Internet Marketing Blog - 2008 In Review

We say goodbye to 2008 here at TCH with mixed feelings. On a personal level the past year has been filled with such extremes of highs and lows that in many ways I shall be glad to see the back of it, whilst at the same time feeling that it has been one of the most formative years of my life. I became a father for the first time but parenthood has hardly been realized in a conventional manner and my wife and I have spent the last seven months away from our island home, living on savings and the kindness of others. The huge upheaval in our personal lives has had a knock on effect on everything we do, including work here at the blog and all aspects of my internet ventures. Now that our micro preemie son, T.J. is growing stronger, we hope to return to Cayman in a few weeks. Before moving ahead into 2009, I thought a quick recap of the past year should be posted here.

I kicked off the year with a guest post about article marketing that gave some good insights into common mistakes made by authors. These all still hold true and I can testify to the fact that as an article directory owner the vast majority of articles submitted to me over the past twelve months have ended up on the cutting room floor. If you are thinking of running an article directory yourself, I would say a couple of things - it is very labor intensive if you are serious about maintaining a quality resource. It is not easy to get a directory off the ground, nor to maintain good rankings. Google reduced my own directory's page rank from 2 to zero some time ago and it has never recovered. Adsense income has been patchy, and probably not nearly enough to cover the work put in. Having said that, I intend to continue with the free article directory so if you have prose to submit, please do so.

In the Spring I kicked off with a rant about the state of a popular internet marketing forum and having read some recent posts elsewhere it seems I am not alone in my disillusionment. On a more positive note I released the free ebook  "The Absolute Beginner's Guide To Web Hosting" which has gone on to be a very successful little book and has helped a number of people with their first steps online. This has been very gratifying for me and has also helped me to introduce more customers and affiliates to my team at Kiosk.ws.

In April I announced a free ebook that has turned out to be its own minor success story this past year and I still recommend it very highly to everyone from raw beginner to more established marketers. The return on the Ultimate Supertip has been extremely good and if you have never made any money online before, it's a good way to start. You won't become a millionaire but for an injection of extra income and profits into the 1000's per cent it's hard to beat. You should at least read the book as it's entirely free to download.

In the same month I also released "Article Marketing Expert" another free ebook which has once again proved popular. It is already in need of an update but unfortunately until I return home I am unable to access the PDF for alteration. It will be done sometime in 2009.

During May, blissfully unaware of the events that were about to take over our lives so suddenly, I wrote at length about choosing an autoresponder service and dipped my toe into the world of micro blogging with Twitter.

After that, things became rather sporadic when Nikki, my wife, was airlifted to Miami in a critical condition having gone into very premature labor with our first child. Fortunately the medical professionals got her to hospital in time (just) to save both her and the baby, but for a husband standing on the sidelines it was a frightening and sobering time. Our son was delivered into this world on May 31 at around 10.30pm and weighed just one pound and four ounces. This of course was just the beginning, and after over seven months away from home, many of them spent in the NICU sitting beside an incubator, the help, kindness, prayers and skills of so many people, we hope to return to Cayman with "T.J." before the end of January. He is, for the record, a chubby little eleven pounds as I write this and doing remarkably well.

Despite all this work did carry on, albeit at a slower a pace and the later months in 2008 saw me working from the hospital thanks to their guest internet connection. The delayed launch of Viral Clickbank Footprints was lower profile than hoped but the free report has gone on to prove fairly popular and downloads continue to grow. the report is free and can be rebranded with your own links, making it an excellent viral Clickbank tool that will help you to make more money. I consider it another successful release that has paid good dividends for me and many others.

The year's end also saw the release of our RSS widgets and the hosting and marketing toolbar which we hope all visitors will find useful. Every download of the toolbar goes a little way to helping us with the costs of our enforced exile in the States so if you find it useful please do share it with as many people as you can.

Elsewhere from the blog, the CaymanHost web hosting directory has seen many changes including the implementation of a proper review and rating system for hosting companies where you can read and submit honest hosting reviews by customers. As a dofollow site, your reviews will earn you a little link love too. You will also find hosting coupons and offers, links to all the top forums, and many interesting articles on the world of web hosting as well as details on how to set up your own Wordpress blog for free and all the Wordpress plugins you will need to optimize your blog for traffic and rankings.

Furthermore, you can now buy advertising on the hosting directory at very reasonable rates and we have also introduced a hosting link exchange for other webmasters and bloggers involved in the world of domain names and hosting.

I also launched another blog by way of example dealing with the Cayman Islands, home sweet home. This is just in its experimental stage and I shall monitor things closely during 2009.

The year has been a tough one, and I hope that despite all the glitches you will continue to read and hopefully learn some new tricks during the course of 2009. I am pleased to say that The CaymanHost has staged a recovery in terms of Alexa and Google rankings and traffic hes returned to the levels before the slump midway throught the year.

For me, online earnings have been less than my intended goals, but the strongest performance has come from affiliate marketing, including Clickbank and my core business at Kiosk.ws Sales of my own products have been slower than hoped for too, but have contributed a reasonable amount to the bottom line. After all the upheaval, I have to be content with what has been achieved in a very difficult year.

All that remains is to wish you all a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.

TCH

Hosting and Marketing Toolbar

We recently launched our feed widgets for bloggers and webmasters and now we have gone a step further to bring you a brand new hosting and marketing toolbar. Download our community toolbar and access a truckload of country music spanning several decades right from your browser - free. Firefox and Internet Explorer versions.Customize with your own email and favorite applications too including security and privacy features.

Add a little Y-E-E-H-A-W to your marketing and hosting news and your working days and enjoy your online ventures. Get free software, coupons, discounts, and expand your knowledge. Chat to others, access forum and news feeds, weather, games, applications, plus automatically discover hundreds of other community toolbars. Very Cool!

Download Our Free Toolbar Here

You will see a preview as in the screenshot below when you click on the above link.

This brand new toolbar will hook you up with a wide range of useful web hosting and marketing content as well as lots of other cool gadgets and tools for your browser. The toolbar will work with both IE and Firefox and is completely safe and spyware free.

Installing the toolbar is as simple as a few mouse clicks and you will have at your fingertips plenty of hosting and marketing related articles, news, freebies and more. You can customize the toolbar to display just the way you want it, so if you prefer not to listen to the radio for example, you can easily remove it - shame on you of you do :-)There is plenty of free marketing and advertising software, articles and information on various forms of online marketing.

Features include - Search, Email Notifier, Weather, Chat, Countless Gadgets, marketing and hosting related news feeds, free software and much more. As time goes by we will be adding even more useful features.

If you'd like to stay in touch with me here at the CaymanHost blog please give the toolbar a try :-) Anyone interested in adding their own content to the toolbar can contact me through the blog and I'd be happy to discuss your proposals.Hook up with the Cayman cowboy, chat with other users in real time via the chatroom feature, I've even included new feeds from our beautiful island home.

Download Our Free Toolbar Here

Widgets Gone Wild - Download Create Share With Widgetbox

Widgets. If you've been blogging for any amount of time you'll have come across them for sure, and perhaps even thought that the widget craze had got a little out of control. Everyone was offering a widget and promising great things for them (remember Blogrush as just one example) and sometimes bloggers got so caried away you could barely find the blog beneath the widgets in the sidebar.

I came across this site recently that rekindled my interest in widgets and thought I should share it here. It's probably a little early for me to post about the site, as I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but here's a brief outline of what you can accomplish with Widgetbox.com

Create Your Own Widgets using your RSS feeds

Download hundreds of different widgets for hundreds of applications and incorporate them into your blogs/websites

Turn your own widgets into Facebook and Meebo Applications

Join Topic Specific Communities To Promote Your Widgets and drive traffic

Create Widgets specifically for other bloggers and cross promote with them

Add your widgets to places like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Netlog, IGoogle and Friendster (coming soon)

It occurred to me whilst exploring the site that as far as bloggers go, this has a lot of potential and some great applications. When you create a widget, using your blog's RSS feed for example, you can then promote it to the world at large in a variety of ways. Widgetbox has a number of communities so, let's say you have a travel related blog and you create a feed widget. You then join the Travel community, and add the community widget to your blog in order to get traffic and visitors from other sites in the same niche. In theory that's great and I've implemented it on one of my non marketing related blogs so I'll report back on its effectiveness. The widgets, both the community ones and the ones you create are pretty customizable so people can make them fit the look of their own blogs pretty well.

I would say that bloggers who know each other however and feel like doing some cross promotion could always put their heads together and use the service to build each other widgets and display them on each other's sites. You could of course just grab another blogger's feed and do it yourself. Cross promotion is a good way to build blog traffic as evidenced by things like guest posting so if you want to work with other bloggers, exchanging feeds in a good looking widget might work for you and the ability to be very selective is more appealing than just showing links over which your control is limited.

The ability to share your widgets in a number of social networking sites is also a great tool and gives you the chance at some huge exposure. If you decide to make things like Facebook apps the potential traffic is of course quite staggering.

I've only just begun experimenting with Widgetbox, but I recommend you pop over and take a look to see what it can do for you and what you can do with it.

The site is a little confusing at first (although I may just be a bit dense) and when I first landed on their page I thought it was just a place to download widgets. Sign up is free and it looked to me as though there were plenty of cool widgets to grab so I signed up and started looking around. Once I'd got the navigation sorted out it all started to fall into place and it took just a few minutes to cobble together three RSS feed widgets for three of my blogs. Here's a screenshot of one of them below

As you can see the widget includes post titles and images - you can choose to display just titles, excerpts of your posts etc and also set the look with various color options and size choices. Customization is pure point and click and should a visitor wish to download and display your feed widget they can change the colors to suit their own pages as you can see from the menu on the right of the widget image. You can easily incorporate the widget code into your own blogs with either Flash or Javascript code and all major platforms are supported so you don't really need any technical knowledge. I think bloggers are going to love this site and can see it growing quite rapidly, so it could be good for your traffic in the future.

The internet marketing community is very under represented at present as far as I can see, but if you have niche blogs it could be another good way to promote yourself. Even without the traffic aspect which may or may not prove to be effective, it's a really simple way to get some neat widgets for Wordpress or any other sites you may be running and makes it very easy to include them on your sites.

Explore WidgetBox Here

Directory Buzz | Affiliate Buzz | Free Software Downloads

I posted recently about several buzz software titles and am pleased to say that I have added two more to the library for my readers to download. Even better, there is no need to opt-in to get them, I have put a direct download button on the landing pages.

Directory Buzz Elite Edition is, as the name suggests, a free directory submission tool that semi automates the process of getting your sites listed in over 200 directories. Features include

Contains over 200 directories that you can submit your sites to.

The directory list is updated monthly (so all the dead links will be removed!)
Automatically rotate multiple titles, descriptions and keywords to make sure your links seem natural and be able to rank for multiple keywords.

Loads up to 10 browsers at the same time to speed up your submission process.

Saves your previous work and records the sites that you have submitted to.

Add, edit and delete anything in the directory list.

Unlimited user and site profiles.

Sort list according to Pagerank, Alexa rankings, alphabetical order, etc... 

Affiliate Buzz Elite Edition is for anyone who wants to create a suite of tools for their own affiiate program and is packed with useful features for you including:

Creates your affiliate promotional pages just by following some step-by-step instructions (if you know how to click the mouse and follow instructions, you can use this software!)

Includes templates for the following promotional tools: Text links, Email Ads, Signature Ads, PopUp Ads, Image Ads, Articles & PPC Ads (leave all the hard work to us! You do not have to sweat over the various types of tools)

Add your affiliate link to the 'Powered By Affiliate Buzz' message at the top of the page. (so you can make some easy money just by creating your own promotional pages for your affiliates!)

Automatically embed the affiliate links of your affiliates into the promotional tools with just a click of the mouse! (literally spoon feed your affiliates!)

Provides your affiliates with ready made promotional tools that they can instantly use for their promotional efforts (and let your affiliates do all the hard work in promoting your products with the tools you provide!)

Make your affiliates WANT to promote your products because of the wide array of tools you provide
Keep your affiliates happy and at the same time, build an ARMY of hungry affiliates who will increase the amount of sales and profits you make! 

Both software titles come with full giveaway rights and an editable landing page so that you can customize it for your own use. Doesn't get any easier than this, and you will even be able to rebrand the software if you check out the "make money" button inside each application.

Creating Your Own Ebooks | Tips and Tools For Digital Info Product Creation

Many marketers they will tell you that one of your key online strategies for making money should be product creation. In this post I thought I would take a look at just what you need to start creating your own digital information products, ebooks and reports. Before we begin however, there are a couple of points to consider, after which we'll move on to the slightly technical stuff which is the part that often scares people away.

 The first important thing is to know your subject and to research just how much demand and how much competition there might be for your intended target audience/niche. If you really can't be bothered, you can always outsource the whole process, including the writing and then just sell the resultant product. All joking aside, many info products have been born this way and if your pockets are deep enough maybe it's something to consider.

Secondly, you have to have a clear idea of the purpose of your book - from your perspective. Are you going to make a saleable product, or do you want to use the report or ebook as a viral marketing/promotion vehicle? This will have significant impact on how you proceed.

In the first scenario, let's assume that you decide to write a free report. You either want to

a) use it as a means of gaining subscribers for your list or

b) to promote and spread site(s) or services in which you have an interest, perhaps as an affiliate or perhaps as the owner of said product or service.

For option a. all you need to do is create a product that you think your target audience will find useful. You can add in some affiliate links to relevant sites and services and create opportunities for sales or to send people to sites where you are running Adsense or similar PPC ads. The concept is simple - give good free information and point people to places where they can find out more and where you may be able to make sales or commissions.

For option b. you may want to consider making your report rebrandable, therefore making it more attractive for people to pass along to others. If they can populate your ebook with some of their own links, they will be more likely to do so. You can still ask people to opt-in of course, it is just a question of whether you think that might stunt the viral effect. Many people are reluctant to offer up their email addresses, no matter what reassurances you offer, so you viral ebook may well do better if you just let visitors download it.

Having decided the direction in which you are going to go, you do not need many tools to do the job. Creating a PDF ebook is the obvious choice because practically all computer users can read PDF's on their machines. Creating PDF's is a lot more straightforward than it used to be. I prefer to use eWriterPro because you can write and edit the book, insert all your hyperlinks and convert the finished product to PDF all with one program.

Alternatively, you can use Open Office, which won't cost you anything at all and will do a good job. For those needing instruction take a look at this post on PDF creation with Open Office.

To make a rebrandable ebook you are going to need some rebranding software. By far the best known is ViralPDF which is very easy to use and represents excellent value. It uses a simple system of tags, enabling you to create special links in your ebook that will convert into rebrandable fields in the finished product. People who download the book can also download a small rebrander software. Whether you give this away or ask people to opt-in to a list or even charge a fee for it is entirely up to you. However, if the viral effect is your biggest priority, you will probably want to make it all as quick and painless as possible for your customers. 

The biggest drawback with rebrandable PDF's is this - many affiliates will not have a website of their own, and this method will exclude them from promoting and giving away the book, even if they want to. If your product is non internet or techie related, a great number of people may therefore be unable or unwilling to promote your viral book. Until recently this has been a problem you just have to live with, but, if it concerns you, read on.....

There is now an ingenious way around this, and no, it's not using .exe format ebooks (which are not a very great idea in my opinion). It basically enables your visitors and customers to rebrand something without having to download any software, without having to host any files or build any landing page or do any of that tedious technical stuff that so often prevents people from taking action. You can find out more by visiting my page at the Ultimate Rebrander where it is explained in detail. To my mind this could well be the way of the future when it comes to rebranding electronic products. 

Moving on to the second scenario - you decide to create and sell a PDF ebook.

Having decided that there is a market for your product, the process of PDF creation follows the same format as the first example. You probably won't want to create rebrandable links, but if you do, the options are also the same.

Once you have written the ebook you will need a few other things in order to bring it to market. These are all vitally important for a commercial product and can signify your success or failure.

Professional graphics are a must, unless you are a Photoshop wizard yourself. You could conceivably use a graphics authoring program like The Web Graphics Creator, but sometimes it's best to stump up for a design professional. The cost should be easily recoverable if your product is a good one. (My last free report recovered the cost of graphics within a couple of days.)

You also need to decide how you are going to sell your product and the obvious choice would be Clickbank or PayDotCom. The cost to list a product in Clickbank's marketplace is a one off $49.95 but again, you should soon make that back if you are selling at $27 to $47 for example. The benefits of using either service is that you will access the huge number of affiliates. Bear in mind that you will need to pay decent commissions if you want affiliates to promote for you - the norm for Clickbank is anything from 30-75%.

You could go it alone of course and stick to selling through PayPal or Alertpay for example, but you lose out significantly by not leveraging the large number of affiliates working with the aforementioned services. Then again, you could use your own affiliate program and if you are launching a low cost or even free product you might want to take a close look at something like the $7 Secrets Script by Jonathon Leger.

Alternatively, for serious product launch power you could also consider using the extremely comprehensive Rapid Action Profits. You can see exactly what this script can do for you over at the sales page, (a long but impressive read) and although it's not cheap, you can see the potential for selling a lot more product is entirely genuine and therefore makes the software a very good investment. I haven't used it myself yet, but when I finally put together a commercially viable ebook it's going to be right up there on my list of marketing must haves. It really does do everything that would normally require a host of various scripts that may or may not all work together to achieve the same end result. I've not mentioned a high end item like RAP on my blog before but for those launching a new ebook, it really is a great solution to a host of problems.  

The other thing you will need is a way to ensure that you don't suffer from theft of your product. (if you're not using something like RAP). Using a static download page is a no no nowadays, especially with social bookmarking sites being so prominent. The last thing you want is your download page plastered all over any one of them. There are several options, but I would recommend SmartDD which I have posted about here in the past - for the full details you can read about SmartDD here. The best thing about it is that it is free for up to five products and can be integrated with Clickbank, taking care of your thankyou page which is a requirement for selling anything through their marketplace as well as protecting you from theft and automating all your sales.

When it comes to launching your product there are plenty of options. If you can persuade anyone to JV with you and plug your book, all well and good, but you will need to offer something in return. Sometimes handing out a copy to potential partners for free is a good starting point and enables them to make a decision about promoting your work from a position of knowledge. If you don't know anyone well enough to offer that kind of trust you could always offer some copies for sale at a heavily discounted price to help things get moving. You may want to post about your book on a few forums and spread it around your social networks too. When it comes to promotion there is much you can do to get the word out. Hopefully you can achieve a snowball effect once you start things off.

If a free viral book mentions certain products, get in touch with the owner, they may well agree to promote to their own lists and members if they think it will help them make more sales. When approaching potential JV partners don't be shy - fire off an email - the worst they can do is say no, and plenty probably will, but don't let that dishearten you, you might be surprised at some of the support you can get. 

So, there is some advice and things to consider. For many people the thought of creating an ebook is intimidating and yet it shouldn't be. If you can write and have a subject on which you have a decent amount of knowledge, you are already good to go. With the technical aspects covered in this post you should now be able to get your product up and running and hopefully selling like the proverbial hot cakes.

I'm sure there are plenty of things I've not covered, but if you have anything to add please leave your comments and share your knowledge with other readers.

Photo By Athena

SmartDD Secure Digital Downloads Version 3 Review

I have written before about the impressive SmartDD, a secure digital download manager that is available for no cost. Frank Hayward, the man behind SmartDD, has recently launched a totally new version of the software and in response to customer feedback the improvements over the previous release are very wide ranging.

Originally SmartDD worked only with PayPal and despite being very effective was still only really of use to those selling digital products of their own and using PayPal as the payment processor. Clickbank merchants, for example, were forced to use far more expensive scripts.

Finally however, the full release of the new SmartDD, going under the guise of Version 3 has been released and is ready and available for you to download immediately.

SmartDD now offers support for both PayPal and Clickbank as well as Kunaki support and the ability to protect free sign up downloads (for example, you may be offering a product in exchange for an opt-in but don't want people to share the download link).

SmartDD has not stopped there however. Version 3 also includes a built in web store and a built in affiliate scheme plus the additiional ability to set up one time offers (OTO's). Head over to the product page now for full details of SmartDD version 3 and its capabilities

The latest version really is a powerful tool and the amazing thing is that you can still get it for free. This is not a restricted function version or a limited time deal. You can download the full version right now and use it on multiple domains to protect up to five different products/downloads for as long as you want. That in itself is an improvement over the old version which only allowed three products, so, with the increased power of the script and the huge increase in functionality, I'd say it's the bargain of the year for internet marketers and ebay sellers - yes it works just as well with Ebay as it does with websites.

I still rank my own purchase of SmartDD as one of the smartest, most useful and valuable I have ever made online and if you are unlikely to ever sell more than five different products the free version is totally unbeatable.

On the technical side, in case you're wondering, there are just three requirements in order for the software to work: Your web space must be running at least PHP4 & MySQL and also have the latest ionCube loaders installed. That's it. You can even use an existing MySQL DB if you don't have one to spare.

This is one essential tool if you are selling digital downloads online - essential for preventing theft through link sharing and essential as a truly efficient customer service tool. All your digital delivery taken care of on autopilot leaving you time to work on other things.

I give this latest version a huge thumbs up for ease of installation and use and I'm still exploring all the cool new things it can do. Recommended without reservation - even if you're not selling anything right now, I'd go and sign up for your free copy of SmartDD right away and see just what it can do for any online business. Get Your Free Copy Of SmartDD Here.

I occasionally heartily recommend programs that I have used to great effect myself, affiliate programs notwithstanding, and with SmartDD you really are onto a winner. Frank even provides support to customers of the free version and is always helpful and courteous to a fault. This is one free piece of software you can count on and one you will be more than happy to upgrade should the need ever arise. Just try it and see.

New Rebrandable Report - Viral Clickbank Footprints

I have today released a new rebrandable report entitled Viral Clickbank Footprints.

Clickbank affiliates can download their copy of the report and rebrand it with their own Clickbank ID and various other Clickbank related programs. The report and rebranding rights are free.

Download Viral Clickbank Footprints here

I hope that you will find the report educational and profitable in your own Clickbank marketing efforts.

New Interstitial Links Manager | Clickbank Report News | Marketing Graphics

Frustration abounds at the moment as I am still unable to launch the rebrandable Clickbank report due to the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of one of the featured services. This is doubly annoying as I had done a fair bit of promotion for the program already and had upgraded my membership to pro. Despite a couple of emails to the site admin I have heard zip so far and am only hoping that the site will resurface after what has presumably been a bad server crash or similar......ah well, the best laid plans of mice and men. If the service in question really has done a moonlight flit, I will have to seriously rework the report, so when it will be available is anybody's guess.

On other matters, I have recently acquired the rights to a great script called Interstitial Link Manager and despite the unusual name, have to say that it is a cool script for marketers. It basically allows you to both cloak and track affiliate links, or any link for that matter, and to present any number of offers to your visitors when sending them to a web page. You can control how many and for how long the offers are presented and in what order they appear.

The real beauty of it is though is that the visitor still has full control over what they see - they can pause or skip offers and go straight to their download or desired page, so they are never forced to look at any offer that does not interest them. 

I've put up an example of an offer with one link so you can see Interstitial Links Manager in action. 

If you would like to learn more (and it does do some other clever things too) you can visit and grab your own copy of Interstitial Links Manager here.

I also wanted to give a plug to the guy who eventually produced the graphics for me for Viral Clickbank Footprints. The standard of the work was excellent and the turnaround time very impressive. This is one talented graphics guy, and I would certainly recommend him very highly. I was amazed what he managed to come up with from my very limited job specs. So who is he? His name is....fanfare......Farihan Bahron and you can find him at PixelOfGenius.com where you can see samples of his excellent work and his very reasonable prices. I think you will be very impressed and surprised at both. I will certainly use Farihan's services again in the future after such a smooth process this first time around. Highly recommended.

OK, bit of a mish mash today, but wanted to get a post in before the weekend when I will be confined to the hospital as our son is due to be released on Monday of next week and I'm not sure when I'll get back to pounding the keys as it looks as though we will have our hands full judging by the amount of equipment we have just taken delivery of :-) It's a great day to be looking forward to though, so I'll let you know how it goes.