John Dilbeck Musings

There are several ways you can promote your business on Merchant Circle: the contents of your basic listing, any items you post to your blog, coupons you create, photos you upload, and the bulletins posted on your directory listing page.

I just learned about Merchant Circle a few days ago and I’ve jumped all over using their system. You can see the profile I’ve created for Dilbeck Marketing on Merchant Circle. I’ve taken the time to use most of the tools and love their system.

(Your business is listed at Merchant Circle, right? If not, you can create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! - MerchantCircle.com.)

There are probably other things you can do at Merchant Circle that I haven’t discovered in the less-than-a-week that I’ve been a member of the site.

What you may, or may not, already know is that every time you blog, create a coupon, upload a photo, or post a newsletter, these things are added to a newsfeed for you, automatically.

At the top-right of your listing, you’ll see “Subscribe to blog and coupon feed” followed by an orange chicklet that says “RSS/XML.” This is a standard news feed that can be syndicated on many services and can be read by anyone using a news feed aggregator or a news reader. Even without sending emails you are broadcasting to the world - potentially.

I’ll write a post later to explain more about making use of this. For now, suffice it to say that you can blog in one place and have it automatically republished in multiple places. This makes it very powerful for getting your news out.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, let me suggest that you read What is RSS?.

One place you may want to syndicate your feed is at Squidoo.com.

To do this, you’ll need to be a member.

Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it.

Of course, you’re an expert on your business, so join Squidoo and create a lens about it. It’s worth the effort to learn how to build free lenses on Squidoo, and it’s a perfect place to syndicate your Merchant Circle news feed.

For example, I’ve created a Squidoo lens about Merchant Circle and I’ve syndicated (re-published) my news feed and Merchant Circle’s news feed on that lens.

Also, as part of that lens, I’ve created a list where you can add a link to the Merchant Center listing for your business. I will be syndicating that list on some of my other websites, so you’ll get free advertising just by adding your link to the list. If you don’t understand, just comment on this topic and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

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

I recently realized that I’ve neglected an important part of my marketing efforts and I know I’m losing business as a result.

I bet you are, too.

Are you trying to sell your products and services to visitors who may visit your site just one time? If so, how much business are you losing when your visitor doesn’t buy right then?

You can do one simple thing to increase your conversion ratio: entice your visitor to subscribe to your newsletter and/or an email series that describes the benefits of the product or service you are trying to sell.

If the visitor subscribes to either of these email follow-up series, then she has shown at least some interest in what you have to offer.

Now, instead of one chance to make the sale, you have multiple opportunities to educate your prospect about the subject, to elaborate on the benefits provided by the product, and to build more of a relationship with your subscribers.

Even if you don’t make the sale eventually, you will have built some measure of goodwill if you provide quality information in your follow-up messages.

I’ve just started an Autoresponder marketing and building your lists series on JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com. I would welcome your thoughts and comments there.

Act on your dream!

JD

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…”

I should have gotten to this much sooner, but I finally made the time to update the 21st Century Marketing Tools site.

Almost two years ago, I set out to develop a site that would keep track of the marketing tools and resources I wanted to recommend. Since then, while I never forgot about it, I never took the time to maintain and update it.

I decided on December 12, 2006 that it was time to make this a priority.

You will find new items added into the directory and I’ll be posting to the news more often, too.

I hope you will visit and see the tools I recommend for marketing your business or personal sites and blogs.

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!

Massive Broadband over Powerline Rollout in Texas [Wi-Fi Networking News]

For those of us in remote areas where DSL, Cable, and other broadband access services are not availble, BPL (broadband over powerlines) offers hope that we will one day be able to get fast access at a reasonable price. While there are technical issues to overcome, it’s heartening to see large rollouts of BPL.

Maybe it will come to your location, and mine, one day.

(Update: September, 2006 - These articles offer more information about Broadband over Powerline Internet access at Wi-Fi Networking News.)

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.

As part of the recent reorganization of GeorgiaDragRacing.com, David has moved the news page to a new Blog at gdrn.blogspot.com.

There, you’ll find news and information about drag racing in Georgia, updated whenever there is something worthy of reporting.

The May 1, 2004 edition of my Home Business Tips newsletter has been posted.

Congratulations to my SFI sales team for growing their businesses in April!