I thought this might be of interest to some people as Jimmy D. Brown is a well known, successful marketer

How to Use Incentives to Get Extra Sales

By Jimmy D. Brown of iBusiness Owner

The vast majority of your prospects aren’t all that passionate about your offer.

Truth is, they’re kind of lukewarm. They’re interested, but they’re not taking their credit card out. Instead of making a buying decision, they decide to “think about it.”

Of course you know what happens: They forget about your offer. They don’t return to your store or sales page. Some of them may even make the conscious decision to NOT buy your product.

So what can you do to get your prospects to get excited and take action NOW?

Simple: Offer them an incentive if they order now. Do it right, and you’re virtually guaranteed to make more sales!

Generally, an incentive can take two forms:

1. You offer a discount. One idea is the straightforward discount, such as offering a percent-off. Another ideas is to offer a discount on the overall package, such as by offering free shipping.

Tip: You can even make it a limited-time discount so that your prospects feel a sense of urgency.

2. You offer one or more bonus products. Again, you can even make the bonus offer limited to increase the sense of urgency.

Offering a discount is a pretty straightforward incentive. So let’s talk about how to offer a bonus as a buying incentive.

Here then are the seven keys to offering bonuses that generate extra sales:

• Make sure the bonus is desirable. Point is, if your prospects don’t care about the bonus product, then it won’t help you generate any sales. So make sure it’s something that your prospects already want. Something that gets them excited!

• Create a valuable bonus. Just because you’re giving the product away for free with a purchase doesn’t mean this bonus should be worth little to no money. Quite the contrary – it should have a high perceived value in the prospect’s mind.

• Choose bonuses that are easy to deliver. This is particularly true if you’re selling downloadable products online, such as software or information. Point is, you want to be able to deliver the bonus instantly – right alongside the main product – without you having to manually deliver the bonus.

• Supply an exclusive bonus, whenever possible. If the prospect can get the bonus somewhere else, he might just do that. So try to offer exclusive bonuses to help make the buying decision easy.

• Offer a bonus that compliments the main product. For example, let’s say you’re selling a book about retirement planning. Offering retirement-planning worksheets and software as a bonus would be a great incentive.

• Sell the bonus. If you’re selling via a sales page, don’t just list the bonus. Instead, sell it just the way you’re selling the main product, meaning you should list the benefits of this bonus product or service.

• Remember that you can offer products OR services. Let’s say you’re selling exterior landscaping supplies and information. As a bonus you can offer a free consultation where you provide specific landscaping ideas for buyers. Or if you’re selling a copywriting product, you can offer a sales letter critique.

Conclusion

Offering an incentive is a simple, yet highly effective way to generate more sales and grow your business. To discover still more ways to grow your business, visit this website   – you may just learn strategies you never even knew existed!”

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketers, bloggers, ebook authors, incentives, infoproduct creators, Internet Marketing, membership site owners

I just came across an excellent wordpress tutorial
that Michelle Macphearson posted on her blog last
week.

I think you’ll find it ‘pretty good’!

Lots of great plugins (with download links) and tips for
maximising your blog’s SEO.

Also it’s an excellent to-do list for the next time you create a wp
blog.

Nothing for sale here, just great info…

http://www.michellemacphearson.com/wordpress-tutorial-for-internet-
marketers/

Until next time.

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, on page optimization, plugins, SEO, wordpress, wordpress tutorial, WordPress Tutorial For Internet Marketers

I thought I would post this copy of a great email by John Reese now as although I have read it before I find that it is always useful to read it again. Food for thought indeed!

I have a copy displayed where I can re-read it when I start to lose track!

It is a quite long post but well worth reading.

Here is John’s post:

—————————————————————————————————————–

“In light of my upcoming 40th birthday, I want to share 12 valuable mini-lessons that I’ve learned so far as an entrepreneur…

These range from mistakes to avoid, to making strategic decisions, of how to get cash flow to come in the fastest, etc.

They are in no particular order…

1. ALWAYS DO MORE THAN IS EXPECTED OF YOU

I learned this at an early age from my Dad. He had a very successful career as a business executive and engineer, and this the core principle that created his success.

You can apply this to your business in many ways… over-delivering to your customers, giving unexpected bonuses to your employees or outsourced workers, and more.

Most people do just the bare minimum. Do more than is expected of you and it will do amazing things for your business.

2. STOP DREAMING AND START DOING

Too many entrepreneurs get caught up in the big dreams of how they will one day be rich and how their life will be amazing…

…but they never end up doing anything.

They buy courses, read all they can, jot down little notes and ideas in a notebook, but nothing ever actually gets created.

A web site doesn’t get made. Advertising isn’t run. Markets aren’t tested. Nothing.

If you want to make a lot of money the only way that happens is getting stuff done. Period.

3. DON’T LET LEARNING DELAY ACTIVITY

Most people that have studied Internet Marketing much already have the basic skills that are needed to build a million-dollar business.

That’s worth REPEATING…

Most people that have studied IM much ALREADY HAVE the basic skills that are needed to build a million-dollar business.

You can get stuck learning new stuff FOREVER. There will always be new methods and techniques that get discovered. The Internet changes on a DAILY BASIS. This is a given.

Don’t get caught in the trap of “I’m going to start building my business right after I go through this next course…”

You can start building your business TODAY while you are studying and learning new things that you can easily apply TOMORROW.

Things will NEVER perfectly align for you and your business. There’s no such thing. So don’t wait. Get started NOW and take action. Get some stuff going and go from there.

4. MULTIPLE IDEAS CAN BE THE KISS OF DEATH

It’s okay to work on multiple projects and ideas. It’s almost impossible to stop entrepreneurs from having tons of new ideas at the same time.

BUT…

No new money comes in the door until you get ONE project launched and making money.

Something has to be launched FIRST.

5. MAKE JUST ONE DOLLAR FIRST

No one has ever made a million dollars in sales without generating $1 first.

ALL successful businesses start with that first sale and then grow from there.

It doesn’t matter what your income goals are. The faster you make your first dollar, the faster you will reach your goals. PERIOD.

6. DO THE IMMEDIATE CASH PROJECT FIRST

What should you work on next? Whatever will bring in cash the fastest for your business — and of course, I mean that in a moral/legal/ethical way.

If you analyze all the great ideas you are probably sitting on, I bet you can realistically prioritize them in the order of which ones would actually make money come in the fastest (if it succeeds.)

THAT is the project you need to focus on.

Cash is the lifeblood of your business (and your life.)

Save some of those “big” ideas for the future. Focus on the ones that stand the best chance of getting new money to come in right away. Once you have some stable ongoing cash flow in your business, then you can take a chance on that project that may take longer to pay off.

7. EMAIL MARKETING KICKS THE CRAP OUT OF EVERYTHING ELSE

When it comes to growing a business online, nothing generates long-term cash flow like an email list of engaged subscribers & customers.

Email marketing is the best way to generate traffic. It’s the best way to ‘recycle’ the same visitors again and again to any of your projects. It’s also the best way to convert prospects into buyers.

RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, BLAH BLAH BLAH

Yes, those methods can generate leads. Yes, those methods can generate some sales. But time and time again little old email marketing kicks their butts — by a long shot.

So make building a list, and a solid relationship with it, a top priority in your business.

8. RUN A LEAN OVERHEAD MACHINE

I can’t stress this one enough.

When you start growing a successful business it’s really easy for your overhead to get out of hand. It’s easy to start hiring a bunch of people and committing to a bunch of expenses.

Take it from me, when you have months where your fixed expenses (doesn’t include advertising, etc.) are well over $100,000/MONTH (and growing) it can put you in a tough position to make healthy profits.

I used to have fixed overhead that high but never again. I realized there were smarter ways to do things.

What you need to realize is that REVENUE doesn’t mean jack squat. It’s your profit (income) that matters.

So while running a $10,000,000/year business (sales) is impressive, I know people running a $1,000,000/year business that nets MORE than the person that owns the $10MM/year business.

It all comes down to your expenses.

Sometimes it certainly DOES take heavy expenses in order to make a lot of money. But that’s not my point…

My point is, your overhead can really get away from you. If your sales experience some dips, and it’s almost guaranteed they will at some point, then you can LOSE YOUR BUTT very quickly.

So add to your overhead as a last resort.

9. MAKE ACCOUNTING A PRIORITY

This is a big mistake that most entrepreneurs make — and I’ve been guilty of it as well.

Keeping the books and doing accounting work is the LAST thing that most entrepreneurs want to mess with. We have more fun by coming up with new ideas and trying to make them grow — not spending hours of our time inputting receipts and figures into QuickBooks.

If you don’t like accounting, immediately pay someone a few bucks to handle it for you. Just make sure your accounting is always up to date. It’s very important.

As an extension of this, make paying your taxes a priority — even if you pay them in advance.

I have paid a small fortune in tax penalties because of being lazy and filing late. And it’s too easy to let one delay turn into another and for the problem to get worse. So make it a priority.

Don’t “rob Peter to pay Paul.” This is a trap most entrepreneurs fall into — again, I’ve been guilty of it in the past myself.

It’s easy to start making a bunch of money and think “I’ll just use this money to make more money instead of paying my taxes on it now and I’ll just pay the taxes later after I’ve made even more money.”

Or the same thinking is applied towards delaying payments to a vendor, or some other expense that needs to get paid.

This is probably the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make that can create problems and a lot of wasted money in paying penalties and interest. So make sure your accounting is taken care of and your taxes get paid on-time for you.

10. DON’T LEASE OFFICE SPACE

(If possible.)

As tempting as this might become if your business starts to grow, avoid it at all costs.

If you’re like me, what will happen is that you will eventually stop going to the office and just work from home where you always were more comfortable anyway. And/or you will end up realizing you really didn’t need it.

Having an “office” is not required to have a successful business. We live in a Digital World now and it’s just not important anymore.

Even if your business grows and you need employees, you still don’t necessarily need an office. There are people out there running $20MM+/year businesses with no office; the employees all just work virtually. This is becoming more and more common.

* There certainly are exceptions to this. My team in the Philippines works out of an office I leased. But they are collaborating on software projects and NEED to work in the same location. And, of course, it’s also very inexpensive.

Most office leases are thousands of dollars per month and usually don’t turn out to be a good use of cash.

11. ALMOST EVERYTHING TAKES LONGER

When creating new projects, or having some software made for you, or having an ebook ghostwritten, or anything else, know that things almost always take more time than originally expected.

This is the #1 reason why you need to act TODAY to start putting things in motion to grow your business. The longer you wait, the more into the future you push your potential of getting money to come in the door.

12. THE MONEY IS IN THE MARKETING

Don’t get caught up in trying to make Web pages and learn HTML, or studying how to create javascript, or learning to master Linux so you can administer your own server, or how to use Photoshop to create little logos, etc.

You can certainly do that stuff if you want, but know that it will most likely just be a HOBBY.

It’s no surprise that some of the most successful entrepreneurs I know are also some of the LEAST TECHNICAL people I know. The main thing they do right is to simply pay others to do all the “nuts & bolts” stuff that makes online business work.

It allows them to spend all their time on the marketing — which is where the money comes from.

*** BONUS LESSON ***

* See how I’m over-delivering as mentioned in the first lesson?

SPENDING TIME ONLINE ISN’T NECESSARILY WORKING ON YOUR BUSINESS

Just because you spend hours a day online doesn’t mean you’re working on your business.

You can do ‘research’ forever and never make a cent.

You need to be spending most of your time on:

# Generating Traffic
# Communicating With Your Customers (i.e. blog, list, etc.)
# Creating Content

Don’t fall into the trap of reading blogs & forums, chatting on Facebook or Twitter, checking stats, reading news, etc. for hours upon hours.

Just know that almost all of that stuff (with rare exception) is LOSING YOU MONEY more than making you money.

————

I hope you enjoyed these mini-lessons. Hopefully, you can apply them to your business and be a lot more successful!

Yours For Online Profits,

John Reese ”

I hope you find this worth the long read!

Technorati Tags: advice for internet marketers, Internet Marketing, internet marketing lessons, John Reese

Here is another free resource I use when writing content to make it
more powerful

http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

You can input sentences and get scores back showing you how compelling
and persuasive they are.

This tool works really well when doing your calls to action.

Technorati Tags: headline content, headline content analysis, headlines

This is a tip I came across recently which I liked a lot. It is a possible timesaver when you are researching your keywords for competition….

http://www.google.se/search?q=Traffic+Dashboard&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en___SE374#q=Traffic+Dashboard&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=PEM&rlz=1R1GGLL_en___SE374&prmd=ivns&ei=BqU-TfrAHJDGswb_263XBA&start=10&sa=N&fp=de8b3f178a30af3a

Technorati Tags: competition, google search, keyword analysis, keywords

Recently, on another of my blogs I was unable to log in, and as I was trying to, a pop-up appeared saying “You have been hacked!”  – and then something about Kurdistan.

Hmm.

Every time I tried again the same thing happened.

How Did It Happen?

What did I do wrong?

Was it on the server? Was it the WordPress software? Was it in my computer?

As a non-techie, I have no idea!

I now had two things I needed to do as soon as possible, and that was first to find out how to access my blog and second to advise the hosting company so they could make whatever server changes they needed to make.

Both could be achieved by contacting the hosting company which in this case was D9 Hosting.

Having dealt with them for some time I was completely confident that I would get a fast response and fast action.

I was not disappointed!

I thought I might give you some ideas that were suggested to me by D9 Hosting

Why am I telling you this?

I don’t want your site hacked so I will tell you how I got my blog back.

Could you get hacked? Probably, at some time.

You will want to get your site cleaned and up and running again as soon as possible.

However, in the meantime you can minimize the chances of that happening – and if it does happen, to have a complete backup.

How can I backup my WP site?

First: You will need to have a complete backup of all your files and folders PLUS the WordPress Database.

I use:

WP-DB-Backup plugin. You can check it out here at WordPress.org

WP-DB-Backup http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

I set it to backup daily.

Second: If you run WordPress, make sure its updated to the latest version, if you see that an update is available, backup your files and database and upgrade it that same day.

Keeping these up to date will keep the hackers from using known vulnerabilities to gain access.Latest versions usually deal with these known vulnerabilities.

Don’t wait for more convenient time, do it right away, it takes only 10 minutes to do all that.

Third: The following is an overview of the instructions that I received from D9 Hosting on how to get my site back :

1. Change your cPanel/FTP username and password or get your hosting company to do it for you.

D9 Hosting did this for me

2. Update all scripts that you run on your account to the latest stable versions, and remove any that are inactive. The vast majority of breaches occur due to out of date scripts running on your account, it only takes 1 line of badly written PHP code for an attacker to gain access.

(D9 Hosting “If you are unsure if any of your scripts are out of date, please let us know and we will be happy to take a look at them for you” so no need to panic.)

D9 Hosting took care of this

3. Run a full anti-virus, malware and spyware scan on your computer. It’s possible that your local machine has been infected, and this is how the hackers gained access to your account details, please run full scans on your computer before re-entering your account. Some popular free tools can be found below:

I use Norton and CCleaner for this.

============
Anti Virus
============

http://free.avg.com/ Has very good write-ups.

http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan/

============
Anti Malware
============

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

============
Anti Spyware
============

www.safer-networking.org

============
Anti Crap!
============

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner As mentioned above, I use and recommend this

4. When connecting to your webspace via FTP, it would be a lot more secure if you were to use SFTP. (Secure File Transfer Protocol)

SFTP encrypts data that is transmitted, whereas FTP sends all data between your machine and the server in plain text format, making it easy for packet sniffers to intercept.

All major FTP clients now support SFTP, so all you need to do to enable it, is to change the protocol in your FTP client from “FTP” to “SFTP”. You will also need to specify the secure port on the server, you can find the SFTP port by logging into your cPanel, and clicking on “FTP Accounts” and then “Configure FTP Client”.

This was news to me but I enabled SFTP on Filezilla – no problem.

Taking these steps should help minimize the risk of future attacks, so please do take action.
To sum up, I followed the advice and got my site back straight away, and so far (a few weeks) – no further problems.

If you don’t follow any of these precautionary steps then do it today! It’s not a nice feeling to lose a site/blog.!!

If you are quite new to all this you can also get more information here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4503871_prevent-computer-being-hacked.html

There are more ways of making life difficult for these people but you do need a degree of technical expertise, so if that is for you I can only recommend Youtube or searching for “being hacked” or something similar.

Technorati Tags: how to prevent your computer being hacked, WordPress backup, WordPress Blog

Like many people I have a hard drive full of PLR products and the reason most of them stay on my hard drive is because for the most part they are badly written and quite frankly are junk!

PLR in itself is an excellent way to create your own product, without doing any research work and writing, and which you can use as if it was your own by rewriting, editing,putting your name to it, adding to other PLR – in fact doing what you like with it!

However, as mentioned above so much of the PLR on the internet is extremely bad and not something you would want to use in your name.

But now there is a new PLR membership site just started and I have to say that after joining that the quality is excellent.

All the articles are written by the husband and wife team of Martin and Delia Avis – one a full time internet marketer and the other an experienced English teacher – so the research and writing is first class.

Martin is takes the quality of his articles very seriously because as Martin is a real Internet Marketer he knows what works!

Check it out here …

He has written his own very good newsletter for many years and he knows how important it is to connect with his readers, which is why he is taking a lot of trouble to produce a very high quality product.

Not only is he producing great articles he is also providing keyword research for those articles as you can see  a copy of the current membership articles:

Check it out here …

The membership is also providing on site software which is shown below:

Software

• Article Repager – Input the text of any KickstartPLR article, follow the on-screen prompts, and KickstartPLR Article Repager will instantly convert it into a fully W3C-compliant HTML page with embedded CSS.

• Article Rewriter – Input any KickstartPLR article and easily rewrite it. You can make small or large changes – even create entirely new articles – quickly and with ease.

• Content Researcher – Input your keyword and KickstartPLR Content Researcher will return sentences that relate to it from top-ranked websites.

• Keyword Revealer – Input your URL or article text and KickstartPLR Keyword Revealer will analyze and report on which keywords are most frequently found

• Meta Hacker – “Input a keyword and KickstartPLR Meta Hacker will display the on-page title, meta keywords list and meta description for each of the top ten Google search results.”

• Theme Surveyor – takes any keyword you input and analyzes the top results from Google to provide an invaluable list of theme, or LSI words for you to use in your articles and web pages.

Training

PLR Articles

• Why Use PLR Articles?
• 18 Ways to Profit With PLR Articles
• What’s in a name?
• All That Competition!

Article Writing

• A Bit Extra
• General
• Cakes and Jam
• Web Site Building

Check It Out Here …

Points to consider are:

• All the articles are fresh and written for the membership by Martin and Delia Avis,
• the articles are unique insomuch as they have never been seen or used anywhere else,
• the articles have not been spun,
• the articles are limited to the membership only
• and the article packs are limited to 400 members only …

Members get 3 packs of 10 articles every month so that means 30 articles plus keyword research, product suggestions and access the the above mentioned software.

How much does all this cost?

At the moment the launch price is $27 a month and will remain at that price as long as one is a member despite any future price increases.

Having been inside this membership I can strongly recommend joining if you want to make money from top quality PLR articles.

Click here now …

Technorati Tags: kickstartplr, martin avis, plr, private label rights, private resell rights

Technorati Tags: learn WordPress, WordPress Blog, WordPress training

Just a very short post concerning public WiFi Access and the question of  how secure it is – or isn’t.

These days we all like to stay connected whenever and wherever we are so I thought the following might provide some food for thought and possibly help folk with public WiFi access.

This is a series of posts from CNet which I found interesting and thought was worth a post here.

I hope you can get some useful advice from this:

Security concerns on public Wi-Fi access

Technorati Tags: secure WiFi Access, WiFi, WiFi public access, WiFi public access security, WiFi security

I use Mozilla Firefox for the most part as I like to be able to add to my browser experience by using Add-ons or PlugIns.

However, now and again things go wrong and this frequently occurs when Mozilla Firefox is updated.
Now, I am not a geek (not being rude), guru or anything else so I find this frustrating, and of course it affects my online business.

Recently I had a problem which seems to be quite common and that was that I was unable to access various sites but had no problems with others.

I am sure you have seen the following:

I had this problem but now it is solved.

In my case, after some research, I took the following steps with Mozilla Firefox.

I disabled all plugins and things were OK.

Check out the procedure here:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

After slowly reactivating all the plugins again, one at a time, I found out that the Alexa toolbar was the culprit in my case.
So, no more Alexa toolbar – no problems since then.

I then moved out of Safe Mode and back to normal mode.

That was my problem but if you are having a similar problem then I hope that you find this useful.

On a slightly different note I have found another problem which might just be related to my computer.

Something else comes to mind.

I have found that after long periods of being online that Firefox becomes slower and slower to the point where it more or less grinds to a halt.

A check in Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) shows that looking at “Processes” it shows that Firefox is using an enormous amount of resources and CPU usage is around 100%.
(Click at the top of Mem Usage column to sort by max or min).

In answer to this I just back out of Firefox or Reboot then all goes back to normal usage.

There is quite a bit of discussion about this on the net, most of which is well above my head!

May not be the answer but worth looking at.

Please feel free to comment on any of this as you may have gathered that I am not an expert in the mysteries of software by any means so all contributions are gratefully accepted )

Anyway, I hope this may throw some light on someone’s problems.

Technorati Tags: add-ons, Mozilla Firefox problems, plugins, server not found