Frank Haywood – Page 52 – Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business

May

2009

I Teach You For Free

I’ve just made a snap decision.

Sort of.

It’s been building up for a while now, and something I’ve just read has made me say “Right, time to blow the lid on this.”

So here’s the deal. I’m going to teach a SMALL group of people to recognise when a product will do what it says it does and to understand when they’re being manipulated and how.

In the process, you’ll also learn how to do a product launch yourself. And you’ll learn how to sell your own products with the right actions and words.

This is SCARY stuff, and it cost me thousands of dollars and countless hours to learn.

I’m not going to charge you anything.

But, I AM going to ask you to do a few tasks for me as we go along.

They’re not difficult, and everything I ask you to do will also be a good learning experience in itself. You’ll be able to perform these same tasks for yourself and apply them to your own business.

Okay?

There’s also a proviso or two. I need to know that you have the right skill set to begin with.

I need to know you:-

o Are proficient in the English language.
o Can write. Both harder and easier than it sounds.
o Are independent and have a “can do” attitude. If I give you a task, you will get a good description of the task, but you will get NO help from me and I WON’T answer your questions – I don’t have the time to hand hold. You have to do this on your own.

In addition and ideally, but not necessary:-

o You would know basic HTML. No CSS required, just an understanding of basic formatting of web pages. This would include the use of FTP.
o Be able to do simple graphics editing using either Photoshop or GIMP.
o Know how to install WordPress, and add plugins and themes.

That’s it.

You can treat this as a “Super Internship” where the payoff is you learn various vital new skills and also how to do a product launch.

In summary, you’ll learn stuff and you’ll be given tasks to do by both written instruction and video.

What this isn’t in any way, is coaching. If you want me to coach you then you’ll have to pay me, and I’m not taking coaching students at the moment.

This is free, and some of the stuff you’ll learn from me no one else will tell you let alone discuss. It’s a bit shady, and it’s a bit on the dark side.

But it works.

There can only be a limited number of spaces. Let’s say 30. That’s all I’m going to take.

I’ll give you more details in a few days when I’ve thought it out some more.

In the meantime if you want to show your interest and get a “foot in the door” or ask any questions (while you can) then you can do so by leaving a comment.

-Frank Haywood

May

2009

Something Tiny Blew My Mind

About three weeks or so ago – since my last blog post really I suppose – my brain decided to turn off for a bit.

I couldn’t concentrate, think straight, or even start a sentence. My memory, poor as it is, stopped being any real use to me too.

I’m not kidding.

At the same time, I was constantly tired and didn’t need any excuse to close my eyes for a nap. In fact, I was getting up in the morning, doing the school run with my wife and then that was it. I needed to go back to sleep.

Yes, I was a bit worried about it, but not to the point where I felt I had to see a doctor…

But it turns out it must have been a virus. Eventually it broke into a sore throat, sniffles and a headache. About the same time my mind started to clear up.

Also, my wife now has the same symptoms, which makes me feel better in a perverse sort of way as I know that my problem wasn’t something more serious.

And because we were both in the same frame of mind for a while, some conversations have been a little strange.

The following joke is a good example of what it’s been like in our house.

There’s an old couple at breakfast time, and the lady says “I’d like something a bit special for breakfast this morning.”

“Oh yes dear, what’s that then?”

“I’d like some ambrosia rice pudding please. I know there’s a tin in the cupboard, I saw it there yesterday.”

“Okay, I’ll do that then.”

“I haven’t finished yet. Write this down, you know you’ll only forget it.”

“No, I’m okay, I won’t forget. What else do you want?”

“I also want some whipped cream on top.”

“Okay. Ambrosia rice pudding with whipped cream on top.”

“Write it down, I know you’ll forget what I’ve said.”

“No dear, it’s okay, I won’t forget. Is that all?”

“I bought some strawberries yesterday. I’d like two strawberries on top please.”

“Right! Ambrosia rice pudding with whipped cream on, and two strawberries to top it off. Is that it?”

“Yes. But please write it down, you know you’ll only get it all wrong.”

“No, no, dear. I’ll remember it perfectly well. Rice pudding, whipped cream, two strawberries.”

“Ooh, okay then, if you’re sure.”

So off the old gent goes into the kitchen, and for the next twenty minutes comes the sound of banging and clattering, cupboards opening and closing and so on.

He finally returns with a plate, and on that plate are two rashers of bacon, two fried eggs, and a sausage.

His wife looks at it incredulously, one eyebrow raised, and with a look of total exasperation on her face. Finally she says “See! I knew you’d forget if you didn’t write it down!”

“Wha… wha… what’s the matter dear? What have I done wrong?”

She looks at him and says…

“You’ve forgotten the toast!”

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2009

5ubliminal Is My New Hero

While doing research for a report on autoblogging, and looking for a tool that would allow you to post to WordPress remotely, I (eventually) came across this blog by 5ubliminal.

It’s well worth signing up to as the owner has released some pretty cool plugins and you’ll only get them if you sign up due to his very nice pp:Morpheus plugin which I’ve just purchased.

If he had an affiliate scheme I’d join it. And if it was a WordPress plugin I’d buy it. 😉

And after purchasing the pp:Morpheus plugin I DEFINITELY want to buy his WordPress store plugin when he releases it, it’s just what I’ve been looking for to use on this site, although I guess I’d want a slight tweak to it. From my recent shopping experience there it allows you access to additional content by adding an access token to your subscriber account on a blog.

The tweak I’d want doing to it is to optionally (on a per-post basis) make some content available to all existing subscribers, but make new subscribers pay for it. Tie that in with an affiliate scheme and it would be bloody awesome. I don’t swear often so I think you can tell what I think about that idea.

If you decide not to look at 5ubliminal’s blog or even subscribe, then at least take 2 minutes of your time to read this and have a chuckle. 5ubliminal is my hero just for creating this page alone.

http://www.5ubliminal.com/

-Frank Haywood

5ubliminal message: I would very much also like a WordPress plugin that allows me to gather subscribers and email them from within WordPress. It would need SMTP support so I could use a service that I like called AuthSMTP.com to ensure email deliverability. Actually I think a lot of people would like that. Thank you. 🙂

Apr

2009

Taking Stock And A 12 Month Strategy

Yes I am still here.

Thank you to all the people who’ve asked if everything is okay, and where I am. Your concern is appreciated, I’ve just been lying low.

Well, actually I’ve taken a little time out to take stock and decide which direction I’m going in this next financial year. I’ve now decided what to do and hopefully you’ll come with me for the journey.

This last few months I’ve deviated from what I know works, and I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation.

First of all, what do I know works? The answer to that is right at the top of this blog, “Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation.”

You create a product, you get some traffic to take a look at your offer, you build your list, and then you automate the whole process.

Cool. I’ll carry on doing that this year.

In fact I’ll be concentrating more on list building than anything else this year, and I’ll be implementing it in everything I do. I’ve decided to make list building my “hedgehog” concept from now onwards. ie no project is pursued unless it builds a list.

Secondly, what have I been experimenting with?

At the beginning of November I was introduced to IPK. I immediately saw the untapped potential and so off I went full steam ahead and created the Price Comparison service together with a method of quickly building sites thrown in for free.

This also captured my wife’s imagination and attention and she started building mini sites to take advantage of the huge empty market that was out there. She also focussed on creating some hub sites, and two of those have just begun to pay off, with two of the sites making her a total of around £65.00 ($97.50) in the first 10 days of this month.

When the children go back to school next week she’ll be concentrating on adding more content to those hub sites to get them onto page 1 of Google.

Which raises another interesting point.

She’s made that £65.00 ($97.50) from just a few visitors a day – around 30-35 average – mostly from Yahoo, MSN and some ISPs own search pages. Google so far has hardly been in the running at all, sending only 1 or 2 visitors a day.

When she gets her sites off page 5-ish of Google and onto page 1, traffic will kick in big time and her earnings will soar.

She’s never done anything like this before, and I’ve been really pleased that 1) she really got to grips with the whole site building thing (the Site Builder makes it easy) and 2) she’s making money from it and can see that her income will grow in time as long as she sticks at it.

As a result of what’s been going on with the mini-sites I’ve also been experimenting with autoblogging, with some very pleasing and exciting results.

It’s funny. You know how some things just bubble around and are there in the background but nothing happens? And then suddenly they “come of age” and everyone’s paying attention to them?

Well, it’s autoblogging’s turn to stand in the spotlight.

I mentioned automation above, and autoblogging is a perfect example of this.

You set up a niche blog, you set up a pile of relevant articles from a free article site to be posted, and push the button. From that point on you forget the blog and move onto the next one.

Here’s a great and recent example. I set up an autoblog 5 weeks ago about petrol lawnmowers. I grabbed a load of articles and queued them up for gradual release over 6 weeks to see how it would do.

There’s no advertising on that site yet, and I’m due to revisit it in the next week to put on a huge pile of articles and also some monetisation. (No, I WON’T be using AdSense.)

So far there are 84 posts and with no links from anywhere I’m now getting 4 or 5 visitors a day for the exact search terms I want people to find the site by. Google has indexed 75 pages but the site isn’t yet in the first 10 pages.

Not a lot of visitors yet, but my plans are to shortly apply a linking strategy which will boost the number of back links and traffic to the site.

The next steps for that site are:-

#1 – Queue a whole load more articles which will appear over the next 12 months.
#2 – Apply a good linking strategy.
#3 – Monetise the site with a few “lawnmower reviews” and Price Comparisons, and also a few ads using AdSpurt and Amazon (and maybe eBay) widgets.
#4 – Link to my REAL petrol lawnmower site. 😉
#5 – Forget about it.

Okay I won’t completely forget about it, as I’ll probably make changes to it as I like to experiment. Experimentation and a bit of thought and applied logic is what will make the site really pay off.

At the end of the day, this autoblogging site is disposable. Notice I said that I’ll be using it to link to my real site. Google likes it when related sites link to other sites. Not reciprocal links mind, just one way.

So if I apply a good solid linking strategy to both sites, and then link the autoblog to my real site, then the real site should do quite well. Especially if I create a couple of other related sites via autoblogging.

Finally, I’ll be automating the creation of my mini-sites by farming the work out to staff in the Philippines and Manila where the employment costs are much lower.

(I’m reliably told that there’s a technical college in Manila where the undergrads speak good English, are well-educated and like to make a bit of cash doing web work.)

So there we have it. My strategy for the next 12 months.

#1 – Continue to create new and useful products for my own business and sell them. Make list building my “hedgehog” concept.
#2 – Create niche mini-sites (monetised with Price Comparisons) using a combination of WordPress and my Site Builder service. (Build niche lists.)
#3 – Create niche autoblogs where I both monetise them and also use them to link to my real niche mini-sites in #2. (Build niche lists.)
#4 – Pay other people to do #2 and #3 for me.

I hope you can see that having a good strategy and knowing just what you’re going to be doing and how, is well worth taking some time out to decide.

Maybe you’ll decide that my strategy or at least parts of it are good ones and will work for you too.

I’ll share more with you as it happens, IF I get feedback that’s what you want me to do.

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2009

Autoblogging

I’ve known about autoblogging for quite a while now, about 2-3 years I guess, but I’ve never done anything about it while spending a considerable amount of time learning a lot about it. Learning new stuff is great, but it’s not a good use of your time unless you put the learning into action.

That’s changing now as I started the first run of an “experiment” yesterday.

I took out a brand new .info domain in the baby niche for a term that suddenly seems to be getting a lot of search. My wife has earlier this week taken out a .co.uk domain for the same term, and is building a site similar to the one she built a couple of weeks ago that resulted in a payout from Amazon yesterday.

So she’s building a regular “hand made” site using Price Comparisons, and I’m building an automated site using autoblogging techniques. We’re going to directly compare to see if there are any SEO or monetary benefits to doing it by hand over having a site built automatically.

In case you’ve never heard of the term autoblogging, it refers to a method of where a blog site is built automatically or semi-automatically over time. It’s populated with freely available material you can get from article directories, and is (usually) 100% white hat.

If you think about it, by gathering together a series of articles and other material on one particular topic from multiple sources, you’re creating a useful resource for anyone interested in that subject.

In the bricks and mortar world you might think of it as a specialist store such as (for instance) scuba diving. There the store owner has pulled together lots of different products all about scuba diving and it’s a one-stop-shop in that niche.

Autoblogs are no different from manually created blogs, but take a lot less effort. And they come in different guises and are used for different purposes, but the ultimate goal is to use them to make money with.

So in my case, I’m using a self-hosted WordPress blog and building it with a set of (as I’ve said) freely available articles from an article directory. I’m monetising it using the Amazon self-optimising widget (like Google AdSense, but pays a lot more), and also eventually with an eBay feed, and of course AdSpurt.

Rather than monetise it directly as above, I could have just set the blog up to grow and rank well in the search engines with no direct monetisation. I could then either monetise it by persuading people to sign up to a mailing list and then having an autoresponder send them a series of offers every week, or I could use it to send traffic to my wife’s site.

Also, instead of using a self-hosted blog, I could have used for instance a free blogger blog, and again monetise it indirectly.

And there are umpteen other methods of building and monetising autoblogs.

Now I know that any non-marketer who is more of a techy geek would likely get very agitated at this and start making false accusations like “spammer” and “splogger”, and “ruining the blogging community”. I’ve seen that talk in various places, but this is total nonsense and in most cases the same people are running AdSense on their sites.

There’s nothing wrong with monetising a blog, and if you decide to do it the easy way via autoblogging, there’s also nothing wrong with doing that either. But some people just don’t seem to get it, and I get the distinct impression that they think that’s it’s somehow cheating to do things more effectively.

After all, what’s the difference between running a generalised article directory full of other people’s articles, and running a niche blog full of other people’s articles? It’s a different platform, but the net effect is the same.

So, just to be clear, there’s a distinct difference between a splog (spam blog) and and an autoblog.

Splogs are by their nature typically black hat, and sploggers are responsible for all the junk sites out there that are filled with AdSense and non-sensical scraped and gibberised wrangled content from other blogs, where all references to the original author of the material has been removed.

Splogs will just appear on the web fully formed often with several hundred pages of junk, thrown together in a couple of hours max and are never touched again. The life expectancy of a splog is about 2-3 months (often less) before de-indexing happens, so the creator isn’t going to spend much time on them and knows beforehand they’ll only get a limited life out of them.

Autoblogs are typically white hat and centre on a niche using a range of legitimately obtained material that gives credit to the original author and the all-important backlink to their site. It’s the back link which is what spurred them to write and publically make available the original material in the first place. The material itself is often genuinely useful and well written articles, but of course not always.

Autoblogs will start small and grow slowly and naturally like a regular site would, with new material being published every day or so. Anyone that finds them would be inclined to believe that they’re maintained by hand, whereas in fact the posts are automated. Your visitors benefit by finding their one-stop-shop on the topic they’re interested in, and you benefit by not having to have done any real work while also being able to monetise your site.

It’s a win-win, and that’s always important to me in anything I do. I provide value, and I take my cut.

Here’s the learning point.

If you provide genuinely useful material on a topic, and the site conforms to what Google expects to see on any quality site – privacy policy, terms, etc – and it stands up to human inspection, then you have nothing to worry about. Over time it will become a force to be reckoned with.

I’ve seen countless what I would call black hatters make comments in forums and on blogs that go something like:-

“I make my splogs so ugly that people want to immediately click on something to get away from them. So I put a big fat AdSense block in their way. Muhahaha!”

*sigh*

There’s just no need to do that. Comply with what real people want and what Google want and everything will be fine. You’ll have a long term useful resource that will bring you in a nice little extra income.

-Frank Haywood