13. And Finally

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Introduction

98 My top mistakes

99 How to get more great tips

100 The greatest SuperTip

101 How to make money with this book

There are plenty tips to pick up when you see my top mistakes.

Then comes my greatest tip.

And we end with a way for you to make money with this book - a must read

I'm often asked questions like these

• What advice would you give to newcomers
• What would you do differently if you started again

One way of answering is to describe my worst mistakes. Here they are:

• Relying on 2nd level commissions from affiliates in preference to getting commission from my own sales.
• Not capturing email addresses from readers of my articles or books for 'fear' that they may object to providing this information and leave my site.
• Following the thousands of other affiliates promoting the same 'make money on the net' products. The secret is to find your own niche.
• Trying to flog a dead horse.

  In other words I would delude myself that the poor initial results from a new product or a new idea would somehow improve and would spend endless hours trying to tweak it. Nowadays I would quickly terminate a new project if this situation arose.

• Not realizing early on the superb resource available to all of us for free in the shape of the marketing discussion forums.
• Failing to understand why certain products were not generating sales. It's important to remember that surfers are often looking for free information. Also what YOU may think is an enticing and irresistible offer may not be how your visitors see it. What you must always do is track and test your results - that's where ad tracking programs are so useful.
• Sending more and more traffic to a site BEFORE I had worked on optimizing the sales page.
• Finally, not checking out a particular ebook when it was first launched.

  I've read hundreds of books since starting online back in 1997, a few excellent ones, many mediocre, but here is the one that has made the most impact.

  '33 Days to Online Profits' is the VERY best book that I have ever come across on the subject of online marketing. You'll see why here

Prepare for a shock.

I'll tell you later, but first let me say this.

I'm sure you have found the tips in this book profitable but I believe the tip you are reading now will make you the most profit.

It involves rebranding this book - a very simple operation, however . . .

1. The truth about book rebranding

In case you don't know, rebranding an ebook means changing all the affiliate links to yours, so that you receive commission (not the author) should a reader make a purchase from the book.

Unfortunately, with many books you get this unsatisfactory situation

• Poor content.
• The book is packed with link after link, overwhelming the reader.
• Some links are completely inappropriate - for example in a book about hypnotism you get a link to a web hosting company.
• Low commission items.
• You may be allowed to squeeze in only your name or email address in some unlooked corner of the book.
• You may only be allowed to rebrand a few of the links,
• You will be charged anything from $20 upwards for rebranding. I've seen prices of $250 and above for rebranding a paid book: remember a paid book only has the limited circulation of it's buyers, in contrast to a free book with unlimited distribution.
• Finally, the author leaves you to get on with promoting the book offering no advice.

2. How I do it

• The links in this book all fit neatly with the context.
• There are many links in this book however they are spread across the individual tips as opposed to a long overwhelming list in one place
• You will be able to rebrand ALL the ClickBank links - nearly 30 of them.
• In contrast to having a small space to put your contact details you will have the whole of the Sponsor section in the Foreword.

Let's see a typical example of how this works.

A reader of this book sees that

• the content is good
• there's no hype
• there's no shouting in upper case letters, no exaggerated claims, no pressure to buy anything

So he trusts my advice.

When he goes to Tip 98 for example he learns about the book which has made the most impact for me as the best book that I have ever come across on the subject of online marketing.

That's all I say about it.

No big presell.

Simply clicking to the sales copy page should convince him of the quality of the book.

And then - quite likely - a purchase.

Now suppose it's your rebranded version they are reading.

Then bingo, you've just earned commission.

(Maybe while you were asleep )

In this case 51% (no paltry 20%). All the commissions you receive from this book are 50% or more.

3. The cost

Now for the shock I promised you.

What do I charge for rebranding rights ?

The answer . . . .

Nothing.

That's right - zero.

It's free.

4. OK - explain. Is there a catch ?

Glad you asked.

There's no catch at all.

If you read the section on ebook publishing you'll see why.

It's a win-win situation.

For example, when you made commission of 51% on that book above, I received 49%.

That's because I own the resale rights - I bought them because the book is that good.

There are other products which are not mine, and I don't get a share when you make a purchase, but that's not a problem for me if it encourages you to give away the book.

I will be just delighted to give you 51% for those products where I do get 49% in return when you rebrand and promote the book.

And that's another thing ..

Promotion.

I'll send you a unique selection of great ideas on how to promote the book. For example

• a winning template letter you can adapt for your mailing list
• selling to the huge newbie audience
• providing a free gift - using a special technique
• posting in forums
• using a viral article
• and more

5. Oops - there IS one catch

 

You have to know how to upload a file to a website !

 

6. Let's go

OK, please collect your rebranding instructions here

Thanks,
Harvey

12. Productivity Ideas

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Introduction

88 Make automation your goal

89 My favourite free tool

90 Text replacement utilities

91 Form filling

92 Visiting favourite sites

93 Stop the hassle of posting at forums

94 Fun with filters

95 Using and choosing an autoresponder

96 The best invention since the wheel

97 How to stop procrastination

The most common complaint from Internet marketers is

Hopefully this section of short tips will help solve the problem.

If you are spending 23 hours a day building your business on the Net you are facing a dilemma.

Your aim might be to have your web traffic, your customers, your orders to double, then treble, and so on - but how will you cope with the corresponding increase in the requirement of your time as more emails, orders, opportunities pour in ?

Here is the solution.

You need to ask yourself this one question - continually.

It's not

It's

By making the second question your goal you will eventually attain the first.

You will find there are many tools, services and ideas around to help you, for example

• autoresponders
• mailing software
• automated order processing and affilate payments (for example ClickBank)
• email filters
• canned email replies
• text replacement utilities
• automatic domain and hosting renewal plans

Start now - ask the question for every task you do today.

If you are using Notepad sling it in the bin.

Imagine a tool that is one thousand times better, with so many features that I still use only a fraction of them after several years.

Introducing NoteTab.

Some of the main features include

• The ability to open and edit many documents at once
• Text drag-and-drop editing
• Clipbook tool for reusing common extracts of text
• Favourites list to quickly open files or directories
• A Paste Board file to save text clips automatically
• Can edit huge files
• Strip HTML tags from your files
• Complete document statistics
• Powerful search and replace tools
• Macros to speed up your work

I have NoteTab permanently open on my desktop and practically run everything from it.

I can click on an URL in a text file and it fires off my browser.

And I don't use a design tool such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to create my web pages. I simply use NoteTab: it helps that my sites use Cascading style sheets - see Tip 17 - so that I am mainly editing text.

All this and more - and its Free !

Visit the NoteTab site here

Are there fields of text that you need to type over and over again in the course of your day ?

Then a great time saver is a tool which replaces text.

The one that I use, ShortKeys can be used with any program that allows text input such as a word processor, text editor or e-mail program. It replaces a word or code of your choosing with the required text which can range from a sentence to several paragraphs (up to 3000 characters).

So, for example, I have set up these short codes:

'e' for my email address
'w' for my main website address

If I type in #e it is replaced by hsegal@supertips.com

If I type in #w it is replaced by www.supertips.com

You may have seen similar features in text editors such as NoteTab or email programs such as Pegasus but the advantage of ShortKeys is that it works at keyboard level and so can be used for ANY program that you are running.

There is a similar tool BizAutomator which has the additional feature that you can select and click on the short code that you wish to use.

Forms can appear in several different guises at web sites, ranging from an obvious order form awaiting entry of purchase information to a forum posting page - yes that's also a form.

You can cut down on form filling time by using text replacement utilities as described in the previous tip, but a much better method is to use a form filling tool.

This will insert predefined fields into a form such as name, email address, home address, phone number, even credit card number.

And the good news is that there's an excellent tool freely available.

It's just one of the features of the Google Toolbar, others include

• improved navigation
• advanced search options
• pop-up blocker
• blog creator
• page information
• page rank display

You can download the Google Toolbar from the Google site.

There are many specific sites which I may need to visit in the course of a day.

For example

• my favourite discussion forums
• affiliate center sites (to check hits and commissions)
• various member sites
• pay per click accounts
• ad tracking control centers
• ISP and hosting support
• and more

In addition some of these will require entry of userid and passwords.

So how do I quickly find these links and associated information ?

I set them all up on a LOCAL web page on my PC (actually one main page with links to additional pages) and make this page the default home page of my browser.

The payoff ?

If my screen is showing only the Desktop and I need to access an important site I can reach it with just two clicks

In certain types of forums you cannot edit after posting - so you obviously need to get it right first time.

In the worst case you may need to set up as many as 7 fields, for example

• Name
• Subject
• Email address
• Message Content
• Link URL
• Link title
• Image URL

My method is to set up all this information first on a file, and run a spell check and line reformat on the content field section. I then copy it all to the Message Content field at the forum.

This means that I now have all the information in one place and can simply cut and paste to the real fields. In case I accidentally hit 'Submit' during the process I leave the Name field to the last as this is a mandatory field so any submission will be rejected if it is not present.

There are more tips on posting at forums (for profit) in my FREE ebook: Forum Supertips

No doubt you are receiving vast amounts of junk mail in your message box every day: and wasting precious time sorting it out ?

Then take a look at the mail filtering tools provided with your email client. You'll find ways to detect messages from certain sources or with certain content and discard them.

You can also apply routine processing to legitimate messages such as moving them into particular folders or sending out an automatic response.

Then it remains to eagerly scan your reduced list of messages for those eagerly awaited commission notifications.

But you don't have to !

If they have a specific format or are sent from a specific address then you can configure your email reader to filter them out and take an appropriate action.

With my email client (Pegasus) I arrange for these messages to automatically change color to red.

I've also heard from others, who make such messages play a sound or even have them forwarded to their mobile phone.

That's a bit too advanced for me.

I'm just happy when I see red.

The benefits of an autoresponder are so well known that there is no need to explain them here.

(But if you are not aware of them then here's a tip: as with any product visit a sales page and you can find lots of good ideas on how to use the technology.)

The first basic autoresponder would simply reply to an incoming message, then gradually more features were added such as a series of follow-up messages: then came a merging of functions so that an autoresponder tool can now provide a mailing list facility with a database of contacts.

When I first started my newsletter I used a free service Yahoo Groups to handle all the hassle of distribution, subscription processing and bounced emails.

Then I started looking for a product where I could maintain a database of contacts including subscribers to the newsletter and those who request my articles, download my books, join my affiliate program and so on.

Plus the facility to follow up with autoresponder messages.

Here are the options:

• 1. An online service

  Disadvantage: the expense of a monthly recurring fee and the risk of loss of service if the company disbands.

• 2. PC based product

  Disadvantage: it can only send instant automatic replies when your PC is up and the software is running.

• 3. A server based product.

  Installed on your own host this has none of the above disadvantages.

  Consequently this is the option I chose. The particular tool that I use and highly recommend is AutoresponsePlus

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Once you have your autoresponder installed you will want to set up autoresponder courses, each follow-up message building on the other, preselling your products until ultimately your reader becomes a customer.

Or alternatively ... he unsubscribes.

Because if you don't manage it properly that will be the unfortunate result. You've probably taken the same action yourself after a barrage of blatant product announcements with no useful content

But done properly it's the ultimate in automation and sales generation.

Learn the right way to do it. Click here

They say the greatest invention ever was the wheel: so I reckon the second best is ... a mouse with a wheel.

It allows you to scroll easily through documents without having to position your cursor on the scroll bar.

If you are ever forced to revert to a basic mouse you will find your finger constantly reaching for the wheel that's not there.

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Well I guess that must be the shortest tip in the book - so I'll add another mouse tip here.

Have you ever found that your mouse had a mind of it's own ?

It fails to point where you want it to, you struggle to select items of text for copying or cutting. Very frustrating - but the solution is simple.

Just unscrew the base and you will see a few rollers which surround the tracking ball. They will probably be coated with deposit which you need to scrape off.

And then, as if by magic, you will have a perfectly behaved mouse

Pardon - you'll come back to this when you have more time later ?

No - I suggest you stop now and read on.

Here are 3 situations which induce procrastination - and I show you how to overcome them.

1. It's great fun to visit the forums and spend hours reading the posts, or to continually interrupt your work checking your email for sale notifications or interesting messages.

The solution ?

Set yourself a specific work target, such as completion of a book chapter, at which point - and only then - do you allow yourself to revert to your favorite pastime.

2. You can spend forever planning the ideal web site - in terms of layout, color, images, tables, lists and so : and you will never get it off the ground.

You cannot afford to wait until it is perfect. The solution is to set up your web site as soon as you can even if it is only 80% of where you want it to be, but ensure that the structure is right so that further improvements will be additional changes to your pages rather than a complete redesign.

Don't become a victim of 'analysis by paralysis'.

3. You are daunted by the size of a project you are about to start - and consequently are unable to start.

Suggestion: why not do individual steps in the reverse order ?

So for example, when creating your own product, rather than struggle with the difficult task of writing sales page copy (step 1) knowing that you then have to set up the ordering mechanism (step 2), get step 2 out of the way first.

Once achieved this will give you the impetus to complete step 1.

11. Companies

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Introduction

85 Before you choose a company

86 If you can't get a response

87 Pay up or else

Why do we tolerate poor service on the Net ?

Well there are ways to get the upper hand.

Here's a common type of question that you find in forums and discussion lists.

• How do I choose a web hosting company ?
• What is the best autoresponder service ?
• How do I select an affiliate program ?

And here's the answer:

Whether it's a web hosting company or any other support company here is the acid test

. . . How do they respond to your emails ?

Step 1
Find out the email address of their customer service or support department. If you have to hunt all over their website to find it (or not find it as the case may be) then eliminate them.

Step 2
Send in a question. Any question will do whether it's highly technical or a deliberate naive enquiry.

Step 3
Note the speed of the response. If you receive an automated message saying "your emails are very important to us and we promise to respond within 24 hours" then eliminate them.

Step 4
Check the quality of the answer for relevance, accuracy and helpfulness. If they drum up a standard reply, or a minimum of explanation or can't be bothered to include your name in the reply then you know how they will treat you as a future customer.

How do you deal with a company that ignores you ?

Here's a real example of how I extracted a response - from a pay per click search engine company (we'll call them Company ABC )

Four weeks after opening an account they still had not processed my submission. I had no response to EIGHT emails and THREE phone messages.

When I finally got through to Customer Support they convincingly said they would investigate. Nothing happened.

The final straw was a reply to an email - which took 11 days - completely missing the point of my question and using the same standard message.

My patience snapped and here is the action I took. I visited their website and collected the email address of everyone listed in the company, some 25 names spanning their Marketing, Sales, Business Development and Customer Support departments.

I sent an email to all of them entitled "An ABC fiasco" which started

The result ?

Within 15 minutes a Vice President had assigned a member of staff to handle the case with the message

This is the story of how I extracted a refund from a hosting company. If you have a genuine complaint you can try this too - with any company or situation.

After 3 days of frustration when my site was down for long periods and my web host - now my EX web host - managed to ignore every email I sent them I began to pursue a refund for the remainder of my year's hosting.

I was told

So I pointed out their 99% uptime guarantee and the loss of my site for over 10 hours in one period

But I was told

So I then complained about their complete failure to respond to my messages.

And here was the startling reply

When I recovered from this response I answered

I was then put firmly in my place by their next response.

Well now it was time to pull out my secret weapon.

Back came the timid reply