It’s that time of the year again, when anyone who has been thinking about giving SBI a try has an extra special reason to take the plunge. For the first year, you get not one, but two complete SBI sites for the price of one.

They’ve recently started marketing SBI as a complete online business course. It’s about time, too, since their Action Guide really is a complete course. It’s a very specific course, designed to allow you to create content sites that compete on high profile keywords.

The secret of SBI is that anything that can be automated has been automated. You don’t worry about search engine optimization, you just pick keywords according to the guidelines in the action guide, and put them in the places you’re told to do so. Everything else just happens. There are tons of other features like that that make it worth the yearly fee.

Your only responsibility to your SBI site is to create content consistently. That might mean one page a day, it might mean one page a week, or one page a month. Just keep creating content at whatever rate you can, and your site will keep creeping up in the search engine results.

SBI is not for people who want to create a site and forget about it. My upcoming ebook is for that audience, but SBI sites require tender loving care on a regular basis. Think of them as high maintenance friends. Give the sites what they need, and they’ll start earning for you.

To take advantage of the 2-for-1 Christmas special, click on that link and click on the Order link at the bottom of the page.

This blog is supported through sales, not ads (although I am testing Adsense placement right now). If you like a product I've reviewed, buying it through my link helps keep the site alive and more reviews coming. Also, if you found this post interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. If you're already a subscriber, thank you!

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Okay, so for this new ebook I want to create video tutorials as part of an upsell package.

My general philosophy on upsell packages is that they should be unique content that makes using the original product much easier for the customer. So those customers that are willing to pay for the upsell package get an easier experience than those who don’t. For my ebook, video tutorials made a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, the freely available products for creating video tutorials fall just a bit short of being as convenient as they could be. My biggest problem is that I’m often demonstrating using a variety of applications, which require dynamically zooming in to show detail. The paid products will do that, but the free ones don’t, at least not so that I can work with them.

Another problem is me…I’m a perfectionist, and it’s nearly impossible to get through even a short video segment without making some sort of mistake. I know that I need to move on and get over it, but I keep wanting to redo the video to fix the mistake (and of course I’ll make a different mistake).

Obviously my talents don’t run to creating videos! I’ll keep at it, though, and get them done.

This blog is supported through sales, not ads (although I am testing Adsense placement right now). If you like a product I've reviewed, buying it through my link helps keep the site alive and more reviews coming. Also, if you found this post interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. If you're already a subscriber, thank you!

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Progress continues on getting the web site set up for my latest ebook. But slowly.

Every time I start working on the upsell package (a video tutorial series, plus some Wordpress goodies), it’s ever so tempting to just come over here and write a blog post instead.

Blogging is easy, and that’s part of what makes it attractive. Who wouldn’t want to make a living writing about what you had for dinner the night before, or what you watched on TV? Writing blog posts is just about the ideal job for anyone who is literate. You don’t have to put too much thought into them, you don’t have to think too far ahead, and you don’t have to spend the entire day at it.

By contrast, Internet Marketing is more time consuming, and harder to put together. The possible returns are greater, but putting the effort into getting there is tough, when the ease of blogging beckons.

Average blogging income is pretty limited, though, which will keep me working on my IM projects. My tests with Adsense on this blog, which gets about 100 unique visitors a day, is that it’ll earn $0.50 a day. Granted, the IM audience isn’t crazy about clicking on ads, but that’s still pretty low.

So, the work continues…

This blog is supported through sales, not ads (although I am testing Adsense placement right now). If you like a product I've reviewed, buying it through my link helps keep the site alive and more reviews coming. Also, if you found this post interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. If you're already a subscriber, thank you!

Popularity: 9% [?]

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I joined this program as a favor to an online friend.

I figured I’d get a case study out of it, promoting a simple low cost program to see how it did in various advertising venues. I’d hit safelists, traffic exchanges, the usual places. It’d give me something to write about while I’m still working through all the details on my next ebook (the ebook itself has been done for quite a while, but getting the site set up and figuring out how to make money from it is harder going).

So, what is Work For 3 Dollars?

List Builder

This is one of those sites that says it’ll build your list for you. It’s a bit like a safelist, except that you can only email the people who are in your referral tree. The tree goes 15 levels deep, though, so that could be quite a lot of people. You can email them once a week.

Since they’ve paid $3 to be part of the program, they’re prequalified as far as being willing to spend a little money for a larger return. This isn’t the audience to send a mailing about a high ticket item like Perry Marshall’s Bobsled Run. But low priced ebooks and other one-time payment programs might do well.

Digital Products

The member’s area has digital products you get with your membership. Right now there are four ebooks there, but I’m sure that’ll grow with time. The four that are there now are: Million Dollar Emails and Autoresponder Magic by Yanik Silver, 1001 Newbie-Friendly Tips by Bob McElwain, and Working with ClickBank by Tom Hua. Each comes with resale rights.

The books are a nice bonus, and worth the $3 one-time fee.

Income Opportunity

You earn $0.50 for every referral you bring in, regardless of where they end up in your referral tree. You also earn $1.00 for every person on your first level, and $0.12 for every person on any other level, down to 15. The matrix is 3 wide.

So, if you recruit two people directly, you have your $3 back. If your upline recruits three people into your first level, you have your $3 back. It’s a pretty easy program to get into profit. From there it depends on whether the people you’re recruiting are active themselves, or if they’re just waiting on spillover. With an active downline, your total potential is pretty good.

Conclusions

While this isn’t the sort of program you get into to make a ton of money in, it is a good value for your $3 one-time fee. You get some quality ebooks as well as the opportunity to refer others for income.

If you’re just starting out, or (like me) want something low cost to test different advertising methods, Work For 3 Dollars is a good deal.

This blog is supported through sales, not ads (although I am testing Adsense placement right now). If you like a product I've reviewed, buying it through my link helps keep the site alive and more reviews coming. Also, if you found this post interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. If you're already a subscriber, thank you!

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A lot has been written online about how to get your sites indexed in Google.

Generally, the advice runs in two flavors. One set of people say that you need to submit your site and do a fair amount of work. These are generally the people trying to get you to pay them to do the work. Another set of people say, just put some links out there and Google will find you.

I subscribe to the second theory, but had it brought home to me recently just how easy it is to get a site indexed in Google. Remember that Google *wants* to index good sites. That’s its job, to index good sites and deindex bad sites.

I wrote a site about places to get organic food in the small town where I live. The search volume on the town’s name and “organic food” was non-existent (I was probably the only one searching on it). So I didn’t bother creating links to this site anywhere, submitting it to Google’s webmaster tools, I didn’t create a sitemap file, etc.

What I did do was use Google Analytics, so I could see how few people visited the site, and I sent out a few emails to local people I knew who might be interested.

Less than a week later, the site was indexed. Maybe sooner than that, since I didn’t bother checking until a week later, out of curiosity.

So the moral is, if you’re creating a site and you don’t want it indexed, don’t use Google Analytics, and don’t send the URL around in emails that might pass through Google.

This blog is supported through sales, not ads (although I am testing Adsense placement right now). If you like a product I've reviewed, buying it through my link helps keep the site alive and more reviews coming. Also, if you found this post interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to my RSS feed. If you're already a subscriber, thank you!

Popularity: 13% [?]

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