The title is not mine, but from a guy called Jason Potash. He and a couple of other folks run PortalFeeder (join when you get the chance) and TrafficKahuna (If you don’t join PF join TK when you get the chance!)

Anyway, a while back he was writing about geting started and how to do it - the title of his post heralded a REALLY useful post. You can read that post here: http://www.jasonpotash.com/blog/?p=5

He was writing about an aspect of the business that for anyone who has not yet made the leap of faith in themselves that working on one’s own business, full-time, is probably more important than any training, products, services, ebooks or personality cults.

Nope, I am not going to paraphrase the thing, here it is, in full: F-You To Suceed

Tell me what you think, please let me know how you agree or disagree with what he wrote.

I am an affiliate for Mass Automation who gave us AutoSocialPoster (ASP), RssBookmarker, Scuttleplus, WordPress Auto Installer, WP CLoner and many more. These internet marketing and blogging tools are all best in class and the price reflects this - they are not cheap giveaways.

My WordPress blogs use several of these tools to drive traffic and search engines and to help me to build better websites.

Well, for a few hours you can get any of Mass-Automation’s tools for a discount of 50%!

Anyone serious about blogging knows some or all of these great tools for WordPress bloggers, some of us would not do without them - I am one of them.

Matt, from Mass Automation has given me a coupon code to enable you take a massive 50% discount on AutoSocialPoster, half off Rss Bookmarker, WordPress Auto Installer and WP Cloner buy both for half price - a perfect pair of blog building and maintenance tools.

In order to get your discount on all products use this link: Mass-Automation
This link goes straight to RssBookmarker
Here for AutoSocialPoster

To get your discount follow these instructions:
This is a 50% discount coupon, available until 15th May 2008:

–Name of coupon: 24hpromo
–Products: applies to all our products
–Discount: 50%
–Validity: the coupon expires on 05/15/08.

Please note that the coupon needs to be entered twice: once in the shopping card and once again if paying in Google Checkout

This is a great offer and if you are serious about making money with your blogs you should be checking out these offers right now!

One of the hardest problems facing a new internet marketer is finding the route to profits. There are so many things that must be done in oreder for us to be successful. There are technical issues, marketing problems, product selection - so much that it is no wonder that most newcomers do not succeed in their new business.

The Little Automatic Moneymakers that we built for so many clients were a big help but there was something missing - the ‘from the ground up’ training in all the basic aspects of the business. That concerned me a lot. So I went out and designed a new product: Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos.

My new membership site offers training from the basics upward and most of the material is provided in the form of videos that can be downloaded to your own PC - I even include iPod versions for on the move learning.

Each month on Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos there will be at least four ‘over my shoulder’ video tutorial series providing an A to Z guide to internet marketing.

Add to that a ‘business in a box’ each and every month - a complete web based business complete with product, sales pages, website, graphics and a promotion video to use on any video sharing site - or your own web pages.

But that is not enough - every month there are a set of books and software concentrating upon a particular Internet Marketing theme - for this month we are concentrating upon SEO.

So, please, if you are interested in learning about internet marketing and you prefer to use video to help your learning then take a look at these internet marketing videos, it will be worth your while, I guarantee it!

Recently Google Adsense have made some changes to the terms and conditions. From now on all websites that carry Adsense need to carry a page with a privacy policy. This will be a bit of a pain for many people however I came across a plug-in for WordPress that will automatically add a privacy policy to all WordPress blogs. The plug-in can be downloaded from the following URL: http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/

This privacy policy plug-in is compatible with all versions of WordPress from version 2.0 upward and therefore will work with all LAMMs. I suggest that all LAMMs owners add this plug into their websites as soon as possible.

HI, I was just rooting around the interwebs when I came across a neat new tool from Jon Leger who has a knack for making neat tools. The guy has had too much of my money!

Anyway, his latest is called ‘Gist’ and is a boon for those seeking ideas or research for article writing.

Basically it does one of two thing:
1) It summarises the content of a web page - much like Microsoft Word’s ‘Summarise’ tool. Very neat if you have a long page from which you want to pull bullet points, or read through quickly.

2) This is the big fun thing. With this tool you add keywords to a box, press a button, wait a moment and back comes a series of paragraphs on the topic of your keywords. This is way cool if you are researching a topic or need to turn out a decent article on a topic upon which you are not an expert.

Both tools are free of charge and very handy.
The link for Gist is: http://gistweb.com/
To do summaries just use the tool on the presented page. TO do research click onthe tab marked ‘Gist’.

Have fun.

Oh yes, this tool can be used for evil as well as good. I prefer to think of the good and not the evil.

A while back Comment Kahuna was launched and I wrote about it here.

Well, it did not go away. In fact there are a whole range of upgrades on the way. For those who don’t know Comment Kahuna is FREE software that delivers unlimited, high-quality, targeted backlinks to all your websites, without using any risky tactics that might ruin your search engine rankings.

If you are not already using Comment Kahuna or another blog commenting program then read the post I made here and then pop over to the Comment Kahuna website and download this very useful software.

This launch of Comment Kahuna is linked to another launch coming up - Traffic Kahuna - I will be writing about that later, but meanwhile perhaps take a shufti at my YouTube video about Traffic Kahuna.

I came across a presentation by a bloke called Eben Pagan the other day and forgot to mention it here.

Eben does a very good presentation about the concepts that go into writing an effective sales letter and also the reasons why we need one. I am not going to try to precis his 25 minute lecture. I urge you to watch it as it also covers a lot of well known, but often ignored ’secrets’ about selling.

http://www.gurumastermindblog.com/2008/03/a_new_technique_for_increasing.html

He also provides a link to a piece of free software that will serve to strongly increase the degree of commitment of your readers to you and your message. The link is given out in the video but may not be live for many more days.

Today I started work with this tool, the ‘Psychic Salesletter’.
It works well on several levels. It involves the user, which, as Readers Digest know, is key to raising committment.

It gathers user info for further communication.

It enables us to address the needs and concerns of our users

and

It gives us two bites of the cherry - two sales pages on which to place ‘Buy Now’ buttons!

A question that I am often asked is ‘how do I find keywords to use when building my blogs?’ The answer is not easy as there are many different keyword research techniques that can be followed.
As a start to an ongoing series of audio internet marketing tips I am featuring a short presentation on a method of researching keywords to use within your niches. I hope that you find this helpful.

I know some here are involved in, or want to become involved in doing work for hire - contracting and consulting. On a discussion board I posted about the topic of calculating the right money to charge for a job. here is that post, I hope you find it useful.

Re: How to determine hours for budgeting social networking

I was responding to a poster who was suggesting that consultants should charge based upon the number of hours in the week and then dividing by the hours worked. This is a simple method but flawed, the slightly edited post follows:

The danger of this approach is that one is starting out by undercharging!
Once one is undercharging it can be very hard to get the ‘right’ price for the job because one’s clients come to know how much output you get for so much dollar input.

One way to tackle this is to look at the job tasks and these are NOT just doing the work.
First concept to address is that of ‘billable hours’ these are the hours of work for which you charge the client and they are the only hours which will pay for you to live.

Consultants who get a utilisation rate (another concept - related to billable hours - the proportion of a week’s time that is used in billable hours) of over 80% are doing really good.
As a one man band you should allocate about 40% of your time to marketing and business building. Your utilisation rate is thus a max of 60% and you can manage in a ‘normal’ working week of 40 hours about 24 billable hours.

So, being really simplistic, if your income need is $5000 per month then you must charge $52 per hour. 5000/96 = 52
I have excluded vacations, sickness and inefficiency slack from this example, but they are easy to add into a real life calculation.

When starting out you will not be as effective as a more experienced hand and thus you will give a lower output per hour. If a ‘market rate’ for your work is $50/hour then you need to discount your rate by the factor that you estimate you are inefficient. So, of you are only 80% efficient then your hourly rate should be $40 per hour and you will be competitive with hands working at full efficiency and charging $50 per hour.
The task will cost the same whether you are hired or your more efficient competitor gets the job.
Now, as you get better you increase your internal hourly rate but the time taken goes down; net result is the same money for less work without having to change the prices that you charge your clients!

When you have the ‘internal’ hourly rate for the job you can start to give quotes based not upon time but upon objectives. So, if a client wants 500 links building and you know it’ll take you 20 hours then you can quote a price for the task and avoid hourly rates. This is more simple for the client and is less risky for them because they can measure a tangible - output as against an intangible - time taken.

This is why quoting for an objective achieved is seen as more professional by experienced buyers because it shows that you know your cost factors and efficiency and account for them yourself rather than leaving the prospect guessing.

Normally I don’t give much thought to WordPress themes, I pick one for the purpose, install it and use it.
Recently though I got involved with themes in a little more detail as I commissioned a customised theme that will shortly turn up for the WordPress Blogs we build.
I had to get the hang of what went where so that I could get changes made and to add some functionality that will be quite cool.
Anyway, this made me think a little.
What goes into a theme?
How does a theme work?
How does one make a theme?

These questions led me to a post by Richard D. LeCour at Richards Ramblings where he shows how to make a WordPress theme in just minutes. If you want to understand what makes your blog tick,or even to make your own basic theme then this post is well worth reading and bookmarking. He provides the code and an explanation. For building basic niche blogs this might form a worthwhile base from which to work.

Andrew.