As you may know, if your a regular reader of my blog, I am a software developer. And in the spirit of giving, I want to use my skills to generate software tools for Internet Marketers (especially beginners, but no just limited to newbies).

The plan is to get as many people as possible to drop me a line with exactly what software tool they would find handy, and I’ll write it, and release it, free for everyone to download and use, with no strings attached.

Interested? Visit my blog and leave a comment with details of the particular problem you are having, and how you would see the software fixing it.

Perhaps it’s something that would replace a manual process you are doing now that takes you hours to do.

Perhaps it’s software that would do something that you just can’t do at the moment. Any and all ideas will be considered, so please get those ideas into me now. I plan to start in the next few days, so don’t delay! Don’t forget, it will not just be you that benefits, but lots of people, and I’ll be sure to credit you in the program (and your website).

Now we have to be realistic here, I’m not going to be able to develop an operating system to rival Windows XP overnight (2 days minimum will be required!), so it would be good to consider little programs that do useful things first and get them released as soon as possible, and then we can move onto bigger programs.

My goal will be to develop as many programs as possible that automate all those annoying manual processes that collectively can take hours out of your day, if your doing them manually.

So drop me a line today (you can contact me on my blog if you want to remain anonymous) or just leave a comment.

Let’s work together and make a difference today. With your help we can achieve a lot!

Remember the software will be released and be free to use, with no strings attached!

Be sure to subscribe to this blog to stay informed of developments!

Hope to be talking to you soon.

Cheers

Tim Buchalka

Have you checked out Squidoo?

This is a relatively new website (recently coming out of beta) that is getting rave reviews from Internet Marketers (who are aware of the site, and many are not) . This site it getting a great reputation as a quick and painless way to drive web traffic, and after spending some time using it over the past week, I would tend to agree that it really is a force to be reckoned with.

What if I told you that my page on squidoo rose to the top position in Google for particular keyword phrase in two days flat (this from a brand new page that had never been indexed before). Impressed? I certainly was.

Let’s talk a little about what Squidoo is. It’s a way to get a web page up and running very quickly (no html/programming experience needed). Squidoo refer to a web page as a lens. Unlike other sites of this nature, they encourage Internet Marketers. The only pre-requisite is that the content on the lens should be unique, and not just be a re-hash of an existing web site.

This is a particularly important point for affiliate marketers, who might be tempted to include only a few words, then have a redirect, via an affiliate link to the product site hoping to make a few quick dollars. Doing this will likely get your lens deleted.

Squidoo has a large number of modules which you can add to your lens automatically, including links for Amazon, eBay, a GuestBook (to get links from other websites or lens), and many more. In additional Squidoo automatically adds Adsense to your website, and allows you to share in any profits made when people click a link on your lens. You also get to share in the revenue from the other modules. Alternatively (and this is what I have done) you can donate all your profits of this nature to a charity, all done automatically for you.

You can also “roll your own” content, and include your own html (although there are a few limitations). But it is possible to add functionality not available on squidoo using this method.

For an example, check out one of my sample lens I setup on ways to increase web traffic on squidoo. If you scroll down towards the bottom of the page, you will see an opt-in box where people can subscribe to my mailing list. The html for this page actually resides on my server, and is loaded automatically by squidoo any time you visit that lens.

Publishing the page on squidoo is very easy, most of the setup is point and click, and the interface is very clean and useable.

Because the web site is fairly new, a lot of marketers are not familiar with it, so this is a golden opportunity for you to sign up and setup a web page.

Check it out and let me know how you find it. If you would like me to post a follow-up article on some great ways to get you into the search engines quickly drop me a line.

Until next time….

Tim Buchalka

If your new to Internet Marketing, it won’t take long to start hearing about Affiliate Programs.

First question, what are Affiliate Programs? Simply put, they are a method to allow you to sell someone else’s products or services on the Internet and to receive a commission for any sales you make. Usually these are downloadable products (electronic books, audio books, videos, etc) but there are also Affiliate Programs for physical items such as books, electronic equipment, etc.

Affiliate programs can be a great way to make some quick money, but there a number of things you need to consider. As you can imagine with the size of the Internet and the number of people connecting to it, there are a huge number of affiliate programs to choose.

How do you go about choosing a program? My advice is to choose a program where you have some expertise, or that you have an interest in. For example if you have an interest in Golf, find an affiliate program that promotes something relating to Golf. If you do this, you will find you have more enthusiasm to promote the product, and this will show through to your potential customers when you promote the product. And let’s face it, you will find it easy to do, because of your interest, and it will feel less like work, and more like fun.

A great place to start looking for affiliate programs to promote is clickbank.com

This is the number one web site for affiliate programs (where the vast majority of product owners list their products for sale). ClickBank make the ability to sign up and promote products very easy for people looking to promote products. There are many thousands of products there, so go take a look.

The next thing you probably going to want to know is how to go about promoting an affiliate program, just where do you start. This is one of the things I get asked a lot, and you will find that most Internet Marketers who are selling a “how to” book assume you are not a complete beginner.

One of the most important things you should do is to setup your own website, and to capture your visitors name and email address. Then you are able to promote products and services to them in the future. Most guides on the Internet will not tell you to do this, because the fact is the affiliate product owner doesn’t want you to promote to your own customers. They would much rather pay you a once off commission for a sale, and then be free to promote to their customer directly (with you out of the picture) in the future.

Any marketing consultant will tell you that it’s a lot easier to promote to an existing customer than it is to get a new customer. So if you have worked hard and managed to get a customer, you don’t want to lose them, you want to keep them, and promote to them in the future.

As I’ve mentioned you want to grab your visitors information before forwarding them on to the affiliate owners website. To do this, you really need to give the visitor and incentive to give you their information. Everyone is worried about spam, so you need to convince your visitor that your won’t spam them.

How do you do this? By being honest and upfront and telling the visitor this. You would be surprised how many websites just ask for someone to leave a name and email address, and give them no incentive to do so, and then don’t let the visitor know that they won’t be spammed.

Visitors will naturally be wary about most things on the Internet, and if you can’t give them confidence in yourself, guess what, they won’t leave their details.

The other thing you need to do is to give the visitor an incentive to leaving their details. The simplest way to do this, is to offer a useful report, or perhaps an ebook that the visitor will be able to download for free if they leave their details with you.

There are a few options for you. My preference would be for you to create you own report (this could be a simple document, even just a few pages). The main thing is that it should be relevant to the product you are promoting, and generally be of interest to the visitor.

Just ask yourself, if you were the visitor arriving at your website, would you be willing to leave your details? Put yourself in the shoes of the visitor, and give them a real reason to leave their details.

The next thing you need to think about is how you actually store the information the visitor leaves you. You need some way for the visitor to enter their details, and then you need to be able to act on this, and forward the information to the visitor automatically.

I believe automation is one of the keys to success on the Internet, as much as possible and practical, you want to automate as many processes that you can.

People expect immediate results, and if your asleep when someone leaves their details, and you don’t act on it for hours, the visitor has likely surfed to another site where they could retrieve the information automatically.

In this case, what you are after is an Auto-Responder service. Many web-hosts have this functionality built into their offerings, but my recommendation would be to use a dedicated auto-responder company who’s focus is on providing this functionality. Two of the major players are www.aweber.com and www.getresponse.com (although there are many other companies). My websites use Aweber, but both are reputable.

Auto-Responders allow you to automatically accept and record details from your visitor (name, email address, etc) and to then automatically send information to the visitor via email. You can even get personalise the emails sent to the visitor with their name, etc. This all happens automatically, even if you are asleep! The visitor is happy because they get the information in a few minutes, and your happy because your web site is working for you, while you sleep.

In the email you send to the visitor, you would include the download link to your free report or ebook (remember that’s the reason they decided to give you their details) and you could perhaps give them some more information about the products you can promote to them (perhaps with a product review, and other useful information).

I will go into more details about Auto-Responders in a future article (this will focus on how you go about setting them up, etc).

In my next post (Part 2 of Affiliate Products), we will move past this introduction and look at choosing an affiliate product, and how to setup your links, and discuss ways to promote them).

Feel free to drop me a line (click the Contact Me link at the top of this page) if you have any questions, or feel free to comment by leaving a comment after this post.

And please, if you know someone who you think this website would help, please pass on the web address to them, the more people we can collectively help, the better.

Until next time,

Tim Buchalka

Hello again,

Guru Internet Marketers will tell you that’s it’s very hard to get decent traffic to your website, and that you need to buy an expensive e-Book to give you the vital information.

I’m here to tell you that, it really is not that hard. First things, first, a disclaimer if you will, I sell an e-Book on Web Traffic myself, but… (and it’s a big but) I also give people the option of obtaining the information for free if they so decide.

I think this is a great idea for people looking for ways to get web traffic to their web site, and it doesn’t cost anything either, pretty neat, huh?

Now if your like me, your probably wondering what the catch is, just why I am giving the information away for free? Am I just a good natured person wanting to help others? Perhaps I have some sneaky affiliate links in the e-Book that, if people decide to purchase any of the software that I use, that I will make a buck, or two. Maybe I just ask lovingly for you to buy the e-Book down the track, when you have digested some of the free content.

The answer is a little bit of everything. Here is how it works (and listen up, because I believe this is a great way to get more traffic to your web site, as well as more sales in the long term).

When people want to visit my web traffic website (yes, I know your keen to get there to check it out, but please read on first), I give them the option of buying the e-Book for a lousy $47 bucks, with over 120 pages of meaty web traffic content (and I am not talking about an e-Book with double spaced, super large font, with heaps of pictures, as many other e-book authors seem to sell). This is actual meaty text.

The other alternative I give them is to sign up for my mailing list, and they then get a chapter at a time delivered to their Inbox every few days. If you are prepared to wait long enough and are prepared to put up with my humor long enough, you will get everything I know about web traffic for free.

I even put some of the content from each chapter of the e-Book on the website for free, so people can get some info without buying the e-Book or subscribing to the mailing list. Yes that’s right, I even cater for the freeloaders. Whoops did I type that…

Why bother getting people to sign up for a mailing list? Well I’d like to think I could build up a relationship with people over a period of time, introduce myself to people, tell them a bit about myself, and get them comfortable that what I am providing is real actual content. It’s really a “try-it” before you buy, but in this case you can fully try it out without ever buying it.

I’d be very interested in your comments about the process, whether you think it is a good idea, and even for that matter, if the content is actually useful to you. Come on, check it out, you know you want to, and be brutally honest in your assessment. Tell me if the information is useful to you. Did it help you get more traffic, did you learn something new?

If your interested in obtaining more traffic to your website, be sure to surf over and sign up for the mailing list (as a special bonus you get to check me out in the video on the front page, and get the proof that I really am an Australian).

I really think this technique is something that will be of great benefit to your Internet Marketing, give people useful information, and they will come back to your website again or again (or sign up for your mailing list and get your information delivered right to their inbox).

Well that’s about it for me, another post bite the dust (or hit’s the database).

Talk soon….

Tim

Newbies guide to grabbing an address on the Internet – Your very own domain name.

As the title of this post suggest, it’s time to discuss domain names. While this may not be of interest to people who have been on the net for a while, or who are already Internet Marketers, it will be of use to people new to the game, so let’s proceed.

Just like your house has a physical address that is unique to you, you need an address on the Internet for people to find you, and for that you need a web site.

Many ISP’s offer a free web site to their customers, and this can be a useful way to get started.

For instance, I used to operate an ISP years ago at www.newave.net.au and all customers were able to specify their own address doe a web site that ultimately was connected to the main one.

For example one user had a username of readymix, so his web site address was www.newave.net.au/members/readymix.

Now this is all fine for an initial startup, but what happens if you have printed all your letterheads, and business cards with that web site address on it, and then you decide to change ISP’s, and you need to change your website address? It’s off to the printers again for a new batch of business card and letterheads, and you would also have to notify all your existing customers and suppliers of your new website address.

Worse still, if your website was listed in the search engines, then anyone trying to click your website would get an error, for all intensive purposes, you would not exist! Not a desirable situation is it?

Thankfully there is another option, and that is purchasing your very own domain name.

Unlike the free ISP website, a domain remains the same and never changes, so you can print your business cards and letterheads in confidence knowing this.

Now getting your own domain is a relatively simple process.

The first thing you want to decide is what type of domain extension you are after.

A domain extension is the last part of the domain name from the last dot onwards. E.g. With my domain timbuchalka.com the extension is .com

The .com extension is a very common one, easily the most used one on the Internet, and I would recommend you stick to that. However you do have a choice of choosing other extensions, for example in Australia, there is a .com.au extension, in Singapore there is .com.sg, and China has .com.cn

Each country may have specific eligibility rules about domain names, so you would need to check specifically with registers for the rules if you decide to register a domain for a specific country.

The standard .com domain generally has no rules; pretty well anyone can register one.

One thing you should be wary of is trademark infringement, if you go and try to register www.mcdonalds.com (or something with the word mcdonalds in the domain name) you may find McDonalds (the burger people) chasing you for using their name. There is an independent organization that looks after these type of disputes, but generally from what I have read and seen they side with the “big guy” particularly if they have a registered trademark.

There are literally millions of .com domains registered, so most of the one-word domain names have been taken. Generally you need to be a bit inventive (or in my case have an unusual surname, which makes it pretty easy to grab the domain you want e.g. buchalka.com and timbuchalka.com).

There are many, many places to register domain names, I personally use www.namecheap.com but another good place to register domains is www.godaddy.com

You will also need to decide how long to register your domain for (generally you get a discount if you pre-pay for a number of years at a time, rather than just paying for a year at a time).

In addition there are buy and sell websites available where you can pay for a domain name, perhaps with a name you were after. These days, domains are big business, and in fact there are some people making a nice living buying and selling websites).

Now we need to discuss web hosting next, because registering a domain name does just that, a registration. To actually use the domain name requires you to place or “host” the domain name with a site on the Internet. That site (commonly referred to as a web host) allows your website to be “seen” on the Internet (note that they don’t put your domain name into a search engine for you, I will discuss how to do this in a future article).

Now if you do any shopping around, you will find web hosting companies who will also offer you to register a domain with them as a package deal.

I recommend you do not do this! If, for any reason you decide to move to another web host, they can “hold you hostage” because they control your domain. Whilst it’s likely that you will be able to move your domain, it may well be a drawn out and/or an expensive process. Of course not all web hosts would do this, but I believe it’s not worth risking it. You also need to consider what happens if the web host went out of business.

My recommendation is to register a domain with a domain register such as namecheap or godaddy. Then go out and find a web host, and once you have, it’s a relatively simple process to “point” your domain name to the new web host. If you ever decide to move to another web host, you simply “point” your domain to the new web host, simple and it means you retain control.

Now I am not suggesting that the above two places are the only places to register domains, there are hundreds of places to get register domains, but in my experience these two are competitively priced and are reputable.

When researching for web hosts, you will find literally thousands of options (and indeed godaddy offer web hosting, although personally I don’t recommend you use them for this purpose). You will find it’s a case of you get what you pay for, if a deal seems to good to be true, it probably should be avoided.

Two web hosts I have had good experience with are www.dreamhost.com and www.kiosk.ws . But again there are hundreds of options for you out there.

I hope this introductory article has been a good introduction to domain names. Hopefully I have not bored to many of the seasoned marketers out there, for them, it is probably a case of ho hum, I will certainly be getting into more detail and more complex subjects in future posts.

Please post your comments below, and I would particularly appreciate you passing on details of my website to anyone you think would benefit from the information, the more people I can help, the better, after all my mission here is give all the information I know to the readers of this blog, to give them the power to be a success on the Internet, as I have been lucky enough to achieve.

Oh, and one last thing, there are no affiliate links here guys, just real useful information. This is not about me trying to make a buck pushing a particular companies products, it’s all about helping others.

Cheers

Tim

I am absolutely sick to death of the Internet Marketers out there attempting to coerce funds from those poor unfortunate souls who have been unlucky enough to subscribe to their mailing list (or worse still to attend a seminar).

Now I am not against making money on the Internet, I make an income myself online, and many of the products available from Internet Marketers are actually decent ones in their own right (I even intend to review some in the near future and post the results here). My gripe is the Internet Marketers (you know who you are) who promote lots and lots of products (most of them not even belonging to them) which to me is a blatant cash grab. Day after Day, there is another “must have” product in my inbox, and of course, the Internet Marketer gets a commission for any sales.

Reading some of the crud that is released by these “guru” (and I use that word loosely!) Internet Marketers, you would think that there was no way to succeed without spending thousands of dollars on products which just co-incidentally they have available for sale (at a one time special price of course).

I believe Internet Marketing is not that difficult a concept to grasp, and it is possible to get started and make a profit without investing in some of these Internet Marketers courses. Again this is exactly the opposite of what they are telling you.

It gets worse though, I was at a seminar recently and some of the “specials” were upwards of $10,000 and sadly a lot of people were signing up for them. A good presentation and speaking well in front of people really works. My problem is not the cost, and not the content (some of it is good), I just believe a lot of the required information is already available, and that this information should be available to the average person for free, yes that’s right for free!

Let me give you an example. I have a Web Traffic e-Book that I developed, and that I promote online. The e-Book can be purchased, But (and it’s a big but) I give people the option to get the entire contents of the e-Book for free if they so choose. That’s right, for free, nada, nothing to pay. Optionally if they want to purchase it (and feed the starving kids), well, they can, but the choice is theirs.

If your like most, you would think no one would buy the book, right? Well I am here to tell you that that is wrong, the vast majority of people who grab the free content, ultimately buy the e-Book, impressive hey? I hope it is a vote of confidence in my offerings, but I also think it’s because they have had the chance to sample the merchandise (so to speak) before they have purchase it.

I am getting off track a bit here, because this post is not meant to be about my e-Book, so I will finish off talking about my e-Book by saying if your looking for ways to increase web site traffic then go take a look, and grab the contents for free if you wish. You will also get to check my lovely face on the video on the front page!

Getting back to the point of this post, I believe information should be available for free, and I intend, over time to put up all the information I know about Internet Marketing on this blog, and to make it freely available to anyone who wants it.

If you have a particular subject you want discussed, by all means drop me a line, and I’ll aim to cover it in a future post. With your help, I intend on making this the best free source of information on Internet Marketing on the web.

Let’s beat these “guru” Internet Marketers at their own game, by giving away the information and making it available to anyone who wants it.

Cheers

Tim