Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Whether you have an online or bricks and mortar business, adding simple videos to your site or blog will increase your sales conversion anywhere from 20% to 47%.

This link to StomperNet’s Stomper Vision free video by faculty members Mark Stewart and Brad Fallon will give you a 20 minute overview of how home-produced videos on amateur equipment will improve your sales conversion. Click over and watch it now.

There are 2 more free videos on this site as well, and I encourage you to watch them when you get a chance. I also encourage you to sign up on the StomperNet email list because their free material is worth a fortune.

Just for the record and to be totally up front with you, I’m not a member of StomperNet, Stomper Vision or any other StomperNet program. I only partake of their free information right now because I just don’t have the money to join them. I am not an affiliate for StomperNet either, so if you watch this video and decide to join Stomper Vision, I will not get a commission.

I’m working on acquiring a small, easy-to-use video camera to start making home-made videos for my blogs, including this one. Money is tight for me right now, but I’m making saving for a camera a priority because it makes such a huge difference in sales and in building relationships with your readers and visitors. I hope you’ll do the same and soon!

Sherri
Making branching into video a priority

Technorati Tags: increase conversion, increase sales, Video, video and building relationships, video and conversion, video and sales

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Anyone who does anything in the e-commerce or internet marketing arenas has heard of Mike Filsaime. I’m going to pick on him in this article pretty heavily, but what I’m about to say applies to a lot of other big-name internet marketers out there. Mike is extremely successful, there is no doubt about that. His products are useful and helpful and he makes millions of dollars a year. Good for him and good for any regular person who used one of his products to make a living or even get rich.

But from day one of my experience with Mike Filsaime, I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling about him. That feeling is present whenever I watch, listen to, or read something from some other big name internet marketers, or Mike clones as I call them. Whenever I watch one of Mike’s videos I feel a really hard sell going on, even if he’s not actually selling anything. I feel he appeals to ego and to people’s materialistic desires more than focusing on the benefits of the product. I also have a slight feeling he is condescending by having to talk to us regular folks. I see the hint in his eyes, the expression on his face and I hear it in the tone of his voice. Remember when you’re mother used to say “don’t use that tone with me”? That’s what I feel like telling him.

That’s fine and it’s good marketing because people buy based on emotion a lot more than logical decision-making. I say “a lot more” instead of “always” because there are still a fair number of folks who have a specific need, save  the money for the purchase and then buy it with cash. I’m also glad to say the number of these logic-minded, cash buyers is increasing.

Personally, I hate to go shopping. I don’t shop, I buy. I’m one of those people who plans purchases, looks for bargains and saves cash to make them. I’m very likely to get up and leave when someone is trying to sell me something I didn’t plan to buy. I’ve only bought one used car from a car dealership, and only because they had the car I wanted at the price I thought was more than fair. I’ve only owned three cars (I’m 47), and two were purchased directly from the previous owners in private sales.

I bought one of Mike’s free offers where you pay the shipping for one of his high-demand products. In the process of paying for the shipping, I was taken through a sales funnel that defines “up-sell”,”down-sell” and “one-time-offer”. I was offered so many products before I got to the end that I lost count. A 5-minute process to get a product I was interested in took an hour. They were all one-time-offers, meaning I’ll never see them again. You buy right then or never. I was more than a little ticked off, but then realized I had just learned a very valuable lesson about a process I don’t like and won’t use.

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from one of Mike’s staff. I was on his list from the product I’d purchased and this guy was offering Mike’s coaching program to me. First off, he didn’t identify himself or his organization before he asked to speak to me. That was a hint it was a sales pitch. I had to ask who he was and who he was with. During our conversation he looked at a few of my blogs and told me I gave away too much content for free and to stop writing content and produce a product to sell. He also said I needed to build my list, and I do.

When I told him I was a recent Blog Mastermind graduate, he didn’t listen to me and told me to stop producing so much free content, develop a squeeze page and start selling something. Internet marketers as a group just don’t get blogging for some reason. They seem to be adverse to the idea of plenty. They tend to give as little away for free as they can get away with, and then they push to sell something.

Part of what he said is correct. I need to develop a product, write a sales page for it, build my list and sell the product. Or do something along those lines with affiliate products. But he completely discounted what I have spent the past 7 months of my life working on, blogging. I’m not here for the fast sell. I’m here to write, to build relationships with my readers, and eventually make a decent living doing it.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being told I’ve just wasted 7 months of my life doing what I enjoy and making some income from it. I also don’t like being told I should drop what I’m doing and sign on to Mike’s $5000 coaching program to start making tens of thousands of dollars per month. I just don’t buy the get-rich-quick thing. It plain doesn’t work for too many people no matter how many thousands of dollars they’ve spent with mentors with various schemes. If a style doesn’t fit you it probably won’t work for you either.

When I told the guy I couldn’t afford $5000, he immediately offered me $1000 down and $4000 due after I made my first $30,000 online. When I told him I couldn’t afford that, he offered me $500 down and $4500 due after I made my first $30,000 online. I didn’t sign up because I can’t afford $500 right now either. I’m not sure the program will still be available when I do have $500, but I wouldn’t spend it on this program.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to unsubscribe from Mike’s email lists and I’ve unsubscribed from 4. I just got another email from one of his lists today, and I have to unsubscribe from that one, too. How in heck to do you get off this guy’s list??? I find this really aggravating.

I’ve also been trying to unsubscribe from his print magazine that I get in the mail. That has been a huge runaround. When I signed up for my free issue, they gave a phone number to unsubscribe if I didn’t find it worth my money. At $29.99 per month, I didn’t find it worth my money. $360 a year is more expensive than buying the Wall Street Journal at the newsstand every day, and believe me, this magazine doesn’t have even a tenth of the content of the WSJ. This magazine wasn’t for me. It’s not where I picture my online business going. I gave it a real shot and even paid for one month to see if the second issue was better. It was about the same quality. The magazine may be just what someone else needs, but not me. So why does it have to be such a chore to unsubscribe? And they won’t give you a refund if you’re trying to unsubscribe but are billed before they “straighten it out”.

To me, that’s just bad business. Mike, take my cash now because you’ll never get it later with your tactics.

Even with the above experience, I couldn’t put my finger on why I don’t like Mike until I watched the video launch of his new product, ReviewCrusher. In this particular video, Mike goes over his background from his previous full-time job back in 2002 to the present. It was intended to give him credibility for anyone who doesn’t know who he is. In this short resume he revealed his previous career before he became an internet marketing guru. He was a car salesman at one of the largest car dealerships in the U.S.

Now I know why I’m uncomfortable with him. He’s a car salesman. Of all the types of sales people on this earth, I have the lowest opinion of car salespersons. To me they are the scum of sales, though there are a lot more jobs that are much scummier than being a car salesperson. Debt collector is at the top of my scummiest jobs on the planet list.

I also don’t like his sales tactics. He seems to have brought his car sales ruthlessness with him onto the internet. He does scarcity marketing. You have to buy it right now before they run out or it will never be available again at this low price. Or, if you buy now you’ll get this ridiculously low price (or you just pay the shipping), but if you wait the price will triple or quadruple. That’s just not my style.

I don’t dislike all internet marketers who are just as successful as Mike. John Reese, the guy who wrote the Traffic Secrets program in 2004, launched BlogRush, and just released Traffic Secrets 2 this month, is a completely above board, honest guy. He offers valuable, free content and then he offers his product at a reasonable price without a scarcity tactic. Buy it now, buy it later, never buy it; it’s available whatever you want to do. And the price won’t go up.

My Blog Mastermind mentor, Yaro Starak, is very successful also and doesn’t practice hard selling or scarcity. He did take Blog Mastermind off the market for 7 months to rewrite it, but it’s back as of July 29, 2008 and won’t be off the market again until it needs a substantial update. But then I’m sure it will be right back. Anyone who wants to become a blogger or become a better blogger can sign up for Blog Mastermind whenever they’re ready to do it. Yaro’s blog, enterpreneurs-journey.com, is about 3 years old now, and has a huge amount of free content. That’s what we bloggers do. We write and publish on our blogs and hope people will stop by and read it. For free.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Mike is a scam artist or dishonest. He sells valuable products, he makes a legal living and helps others make a good living as well. But his marketing style just doesn’t fit me and I don’t like it. Judging from the product I did pay the shipping for, Mike is not above selling you something that’s not quite as valuable as it seemed on the surface. He doesn’t practice under-promising and over-delivering. He uses a lot of hype and the value of the product just isn’t as great as I would have expected from someone who is so highly thought of in the internet marketing industry. I’ve found that to be true with other internet marketing gurus, like Keith Wellman, Marc Horne, and Hollis Carter. I just got another free product where I paid the shipping from Jeff Mulligan, and with my prior experience so far, I have low expectations and haven’t made the time to watch the DVD or go through the book. Maybe Jeff will be different. I won’t know until I go through that package. I may be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not motivated to make it a priority.

I guess I’m more used to Yaro’s style of giving a heck of a lot away and then over-delivering on what he does actually sell. Maybe it’s just a blogger’s mindset versus a hard-core internet marketer’s mindset. I don’t know. But I do know Yaro Starak and John Reese are a lot more my cup of tea.

I know that when I work with someone I’m not intrinsically comfortable with, I feel I’m selling out doing what they require I do to work with them. I’ve left offline jobs because of this and I refuse to buy back into it online just for a quick buck.

When you are looking for a mentor, you need one with knowledge in your business niche, and you need someone whose ethics match yours or you won’t be comfortable learning from them.

Have you had similar or different experiences? Please tell your story in the comments.

Sherri Joubert
Just trying to stop being underwhelmed by the overwhelming amount of information that keeps flying at me.

Technorati Tags: car salesman, down-sell, hard-sell, john reese, Mike Filsaime, one-time-offer, up-sell, who I don't like him, Yaro Starak

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Free targeted traffic to our niche sites is what we all want, and using Web 2.0 to our best advantage is the way to get it. We want organic growth in the search engines, especially Google, and we want it as fast as we can get it. But that’s the trick. You can’t artificially grow organic traffic. But you can speed up that organic growth by diligently using Web 2.0 consistently.

Web 2.0 is the key to any online business’s success, whether you plan to make a part-time income to supplement a regular job or a full-time income to replace that dreaded J-O-B.

Web 2.0 also works for offline products and your local, bricks and mortar business. You can have a web presence for very little money to drive in additional sales. Local customers tend to research online and then go to the store to make the purchase. Why not have your store available for that online research and have customers come in to make there purchase at your store? You don’t have to make sales online if you don’t want to. Just being on the web to provide product information will drive more traffic into your local store.

How much should a web presence cost? For $9.95/mo in web hosting and $12 or so per year for your domain name ($132 per year), your local business can have a website to drive traffic in your door. If you’re paying substantially more than $132 a year for a website, you’re getting ripped off. Find a local blogger to help you set up a hosting account, get your domain name moved and start a website using WordPress software. WordPress software is free and a local WordPress blogger will likely help you get set up and show you around WordPress for substantially less than your local website design firm.

Many businesses are paying hundreds of dollars a year just for hosting a site they don’t understand and can’t change. Getting that site developed may have cost hundreds to thousands of dollars as well. Having changes made is yet another big expense. Cut your budget with a WordPress blog!

How do you learn about Web 2.0 and how to use it?

With a bundle of great resources to teach you Web 2.0 and how and where to use it to your best advantage!

In the Web 2.0 Resource Bundle you get 4 Current and New Web 2.0 and Social Media Products in One Package for One Remarkably Low Price!

• “Resource Explosion”  ($17.77 value)
  
• “Web 2.0 Resource Bible” ($37 value)
• “Social Media Traffic 2.0″ ($10 value)
  
• “The Ultimate HubPages Guide” ($10 value)

The entire package is only $47.77!

The going rate for most e-books is $97.

I don’t like to spend a bunch of money on e-books and digital information products. But when you can get a bundle of e-products and resources you really need at a 34% discount, and not spend more than you normally might at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, that’s a good deal.

So if you need to learn about Web 2.0 this is the resource bundle to buy!

Web 2.0 Resource Bundle

This package was bundled by Professor Ron Capps, a premier writer of private label rights (PLR) products you can purchase and then resell under your own brand.

Technorati Tags: bargain, bundle, Resources, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Resources Bundle

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Most of us are working from home to make a living, whether online or offline. Many of us are using our computers to help generate extra income, and a lot of us use the Clickbank affiliate program to market information products.

Clickbank is great, but it has many limitations and restrictions, especially when it comes to commissions paid to affiliate marketers. I use Clickbank, but I haven’t had much business from them. They just don’t carry the products that would sell well in my niches.

Enter PayDotCom. Mike Filsaime, the well-known internet marketing guru, figured there had to be a better way to do what Clickbank does without all the restrictions and limitations.

PayDotCom is FREE to sign up with the affiliate program and you can immediately start marketing products from their site and earning better commissions than with Clickbank. Their marketplace is HUGE, so finding appropriate products for your affiliate sales is easier.

OH! - They also have their own affiliate program that pays you COLD HARD cash just for sharing PayDotCom with people like I am doing with you…Clickbank doesn’t have an affiliate program of its own at all.

What if you want to sell your own information product?

If you have an information product for sale, you can sell it on PayDotCom as well.

They give you cool tools like BLOG WIDGETS, and they even have an advertising program to help you get traffic to your site.

If you want an ARMY of affiliates to sell your products for you, they also allow you to have Free placement in their marketplace!

Even better… If your product becomes one of the Top 25 products in its category in the marketplace (not that hard to do)…then you will get Free advertising on the Blog Widget which is syndicated on THOUSANDS of sites World Wide and get Millions of impressions per month.

Get your FREE account now…

PayDotCom.com

Thanks,
Sherri

P.S. - Make sure to get your Account NOW while it is Free to join.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, PayDotCom, PayPal, Sell Products Online

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In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Technorati Tags: Blog Mastermind, Blog Profits Blueprint, discipline, mentoring, writing

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Hello everyone,

I participated in my very first podcast. I was Charles McKeever’s guest and he interviewed me about my experience with 30 Minute Backlinks. Charles is the creater and owner of Open Source Marketing.

I’ve had more time with the product and you’ll get an update on the progress. I also give you a lot more details about exactly what 30 Minute Backlinks is and how it works to create backlinks to your sites.

30 Minute Backlinks Podcast with Charles McKeever

I hope you’ll listen and enjoy it!
Sherri

Technorati Tags: 30 minute backlinks, Charles McKeever, my first podcast, open source marketing

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Product Name: 30 Minute Backlinks Tutorial
Creator: Michelle MacPhearson
URL: www.30minutebacklinks.com
Purpose: To generate large numbers of one-way backlinks to your site from sites with Google Page Ranks of up to 5, 6, and 7.

This is an ingenious way to create one-way backlinks to your site. It truly is brilliant.

I wanted to write and update you on the progress of the backlink building I did using 30 Minute Backlinks. I also wanted to write my review of the tutorial now that I’ve had sufficient time to use it. It’s been 30 days.

I haven’t done anything more since my last update to actively build more backlinks. I did what I was able to do with the time I had to devote to it during the first 11 days.

Here are my current statistics since my last post:

• Pageviews per day: 10 (up from 6)
• Visits per day: 9 (up from 5)
• Traffic from search engines: 13.6% (down from 23.7%)
• Traffic from referring sites: 65.9%
• Direct traffic: 20.6%
• Google search results page the site first appears on: 2 (It’s result #19, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 416 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

Benefits

As you can see, the number of inbound links to this site increased by 312 from when I started implementing 30 Minute Backlinks. I initially had 104 inbound links.

The Google search results page this blog first appears on improved from #7 to #2. It was on page one after 11 days but has fallen to page two at 30 days.

Daily pageviews and visitors also increased slightly.

The long-term benefits may be substantial, but I won’t know until 3-6 months pass. I’ll have to wait for the other software directories to scrape my content and add it to their directories.

The amount of work I devoted to getting the increase in backlinks wasn’t that much comparatively. I spent about 16 hours on it.

Downsides

I hate to say it, but there are several downsides to this tutorial.

The product hasn’t had the desired effect of bringing more visitors to this blog from the search engines. I’m still getting most of my traffic directly and from referring sites, which didn’t cost me anything but time writing content and submitting posts to the social bookmarking sites. I expect to spend time writing content and submitting posts to social sites because this is a blog, and that is what bloggers do.

Michelle says you don’t need any software-writing experience to use the methods she teaches, but I disagree. A small amount of knowledge is needed to understand the tutorials. Since I had no prior knowledge and some problems my first time through, I used the forum to ask how to solve my problem. The forum is the way you get help. I got a response that worked quite well, but it took 5 days for them to get back to me with a solution.

Thirty minutes is also misleading. The tutorial itself requires more than an hour of your time before you even begin to work on generating backlinks. It takes another hour or so to download all the programs you need to create the content for the backlinks.

There are 5 methods for generating backlinks. Once you have everything in place to start work, it takes about 30 minutes per method for 4 of the methods to create the basic content and use the free directory upload software you downloaded during the tutorial. Parts of method one don’t work as shown in the tutorial videos. The first method is actually two methods in one, so it takes an hour to implement the basics of it.

The 5th method requires you to create an e-book or long report. If you don’t have one already, you have to write one. I skipped using this technique because I didn’t have time to devote to writing a long report for this blog last month.

If you want to get the maximum bang for your buck, you have to buy the full versions of 3 programs, or you have to spend about 24 hours for each method each time you submit content by hand to the rest of the directories available. You could pay someone else to do that for you, but that still costs money. In either case, you have to spend more money or a lot more time to get the most out of this tutorial fast.

I’m using the slow option of waiting for the other directories to scrape my content into theirs. This will take 3-6 months to do what buying the programs or hiring help can do in a few days. Therefore, I’m not seeing the dynamite results advertised.

The 4th program, Snag-It, is software necessary to create some of the content and only comes with a 30-day free trial. Then you have to buy it if you want to continue using it. Snag-It is screen capture software and is extremely easy to use. If you plan on doing any sort of online marketing or producing any graphics, a good screen capture package is necessary. Although it’s another additional cost, it’s worth the money.

The cost of the tutorial is $100. The cost of each full software package is anywhere from $50 to $100. If you purchase the tutorial plus all the software the total comes to $400 - $500.

I didn’t have that much to spend, and I didn’t have 120 hours or more to spend submitting content by hand either. I have no idea what hiring help might cost for such a large amount of time. I figured it would be a lot more money than I could afford.

Conclusion

The 30 Minute Backlinks tutorial does what it says and teaches you how to create a lot more one-way backlinks to your site(s). In a few days, a few weeks or a few months you can have substantially more backlinks, depending on your implementation choices. This will lead to better search engine rankings.

It truly is a brilliant way to obtain one-way backlinks from high Google page rank sites.

However, it takes a lot more time than 30 minutes, and it’s not that easy if you can’t afford to hire help or buy the additional software, or don’t have much experience with creating software.

I think I would be much happier with the product if I hadn’t been led to believe it would be a lot easier than it is to use, or that I would have to spend more than the cost of the product for it to work. I would have been happier if the real cost and the real amount of time and work required had been made clear up front.

If you have the money to buy the additional software required, or you can afford to hire help, this product will get you tons of one-way backlinks and I recommend it. You can use the tutorial and programs over and over again to generate even more backlinks. You can use it on all your sites and blogs. Just lather, rinse and repeat.

You must decide if SEO and search engine rankings will really help you accomplish your goals. If you get or need to get most of your traffic from search engines to be successful, this is the tutorial that will do the trick.

You can find more information about 30 Minute Backlinks at:
www.30minutebacklinks.com

Sherri Joubert
30 Minute Backlinks user

Technorati Tags: 30 minute backlinks, product review, SEO, tutorial

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If you haven’t read my previous posts on 30 minute backlinks, here are the links:

• Easily Create One-Way Backlinks
• Update: After 1 Week of Backlink Building

Date: 3/2/2008

I really buckled down and produced 2/3 of the backlinks that you can build using the 30 Minute Backlinks Tutorial program on February 28th and 29th. I am nothing short of amazed at the dramatic move up in the search engine results I’m seeing and the increased number of backlinks to this blog!

Here are my current statistics:

• Pageviews per day: 6
• Visits per day: 5
• Traffic from search engines: 23.7%
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 1 (It’s result #4, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 170 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

The first Google search result where my site appears on page one is the link to the toolbar I created for this blog. It’s in position #4. My CHMOD calculator is result #11 in Google. The first reference to this blog prior to 30 Minute Backlinks was page 7, result #72. The number of backlinks to this blog has grown by 66 in the last 11 days.

My overall traffic count is down, but it was never steady. The high traffic I saw all came in one or two days of the month.

I’m working on the last 2 backlink building methods suggested. One is pretty easy to create, the other requires putting together an ebook or white paper, so that will take a bit of time and work. I don’t want to put together any substandard work just for the sake of extra backlinks.

I also haven’t done any of the power user parts of the tutorial. These results are based on the bare bones basics of 2/3 of the backlink building methods in 30 Minute Backlinks.

Another thing I haven’t done is lather, rinse and repeat for my other blogs. I plan to do that over the next month in between content production (which I need to do a lot more of).

Try 30 Minute Backlinks yourself and see what amazing results you can obtain in a short period of time.

After I thoroughly test it out, I’ll write a full review of the product.

Here are my statistics before starting the program:

Date: 2/16/08

• Pageviews per day: 20
• Visits per day: 13
• Traffic from search engines: 8.5%
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 7 (It’s result #72, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 104 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

This traffic count is a bit deceptive. I got 230 visitors on one day, January 26, 2008. This day caused my monthly average visitor count to appear considerably higher than reality.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, new product, SEO

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If you haven’t read my first post on 30 minute backlinks, here is the link:

Easily Create One-Way Backlinks.

Here are my traffic statistics before starting the program:

Date: 2/16/08

• Pageviews per day: 20
• Visits per day: 13
• Traffic from search engines: 8.5%
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 7 (It’s result #72, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 104 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

Update 2/23/2008:

I worked through the tutorial yesterday and today. I created and submitted 1/6 of the backlinks that can be produced with 30 Minute Backlinks.

Update 2/28/2008:

• Pageviews per day: 6
• Visits per day: 5
• Traffic from search engines: 28.2%
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 6 (It’s result #64, search term “home office organization“)
• Number of inbound links: 111 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

Inbound links have grown by only 7 in a week, and my overall traffic is down. There are a few reasons for that. I haven’t social bookmarked my most recent posts on this blog and I haven’t been producing content consistently over the last month.

I still haven’t produced any further work on the 30 minute backlinks tutorial. I’ll update you again in at least a week.

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Updated 2/23/2008 See Below

Many of us who work from home make some of our living on the internet through affiliate program sales or selling our own products.

That’s all well and good, but before you can make sales you’ve got to have targeted traffic, and lots of it. Targeted traffic equals customers interested in buying something you have to offer.

How do you get more traffic to your website?

There are three ways to get traffic to your website or blog:

• Direct traffic
• Referral traffic
• Search engine traffic

Direct and referral traffic rely on you going out on the web (and off) and creating interest in your site through social bookmarking, forums, commenting on blogs, press releases, and sending notices to your email lists.

These are important methods, but they are often slow-growing and require a very valuable resource, your time.

Search Engine Traffic

The way many sites get a lot of their traffic is through the search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Your site may be the best site for someone’s search, but if you’re on the third page of the search results, your chances of anyone coming to your site are very small. People often don’t go to page 2 of the search results, let alone pages 3 or 4.

So what do you need to do? Get on page 1 of the search engine results.

How can you get better page rank? Quality, one-way backlinks to your website for your keyword phrase. In my case, my keyword phrase is “home office organization“.

How do you get quality backlinks to your website quickly and easily? 30 Minute Backlinks!

What is “30 Minute Backlinks“?

It’s a brand new tutorial product developed by Michelle MacPhearson of Social Media Daily that teaches you to quickly build one-way links back to your site to improve your search engine rank, Google page rank and get more site visits fast.

It’s comprehensive, mostly automated and 100% guaranteed to supercharge your site’s traffic.

I’m putting 30 Minute Backlinks to the test starting today or tomorrow on this blog. (I have some family obligations that may keep me away from the computer most of today). I plan to see how it’s performing as frequently as I can. I’ll be updating this article often to show you just how powerful this method is. I would love to update you daily, but with my schedule, I know that isn’t realistic.

I’m promoting this product as I evaluate it because some of my blogging friends are already using it and seeing phenomenal results.

What if I don’t see great results? There is a 60-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not happy, your money will be refunded, no questions asked.

“Before” Blog Traffic Statistics (Google Analytics)

Here are my traffic statistics today before starting the program:

Date: 2/16/08

• Pageviews per day: 20
• Visits per day: 13 
• Traffic from search engines: 8.5% 
• Google search results page my site first appears on: 7 (It’s result #72, keyword phrase: home office organization)
• Number of inbound links: 104 (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)
  

This traffic count is a bit deceptive. I got 230 visitors on one day, January 26, 2008. This day caused my monthly average visitor count to appear considerably higher than reality. It more like 5-7 visitors and pageviews per day.

As you can see, this blog appears much farther down in the Google search results than most people will ever reach. I get very little of my blog traffic from search engines. In fact, most of my traffic (85%) comes from referring sites.

If I could keep my referring site visitors and add a significant number of visitors from the search engines, I would grow my traffic significantly. 30 Minute Backlinks is just the ticket to dramatically improve my search engine rankings by getting one-way backlinks to this site.

Update 2/23/2008:

I worked through the tutorial yesterday and today, and created and submitted 1/6 of the backlinks that can be produced with 30 Minute Backlinks.

If you’re more tech-savvy than I am, it will take you less time to get through the tutorial. I can see that once you learn how to do this the first time, repeating it is very easy and that’s where the power comes in.

I’ll check my traffic and inbound link counts in a few days and see how I’m progressing. Michelle says we should start seeing results in about 48 hours. I’ll also be working on the other 5/6 of the tutorial.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, new product, SEO

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