Today I had logged on to my Twitter page to put out some update just to get in contact with my followers, and I check the trending topics expecting to see nothing but Michael Jackson topics. To my absolute shock, my marketing idol Billy Mays was the topic of discussion, and his name was preceded by “RIP”. I took the news quite hard, Billy Mays is not only the host of the only TV show that I watch on television “Pitchmen”, but he is the reason I have this blog today.

I am a 20 year old college student that started an internet marketing company 2 years ago, which I now realize will become my future. I have no plans of working for some other company, I am loving the life of an entrepreneur and quite frankly I am doing well for myself. I realized a few days ago that the original source of my marketing interest was from Billy Mays.

When I was a kid I saw an Oxiclean commercial with the famous wow demo, and the next day when I went into bed bath and beyond with my mom I made her buy a small tub of it. We have never actually used it, and it is sitting under my sink, but we still bought it. Since that point I have been analyzing commercials and advertising ploys.

In short, Billy Mays is the main reason why I have become an internet marketer today. When I found out that discovery was launching “Pitchmen” I could not have been more excited, and I must say that I find the show fascinating. I fully intend to continue my marketing career for the foreseeable future, and I am devastated at the loss of my idol. Billy Mays products are a multi billion dollar industry, he could sell literally anything. I can only wish to eventually reach his level of success in the marketing world.

He was a hard working man that was always looking out for his family, and he will be missed. If there is something positive to come out of all of this, he died in the prime of his life and therefore he will always be remembered at his peak. My best wishes go out to his family.

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I have done many things with internet marketing, but due to my stubborn nature I have only worked with 5-6 graphic designers before.  As my normal readers know, I am creating a product that will launch in late January called “Weekend Marketing”.  I haven’t gotten very far in writing the book yet because I have been focusing on scaling up the marketing campaign for it.  I intend to have all of the content finished by early November, but the actual marketing campaign has to start months in advance in order to sell well in the ClickBank marketplace.  This will be a household name by the time I am done, so you will hear all about it in the future.

The content may still be under construction, but the graphics for the site have been made.  I have the full template as well as affiliate resources created, which means that now all I need to do is fill in the sales page with the copy (that will be a 3 week project).  I got the idea for “Weekend Marketing” back in mid-May, and I have already decided on the name, received and paid for my graphics, found a proper web host, and began my marketing campaign.  I would say the project is well on its way.

Since I know you all want to skip through what I am saying to see the pretty pictures, here they are!  Weekend Marketing This is also the first official link to my website, so taking my own advice on getting indexed as soon as possible, I figure now is a good time for the spiders to have at it.  I would love some comments on the graphics, please tell me how they work in your browsers, how they catch the eye, etc.  I especially want input on the “Peel Away Ad” that I have added, because it took me 5 hours to make the simple script work (my web host apparently didn’t have my PHP scripts whitelisted).

Now less about me, more about the process.  The process of hiring a good graphic designer isn’t necessarily a quick or cheap process.  I have dealt with a handful of designers before, and while I have been “satisfied” with the work they did, I didn’t truly love it.  If you have a project you are truly committed to, you need to take your time with every aspect of it.  I went through and got quotes from the 5 biggest direct response graphic designers in the business and looked through every single example in their portfolios to make my choice.

I had a huge range in the quotes that I received, and I didn’t go with the cheapest or the most expensive of the quotes I got.  I was torn between three designers, as all had approximately the same level of skill, and two were within $50 of each other and the third was an extra $500.  I waited a day before responding to any emails to make sure that I had thought through the process as the graphics can make or break a product.  I decided that for my product I wanted a more subdued look while still catching the eye, and for this I ended up choosing Sean Lowery.

I very rarely give out free advertising to business partners, but he truly did an excellent job with this project.  We had about 20 emails back and forth and multiple redesigns as I know exactly what I am looking for.  I couldn’t have asked for any more, I love the design, the affiliate resources, and he delivered on every little detail and more.  If you want to have a big product, you will need big graphics.  If you plan to make an opt-in page, ClickBank product, blog, etc. make sure to get a quote with Sean, he will work until your are satisfied.  The key to success when hiring a designer is to have an image in your head and hold true to the basic design, but allow the expert to make it into something that will sell.

Feel free to check out Sean’s website here: Minisite Graphics and make sure to leave me some comments on the images.  You guys are my first wave of testing!

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Well no real words of wisdow on this post, I just wanted to say that I have finished the transfer of my first website Easy Online Money Making.  If you didn’t see my website in its old form you never will (unless you use the way back machine).  It took me about 2 days to create the content and modify and monetize the design for the new site.  I intend to add a couple things such as a place to capture opt-in subscribers.

In terms of my own marketing I have decided to create another free ebook to giveaway, so when I am finished I will send it out to all of my Aweber subscribers.  It will focus on general marketing strategies with an emphasis on properly converting your traffic into sales.

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I just spent 10 hours straight doing the design for Easyonlinemoneymaking.com (still waiting for the dns to update for my Host Gator switch, I’ll post when the results are live).  I figured that since I spent such an extended period of time actually being productive I would make a post about some of the “time fillers” that you can do to promote your blog when you don’t feel like pumping out posts or articles.

When I have spare time I usually do some or all of the following, mixing them up every 5 minutes or so to keep myself interested.  I love internet marketing, but I don’t always have the attention span to keep churning out the content so it is fun to do moderately effective traffic driving techniques rather than the high power but highly boring techniques such as article creation/submission.

Here’s where my spare time goes:

• Adding followers on Twitter and starting conversations with some of my followers when they have interesting status updates.  My twitter: James Spinosa
• Adding contacts on MyBlogLog and joining communities.
• Adding friends on BlogCatalog and joining groups, discussions, blogs, etc.
• Posting on various forums that allow me to have a blog feed, this is mainly to build up name reputation but it doesn’t hurt to get some traffic.  Don’t just spam them, post useful content.
• Commenting on a bunch of related niche blog posts.
• Tinkering with my advertisements to find better converting programs so I can make some more money.
• Creating link bait lists, such as “Top 100 dofollow blogs” so that I can get some free links from other bloggers.
• Staring at the ClickBank marketplace trying to reverse engineer the success for some of the products that I have no idea why people buy them.

While these may seem like a waste of time I actually enjoy them, and they do yield results.  Most of these are designed to get a one time visitor, but about 10% of people that come to this site sign up to receive my blog posts, yielding long term traffic.

In terms of things like blog commenting and forum posting, this will yield permanent one way dofollow links, which will make me show up for more search results.  The other methods like adding twitter followers, friends, contacts, etc. make it so that I have another set of people that get updates each time I post.

If you have spare time, you might as well use it for something constructive.  There is always some way you can be promoting your blog even if it isn’t through the traditional methods.

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I am not quite sure when I will switch over this blog, but my current plan for my websites is to migrate them all to a new HostGator account that I am opening later today.  As some of you may have seen in my post about a week ago I am going to be launching a ClickBank product and with this comes a need for a more expandable web hosting plan.  I fully intend to get 30,000+ unique visitors each month, and with this comes quite a bit of bandwidth requirements which a regular shared hosting account cannot support.

For now I will just be buying the “baby” plan because it more than fits my current usage needs, and at quite a good rate as well.  I am going to buy it for 3 years because their sales department told me that when I upgrade to a dedicated server the money in my account will rollover anyway, so I might as well get the hosting cheap until I hit that point.  There are two basic reasons why I am switching to HostGator, the first is that they provide a much faster shared hosting plan than BlueHost currently does in terms of webpage load speeds, and the second is that it is a scalable operation.  Once I use up too much resources for a shared account, I can simply upgrade to a dedicated server with no interruptions and continue on as if I was still on a hosting plan except with a much faster loading speed .

Normally I put a lot of time and effort into cutting my costs to a minimum, and since I have already paid for the next 6 months of BlueHost I would normally wait until it has expired.  This time around, I figure that I am making good money from my sites and a couple hundred dollars is really just a drop in the bucket, the only real loss would be about $30-40 and since there is currently a 20% off all initial orders coupon floating around I will be saving more than that by buying it ahead of time. I have called their sales department 3 times to see if I could skim out a better deal but this is as low as they are going, at least all of their support is U.S. based.

This will be my first time transferring my sites around to another webhost which doesn’t seem like a complicated process, if I have problems I’ll make a post begging for you guys to help me out   This also works as a great motivator for me, if I want to get to the point where I literally need to own my own server to run my sites, then I would clearly be raking in quite a bit of cash.

Feel free to copy me, this HostGator link + the coupon “Spring” will get you 20% off your first order.  If I have any problems I’ll post them up

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For quite a long time I have been proud of my first website which has only gone through two iterations of redesigns, poor and worse.  The worst was my original design, which was done completely by utilizing 9 subdomains as I did not realize that I could make new pages without make a new subdomain, I am not kidding.

Here is one of the pages still completely intact as I have not felt a need to delete the old subdomains: http://paidtoread.easyonlinemoneymaking.com/.  This really speaks for itself, I clearly had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it.  I had no experience whatsoever in marketing, programming, servers, etc.  I was as clueless as they came, but at the time I thought I did a damn good job of creating that site (I wrote it in notepad because I didn’t realize there were easier ways to do things.

After about 2 months I realized how horrible my site looked so I decided it was time to redesign it, and I was much better at this point.  I then decided to create Easy Online Money Making - The current iteration of it.  Yes, it is also absolutely disgusting looking.  It has stayed that way for a whole year and a half at this point, and believe it or not that site brings me around a  thousand dollars a year solely based on my SEO efforts 2 years ago. This time using my newly acquired knowledge I used some piece of **** software to create that site, even then I realized that it didn’t look good and the HTML for it was at least 10x longer than it should be.

I am writing this because this has been my trophy site for a quite a while, the only site I have not updated in any form for a year and a half simply because I found it awesome that I could make money off such a horrible web site.  I decided two days ago it is time to completely revamp the site in terms of content, design, monetization, promotions, etc. because it does have quite a bit of potential.  It gets a good amount of traffic (2k+ google visitors a month) so with about 3 days worth of effort I bet I can pull about $5k/year out of it after redesigning it, getting rid of my stupid monetization ideas from the time, and doing a little bit of marketing on it.

Although I am updating this relic, a lesson can be learned from the fact that I have made a good amount of money off this site with minimal efforts in terms of upkeep.  I knew nothing about marketing, let alone internet marketing, but by dedicating a lot of effort for 4 months I managed to make a site that continues to bring in money two years later.  This is especially true with SEO, because all I did was try to get links from any site I possibly could and I managed to get great SERPs later on.  The effort put into something is the basis of success, knowledge simply takes it to new heights.

I am also switching the site to a new web host, so when I am done with the whole process of revamping it I will let you all know so you can see the progress and give me some critiques.  If you have some relic out there not living up to its potential, put in 20 hours into it and double your profits.

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Well college is done for the semester, and with that comes a load of free time for me to expand my business.  With this comes many different ideas for websites, but the biggest point of emphasis for me will be the book I am creating called Weekend Marketing.  It is going to be sold through ClickBank and depending on how ambitious I feel, it may also be sold in paperback.  I have created an e-book before, The Seven Day Millionaire, but that product was created only 7 months into my marketing career and while I had been making a lot of money, I didn’t realize the reasons why I had become successful so quickly.

I have seen many products come and go throughout the years on ClickBank, but I want to be one of the first to create a product with actual staying power.  I have planning this book for about a year already, and now I am going to start going through the marketing and production phases followed by actually writing it over the summer.  My plan is to create it and have a sales page done by August and to then go into full scale affiliate scouting and promotions for it.

You will hear all about it as time goes on, but for now I will just leave you with a list of the steps I plan to take to promote my book, so that you can replicate my plans for your own needs.

10 Steps to creating and launching  a product on ClickBank:

1. Think of a product to create
2. Do market research to make sure that the niche isn’t over saturated, and check to make sure there is market demand
3. Think of a title, and register that domain
4. Create the product – If you are creating an ebook write it in OpenOffice and use their PDF export option.
5. Work with a graphic designer for the sales page (I’ll post a link to whichever designer I decide to go with, currently there is one that I want to hear back from) – This is my current step in the process.
6. Begin building your credentials as an expert (posting articles, trying to get into trade magazines, newspapers, etc.)
7. Start recruiting affiliates, they will be the primary engine of sales so do what you need to court them.  Many posts to come in the near future about how I plan to get affiliates.
8. Begin promoting the product itself to drive up buzz (well before the actual launch)
9. Capture affiliate and customer emails via opt-in lists on the sales page so you can have big support for the launch date
10. Watch the ClickBank gravity system propel your product to the top as more affiliates jump on board as they sense a profitable product.

This is a very general outline, I will be going into detail on each section of the process as I go along.  I expect to be posting once every 2-3 days until November, and then I will slow down a bit as launch comes closer to happening.

Thank you to all my loyal readers, I’m sorry that I always do this to you but I am going to be back for a while this time.

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One of the horrible habits I have established since early on in my marketing career is that I quickly move from one project to the next, and left by the waist side is typically design.

I have begun a new project in which I will review a large amount of “digital products” such as those sold via ClickBank. Since I intend to go through hundreds of different products, I might as well make my time count in the long run by optimizing my site upfront. Even the slightest error I am going through and correcting, whether it be a slight malformation in URL’s or one of the many Joomla! plugins that I have installed. So far my first experience with Joomla has been very positive, while it is somewhat self explanatory once you add in a bunch of components then your .htaccess file as well as many PHP files become incompatible so it takes patience.

Thankfully I have jumped over most of the hurdles, and I consider the design portion to be almost complete (I am still searching for a better template for the site), but all the behind the scenes work for optimizing load times and intrasite linking for SEO has been done.

I am looking forward to see how this works out, as I will essentially be targeting a list of 3000 long tail keywords I have spent the past days researching.

Once again I am sorry that I don’t post as often as I should, I am working full time on top of marketing during the Winter break from school so it kills the majority of my free time. If you would like to check out my site conceptually at least (since it has no content), it is http://www.productscamreviews.com

Happy Holidays everyone!!

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I was pleasantly surprised to see Automatic Upgrade telling me that there was already a new version of WP coming out (2.7). I have just started playing with the new features but I know at a minimum it has changed the back end in a big way.

Without hitting a single button I am writing this post, it has a new module called “QuickPress” which allows you to type up a new post right in the opening screen and publish it, while also easily being able to modify your themes and check your stats. My stats right now stand at 27 posts, 8 pages, some of which are hidden , 12 categories, 102 tags, 215 comments, 113 approved and 102 spam.

2.7 Actually released on the 10th but I am that guy that against better judgement typically holds off upgrading for a couple days to allow WP to iron out any bugs before I stick it on my server and risk my wonderful websites.

If you don’t have automatic upgrade yet you should get it, you can here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/

Automatic upgrade is one of the most popular WP plugins out there, it will guide you through the steps of updating your server and database while backing up your data for you automatically along the way. It also makes it really easy to clean up old upgrade files, etc. to preserve as much space as possible.

Well back to cramming for finals tomorrow for me, I guess I’ll post what I had planned to post on SEO optimization for domain names on Tuesday.

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We are currently in a global recession, one which I can personally attest is hitting the United States hard but one thing that will still experience growth in 2009 is the internet. The internet is a constantly shifting medium, with more people entering the market and constantly shifting technologies and techniques a good marketer will always be in high demand.

I am not saying you should go quit your day job, but what I am saying is, wouldn’t it be nice to have a safety net so that you could do this full time if you wanted to? I have treated marketing in this fashion since I started, while also viewing it is a hobby that happens to make me a good deal of money. If I get out of college and there is no jobs market, then I will have absolutely no problem expanding my business into a full time enterprise, and with it I expect to make a very fair yearly income which will most likely surpass my initial job offers after getting my MBA.

In an economy that is leaking jobs, you should always have another pipe to go down. There are always perfectly good contingency plans for a situation, you just need to spend the time to find one that suits your needs. Yesterday I announced my newest project, but I have no intention of mentioning my project planned for after that which I feel will make me $xx,xxx and will expand naturally in a good economy, and expand at least twice as fast in a down-turned economy. A new economic condition leads to new opportunities, for instance the repossession industry is booming right now.

My advice to you is to treat your blog, your website, your mass spamming, whatever tactic you use (don’t spam, it doesn’t work and it is illegal); treat it like a job. You should itemize your budget, you should determine how to spend your time and what opening there are in various markets. Once you figure all this out, realize that you should eventually create a flagship website as well. One major website which is a large income earner and can be pointed to as a sign of stability and success. I am in the process of creating a site which I hope will earn me 5 figures a year within 2 years and 6 figures within 4, thinking big is the way out of a mental depression and the same applies to an economy.

Moral of the story, look for opportunities because you never know when they will come.  Diversify your websites like you would a portfolio, and if you ask me, within the next 2 weeks is the prime time to invest in the stock market as well.

“Be fearful when others are being greedy, and be greedy when others are being fearful”  –Warren Buffet

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