John Dilbeck Musings

Healthy Coffee House (Murphy, NC US)

Come visit the Healthy Coffee House, Bed & Breakfast, and Bakery.

Have a drink on us!

Buy one, get one free any drink in the Healthy Coffee House.

Stay one night, second night half price.

Free wireless internet service.

Expires: This coupon expires on January 24, 2009.

Restrictions: One coupon per week per customer

Click the “Get Details” link below. You will go a new page where you can have the required coupon e-mailed to you instantly. Then print out the coupon and redeem at:

Healthy Coffee House
215 Peachtree ST
Murphy, NC 28906, USA

Questions on this offer?

Contact: Healthy Coffee House via Phone: 828-837-1515

Get Details and Money-Saving Coupon

First, if you’re not listing your business on MerchantCircle, why not?

Create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! - MerchantCircle.com

Truly, even if you are not a highly skilled web designer or webmaster, you can use the tools provided by MerchantCircle to promote your business and the products and services you offer. It won’t take days, weeks, or months, either! You can get started in a few hours and can continue promoting your business as long as you want through posting to your blog, creating coupons, and publishing newsletters.

This is the kind of business promotion that every owner or manager of a small business should jump onto. It’s free, effective, and easy to use. What’s the downside?

Act on your dream!

JD

After a very long hiatus, while I was trying to decide on a new approach, I have published the latest issue of the Act On Your Dream! newsletter.

It is archived at Act On Your Dream! — Issue #6 — Getting back on track

If you would like, you can subscribe to Act On Your Dream to get the next issues when they are published.

I intend to publish the newsletter on a regular basis, probably twice a month, and I want to feature you and what you are doing to act on your dream.

What can we do to help each other find the success and freedom we all want?

Act on your dream!

JD

The more I participate at Squidoo.com by building lenses and adding those lenses to groups, the more I see pages on Squidoo referenced in my traffic stats on various sites I have.

What?

I mean that Squidoo is sending an ever-increasing stream of traffic to my sites, blogs, and forums.

Thinking about that, I took a little time this morning to create a new Get A Free Marketing Site lens on Squidoo.

Then, I found several related groups and submitted my new lens to them.

This morning, my lens is ranked at over 180,000. I’m guessing it will jump to about 30,000 or less in the next 24 hours. Then, who knows where it will end up.

To make it a bit more interesting, I added a Plexo module where you can vote for your favorite marketing book on the lens, and I added an RSS feed for marketing articles from 21st Century Articles, my article directory specializing in business, communications, technology, and self-improvement articles.

If you don’t see your favorite marketing book on the list, please feel free to add it.

I have been getting tens of thousands of page views to my Get A Free Marketing Site suite of marketing tools at LinkScout, and I know it has been worth the time and effort - and money - I’ve invested in it.

Therefore, I feel confident in recommending it to you, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. I also recommend that you start building as many Squidoo lenses as you need to promote your business, talk about your hobby, or write about anything in which you are interested. It’s free, and you may well get paid by Squidoo. I earn a small check from them every month, and that’s a lot better than buying advertising, in my opinion.

If you have a blog on just about any topic, you should create a related lens at Squidoo, and don’t forget to use the RSS module to syndicate your blog feed.

It brings me more visitors, and I’m sure it will work for you, too.

(This article is part of my Marketing Tools and Techniques: Traffic Exchanges series.)

Normally, I won’t be promoting the latest and (supposedly) greatest thing, so don’t be afraid that I’ll bombard you with untested programs that may be here today and gone tomorrow.

I prefaced this recommendation because Soaring For Traffic is a new traffic exchange, but I believe it will be around for a long time and I think it will rise to be one of the best.

I’ve known Ray for a few months and I have seen for myself that he knows quite a bit about Internet marketing and is always working to learn more and to share what he learns with others.

I first met him on the Affiliate Funnel forum, where he answered some of my questions about ad tracking on traffic exchanges. I did some searching and found that he is the owner of Private Success Team, where he is busily helping others learn how to market on the Internet more successfully.

I recently learned that he has been working for about a year to introduce Soaring For Traffic, his free traffic exchange and downline builder.

Lately, I’ve become more discerning when it comes to traffic exchanges and I’m reaching the point where I probably won’t join too many more.

Over the last year, I’ve joined and used about 75 traffic exchanges with varying amounts of success. Now, I’m a member in about 60 and actively use about 20 of them.

I am an upgraded member in about a dozen exchanges, and I just upgraded my account with Soaring For Traffic.

Although Soaring For Traffic is free, you will get more traffic with less time and effort by upgrading to one of the two upgrade levels. I chose the highest upgrade and I’m looking forward to using this exchange a lot in the coming months.

I added about 170 sites to this exchange in one fell swoop by using my Page Swirl rotator and spent another hour or two advertising it on some of my marketing pages, including my LinkScout marketing site.

After I’d finished setting everything up, it was time to surf the new exchange and see how I liked it.

I found a couple of small errors when setting up to use the exchange, but surfing the sites of other members was easy and the site responded quickly, even on my very slow dial-up connection.

The downline builder part of the site contains five money making affiliate programs and I’m a member of three of them. I didn’t count the number of traffic exchanges in the downline builder, but almost all of my favorites were there and I saw only a handful of sites I’d never tried before.

I know that Ray will be a helpful and responsive owner, and that is a big part of being an upgraded member of an exchange.

Even though Soaring For Traffic is new, it already has nearly 1,500 members and is growing quickly.

Regarding the problems I encountered, one was just an incorrect height and width attribute in the HTML code for a 100×300 sidebar button link. That was easily corrected, and I’ll let Ray know about it as soon as I publish this.

The other was a bit more of a problem, but probably has an easy solution. The site offers a way to personalize one of the splash pages that can be used on other traffic exchanges. It features your name, photo, a banner, and a testimonial.

I filled in the form and submitted it, only to be told that the banner URL was incorrect. No problem; the exchange is new. However, the real problem, for me, was that the error page did not preserve the entries on the form that were correct. As a result, a very complimentary testimonial was lost.

Ray, if you read this, I said some nice things about you that nobody will read because the form lost my heartfelt compliments.

With only a couple of minor negatives (which I’m sure Ray will fix quickly) and lots of positives, I heartily recommend Soaring For Traffic to you.

If you want to be a free member, this exchange is better than most.

If you plan to upgrade, the prices are right and the One-Time-Offer page offers good discount pricing for an annual or lifetime membership.

If that doesn’t fit your budget, the second One-Time-Offer (OTO) page offers a 33% discount on the highest upgrade level, making it a good buy. Normally, the highest level, Soaring Eagle, costs $14.95 per month, and I think that is over-priced for a 1:1 surf ratio and anything less than 1,000 credits per month. However, the second OTO page offers the Soaring Eagle level for $9.99, and I think that is the proper price for what is offered.

I don’t know if either of these discount pages will be available should you join, nor what they may offer at that time. These things are always subject to change.

If you don’t take advantage of either OTO page, you’ll pay more, perhaps a lot more, in the long run.

Soaring For Traffic will be one of the dozen or so traffic exchanges I’ll use on a regular basis.

You can join Soaring For Traffic for free and see for yourself how well it works for you.

Act on your dream!

JD

Brad Fallon, CEO, has recently introduced Free IQ, an interesting new website that brings content providers, purchasers, and affiliates together.

Free IQ looks to me like it combines some of the features of several sites that are doing well: Squidoo, Lulu, CafePress, and a few others.

Like Squidoo, Free IQ asserts that most people are an expert in something, and then provides a platform for you to express your expertise.

Lulu.com offers a place to sell your ebooks and also offers extra features for print on demand real books as well as help in marketing your real bound books in bookstores and online retailers.

CafePress provides services for selling your CDs and printed ebooks.

Free IQ offers some of these services, but in a totally different way. They do not offer print on demand services. They don’t offer an unlimited number of one-page lenses as Squidoo does, but they do offer multiple categories on your publisher’s page.

Here’s a brief introduction from the Free IQ “Learn More” page:

We believe everyone knows something that’s valuable to someone else.

And some people know things that are very valuable to many other people.

So who decides whose ideas are more valuable?

The answer, of course, is everyone! We all do. This is the “Marketplace for Ideas,” where the best knowledge, ideas and information rise to the top. At Free IQ, the best content appears at the top of every search, based on actual reviews.

In a nutshell, we base our search result rankings on the feedback and reviews by people all around the world. (In fact, Free IQ has more than one patent pending based on the way in which the very best ideas rise to the top of our search results.)

Do you have knowledge and ideas to share?

Are those ideas presentable in a video or audio format? How about an e-book or an article?

Whatever your choice of media (video, audio, or print), Free IQ is the place to offer (present?) your knowledge to the world. And we’ll host your materials and stream them - for free!

This is why, when you want to learn more about almost anything, Free IQ is the ideal place to learn from the world’s best experts - for free.

We believe that internet video offers the best way to learn what you want, when you want - and the best thing is, it’s Free!

Go ahead and try it. Search for any topic you’re interested in learning more about - from business management to marketing to software to your favorite hobby - and see all the experts and authors and speakers on that subject.

Our patent pending search algorithm causes the best information to appear at the top, based on the reviews of the free information by other people interested in that same topic. In fact, other Free IQ users all over the world screen all the available information for you, so when you want to know something, the best video and audio presentations come out on top.

Now that’s a Marketplace for Ideas!

You can read more on their site by clicking the “Learn More” link at the top of the page.

If you have information you want to share with others, you can upload your ebook, video, teleseminar, audio, or other presentation to Free IQ and make it instantly available to others.

Now, I’m brand new to this site, but I already see a problem developing.

Many people have uploaded some of the free ebooks that Ken Evoy wrote. Yes, as affiliates, they have the right to upload copies of Make Your Site Sell! or the Affiliate Masters Course.

However, this will clog the system with duplicate content, the only difference being whose affiliate links are branded in the copy that’s being distributed.

Free IQ claims that their review system will bring the best content to the top of the page, so why do we see the exact same ebooks spread throughout the page? I’m not saying the best content won’t bubble to the top over time, I just see this as one way the system will be clogged with duplicate content.

I think it would be better for a Five Pillar affiliate to write a report of his/her own and recommend good resources for people who want to become an affiliate master or sell from their sites. Then, it would be easy to reference the resources you recommend and still provide unique content that you can show on your publisher’s page.

Now, that’s how I intend to test this site. To that end, I’ve created my publisher’s page for John Dilbeck.

Currently, there is not much on the page, but I’ll be adding some articles or small ebooks as I have time to develop them. Free IQ looks to be an excellent way to market and provide your content on a site that is relatively easy to use.

Not only that, but it will help you build your mailing list. If you have an Aweber account, you can plug your mailing list in directly. If not, you can choose to have leads emailed to you.

Back to finding info on Free IQ. Just go to the Free IQ home page and either enter a search term or click one of the tags.

You will be taken to a page that has free content in the left column and paid content in the right column. In other words, you can read, view, or listen to (as appropriate) the information in the left column for free. You can purchase, should you decide to do so, the information in the right column.

If you want to review an item, give your opinion, or leave feedback, all you have to do is Join for free and create your account.

Content Providers

If you are an expert on almost any topic, Free IQ may be a good place to display your expertise and pass along your best ideas.

At the moment, while Free IQ is still in beta, there is no limit on the size of the files you upload. They will stream or let others download your products for no cost to you. If you are providing content for sale, there is no monthly fee to use the Free IQ shopping engine to sell your information products. When you make a sale, Free IQ will charge you 5% of the sales price, plus credit card processing fees. You don’t even have to have a merchant account.

Once you’ve created your free account (see above), you can upload your content and see how well the system works for you.

Currently, I’m not sure if each content provider has to take part in the affiliate program, or not.

Affiliate Program

One of the things that attracted me immediately to Free IQ is their two tier affiliate program.

If you join the Free IQ affiliate program, you will get paid for the purchases made by anyone you refer, not just once, but for an entire year! Of course, many of the people you refer will buy nothing or maybe one item. However, if he or she does buy multiple items, you’ll get paid for each of them for an entire year.

You also get paid a percentage of any content sold by any Content Providers you refer.

While not as good as having a lifetime customer, getting paid for a year of purchases beats getting paid (maybe) for a single purchase.

If you are interested, you should read the affiliate program page to learn more about some of the innovative things Free IQ is doing.

You are invited to join their affiliate program and see for yourself how it works for you.

It’s free to join and you can quit at any time if you find it doesn’t work for you.

Again, to recap, this site is still in beta and there is no way to tell if it will gain market share or not. It looks interesting to me and that’s why I’m passing it along to you.

It has been an interesting week.

I’ve been working as hard as I can to simplify my life and refocus on doing what I really want to do: to help you succeed in what you want to do.

Yes, it’s a bit abstract and a little hard for me to wrap my brain around, but some interesting people have contacted me this week.

One contacted me on Ryze and I noticed that she was a member of the Feel Free to Prosper network, which was started and is managed by Marilyn Jenett.

In the introduction to the Feel Free to Prosper network, she says:

Marilyn Jenett spent 30 years learning and applying these principles to accomplish in the business arena. She recently released her corporate business, and is now teaching others, through her live and audio lesson and mentoring programs, to use simplified mental and spiritual based techniques to make more money, attract unexpected income, advance their careers or businesses or find that right job or more clients. In fact, these laws can be used to change any area of life. One can “prosper” in finances, health, love and relationships, creativity, or spiritually.

Students can use this network to share their results and successes, to inspire other members and to communicate with Marilyn and each other for the benefit of all. Its purpose is to provide an oasis of knowledge, exchange and inspiration. All network members can post and gain inspiration and knowledge here, so all are welcome to “hang around”. You’ll find excerpts from the lessons, valuable information and Marilyn’s views based on the laws included among the postings and testimonials.

I think you will find her network on Ryze to be interesting and I invite you to read what Marilyn has been posting for the last few weeks.

I joined her network and look forward to participating there as I find useful thoughts to contribute.

I recommend her newsletter, too. Here’s a link to volume 1, issue 3 of Wings, her Feel Free to Prosper newsletter.

I especially enjoyed her “Metaphysical Marketing” article.

Any comments?

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. For those of you who know me, I was not surprised to see a picture of a castle on her network page. “Build a castle…”

Did you know you can get your own better shopping center from Better Universe?

It’s free to join and you can receive cash back from over 1,000 stores that you are already shopping at.

What’s even better, you can give away shopping centers to your friends and not only will they get cash back from their purchases, you will get cash back when they shop from their own better shopping center.

How’s that for a deal?

Not only that, but you aren’t going to be shopping at places you’ve never heard of. Here’s a list of the top 100 most visited stores. You will immediately recognize stores at which you already shop.

Like what you see?

Get your free cash back shopping site now, while you are thinking about it.

Several years ago, I needed a way to earn a living while staying home and being a full-time caretaker for my Mom.

I tried several things before I decided that affiliate marketing was for me.

There were many reasons for this decision. There was a low cost to entry since I didn’t have to buy merchandise, pay for inventory or interest, hire staff, set up an online order entry system, manage customer service, deal with shipping and returns, and do many of the other things that are necessary when you are selling products or services to the general public.

As an affiliate marketer, basically I work in advertising and marketing, and someone else handles all the rest of the necessary activities.

The downside to affiliate marketing is that there is a lot to learn, there is cut-throat competition, what works for me may not work for you and vice versa, and the Internet and online marketing is changing all the time.

At first, I knew a lot about the technical aspects of building websites, but I did not know nearly enough to be effective as an affiliate.

Fortunately for me, I found Ken Evoy and I have been successfully following his advice for several years. My affiliate marketing business is growing and I’m earning more as time goes by.

Ken provided a couple of things that made a huge difference in my affiliate marketing success. I appreciate his down-to-earth, practical advice and the products he has created to help me become a more-effective affiliate marketer.

The first was a free email course he called the Affiliate Masters Course. It was a five part course sent via email. Later, it was redone as an ebook in PDF format. Earlier this month, he released the November, 2006 updated edition of the Affiliate Masters course. I just finished reading it and the updated edition offers lots of information that was not included in the previous version. I recommend this book to you.

The cost? It’s free.

Download your copy of the Affiliate Masters course now. You’ll find about 160 pages of outstanding information. Others sell ebooks with much less information for $50 or $100 or more. Get this one and read it. Learn what you need to know and put it to work. I believe your affiliate marketing efforts will be more successful if you implement what Ken tells you.

Along the same lines, Ken wrote an ebook called “Make Your Site Sell!” a few years ago. The original version sold for under $20 and the updated 2002 version sold for about $30.

A couple of months ago, Ken decided to offer Make Your Site Sell! 2002 as a free download.

This multi-volume ebook contains over 1,500 pages of outstanding information and has been worth thousands of dollars to me in revenue I may not have earned if I hadn’t followed Ken’s advice.

While some of the information is a bit dated, the core information remains very valuable and you will find much information of use to you in this PDF format ebook. I regularly refer to it and continually discover useful tips and techniques to improve my marketing efforts.

If you want to build an online business, you need to read this ebook. Download it today.

These two ebooks made a great impact on the effectiveness of my online marketing and my affiliate marketing business continues to grow today based on what I learned from them.

Of course, reading and learning isn’t going to build a business. You have to take what you learn, plan how it will help your business grow, and then put it into action.

Act on your dreams!

Dan Nickerson has done it again.

Every time I turn around, Dan has come up with a brilliant idea and implements that idea before you can turn around.

This time, he has created the Newbie Report to help new Internet marketers learn more about the tools, processes and sites you need to master to profit from your marketing efforts.

It’s free to sign up for the newsletter.

The site already has links to some of the best marketing sites a new online marketer needs to find. Not all of the sites I’d recommend are listed, but it’s an outstanding start. I’m sure he’ll be expanding the listing as time goes by.

It even comes with a free affiliate program.

Go to the Newbie Report, sign up for the newsletter (the sooner the better, you’ll see why when you do it), and learn how to be more successful in your marketing efforts.

I’m not a newbie, but I’m looking forward to learning more from Dan.

Check it out right now!