Monetize your site

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

The flow of froms

Before you worry about inserting the input box,
first you need “THE FORM“.
Placing the actual input box is the last thing.

“THE FORM“ consists of
1. input box
2. primary thank-you page
3. confirmation request email
4. secondary thank-you page
5. thank-you / password / download link email
6. Success / download link page

Usually your form manager program generates those six items
for you, but roughly. You have to pretty them up with your
corporate colors, logos, and a few kind words.
Upload those components.

Only THEN do you copy / paste the generated and prettied up
input box to wherever you want, including your blog.

To paste the input box into the sidebar of your blog, decide
on the exact location, find the last word above it,
open the sidebar in the blog editor and look for that word.

Paste the input box below that word,
save and upload.

To make your life MUCH easier, print out the set-up page of “THE FORM“,
where it lists the file names of the six components.

The better form managers let you re-use components from
existing forms, but you need to know their file names.
Quite often you can partially re-use components, so save a
prettied up master copy of each, so that you can quickly
and easily adapt them to the next form.

I know that forms can be initially a bit confusing, so I
drew up that flow chart. Try to get VERY comfortable
with the concept. Forms are the pick-up trucks of
business, whether on-line or off-line. Once you are
familiar with the process, you can snap up a form
in a minute or two, without worrying whether it works or not.

There are forms managers that can be rented, some can
be used courtesy of the hosting company, and some can be
bought.

Obviously, using the forms manager of your current hosting
company is rather reckless. If you have to move, your work
and your forms are left behind, and you get to recreate
everything from scratch.

The cheaper your hosting, the more likely you will get fed up
and move. If you use bargain hosting, and use the web hosts
form engine, document every single step! You will need all
that info for creating the forms again at the next web host.
I can’t overemphasize the need for very thorough documentation!
Save the source code of the prettied up pages, That way
you have the color numbers and whatever you need to
duplicate them reasonably quickly.

There are some form and list services that you can rent by
the month. Aweber is quite popular with beginners. Their
service is only around $25 a month and they have a fairly
easy user interface.

The problem with rented form services is similar to courtesy
freebies included with hosting. If you make a mistake or
get too busy, you are out on your ear.
Document EVERYTHING! Sooner or later you WILL need that
information again.

The final option is to buy your own forms manager or forms
engine. They range from $75 to $5000. They do about the same,
but the $5000 programs have a lot more hype and sales effort.

I use the MagicForms©. from Webby.
We wrote that in 1995, because I realized the need for forms
in business. Initially it was just for our internal use.

You can have thousands of separate forms running simultaneously,
share and re-use components when it suits you, or tweak the
looks of them with normal HTML. MagicForms© is so simple to
use, that I still have not found a need to write a manual for it.

Purchasing MagicForms© ($75) includes professional
nstallation, but you have to be on a UNIX or Linux server,
and have SSH privileges for the installation.

Summary:
start with freebie forms
upgrade to rented form service
graduate to your own form engine.

Document every step and keep copies of every component.

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

How often have you observed that amateur marketers
had launch day problems? It almost seems, that the word
“launch” is a command line call for the gremlins.

OK, so how do you get around that?
Quite simply and easily: Set up a download mirror.

When Garry launched TheProfitPullingProject, HostGator
messed up their router and lost access to North America.

I had opened a site there on HostGator on Sunday,
mostly to see why Alex Jeffreys was so insistent that we

host there. That site, http://monetlists.com/ (similar name
as this one, but with an S at the end) was down too,
not just Garry’s site.

So I quickly made a mirror for Garry on one of my servers
at http://monetsite.com/Garry/ and put his download up
there.

Then I contacted HostGator and told them about their router
problem. Once they had been made aware of it, they fixed
it within a few minutes.

Unfortunately, Garry’s problem is not an isolated case.
Set up a mirror BEFORE you launch anything, and
mention in your mails to go to the mirror site, if the
regular site is overloaded or down.

If you set up a mirror beforehand, you can get all your
pages up there, not just the download file. If you are one
of Alex Jeffrey’s students, it won’t cost you anything.
I have big postcard servers in the Hub of the Internet,
and as long as you don’t launch at Christmas, Valentines
Day, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, those servers are
mostly just idling, and can easily handle even the biggest
launch.

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