John Dilbeck Musings

Whether you’re an advertiser using pay per click ads on Google or you’re a webmaster hosting Adsense ads on your websites, you’ll want to know about the new Adsense updates that Google recently released.

Rather than writing about it myself, I’m going to refer you to Ken Evoy’s explanation of Adsense and how these changes can be beneficial to you, especially from the viewpoint of a webmaster using these ads to add another stream of income.

Adsense is an important part of my strategy for monetizing my website traffic. If you have a site with any significant traffic, I’d urge you to learn more about Adsense and see if it makes sense to use it to add another stream of income from your site.

The new features make it even better than it already was.

Google has added several things we’ve been wanting since Adsense was first introduced.

Hi,

This week, I’ve been thinking about a couple of issues that are gaining in importance for reasons I’ll mention below.

I was a bit out of the loop last week because my mother was scheduled for surgery on Thursday. The surgery was a success and she’s back home and doing well.

(You may not know that I’m a full-time caretaker for her after her cancer surgery a couple of years ago. I help her during the days and do most of my marketing work from the next room during the nights and early mornings.)

So, now, my mind is back in the game and I’m looking for ways to help you grow your SFI Marketing Group business.

Some thoughts about marketing and selling

As I’ve said before, we are a sales organization. No sales, no business.

Most people hate selling, but that may be because they have a misconception about what selling is all about.

Look around you. Everything you see was sold by someone and bought by someone.

Selling is difficult when you are trying to convince someone to purchase something she doesn’t want.

Selling is easy when you talk to your customer and find out what he or she is most interested in. If she’s interested in what you have to offer, tell her about it.

Selling is easiest when you find what a group of people want or need and then you find a way to provide that product or service to them.

It is much easier to sell ice to a hot person in the summer than it is to sell it to a cold person in the winter. Few people can sell refrigerators to Eskimos, but practically anyone can sell a cold soda to a hot sweaty person in the summer.

You don’t have to do a hard sell. Just mention the benefits and how to get it.

Don’t know how to define the benefits? That’s pretty easy once you know the trick.

First, take out a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the center of the page. On the left side, list all the features you can come up with. On the right side list the benefits of each of the features.

How?

A benefit must answer the question “What’s in it for me?” or “How does that help me?”

Try to think as your customer would think and then list how each feature will be of benefit to him or her.

Once you know the benefits of your product or service, don’t list the features any more. Tell about the benefits, because that’s what we’re all interested in.

Now, you’re not trying to make someone buy what you have to sell, you’re offering a list of ways to help someone get what he or she already wants.

Are you selling when you tell someone that you saw a good movie they would probably like?

Are you selling when you recommend a good restaurant?

Are you selling when you tell someone about the SFI business opportunity?

Sure you are.

You may or may not be getting paid for your selling efforts, however.

That’s the beauty of affiliate selling. All you have to do is get someone to go to your gateway or a specific page in your Veriuni store and purchase from that link, or sign up as your sponsored affiliate. Then you get paid.

It’s not hard, it just takes some effort. When someone likes what they see, buying is easy. Remember how easy it was for you to become an SFI affiliate? That’s just how easy it will be for someone else to sign up as your affiliate and that’s how your sales team will grow.

The more you learn about selling, the more money you make in commissions.

Of course, it’s not just about learning. You must take action. Knowledge without action accomplishes nothing. Action without knowledge may or may not accomplish something. Sometimes it can work against you.

So, make sure you know what you’re going to do before you just start doing it. Set your goals and plan how you’re going to accomplish them.

Then, work your plan.

Does your upline answer your email?

It occured to me yesterday that there may be several reasons why you don’t get a reply when you email someone for help.

One of you — I won’t mention who — sent me an email last week that I almost never saw.

Because of all the virii (viruses) and worms, I no longer open an email with the subject of just “Hi”, “Heya”, or “Hello”. I have programmed my email program to drop those directly into the trash without seeing them.

I get over 1,000 email messages every day and several hundred are spam. Of the others, I have a couple of hundred filters defined that send the messages into over 50 inboxes. Some — such as my SFI inbox — are a high priority. Others are low priority.

When I check my email, I read the messages in the high priority inboxes first, and if I have time I eventually get to the others, but it may take days or even weeks, if I ever get to them at all.

Last week I got an email from an affiliate with a subject of “Hi” and a body that consisted only of “What do I do next?” No name. No company mentioned — and I represent several. No discussion of what had been done before to lead up to this point.

It was automatically filtered into the trash. I only read it because I had a few extra minutes that day — unusual — and recognized the email address.

It took a while to respond to the message, because I had to find the affiliate’s name, and what he/she may have done already. It would have been much easier and faster with some basic information in the email.

So, I’m going to ask you, whenever you write me, to please include the following:

1. Your full name.

2. Your SFI affiliate ID.

3. Your city, state, and country — whatever is appropriate.

4. Put “SFI Affiliate” at the start of the subject line.

5. In the body, ask questions that can be answered and provide information about what you have already done and what I can help you with.

6. If you reply to a message from me, please quote the previous conversation so I don’t have to go searching for it. These simple steps will make sure I see your message and will make it much easier to respond to you.

That’s assuming, of course, that some ISP between us doesn’t throw the message away or refuse to deliver it for whatever reason.

Because email is getting more and more unreliable, I’m opening up alternative forms of communications. I’ve created a Residual Income Forum and I invite you to register and participate there. We can discuss SFI in the SFI Marketing Group section.

How do international affiliates become MIQ?

I define “international affiliate” to mean anyone who lives in any country other than the United States.

As you may know, it’s sometimes difficult for international affiliates to purchase anything online. We’re getting more and more international affiliates in our sales team, and I welcome you! I want to find a way to help you transfer money back and forth between the US and your country.

There are two issues: how to buy something here and how to get paid there.

Be aware that you are never required to purchase anything from SFI. You can become MIQ by selling rather than buying and I highly recommend selling. However, you may have decided that you’d like to join the IAHBE, but don’t have a way to do it if you don’t have a credit card.

I have to admit that I was rather ignorant of this whole situation until recently and now I’m trying to find a way or ways to help you. I’ve sent some information to a couple of you. If you find it helpful, please tell me and I’ll pass it along to the entire team.

I’d also like to know if it wasn’t helpful.

I think SFI must find a way to make it easier for international affiliates to play a bigger part in the company and I think that’s under development. After all, Gery Carson — the founder of SFI — has announced that he’s changing the name of the organization from Six Figure Income Marketing Group to Strong Future International Marketing Group, and if he’s going to position it as an international organization, it’s necessary to make it easier and more profitable for anyone who lives outside the US to be a part of the effort — and to reap the rewards.

I’ve also learned that it is difficult for some people to receive their commissions from SFI. Some of you have to pay very high fees to cash a check from the US. Som you may want to accumulate your commissions until they reach a certain level before SFI sends you a check, so the fee will be a lower percentage of what you earn.

I’m still looking into this and I’ll be checking the SFI discussion board every few days to see if any news is forthcoming in this regard. If you learn something that works for you, please share it with us.

(Update: September, 2006 - SFI has made some dramatic improvements in working with international affiliates. I’ve written about some of them in my SFI Sales Team blog.)

That’s all for today.

As usual, if you have any questions, comments, feedback or want to talk to me about any of this, I look forward to hearing from you.

I’d like to recommend that you read the SFI discussion forum on a regular basis and post there if you have questions or comments. We’re a friendly bunch and there are some very helpful people there. Just remember that you can’t post contact information on their forum.

If there’s anything I can do to help you grow your SFI business, please let me know at your convenience. I always try to answer my email within two or three days or so.

All the best,

JD

PS. Want your own SFI business? If you’re willing to learn, set goals and work to achieve them, and have at least a couple of dollars per day to invest in growing your business, please click the link and join my sales team today.

About a year ago, I started recommending, to anyone who would listen, that it was important to put full addresses, city, state, zip code and phone numbers with area codes on their websites.

Sharon Fling has been predicting the importance of promoting small local businesses on the Internet for a couple of years now, and those who have followed her advice are very well placed as we see more of the major search engines incorporate local searching in their arsenal of search tools.

Google now offers local search results — something they’ve been working on for months — and their implementation is coming along nicely.

For example, I just entered “restaurant 28906″ on their search page, and at the top of the results it shows a heading link for “Local results for restaurant near 28906″ followed by three local restaurants with their address and phone number.

If you click on the link just mentioned, it brings up a page of restaurants near Murphy, NC sorted by distance. It even lists the mileage and direction to the restaurant with a link for directions.

At the top of the page are other categories related to restaurants.

Right below that is a compass icon with a link to see the listings on a map of the region.

Clicking the link brings you to another page with a Mapquest map showing numbers indicating the restaurants. There is a legend to the right of the map showing the restaurant indicated by each number, with a link to the restaurant.

Mapquest maps for our mountain area are not extremely accurate and I often get erroneous results, but this map looks mostly accurate — although not 100%.

If I click on my favorite restaurant in Murphy, Shoebooties Cafe, next to its number in the legend, it brings you to a page dedicated to Shoebooties, with its location noted on the map and a button for getting driving directions.

I’m less satisfied with MapQuest’s driving directions, since they give you a 23 minute, 12 mile drive to get to a location that is about a 30 second walk from the main intersection in downtown Murphy. The last two or three steps in the directions are accurate, but I have no idea why they start where they do, way out west of Murphy a long way from the town.

Regardless of the deficiencies of the MapQuest directions, the Google implementation of local search is accurate and fast.

Let’s try another. How about “antiques 28906″ or “real estate 28906″?

For antiques, it lists three shops in the local section at the top of the page, but misses Pickled Parrot Antiques which is right in downtown Murphy and starts with a shop over two miles away. Pickled Parrot Antiques is listed first in the regular search results, right below the local results — so there are still some bugs to be worked out for the most accurate results.

For real estate, the link to the full page is more accurate than for antiques. It correctly lists the downtown real estate agencies and extends outwards from there. This is clearly useful.

While the Google local results feature is not as accurate as being listed in the yellow pages, it is free and fast. As time goes by, I’m assuming it can only get more accurate as Google improves their algorithm and cross-linking.

I think you’ll find this to be a very useful tool.

Looking for a bagpiper near you?

On a lark, I tried searching for “bagpiper 28906″ and learned that Clay Will lives about 40 miles southeast of me on the north shore of Lake Rabun in Georgia. I bet I never would have found him in the local yellow pages!

But, just when this looks great, I tried searching for “musician 28906″ and got results that were not very good. I know there are hundreds of excellent musicians within a 20 mile radius of here and none of them are listed.

“pizza murphy nc” correctly lists Downtown Pizza Co (where I had lunch a couple of days ago and enjoyed it) and branches out from there. It misses Papa’s Pizza To Go in Murphy, but finds the franchise in Blairsville, Georgia, which it says is about 15 miles south of Murphy, but I’m pretty sure it’s a good bit farther than that.

While still a work in progress, Google’s local search is decidedly useful, especially for businesses that are most likely to have a website or which may be listed in various directories.

I could probably spend the rest of the day playing with this, but it’s time to move on to other tasks!

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March 31, 2004 4:42 AM

I’m sitting here this morning sipping from a steaming mug of PurJava coffee and thinking about how you can most easily get started in marketing affiliate programs on the Internet.

Perhaps you’re just getting started and are looking for a way to get your message out without having to learn how to build a website and build traffic to your site.

Maybe a good starting point would be to create and maintain a blog on a regular basis. As you probably know, a blog (short for web log or weblog) is an online journal or diary that is displayed in reverse chronological order (last item shown first) and can be as easy to create and maintain as sending email or participating in an online discussion forum. If you can write clearly and put text into a box on your browser, then you can maintain a blog.

I truly believe in blogs for business and personal purposes. Currently, I maintain about a half-dozen blogs. Search engines tend to like them and, if you post quality content, you’ll attract a group of regular readers.

For the blog newbie, I believe blogger.com offers the easiest introduction and the simplest software. It’s easy to set up and easy to update. When you learn more, you can customize the look of the site and add links to other sites. Be sure to turn on the syndication feature.

(Update: I no longer recommend blogger.com. I am convinced that WordPress is the way to go. If you want to create a free Wordpress blog, you can do it at WordPress.com.)

The last time I checked, you could have as many blogs as you want at blogger.com. I tend to write about anything that interests me, and it is usually business related, but sometimes I get a burr under my saddle and just want to rant about something!

I think my last rant was either about spam or about people who don’t protect their systems from viruses, thus making it more difficult for all of us.

You can see my blogger.com blog at (link deleted - I no longer have any blogs at blogger.com).

Next up on the list, and my personal favorite is Radio UserLand, which costs $40 per year. It’s a more powerful blogging system and you can have multiple categories so that, if you — like me — have many different interests, the computer will automatically sort them for you by simply selecting a check box for each category for which you want a message to be routed. You can choose one or more categories for each posting. Dave Winer, founder of UserLand and one of the chief architexts of Clay Basket, which became Frontier and Manila, which then became Radio Userland, created one of the first content management systems for the Internet that was affordable. He was a co-creator of RSS, and had one of the very first blogs.

Radio Userland is more powerful than Blogger.com, has an annual fee, and takes longer to learn. Unlike Blogger.com, RU is a downloadable program that runs on your computer. It’s available for several platforms including Windows and Mac. You can download it and use it for a month for free to try it out.

Part of your $40 annual fee pays for up to 40 MB of webhosting on a public server.

I started out a long time ago with Clay Basket, which was the first content manager I ever encountered that was reasonably priced. It was free! It took a long time to wrap my tired old brain around the concept, however.

As the next couple of years progressed, Dave and his team introduced Frontier and Manila, which were, and still are, very powerful content managers. Frontier ran on a particular machine as a user application and Manila was designed for servers and could even allow multiple authors to publish to the same site under the control of one or more editors.

My first weblog is still hosted on one of the first publicly-available Manila servers at EditThisPage.com, but they no longer offer hosting services. You can get a free 14-day trial of using Manila to see what it’s all about if you like. At this time, I’m not aware of any commercial Manila hosting services, but the program can be licensed for about $900 per year and you can host as many sites as you’d care on your own server, if you find that of interest.

My Manila website is at johndilbeck.editthispage.com and I update it on a semi-regular basis.

If I only had access to one blog service or software, I’d choose Radio UserLand without a second thought. It has all the power and features I need for blogging, and I also generate all of my static websites using its advanced website building tools. I’m currently managing over 4,000 web pages on a dozen sites and all of them are stored in the Radio UserLand database. It’s like no other web management system I’ve ever encountered. Nothing else even comes close for the sites I like to build.

(Update: September, 2006 - If I only had access to one blog service, it would be WordPress. WordPress offers an outstanding blogging platform and a vibrant community of users. I still use Radio Userland for managing static websites, but I’m moving most of my blogs to WordPress.)

(Now, if you’re just going to concentrate on building one website, I’d have to steer you to Site Build It!. It has more features for one low price than any other hosting service I know about, and I have sites hosted on many services. Although it is powerful enough for pros, Site Build It! is a great way for people to build an online web business without having to learn all the techie stuff.)

I have used a program called NewsPro in the past on several sites to maintain a blog, but the lead developer disappeared and the program fell into limbo. This program is a set of PERL scripts that may be hosted on any commercial webhosting service that supports PERL.

Since the demise of NewsPro, which was very popular, a team of developers around the world extended it into a new program called Coranto that has much more capability — at the cost of being more difficult to install and configure. I spent the month of December getting it to run on a couple of my sites, including my main site. It has the capability of generating a static web page for each message I post, and Google loves blogs. The more I post, the more little strands I leave out on the web for people to find me. This will work for you, too.

You can learn more about Coranto at the unofficial site at coranto.gweilo.org.

I really like Coranto, but it took me about a month to really get the hang of it and to learn to configure it to take advantage of just some of its power. You can see some of my Coranto blogs at JohnDilbeck.com/news/ and DilbeckConsulting.com/news/. I’ll be installing this script on more sites as I have time.

Even now, though, it takes me most of a day to install and configure Coranto, even for a basic blog.

On JohnDilbeck.com, I went a step further and used the advanced feature of not only including each posting into the normal blog and archives, but also of creating a single stand-alone static page with specific keywords for that story. This is just like creating a normal web page with all the meta tags that make it easy for the search engines to find and index it. You can see this in action by going to JohnDilbeck.com/news/ and clicking one of the headlines in the left column. On my other sites using Coranto, it will take you to the story in the weblog or the archives, but on JohnDilbeck.com, it will take you to the stand alone page for that story, which is also included in the archives. One example is at Cognigen introduces new products.

Once installed and configured, Coranto provides outstanding features and excellent quality. It’s a free product and may be too technical for many people to install on their websites. If you go to coranto.gweilo.org you can find the links to the support forum, and you can probably find someone there who will be happy to install and configure it for your site — for a reasonable fee. If you’re really trying to build traffic to your site, I recommend Coranto configured to create stand-alone static pages for every article you post.

(Please don’t contact me to help you with this. I just don’t have the time.)

(Update: September, 2006 - With the increasing power and easy-to-use features of WordPress version 2, and the easy installation on many webhosting services using Fantastico, I no longer recommend Coranto. I can set up a powerful, full-featured blog using WordPress in a matter of minutes and it is both easier to use and easier to maintain than Coranto.)

When I was just getting started a few years ago and had no money to spend on this, I made extensive use of the free tools offered by Bravenet.com and even though I’m not using their tools much these days, I recommend them highly. They’ve been around forever and look as if they are a good choice, especially when you’re just getting started.

In addition to free webhosting, they have a new service they call their web journal, which is a cross between a blog and a portal. It looks like it will do everything you can do with blogger.com.

Yesterday morning, after writing the message on a discussion forum that became this article, today, I created my Bravenet.com-hosted web journal at johndilbeck.bravejournal.com and I’m happy with how easy it was to set up and how well it works — even with my old Macintosh.

I find that I get good results from my various blogs, discussion groups, mailing lists, and websites. Blogs are the easiest to maintain, and can be used to start building your mailing list — which in the long run will become your most valuable asset. I’ll save discussion of this topic for another article.

I’m very interested in this topic and have been blogging since before there was a word for it.

I’m sure there are other excellent blog services and tools available. The main thing I would look for is whether they are well-indexed by Google and/or Yahoo before I invested a lot of time or effort into creating and maintaining my blog.

Anyone who doesn’t have at least one blog is missing a very good opportunity for marketing on the Internet. As long as you update it on a fairly regular basis and write something interesting with truly useful information, it will be indexed regularly by the search engines and your visitors will come back. The more you can get them to interact, the better the whole system will work.

All the best,

JD

Cognigen Networks, Inc. recently introduced a redesigned retail website for their products and services. The new site features easier site navigation, and improved Best Rate Calculator to help you lower your long-distance bills, and improved support sections. A wide variety of cost-effective telecommunications services is available.

BillZilla offers a quick way to find your lowest priced long distance service for residential or business use. It also offers a quick way to find high-speed Internet broadband service, both T1 and DSL.

Cognigen introduced the Trinsic / Z-Tel bundled local and long distance services. Alternate plans include unlimited long distance for a flat monthly fee with toll free service and Personal Voice Assistant. All services are not avalable in all areas. See the site for information on what’s available where you are.

The Neighborhood by MCI is now available through Cognigen! Take advantage of this bundled package of services offered by one of the biggest names in telecom. All services are not available in all areas. (Update: The Neighborhood by MCI service is no longer available, but the link takes you to alternative bundled service providers.)

Cognigen and VMC Satellite have partnered to market the Dish Network. Click the link to see any currently offered specials.

UltraConference Launched — this exciting new conference calling service is now available with two plans, Flat Rate or Per Minute. Enhanced web interface with outstanding features. International access is available at no additional cost.

ClickPrint just introduced PressAbles into their extensive line of customizable labels.

PressAbels can be applied, removed cleanly from almost any surface with no residue, and reapplied!

Choose from their wide selection of PressAbels such as Counter Mats, Bumper and Window Stickers, Custom Calendars, All Purpose, and others.

PressAbels are available in the Labels section of their website.

Art.com is changing their affiliate program, again.

When I first joined, a couple of years ago, they had a very good in-house affiliate program with excellent tools. Then, they discontinued it in favor of going with LinkShare, and the tools that were available for marketing their art products were not as good, at least in my opinion.

I recently learned that they were transitioning back to an in-house program. So, I joined the new program and I’ve spent the last week or so reorganizing and updating my Art Store at JohnDilbeck.com.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adding posters and photos to the appropriate pages in my bookstore, too.

If you are interested in affiliate program marketing, I encourage you to learn more about Art.com’s affiliate program and join it if it fits your needs and interests.

Oh, yeah, check out my Art Store and purchase posters, photos, and fine art prints. Over 100,000 products are available in thousands of categories. If you don’t find what you want on my site, every page in the art store has a search box. Enter the name of a movie, musician, topic or keyword and you’ll be presented with great artwork for your consideration.

Utility to Offer High-Speed Internet.

A division of utility Cinergy Corp. plans to offer high-speed Internet service over its power lines, letting customers connect by simply plugging a computer modem into existing electrical outlets.

[eWEEK Technology News]

The Junk Science of George W. Bush, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration–aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals–are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration’s corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact ‘for partisan political ends.’”

[The Nation]