Just recently, I came across a forum that I hadn’t known about yet, when I wrote those articles. The forum I’m talking about has the catchy name: Honest Work From Home Success (and I thought I was bad at coming up with short, memorable names…).

I’ve had a good look around the forum, which is UK based (as far as anything can be nationalized on the internet). All in all, it’s a very pleasant community and it has quite a high level of activity, which I think is important in a forum.

And that’s about all there is to say, because instead of reading my thoughts about it, you should just hop over and take a peek yourself. Let me know what you think.

Question of the day: What’s your favourite online marketing forum?

Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

A big thank you to everyone who took part!

Check out the video below to see the results and hear about what I’m going to do, now that I have a better idea of what you guys want to know more about:

As I mentioned in the video, you can get in touch with me any time to discuss what you’d like to know more about, what you want me to include in the training material I’m putting together etc. All feedback is always welcome.

Cheers,

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And I’m not about to stop. I will keep creating products and guides like these, to help you get started online and to help take your business to the next level. To help me make the perfect products, suited to your needs, I want to ask for a favour: Take two minutes of your time to answer four quick questions in the survey linked to below. Your answers will help me prioritize my products and tailor them as perfectly as possible to your needs.

>>> Click here to take the survey. <<<

Thanks.

Two things you might need to know concerning my upcoming products:

1. The next one in the pipeline is a detailed link-building plan (you won’t believe how many backlinks you can build, using only free tools!).
2. In addition to my free guides and trainings, I will also be releasing some higher-end products that I charge for. You’ll always be able to get tons of value for free and soon, you’ll be able to get even more value for a small price.

Again, please take the survey above and help me out with this. Also, taking the survey makes you totally awesome and increases your attractiveness to the opposite sex by at least 130%, so there’s something in it for you, too.

Cheers,

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Three things I want to let you know about this:

1. For anyone who has already joined SEOLV, I have something very valuable for you coming very soon. Also, it will be free, so be sure to check back here and/or subscribe to the feed.

2. For anyone who wanted to join, but missed the chance, I also have something for you guys in store. I’ll be publishing a link-building strategy that you can follow for free and that will give you similar or even better results than a system like SEOLV (depending on how intensely you use it, of course). This will not be free, but I will be offering it for a very reasonable price.

3. For everyone on the lookout for alternatives to SEOLV, I’m trying to get the chance to review other, similar systems like Article Marketing Automation, My Article Network and Unique Article Wizard. I can’t guaranee anything, but I’ll see what I can do. I’d love to do a proper roundup of the different alternatives and show you the actual stats and numbers, so you can decide which network is the best for you. If I can make it happen, I will. I just hope the owners of the networks will be cooperative.

That’s all for now. Cheers,

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I don’t really want to go in-depth on this, so let me just say: if you use or want to use any kind of tables on a WordPress site, do yourself a favour and get the plugin.

Are the Themes Any Good?

In a word: yes.

In a few more words: the visual design of the Elegant Themes collection is, without a doubt, top tier.  All of the themes are really well designed, most of them look absolutely stunning and in terms of usability, page structure etc.  there’s nothing to complain about.

Apart from the eye-candy, I was also pleasantly surprised by what the themes have to offer “under the bonnet”.  Every theme comes with an easy to use and feature-rich options menu, accessible in the WordPress admin area.  The options let you easily modify and change several aspects of the theme’s appearance, switch between different colour schemes (if available), set up ad space and AdSense areas, tweak SEO settings and much more.

Here is a Screenshot of part of this options menu, called the “epanel”:

Another thing worth mentioning: I am very happy with the loading speeds of all the Elegant Themes I have tried so for. Even with animated galleries and lots of pictures (like you see here on RQR), the pages build up fairly quickly.

Are They Suitable for Money-Sites?

So, the themes may be good, but are they also suitable for sites geared completely towards monetizaton? I can only see one potential problem with using Elegant Themes for money-sites: they aren’t ugly.

As you may know, for certain types of sites, particularly if they are monetized with AdSense or banner ads, it’s beneficial to use an ugly theme.  Essentially, if your website is ugly, then the ads on it will be the most compelling thing to click on.  This definitely won’t happen with Elegant Themes.

Apart from that, some of the themes on offer are actually very interesting from a marketing prospective, because they can be used as a flexible CMS for websites that don’t actually look like blogs.  If you’re promoting affiliate products or your own products, then some of these themes are definitely worth taking a closer look at.

What it comes down to is that it simply depends on your market and how you intend to monetize a website.  What I can tell you is that even though I originally only signed up with Elegant Themes to get this one theme that you are now looking at on RichQuickReview, browsing through the ET gallery gave me some new ideas and I have since set up several websites using their themes.

The Marketing Lesson

Elegant Themes has a very interesting business model, which works like this: you sign up for a membership to get access to all of their themes, future updates and support.  There is no way to buy only one single theme but you can keep any themes you are using, even if you cancel your membership.

What’s special about this is that the membership costs only 20 bucks a year.

The question I asked myself when I saw this offer was: if I were this guy, would I offer (currently) 37 high end, premium themes plus support for only 20 bucks a year?

And this is in a market where, for example, the Thesis theme is selling like hot cakes, costing $87 for a single-site licence and competitor Woo Themes is selling smaller packages of themes starting at $70.  Not to mention that buying a single premium theme that has the kind of quality design and flexibility that elegant themes offers, will usually cost more than 20 bucks.

At first glance, it just doesn’t make sense for Elegant Themes to put such a low price tag on what they have to offer.

However, it seems to be working out just fine.  I don’t know any exact sales numbers but I can tell you that there are more than 22,000 members registered in the ET forums.  It’s safe to assume that not all of those are still active and paying members, but even if everyone were to quit before the second yearly payment, this amount of members still represents quite a tidy bit revenue.

What’s the lesson here?  Making a really, really good offer can pay off.

$20 is kind of a no-brainer and I was willing to pay that amount just to get hold of one of the themes.  The other themes on offer and the good support won me over and I don’t see a reason to cancel my membership.  If you can make an offer that gets around 20,000 people thinking along those lines, well, then you’re making a good living.

By the way: How do you like the new look?

Cheers,

In this post, I explain a big problem I see with “Make Money Online” guides and what I want to change on RQR because of this. Also, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t post for a long time, I’ll briefly explain at the end of this post.

All Marketing and No Content a.k.a. The Newbie Trap

As I said, I had been looking to review several products lately, but ended up not reviewing them. Why? Basically, because I was disappointed in them. I was so disappointed, that I couldn’t even be bothered to go through all of the material and if I don’t do that, then I can’t write a proper review.

Now, on the one side, I feel almost obliged to write about bad products, so that some people might be saved from buying them. On the other hand, however, I have more important things to do with my time than going through sub-par training courses just to write a review.

The problem with many of the products I looked at is the same that Banner Ad Blueprint has: They are made by pure marketers – people who know everything about creating a great offer and nothing about teaching.

This type of product is usually set up as a “Newbie Trap”: Make huge promises to an audience that doesn’t really know much about marketing and then feed them some rehashed crap once they bought the product (and fought past half a dozen upsells).

–

Real Marketing Products

Instead of writing a ton of negative reviews about products like these, I want to make one general recommendation: Always think twice about a “how to make money online” guide. Most of them seem to be lacking in quality. There is a separate category of products that are much more often worth an investment and these are what I call “real” marketing products.

Real marketing products are tools and services that can leverage what you’re already doing to make money. For example, the recently reviewed WP Split Test plugin for WordPress is quite such a program. It’s quite simple and it serves to split-test your WordPress posts. It doesn’t claim to make you tons of money overnight, but it actually has more money-making potential than most of the guides I’ve read lately.

Further examples of “real” marketing products include keyword research tools, automation tools and services, programs like The Best Spinner, which helps leverage article marketing, programs like Web2Mayhem to help spread content around the web and things like rank tracking and analysis software.

–

No Love For Guides?

I won’t be seeking out guides and ebooks to review from now on. That doesn’t mean I’ll never review them again, just that I will be concentrating more on the “real” products mentioned above.

The question is, of course: What is a beginner to do? You have to learn the basics of Internet marketing somehow, after all. Well, for this purpose, I’ll be building a library of ebooks to cover all of the essentials. WordPress Websites Made Easy is the first in this series of guides and just like it, all of the following ones will be free.

I hope to be able to provide you with everything you need to know to make your first steps in online marketing and I want to provide all this for free. My motives aren’t entirely altruistic, either. I’ve been getting more and more questions in my inbox and I want to be able to point you to guides I’ve already written, so that I don’t have to type out long responses.

Also: Pretty soon you’ll have to sign up to my list in order to download the free stuff. Then, I’ll spam you with pre-written mails for every big Internet marketing product launch that comes along. And if you believe that last sentence, you must be new here. Welcome to RQR!

Anyway, that’s all for now and I’d love to get some feedback from you. Do you think this is a good plan? What kinds of products do you want to see reviewed the most? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

P.S.: About my hiatus: I took some time off to clean out my life. Cleaned out my apartment, sold a lot of junk I had lying around and cleaned up my mind in the process. That was really good, believe me. Then, I also caught some bloody virus and my camera stopped working, which also delayed further production of blog-posts. I hope you all missed me! (Yeah, I know, you didn’t even notice my absence, did you?)

This post is about the concept of the “Free Line”, the line that separates stuff you give away for free from stuff that you charge for. The Free Line is a concept that I first heard Eben Pagan talk about (though I don’t know if he coined the term) and it’s one of the things that is drastically different in online marketing, compared to “traditional” offline marketing.

Read on to learn exactly what the Free Line is and how it’s placement can dramatically impact your business.

The Basic Concept

As stated above, the Free Line is simply what separates your free products from your “premium” or paid products. The first interesting point about this is that there is a part of your product range that’s available for free. I’m sure you’re no stranger to this: In online marketing, everyone’s trying to give away free stuff, right? The typical example would be a short ebook report or a freebie to download (free theme, free sample, demo-version of a program…).

When we’re talking about the Free Line, it’s about more than just having some stuff that you give away for free, however. The question is where you are placing your Free Line, in other words: How much stuff you give away and how valuable that stuff is.

-

Value

Value and amount of freebies is where we see the big difference between online- and offline marketing. Offline, most things you can get for free are purely promotional (e.g. brochures, product catalogs,…). Online, you’ll often be offered real value. A brochure is something you wouldn’t pay for if you didn’t get it for free, since there’s almost no value in it. On the other hand, a limited-time trial of a piece of software has real value – as much value as the full program, during the time of the trial. And the same goes for free information products: Many businesses give away very valuable and useful information in the free guides they offer.

-

Business Application

Giving away free things is valuable in three ways:

1. Reputation
   By giving away something of real value for free, you position yourself favourably with your potential customers and the better your freebie is, the more likely people will remember you.
2. Sign-Ups
   Most freebies are offered in exchange for an e-mail address. In fact, giving away free things is the most popular list-building technique out there.
3. Trust
   The prospect can get an idea of your quality standard by checking out your free offering. If you’re giving away something really awesome for free, then your premium products must be worth looking at.

Eben Pagan says that you should give away your best stuff for free, then create something better and sell that. He recommends that you push the free line further back, offer more things and more valuable things for free and then scale your prices in the back end. He himself lives this principle in his businesses: He always gives away a lot of valuable stuff and on the premium side, he holds $10’000 seminars, among other things.

-

Your Free Line

Are you aware of where you have placed the free line in your business? If it doesn’t exist yet (common in e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses), how can you create it? What is the best thing you can afford to give away for free? If you already have a free line, how can you push it back? How can you give away more value?

Whatever you do, don’t be afraid of the free line plunging you into poverty. If you’ve been watching the recent big launches in the make money online market, you’ve probably seen very generous free offers in the pre-launches. For example, Frank Kern gave away one of his earlier big courses and a very interesting list-building script during the pre-launch of List Control. We’ve seen many examples, lately, of marketers pushing back the free line and still raking in millions with their premium product.

What has your experience with free giveaways been? Do you appreciate them as a customer? Do you like to give things away to your prospects? Let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

Market research is usually concerned with the demographics of a market, the amount and kind of competition you can expect, evaluation of what type of content and delivery the target demographic responds to etc.

For this article, I want to take the market research down a notch and present you a very simple, very basic research “method” that you should be applying on a regular basis as an online marketer. Especially if you are new to this game.

Competition “Spying”

To get a feeling for a market (or even Internet marketing in general), go and take a look at websites and sales-pages created by other Internet marketers.

How do you find those pages? If you are already selling products or affiliate offers yourself, simply find some more offers in your niche and run a search on the product names as well as some closely related keywords. Especially for the product names, most of the resulting pages will be pure marketing sites. For your “typical” money-makers like “weight loss”/”how to lose weight”, “dog training”, “make money online” etc. you’ll also find lots of pure money-sites.

If you haven’t decided on a niche yourself yet, just go to ClickBank or CBtrends and search through the product catalogue there. Not that ClickBank is the only or even the most important online marketplace, but it’s the most easily accessible and you can find lots of product names and keywords to search for within minutes.

If you’re a member of some CPA networks, apply the exact same method. Search for the product/offer names as well as closely related keywords and browse some of the results.

–

What to Look Out For

As you are browsing these sites and pages, here are some things to take note of:

• Types of Sites
  Are you encountering many squeeze pages or sales pages? How are they set up? Is there an order-button right on the page or do they squeeze your e-mail address first? Or are you encountering blogs and blog-style pages?
  –
• Use of Media
  What are you finding on the resulting pages? Is it mostly text, test with images, audio or video? What’s the writing style like? How is the information in the video delivered?
  –
• Visuals
  Are the sites visually appealing? How are they making use of colours and fonts? Are they simple or graphically elaborate?
  –
• Incentives/Promises
  What is being offered on the pages? Are there free giveaways or other incentives? What’s being promised?

Once you’ve taken note of these things, simply ask yourself: Could you do the same? Or could you even do better?

Remember that many of the people behind those pages you’re looking at are making money from them. Of course, not every offer and every sales-page is profitable, but particularly the top listed pages in organic search results are almost guaranteed to turn some kind of a profit for the site owner.

The reason I mention this is because especially those new to online marketing can easily feel overwhelmed by it all and not know where to start. If you just take a close look at what other marketers are doing, you’ll soon realize that there’s no real magic to it. Many a successful sales-page is not particularly pretty and you don’t have to be a genius to create something similar, or superior, yourself.

Allright, now go forth and research! And once you’ve researched, build!

Cheers,

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A few days ago, Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger), Chris Brogan (Trust Agents), Sonia Simone and Brian Clark (both Copyblogger) launched a new membership site called “The Third Tribe”. You’ve probably heard of it, since it made something of a splash.

This post is not another Third Tribe rant. Others have already done that better than I ever could. If you take just one thing from this post, let it be this: Go to Griz’s Third Tribe review and read it. It makes a more than excellent case and is very much worth reading.

If you take another thing from this post, then it’s a clearer and less biased overview of Internet marketing “tribes” that follows below:

Third Tribe

First, here’s the skinny on the Third Tribe:

This product is marketed using a common marketing technique: You establish a scenario in which there is a very apparent need and then you fill that need. This is often described as “creating the market for your product”. As I’m sure you are aware, every product should have some kind of a unique selling proposition (USP) that answers the modern consumers ever-present question: “Why should I buy this instead of one of the other, similar products on offer?”

It’s not always easy to create a USP for your product, especially in saturated markets such as “make money online”. What the Third Tribe says, is: “So far, there were two tribes in Internet marketing: Slimey, dishonest and obnoxious sales-types and hippy social media types who want to be everyone’s friend and are all broke. Now, there’s the third option: Real, honest, non-obnoxious marketing that will still fill your pockets with cash!”

It’s a pretty clever setup, in my opinion. Of course, it’s dead wrong, but what can you expect from something you see on a sales-page?

–

Tribe or No Tribe?

As I’ve confessed previously, I’m a bit of an information junky and I spend more time than is reasonable on different forums, reading blogs, ebooks, books etc. about Internet marketing. It seems to me that there really are certain types or tribes of Internet marketers, all coming at this same subject from a different angle.

Below, I list the groups and types of marketers I’ve encountered online. What can you get from reading about this? You might be surprised at how many different online marketing philosophies and methods exist and you might get some new ideas and a fresh perspective.

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The Bums

As far as I know, Travis Sago is the guy who coined the term Bum Marketing. The term simply comes from the fact that bum marketing methods all rely on free traffic sources (i.e. a bum could afford it). Many beginners in Internet marketing start out with some variation of bum marketing, relying on article directories, Squidoo/Hubpages, free blogs and classifieds to make their first few dollars.

Bum marketers also seem to have a certain affinity towards Clickbank and the Amazon affiliate program and the most successful among them tend to produce a very large volume of articles every day, often making use of article spinning to get more mileage out of their work.

Bum Marketing:
Write lots of articles, get traffic and rankings for free.

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The SEO’s

The SEO’s are all about getting free traffic via search engines (primarily Google). There’s quite a bit of overlap between the SEO and the Bum tribes, since both swear by free traffic.

While the bum marketer mostly drives traffic to articles on article directories, the SEO drives traffic to self-hosted websites. Articles may or may not be a means towards this end. SEO’s often make use of social bookmarking, profile-links, article and video distribution, three-way link-swaps (not as kinky as it sounds) and other methods to get more and better backlinks to their highly optimized pages. They are also often engaged in heated debates among each other, since no one really knows how the Google algorithm works, but everyone has their theories.

SEO:
Keyword research, optimization and lots of link-building.

–

The Involved Marketers/Product Creators

Involved marketing (I got this term from the Smart Passive Income blog) is all about being transparent, open and honest, getting out there, getting in touch with people and building a “personal brand”. Think Gary Vaynerchuk.

Involved marketers spend a lot of time building relationships with their potential customers and are often heavily involved in social media platforms like facebook, twitter and Digg. They also tend to make more use of video than marketers of other tribes.

Since involved marketing is all about personal branding and transparency, these marketers are often also product creators. After all, once you’ve built real trust and you become recognizable and liked by the crowd in your niche, selling something made by yourself makes the most sense.

Involved Marketing:
Build relationships, create a fan-base and sell your own products and services.

–

The Traffic-Arbitrage Crowd

Why work your butt off to get pages and articles ranked in search engines and to get people to notice and like you when all you need to do is give a search engine or CPV company some money to get floods of traffic almost instantly? That’s the question that describes the Traffic Arbitrager’s take on online marketing.

These marketers have an affinity towards CPA offers and a bit of a love/hate relationship with Google, since AdWords has enormous traffic-potential but also strict rules and a twitchy trigger-finger when it comes to banning accounts.

Paying for traffic is something of a daring gamble and for everyone who hits it big-time and starts making unspeakable amounts of money in a short time, using PPC or CPV, there are hundreds who lose a lot of money and give up before they ever see a dime in return.

Marketers in the traffic-arbitrage tribe are perhaps the most technical and tend to spend more time and effort with testing, tracking and tweaking than marketers in any of the other crowds.

Traffic Arbitrage:
It’s all about the ROI. And the CTR, and the CPC, and the EPC,…

–

The Bloggers

Blogging is another thing many beginners in online marketing get into. One hears stories about people making fortunes with blogs and there are many “blogging for money” related products and, of course, blogs.

Bloggers, like involved marketers, are all about building a community and connecting with others. They leave comments on other blogs, write guest posts and do the social media thing.

Blogs can be monetized using ad-space, AdSense, promoting affiliate products in posts or as platforms for selling self-made products.

Since blogging is as public as it is, in this tribe, the vast discrepancy between the few who make it big and the thousands who struggle to make a dime is very apparent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that making money from a blog is more difficult than making money with “real” marketing, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered, I happen to believe so.

Blogging for Money:
Become Internet-famous.

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Conclusion

People have a strong tendency to form groups and identify with them. They also have a very strong tendency to think of themselves and their own group as superior to others.

You will see that in each of the above mentioned online marketing tribes, there are people who are very firm in their belief that their way of doing things is the only “right” way or the only “real” way of making money online and that all the others are just scammers, time-wasters and/or idiots.

For this reason alone I encourage anyone to become familiar with more than one method and more than one crowd. Wherever you are involved, if you get in too deep and follow just one direction, you’re always blinding yourself to many opportunities and ideas that can be found outside of your particular tribe.

What tribe do you belong to? Or do you think this entire concept is rubbish? What about the Third Tribe, do you have a rant about that you need to get off your chest? The comments are all yours!

Cheers,

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