in mind for your domain name:
It should be short
memorable
easy to spell
not a typo magnet.


For the acid test, I always suggest
to sing it in the shower.
If it sounds awkward or ridiculous in the shower, it will
sound awkward or ridiculous when you mention it on the
phone, in an elevator, or yell it across a bar.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Best of luck with your 2009 plan, and I hope a year from now you can write: “Mission Accomplished” under it.
Have FUN!
DearWebby

Merry Christmas and all the Best for 2009 from Dear Webby

I wish you a Merry Christmas,
not a pleasant “Seasonal Holiday”.
That one is on April 1st.

Hopefully you can take some time off and spend it with loved ones.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Winter Solstice site review

Yes, it was winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.
How many of you monitor addicts noticed that?
Since there is no Gullible Warming in Canada,
it will still be cold for a while, but at least the days
will get longer.

The interactive site review today made one thing very clear.
We need ONE central site where everybody can post
questions.
JUST questions,

OK, so we need to settle on ONE site that we use
just for posting questions, and reading questions.
People who have answers, can post them there,
or on the questioner’s blog, or answer them via
email for those who know how to take care of spam,
and have the guts to post their email address.

We can gladly use my blog for the help bulletin board.
I am not competing for the traffic price, because it
would not be fair to those, who are new to blogging.

Whether we decide to use this blog, or somebody
else’s, we will have to settle on ONE site as a
bulletin board for posting help requests and questions,
and we will have to agree not to peddle our marbles
when we post a question or answer one.

Keep in mind, the person who might be ideal for
answering your question or solving your problem,
might be selling the same marbles on his or her
site, and would be very annoyed, if you spam the
central help request board with commercials.

The person, whose site we use for a central
help request board, won’t have to answer the
help requests, just moderate it, and weed out
thinly disguised commercials.

Feel free to copy this post, or link it into your
blog, and get the message spread around.
Let’s see who else volunteers to host and
moderate the help request board, and then
vote on which choice we settle on.

Anything else is a waste of everybody’s time.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Do yourself a favor and start a database or spreadsheet,
and mark down which of your addresses you use and where.
If you use an address in an auto-responder, on a page,
in a blog, ANYWHERE, where you tell people to respond
to you, write it down!

If you don’t, you will wind up with a Chinese Firedrill.

Any time you change or abandon or forward addresses,
or use an auto-responder to tell people to use a different
address, check that spreadsheet and make sure you are
not creating a loop or directing people to dead addresses.

Unless you are a web host and control the servers, it is
also a good idea to have an emergency address for your
buddies to contact you, in case your domain gets blocked
or there is some problem. If that address doesn’t show on
any web page, it won’t attract spam

You can set up your email program to also check that
address. There is no need to check it separately.
However, when you notice that the only incoming mail
is via the secret buddy alert address, then you know that
there is a problem somewhere.

Have FUN!
DearaWebby

Alex Jeffreys about Goal Setting:

It’s the traditional Franklin method.
Makes sense, and LOOKS simple.
I have seen it many times, but unless there is
a spouse or friend nagging me and helping me to
ignore everything else, it seems to get pushed out
of the focus by routine priorities.

Hmmm, maybe I should make my first priority to
find a girlfriend who takes care of the mundane
routine “emergencies”, and nags me into sticking to
my goal setting plan?

You definitely should look for an “Accountability
Partner” who nags you towards your set goals.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Blog

In the next seminar Alex Jeffreys told us to start a blog.
No big deal, I thought. I have been running blogs for years.
One of them has about 2000 - 2500 visits a day,
depending on the subject line.

But then, in the third seminar Alex specified that it has to be
a WordPress blog. Personally, I prefer a different
type, but eventually, I did install WordPress, pick a theme
and start writing. I’ll get used to it.

Have FUN!
DearWebby

Monetsite

This is about monetizing your sites. And mine too, of course.
.
Have you ever heard of Alex Jeffreys?
Until very recently I hadn’t either. I used to be a gooron groupie,
and bought all kinds of courses and seminars that were supposed
to help me make more money off my sites. That was an expensive
period of learning what didn’t work.

I know the names of all the big windmills, who so eloquently
conned me into selling their stuff to newbies and promote their
own names towards sainthood and beyond. They made good
money, but most of the people who bought their stuff probably
would have gotten a better return for their time and money if
they had worked at McDonalds.

Then I read Alex Jeffreys “Gurus Dream”. His thoughts in there
totally resonated with mine. The way to success is not through
buying more new and improved wonder programs, but through
building a solid business foundation.

So I signed up for his on-line seminar course. Yeah, here we
go again. Picture my secretary rolling her eyes.

She also mentioned that there were still some unopened books
on the shelf behind me. Well, at least Alex Jeffreys promised
to do it all on-line.

Seminar

The first thing I noticed was that Jeff is definitely not a cookie
cutter cloned windmill. Instead of the slick and well practiced
hypnotizing attempts of the big name goorons, he came across
as a regular guy, who is just learning how to do seminars.

Most noteworthy in the first seminar was his comment that
the profits are not in the web site,
but in the business behind it.

I can certainly chime in with a loud “AMEN!” to that. In the
fourteen years that I have made my living on the web, I have
helped hundreds of people to get established on the net,
but because they refused to set up the business part and
instead focused on being creative, most of them were never
able to give up their day jobs.

Considering how easy it is nowadays, to set up a merchant
account to receive online payments, there is no excuse
for procrastinating with that most important step.

EMAIL addresses

Alex also talked about email accounts.
Don’t do as he does, do as he says!

Make yourself easily accessible.
Abandoning good addresses just because you can’t figure
out how to deal with spam, is dumb! Alex Jeffreys is a great
mentor in many ways, but when it comes to email, he flunked.

Get yourself Mailwasher, at least the
free version, and take control of your email. Don’t waste
your time with blacklists. Spammers never use the same
address twice anyway, and often forge yours as the sender.

Automatic blacklisting just blacklists your own address.
Instead, use the filters. See what is common with most
spam, and use those common traits as filter triggers.

Don’t procrastinate with that! Either learn how to deal with
spam, or outsource it. Once you get the hang of making
spam filters, it actually becomes a fun game to stay on top
of your email.

I get about 5,000 pieces of email a day, but I only see the
200 or so that I actually NEED to see and answer.
Don’t let spam chase you out of town and abandon a good
address. Nuke the spam instead.

I guess I should write a book about spam control.
OK, added to the To-Do list.

Domain Names

Before you register a domain name, do some homework about
registrars. The one to avoid at all costs is Network Solutions.
They were good once, a long time ago, and I even was an
affiliate VAR for them for five years in the early and mid 90’s.
But they got too big and too hard to deal with.

With all other registrars, keep in mind that the lower the cost,
the lower the service quality. If you enjoy arguing with
auto-responders and robo-responders, go for the lowest price.
We still charge $10 per registration, unchanged since 98,
even for the newer ones like .ca. The extra service we provide
becomes obvious, if you for some reason have to change your
address. Instead of arguing with auto-responders, you simply
skype dearwebby or email h@webby.com, and we
take care of it for you.

Next is to think of a domain name.
Alex Jeffreys favors personal names in the domain name.
I prefer descriptive names, and as short as possible.
Every extra letter in the domain name invites typos, and may
send visitors to your competitor, or worse yet, to a vulture.
Vultures register domains with slight mis-spellings and
harvest all the typo visitors.

I registered the name for this site specifically for this
Alex Jeffreys seminar, so that I would not have an unfair
advantage with an established site over people starting
out fresh.

Sure, I could have chosen “monetizeyoursite”, but figured
that compassion with your typo finger will in the long run
outweigh spelling it out, and so I shortened it to monetsite.com

OK, enough for tonight.
Have FUN!
DearWebby