One of the people I admire in the internet marketing industry is Randolf (Randy) Smith, one of many internet marketers out there who genuinely want to help others to succeed. Randy’s blog called “Randy’s Ramblings” is one that I read on a regular basis because it is down to earth, humorous and helpful. You won’t get any bullsh.. on this blog – Randy tells it like he sees it and if he doesn’t think a new product would be useful, he’ll say so or else it just won’t be mentioned at all.

Randy has, or should I say had, a number of websites and products but in early October, his sites were hacked and all his domains stolen. To read the story behind this nightmare, visit the blog at http://randolfsmith.com

If you feel sick, as I did, that one human could treat another in this way, just take note of the effort Randy put in to try to put right all the wrong being done to his customers, a time consuming and costly endeavour, and you’ll realise that this is a man that just won’t give in, he’ll keep doing what he believes is right. This is a man worth keeping in mind to buy products and services from.

Once he gets everything back up and running, there will again be links on his blog to his many services. In the meantime, here are the ones I have used and recommend:

Sales Letter ABC – www.salesletterabc.com
7 Key Elements – www.7keyelements.com
More Monthly (stolen) – now called More Monthly Plus – www.moremonthlyplus.info (more info on this site on my Online Resources Page http://trishfindlay.com/online-business-resources)

I have not included an affiliate link in the list above, so I won’t profit if you buy from Randy, but I believe he deserves a break, so if what he offers is useful to you, buy from the man!

Best wishes
Trish

P.S. – there is always something to be learned from someone else’s misfortune, so to all out there with an internet business of any kind, make sure you back up your sites and your lists. You’ll be glad you did if a hacker comes your way, too.

There has been an update to the extremely popular Free Monthly Websites that John Thornhill and Dave Nicholson launched in 2006. Since then over 37,000 people joined the program, not just to get the free niche website each month, but also to use the informational materials provided to learn how to use the free site to earn income. Not just with these sites, but relating to making money with internet marketing generally.

Free Monthly Websites 2.0 gives you a professionally produced website every month  in a carefully selected and popular niche. To make money, four different streams of affiliate products are promoted with your personal affiliate ID, Clickbank, Adsense, resell rights and Free Monthly Websites 2.0 itself. Each site contains targeted ads and when these ads are clicked on or people buy the products recommended, you get paid a commission.

For those who would like to change their sites to make them different from other free sites, Free Monthly Websites 2.0 has a premier membership which is currently available for only $10 a month. This low cost gives you more themes & content so you can personalise & optimise your sites as well as have more ads & extra support & training.

This is an excellent opportunity for anyone who would like to make a bit (or a lot) of extra cash from internet marketing.

Best wishes
Trish

Joint Venture

Internet marketers often work alone to generate income for themselves, but sometimes it can be mutually beneficial to form a joint venture with other like-minded folks working on similiar projects.

The ability to spread out effort and risk, while increasing returns, can be somewhat risky, but one worth taking because, if the exercise is successful, you have made a new friend and maybe even developed a permanent working relationship.

As with any worthwhile pursuit there are some core basics and guiding principles that joint venture participants should practice when seeking partners and executing a plan.

Before proceeding, it’s essential to know what a joint venture is. A “JV” is an agreement between two parties each seeking to cooperatively leverage the assets of each other, be it a skill, a product, a trade secret, or a customer or prospect list. In the case of an internet marketer, the agreement usually involves one marketer mailing to the other’s mailing list.

Once it’s been determined that a joint venture will be undertaken there are some fundamentals that should be followed to assure the best outcome.

Assessing your partner is a critical first step when forming a joint venture. Analyzing each other’s strengths and weaknesses and discerning each other’s agenda beforehand will serve to lessen negative surprises later.

You can get a free Joint Venture Agreement form here.

Strategy development is an initial activity where both participants assess the viability of their effort and any potential obstacles to the outcomes they plan to achieve. Concurrently, the partners can set milestones and financial agreements during this period. A 50-50 profit split is most common. In some cases, a newer marketer may forego some of the proceeds in order to establish a presence in their market.

Once these tasks are found to be suitably addressed, the new associates can move on to carrying out the campaign. Of course, this is not a static operation. If time and duration allows, testing and improvement should be ongoing as the campaign proceeds to its conclusion.

Finally, the hopefully happy and prosperous end is reached and various goals realized. It’s important to note that any end-defining milestones should have been during the assessment and strategy sessions. This will prevent misunderstandings and promote further collaboration.

Another pointer is to aim high. Sure, rejection may be the first response, but perseverance rules the day and a big player could be the tipping point to reaching a critical mass of success and security.

Lastly, always operate with a win-win mentality while following the sequence. Do it right, and it will be the first of many join ventures…or the last one you’ll ever need.

For more information, you can get a free copy of “Joint Ventures: Tips for Successful Partnerships” from this link or by clicking on the book below.

World Traffic Summit is 3 days of easy-to-understand teaching on the subject of how to get loads of traffic (visitors) to your website – no matter what you sell.

The World Internet Summit team are bringing in the world’s best traffic experts to show us all how they get people to their websites. Meaning you’ll know how you can do it too. They’ll make their lessons quick, simple and practical for you, even if you’re a beginner.

Which all means, that you’ll know how to get traffic to your website as soon as you leave the event!

You’ll discover the latest and greatest techniques … including a ton of FREE strategies … for:

· Video marketing

· Article marketing

· Social media like Twitter and Facebook

· Blogs

· Search engine optimisation (SEO)

· Paid traffic

· Joint ventures

· Traffic harvesting

· Affiliate marketing secrets, and more
If you are struggling with getting visitors to YOUR website, check out the World Traffic Summit here.

Bing, Yahoo and Google

Now, while Google still has by far the greatest amount of traffic at approx 62%, the agreement by Yahoo & Bing (Microsofts new search engine) to share resources, means that when their respective search shares of approx 19% & 13% is combined, it will provide much bigger opposition to google.

So should this concern you? Probably not unless your business uses search traffic to make sales. Lets assume for a moment that it does. And did you know that facebook search is powered by Bing?

What can you do to increase search traffic to your sites from Bing? Well first of all, you can submit your site to Bing here and submit a sitemap here.

Bing has just released their updated Webmaster tools, not as comprehensive yet as google’s webmaster tools, but definitely a step in the right direction. Open an account to access these tools using your Windows Live ID (or create one if you don’t already have one).

To see how Bing crawls and indexes your pages, you can add your sites to your account. How to do this is set out quite well in the section “Add a Site to Your Account” under “Sites List”. You can only add your own sites and you must verify ownership before they can be added – you don’t want other people looking at your results!

The only hitch I encountered was adding verification to a wordpress blog that didn’t reside in a public_html folder so meant I couldn’t just upload  the xml file, as suggested in Option 1. Using Option 2, I had to search around my blog admin section to find the file containing the <head> tag. In fact, it didn’t have one just like that, but it did have an </head> in the file header.php, so placing the <meta> tag just before that worked fine .

If you need more details, proceed as follows:

In your wordpress admin area, click on Appearance, then on Editor. This will bring up an open file with the html code showing. Go to the list on the right hand side under Templates and find Header (header.php) & click on this file. Now, have a look in this file for  </head>  something like this:

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

Now paste the meta tag code copied from Bing in between these two lines and then click the Update File button at the bottom. Go back to Bing webmaster tools now and verify your site.

Newly added sites will take up to three days to begin showing data, assuming they are getting some traffic, of course.

Hope this helps someone.

Regards

Trish