Nick Temple

Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

I have an old P4/3.4Ghz tower that has been (up until this point) running Fedora Core 8. One thing I have never been able to do is to get the Linksys wireless networking card running.

Since I need to rebuild it for the kids anyway (they are all hot on learning how to really work on the Internet), I thought I’d try Ubuntu as it was recommended by a friend.

The first problem I had was the install media … after burning and trying 3 different CD’s, each one had multiple errors when I tried to install.

What’s really weird is the erors came up in different places (same disk, different reboots).

This could be the media itself (Memorex), the burner or the reader … I don’t actually know.

What DID work, however, was buring the CD ISO to a DVD instead … first time worked wonderfully, and ubunty came up quickly and without a hitch.

Getting the wireless card running is still not happening, however. ndiswrapper says hardware is present, and modprobe says that ndiswrapper is installed, but still no wlan0 to fiddle with.

I’ve been futzing with hardware most of the evening (after we returned from Six Flags), and am putting it away for now. It may just require a reboot … but given that I’m running from CD (DVD) that’s not an option. I’ll need to find a way to do some sort of “soft reset” that doesn’t dump the ramdisk.

IF I can get this card working, then I’ll switch to Ubuntu permanently and let the kids have at it …

Anyone have any clues?

I’ve had a few requests that I port the Intellispire Auto-Responder products I’ve created for Joomla! over to Wordpress. I’m still unsure though - will people using wordpress use plugins for auto-responders?

You can find a complete list of autoresponder products here.

Let me know what you think - should we port? Or spend the time adding more options (AutoResponse Plus, Constant Contact, MailChimp … any others?)

Traditionally, Internet “niche” marketing has been traditionally taught in the following manner:

• Create a “free” report
• create a “squeeze” page that captures a prospect’s name and address, and in return, the free report is provided.
• on the “back end” you sell the product you really want the prospect to purchase.

The above may be an oversimplification, and there are many variations … but in the end, what you end up with is a email list with a lot of barely-qualified people on it.

Two things at Ryan Lee’s Continuity Summit has me questioning this sales method.

The first was Russel Brunson’s presentation, where he shows that providing a very low cost CD actually increases conversion.

In this case, you end up with a very qualified list of people that actually are willing to pay for information. But more importantly (in my mind), the conversions of the back-end offer were tested to be two-times that of sending a prospect directly to the sales page.

(I think more testing could - and should - be done, but the results are encouraging)

The second presentation was Stephen Pirece, who shows how to start making sales directly with a five step process that gets qualified traffic to just about any offer. Russel also us upteen (60? More?) ver different methods to get offers in front of traffic (and some of them are quite ingenious).

You see, originally getting a “big list” was necessary so that marketers could send traffic to various offers. But now, there are so many alternative ways of getting offers in front of people that are already online, email marketing just simply isn’t as attractive of a traffic source as it once was.

Maybe I should qualify this a little: CUSTOMER listbuilding is NOT dead. What may be on its way out is listbuilding for list building sake: free reports, for example, where all you can do is hope the person on the other end is a live, human, prospect.

Having a CUSTOMER list (those people who have actually purchased from you, vs. “just interested”) is another matter entirely.

A corollary to this theory becomes: listbuilding may not be your most valuable skill, and “not having a list” may no longer mean doom to your business. The “my list is bigger than yours” pants-pulling-contests really don’t mean squat.

The real skill is getting your message in front of people - or “traffic building”.

With good traffic skills, you can easily build any list.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know below.

Savannah and I are at Ryan Lee’s first ever Continuity Summit. We’re there promoting Joomla! as the membership software of choice as well as our own Easy Membership sites. You can keep updated on twitter or from our special page set up just for the event.

The easy membership sites website is currently in pre-launch, and open to new subscribers … it’ll just take a few days to deliver the software and setup because all the automation isn’t quite done yet.

People have often asked me how I get my sites listed on the first couple of pages of Google for great keywords like “aweber” and “getresponse”.

Well, I’ve been a student of Brad Fallon’s for many years (long before StomperNet was born), and I’ve picked up quite a few things including being the “coolest guy on the planet“:

The “coolest guy on the planet” was a contest to see who could get the #1 phrase for that spot. As you can see, I didn’t quite win, but having spots #2 and #3 - even for just a couple of days - was pretty cool.

Why did I drop out? Simple: top rankings for that particular phrase got me exactly one thing - people wanting SEO help! And that’s something I usually don’t do for other people.

Frankly, there’s just not enough money in helping other people rank well when the effort spent on my own sites can be multiplied tenfold or more.

But I CAN show you where to go and get some of the same information I’ve used over and over to get ranked well, and it won’t cost you much, either. ($1.00 right now)

http://www.stombernet.biz (affil.)

This course has just about everything you need to know about SEO in it, except for a few closely guarded secrets I don’t reveal for cheap. One of those “secrets” I sold in a report for $1,000 to exactly 10 people - and promised I’d never sell it to anyone else. [Yes, some things just work better when the whole world doesn't know about it]

So the second best thing you can do to learn about SEO is to get Stomping The Search Engines 2. The first, of course, is getting inside of an experts head, but even then … you gotta do the basics, or the rest simply won’t work.

Comwired is a DNS new service that allows you redirect your visitor based on their place of origin.

I’ve setup a free account, and am playing with it …. what I’m finding is really cool.

What I’m doing now is using the dynamic portion of the DNS to send visitors from different locations to different hostnames on my server …. which, in turn, redirects to different parts of my website (or you could send them to an entirely different website ….).

The advantage? Visitors from across the pond get localized content.

I’m still playing with this, but the concept is cool, and right now I can already drill down to the city level.

A website accessible _only_ from within Louisville, anyone?

Now, what I need to find is a city->timezone conversion map, so I can get accurate timing stats, too.

Any ideas?