London Meetings - Meeting Feb 06
Minutes of Meeting on Saturday 18th February 2006
Venue: Duke of York, 35 New Cavendish Street, London W1M 7RL
Attendees: Richard Taylor, Bruce Bird, Dee Halpin, Anthony McGuigan, Tony Clingan, John Hillage
To make the minute taking easier and to avoid any misrepresentation, it was proposed and agreed that each attendee would follow up the meeting with a summary of their own input. Mike Rogers was unable to attend but sent a report on his activities since the January meeting which is included as an addition to these minutes.
Bruce Bird
www.modelairplanesecrets.com.
This is a Stephen Pierce Business Briefcase. I was critical of his organization at Impulsive Profits in the beginning and am still of the view that they are a young bunch who were overwhelmed by the workload when they launched this program. I suspect that part of the problem is that the man is doing so much in so many areas and many things are done ‘on the fly’ so the ball will inevitably be dropped from time to time.
Having said that, I would urge anyone else with a briefcase to really commit to it. You have to listen to the calls and take the actions. You cannot do this as an occasional activity but must look at it as work leading to an income. His stuff works – and he concentrates on getting max advantage out of free methods.
I took a leap of faith at the last briefcase owners session when he opened up his upsell to the ProfitApex programme. This is costing me a 3 figure monthly subscription with the payoff being that his first action was to lay out an earnings target at each 3, 6, 9,12 month interval leading to a 6 figure annual income after 12 months. Out of that I pay him 12% of earnings and those who choose to do so will become mentors for the briefcase owners. ProfitApex participants get a weekly 30 mins telephone call personally with Stephen when he identifies the tasks for the next week and resolve any outstanding problems from the previous week. He has laid out action plans and he is already uncovering stuff that I have heard nobody else even mention.
His strategy is clear. He has the solutions and the tools but there is only one of him. So he is helping a small group to achieve big incomes so that they, in turn, can support his growing band of briefcase owners. He makes a residual income from us and builds another layer into his income pyramid and produces another bunch of disciples. From what I have seen, and the amount of free stuff including cutting edge software which is only just being completed, I have to say I have never been more optimistic about my own chances and I will be happy to pass on his advice to any other briefcase owners and OMMG members in general.
One of the tools already provided to briefcase owners is Smart Optin Pages. I have now cracked this and am happy to generate SOP pages for any member for a period so that you can see what the results might be. Then, if you want to continue I believe it is a monthly subscription licence. SOP generates dynamic optin pages for each of your specified keywords. You can see the sales page at www.smartoptinpages.com but I am happy to do it for you for an initial period. You need 100-200 keywords for it to generate the same number of pages on your domain. You then blog and ping the pages – and there are some specific instructions on how to set up your Blogger template to deal with the latest changes at Blogger as well
Adsense package from Carl Galletti.
I reported last time on the Carl Galletti package I bought into at the Entrepreneurs Bootcamp, and the difficulties in finding out exactly what I had bought and getting registered and set up. There are apparently only 100 members of ‘The Inner Circle’ with more stuff to come. I have now got the service set up. It is essentially an automated adsense site program and until yesterday I would have said it was magic. I simply register a domain, do the keyword research and input the domain name and point the browser to the keyword file on my PC and the program creates an adsense site which is up and running within 2 minutes. In addition I can set up unlimited number of online shops for which I select goods from a big list of dropshipping companies carrying 250,000 line items. I was amazed to find a free shopping cart system included which I have yet to investigate. They say it has all the facilities of 1shoppingcart that they used to use but have improved upon.
Again, reflecting my frustration, I have bought into the convenience of having someone else do the technical stuff. In exchange the revenue is split 50/50. I am disappointed with Carl Galletti. I understand he is involved in this service which is delivered by Firehorse hosting who provide all the hosting for free and continually optimize all the pages across their servers as the adsense parameters change. But I have heard nothing from Carl at all except acknowledgement of correction of an email address. No welcome message confirming the package, nothing about the 10 free tickets to his seminars which are included as a bonus etc. I will have to follow that up.
Since the meeting, Stephen Pierce has shown us his new software for creation of adsense sites that he is going to give to the ProfitApex team and no-one else. All I can say is that it is even better, it even does the keyword research for you – and pulls in Amazon products, Google news etc to provide a better looking and more content rich site. Am I optimistic? Is the Pope a Catholic?
www.TheMarketMatrix.com
Big ticket financial trading package. I have been having difficulties with this because I have been trying to develop a big ticket item while learning. Not a good idea. At present I am just leaving this on hold while I get to grips with my 6 figure income programme!
Tip
For domain names use www.whois.sc. – which appears to be a good name for Name Is. Anyway, take a look – quicker than my trying to explain. Why? Put in an existing domain name and it will tell you everything about that domain. Initial services are limited until you join but it is free – and they take pride in not mailing you!
Then download the latest Google toolbar and you will find that NI is one of the icons you can load into the Google toolbar. When you are on a site you can hit the icon and it will deliver the same report without having to go back to the whois web site.
Dee Halpin
I gave a brief outline of Mark Anastasi’s Financial Freedom and Wealth Creation 4 day seminar. The first day was about creating the right mindset; listing 100 reasons to have money and 100 ways to make money (to trigger and focus the subconscious) etc, easier said than done but I can see the value. The next three days were about the immense leverage provided by the internet, product creation, copywriting, conversion and traffic strategies. There is a very complete course manual which does include loads of resources and for me it had helped me get re-motivated.
In terms of my own resources, I have finally set up an Adwords campaign for my Canoeing e-book, unfortunately it’s been suspended (twice now) due to lack of clickthroughs. I was encouraged to persevere with this, Bruce is working more closely with Stephen and pointed out that the one book can be a launch pad for a range of other more niche products and John has offered to help me with my Adwords as this is an area he has a good deal of expertise with.
I still haven’t set up an Xsite website but am committed to doing this before the next meeting.
I have also agreed to check what I thought about getting free ISBN numbers of UK published books, I found I was wrong but please see below for information on process and costs for both UK and US ISBNs. There is no legal requirement for books to have ISBNs but you cannot sell through Amazon (and others?) without one.
The Link for a UK ISBN is: http://www.nbdrs.com/isbn_sernew.htm cost
£94.00 for 10
For USA it is http://www.isbn.org cost (last year) $225.00 for 10
Anthony McGuigan
My first ebook: Cure for Athletes Foot & Nail Fungus in under 10 Days http://www.curemyfeet.com
Reg with click bank sold one book so far. Started a Google campaign with not much result.
My challenge is not using enough Keywords.
Homework suggestions from the group:
Need to read Perry Marshalls ebook on Google & start using his suggestions.
Tony Clingan
Just to summarize my topics, I started out by talking about the need to find a suitable shopping cart provider, I had experienced difficulty with self build sites having hidden charges which quickly ramped the price up and said I was cautious as this was a problem from before with being tied into a package that stopped you progressing and that imposed excessive charges.
Since the meeting we have been looking at 1&1 Internet, an associate of 123 reg which looks really good and their follow up seems to be very good to.
On my own project I was asking for help with Opt in pages, to make it that unless somebody gave me their e-mail address I would not grant access to the site in one of its formats, Armond Morin says that anybody who will not give you their e-mail address will not buy from you.
I had asked if this page should be built in the same folder, I am using xsitepro to create this site.
I had also asked how difficult it was to do what Richard had done to bring us straight onto the February meeting page of the OMMG site.
I had also asked about the difficulty of putting up an e-book as a sign up bonus as well as offering them as a bonus for purchasing the product.
Richard offered to help me with my issues.
In closing could I once again say thank you to John Hillage for the e-book.
John Hillage
I spoke about my Google campaign for the affiliate ebooks with Mark Anastasi. Google priced me out of the market (eg 5c clicks became $5 clicks overnight). This was because I dumped literally 1000's of keywords into one ad text. Google does not like this as it likes relevancy (ie their ideal is one keyword per ad text). The only way round it was to use a new website to
sell the books - all selling well again now though. Also using overture pay per click.
I talked about my weight loss ebook. Project completed including website and autoresponder but no sales!! Traffic too hard to bid for on Adswords due to HUGE competition so currently researching more niche markets.
I intend to find niche markets and throw up a website featuring affiliate products, flycatcher pages, "your burning question about topic X" pages and then produce products from the question pages.
Richard Taylor
I reported last month that I had pulled the article burner script from my adsense sites and it did not seem to make much difference to the CTR. Well since then, I discovered that the RSS feed on some of my sites had stopped working with an ugly message in its place to say 'permission denied' . It was all the sites I have hosted with Hostgator. Having contacted them I find out that they have banned a number of RSS scripts including mine - RSS Equalizer - because they were taking up too much resource on their 'shared' servers and that I would have to change the script or subscribe to a dedicated server if I wanted to continue using the RSSEQ script. I contacted RSSEQ about this and all they could say was move to another server. Having paid $97 for RSSEQ I was not at all pleased with that response. Apart from this issue, I am very happy with the Hostgator package and am not inclined to move the 6 sites I currently have with them. So I now have 6 of my sites without Article Burner and without any news feed so it leaves very little else for the visitor to look at YET if anything the CTR has increased!!! I am sure that the search engines will drop these sites very soon unless I replace those scripts with something else but it does indicate that visitors when confronted with nothing more than google ads they are more likely to click on an ad than click off the site.
While this was going on, I purchased 2 new ready made sites which were on special offer on the NHP forum from a member in the USA and incorporated into those sites was an RSS news feed. By analysing the source code I was able to establish that the aggregator script is from http://www.feedforall.com/free-php-script.htm and the news feed from Yahoo - both of which are free! So my next task is to install that on my other 'hostgator' sites.
Anyone interested in taking a look at the 2 new sites I purchased complete for $35 each can see them at http://www.mmorpgonline.ws and http://www.highdefinitiontelevisions.ws All I had to do was replace my own code for the adsense, amazon and other affiliates represented on the sites and to set up the 'news' page with my own blog using wordpress. I do intend to make a few changes to avoid being picked up for 'duplicate content' which appears to be a big issue right now. The blog template was provided as part of the site complete with adsense already incorporated. Wordpress is a free tool and is very easy to install especially if your host has a 'fantastico' feature (which Hostgator does). If anyone is interested in purchasing similar sites (the sites I purchased are now sold out - limited for obvious reasons) but I might be able to negotiate a similar deal for our members for future sites - let me know if interested. The sites also come with 12 articles to use as you wish - I will use them for the blog.
My bird flu site is by far the most successful of all my adsense sites with an average 17.6% CTR in Feb so far and the site only has 1 page indexed on Altavista and Alltheweb. This is obviously a hot topic right now and I am desperately trying to find a way of getting it indexed with the other search engines and create more traffic. I have already placed an article on the front page (in place of article burner) and will get the RSS feed sorted very soon - I will then work at getting more articles on the other pages and then blog and ping to try and get Yahoo and Google interested. I'm also thinking of putting a 'news' blog on this site.
I have found a great free tool for collecting articles from the web - you will find the download link and a tutorial on this blog - the 02-03-2006 post. I entered the keyword 'bird flu' and it came back with 350 articles.
http://www.orwellpro.com/blog/
Question!! Does anyone know how I can find out which page/s of my site are indexed. I have SEO Elite which can find the ranked position of the site on the search engine from a specific page/keyword but I have around 300 pages/keywords to work through - must be an easier way?
Report from Mike Rogers
Go Get Me A … Website Marketing
http://www.gogetmea.com
Progress and Thoughts
Saturday 21st January 2006
Saturday midnight, start a thread on Money Saving Expert website forum, in the section dedicated to eBay and online auctions in general. This is a very popular site and well worth getting noticed on.
Sunday morning 9am. Thread is removed as the moderator doesn’t like the link. However the thread had already been read 37 times and there was one post saying that GGMA looked very useful.
Started an email discussion with the board moderator as to what they didn’t like about the post/link. As of 15th Feb we’ve reached the point whereby the moderator is going to have a look at my sight to decide whether I can post about it.
Trying to place posts on forums could work and I’m still going to pursue this but it has a limited life span of a few days on a board before other threads are placed which are more current and move mine out of sight. Continuous posting would be treated as spam.
So it got me thinking that what would be better is to have some way of having details about my site that are present all the time on other sites to constantly remind people about it. Which got me thinking that the best way to do this would be to embed specific search pages from my site on existing popular sites that service specific niches. So for instance, I could create a page which searches the antiques category of auction sites and then present this as a useful tool for existing antique related websites. They get to have functionality useful to their existing user base and a cut of the commission and my site has instant access to large user bases.
So I stopped any further advertising efforts and concentrated on modifying my html generation application to additionally produce a set of inline search pages.
This is now completed and so I now need to start finding some sites that would be potentially users of these inline pages..
Saturday 4th February 2006
It only took about a week to sort out the inline pages and so I was about to start looking for some prospective sites when my hosting company mailed me to say they were giving £30 vouchers for Google Adwords for each site you host with them. I wasn’t planning on doing any paid advertising yet but since this offer came up, and I have three sites with them, that was £90 worth for free.
So I spent a week setting up and tweaking some ads.
So far between 7th and 14th I’ve had 7,000 ad impressions and about 70 clicks, so 1% CTR. The cost has been £7.00 and I’ve made in commission a whopping £2.50. However, I need to see over a period of a few weeks if people are coming back to the site or if they are just going to be one off hits. By far the most popular area has been the eBay misspelt item searches. I still need to do quite a bit of refining to reduce costs and increase click through, but it has been interesting and I think will be worthwhile.
As an aside, I’ve started selling a few items on eBay and it occurred to me that using Adwords to advertise individual auctions of mine could help ramp up the final bid price. And I would get commission from the link when someone bids on my item! It could potentially pay for itself and give higher final values. Definitely going to try this in the next few weeks.
Thursday 9th February 2006
Whilst setting up some ads and researching what some of the competitive ads were like I found a site that does something similar to mine! www.bestprices.co.uk However they only do a general search of several comparison sites. Whereas my site is more focused on individual categories, can cope with any sites I configure and is more flexible. However, there was one thing I particularly liked about their site and that was rather than open individual widows for each site searched they have a single window with a list of site names. You therefore can tab from one site to the next without being bogged down with multiple browser windows. I don’t like their layout but the idea is good.
So, I’m currently working on a single window results page for my site. I’ll give the user the choice when searching for displaying a single or multiple results windows.
I reckon though that other sites using the inline search pages of mine will benefit more from having a single results window. I’ve nearly finished the changes and expect it to be only a week before they are up and running.
I can then get back to sourcing some joint venture sites to start hosting my search pages.
Next Meeting
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