This is a presentation I did live for the current uQast founding affiliates at that time. It was presented live but I hope most of the audio is understandable.

The keyword term used in the search engine visibility example was “Body Wash”.

We still have the doors open for 2 more weeks for founding affiliates to get in at a special fixed rate before we switch to monthly subscription with our chartered launch.

There is a special offer only available to webinar attendees.

I have spent the last 5 months working with the uQast team and my official role is uQast Product Manager… the viral SEO features I spent a long time working with our development team refining the code and I am confident no one does it better… but it is only a start.

Very soon we strap on the booster rockets for rocket propelled Video SEO giving people a reason to share great content.

I am an employee/consultant with uQast, an affiliate and power user, and the video seo features are my baby – damn yes I am biased.

But when I see the tech media oohing about a 3rd Party captcha service that uses ads, I feel I can add something to the discussion.

4 or 5 years ago one of the best though slighly naughty Adsense tricks was to slap a adsense advert right next to the submit button of any forum form. People make mistakes and occasionally click by accident, or at least the ads get seen.
Worst case scenario was you at least got an advert impression.

Microsoft have a patent application for using advertising as part of a captcha from February 2008, as pointed out by Tim when that application was made public a year ago, and he felt he was being squeezed out of the advert captcha market.

Tim’s solution is slightly younger than Microsoft’s patent, launched commercially in December 2008 to existing customers.

However the concept of tying a brand to a captcha goes back at least 5 years to this post.

Your Captcha Adverts In Action

This is what the output from the Captcha Adverts WordPress plugin looks like.

This is what the Microsoft patent shows

This is what the Solve Media captchas look like.

I would hope the Solve Media (pending) patents are related to turning a captcha advert into an advertising network, and not based on a 5 year old concept that isn’t theirs.

Captcha As Part Of Sales Funnel

In practice for many sites captcha adverts are a terrible idea unless they are part of the site’s own sales funnel.

• You don’t or shouldn’t show a captcha to members – you have their email address confirmed
• Many sites are moving over to using a shared comment management system despite the synchronization issues and potential privacy issues. Again a vastly reduced need to use a captcha.
• The primary reason to use a captcha these days is at the time of account signup.
• If your site doesn’t gain tons of comments, a payment based upon completed captcha’s is fairly pointless.

A far better scenario is to use a captcha that is either part of the lead acquisition funnel, or to increase awareness for an advertising message that is shown immediately after the captcha is completed such as a one-time offer.

I am sure there is a value to the advertiser – the problem is for most publishers they should be integrating their own messaging, not 3rd party advertising.

Media Memo state

Playing along so far: Advertisers including Microsoft (MSFT), GE’s (GE) Universal Pictures and Toyota (TM), and publishers including Meredith (MDP), Tribune and AOL (AOL).
AOL is also an investor in the company (previously named AdCopy), via its AOL Ventures arm. Other investors, who have collectively put something like $6 million into the company, include First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures and angels like Chris Dixon, Roger Ehrenberg, Aydin Senkut and Shervin Pishevar.

Captchas for users who are not logged in for most media publications should be to enhance lead acquisition.

But how about for logged in users?

Captcha For Logged In Users

Completing a captcha is a one time event that is currently looked on as a barrier, when it could be turned into a reward for interaction.

Imagine members (maybe even non-members) could give answers to questions related to the content or other recent events for a prize, but they could only enter by commenting. Blogs run giveaway competitions all the time which reward entry points for placing a comment, though it isn’t really as scaleable as it could be, and the presentation needs to be refined.

For non-members such a competition could be the first step in a subscription funnel.

More on Techmeme but most of it seems like reworked press releases plus a video using Vimeo (who are not for commercial use)

I even promote his launches sometimes without using an affiliate link just because I feel like it such as his recent launch of The Twitter Method.

He has also finally overtaken me in the SERPs for the rankings for the predecessor of the course he is now running, Social Power Linking – I still get search traffic on that term.

He effectively gets that traffic for free as well as I just didn’t get around to changing the links.

Such is the longevity of blog content.

Jack currently has the latest incarnation of his blogging and social media training launching – he is a damn good teacher.

This is a raw affiliate link to Jacks course… Blog Success but I want to discuss this affiliate link with you a little.

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=blogpost

This is an Infusionsoft tracking link – a while back they introduced a way to have a redirect script on your own domain, but very few affiliate launches use this method.

The parameters

w=product code
p=affiliate ID
a=advert

Now the advert part is very interesting

In Infusionsoft it looks like you have to manually define these one at a time, but in fact you can define them on the fly

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=keyword1

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=keyword2

http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?w=btm&p=AndyBeard&a=nUFFggh4hbdbheh5

However ideally as an affiliate from a blog or landing page you would want to use a much cleaner link such as

http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/BlogSuccess.html

http://dedicatedaffiliatedomain.com

Lets add to the confusion that you might also be driving traffic to a blog using Speed PPC as I wrote about earlier and it is obvious there are some technical hurdles to getting effective tracking working with blogs & landing pages.

Paid or Free Traffic Source
>> Landing page
>> Set cookie based upon keywords
>> Modify page using SpeedPPC using keywords
>> Modify cloaking page to read cookies or parameters if cookies are off
>> Write data to custom database
>> Create tracking link with tracking software on the fly based upon parameters used
>> possibly still have a fully cloaked paged rather than just a redirect using iframes etc.
>> potentially jump through some double meta redirects, javascript & iframes to hide traffic source or other funky stuff.

This side of things is relatively easy, the problem comes with Infusionsoft when dealing with multiple products, multiple sales paths, different prices and quite frequently 5-10 different landing pages for one launch.
The tracking can become a royal mess, and there is no current way to export the data for affiliates.

Back To Jack & The Buzzworm Earth Blog

I have no idea where he came up with the name of that blog from, just another demonstration of how creative Jack is.

That is a screenshot from 1 of 4 free training vidoes you can watch right now without even having to give jack your email address.

Notice in the screenshot Zemanta – they have recently opened up their service to more blogs, which is going to make Jack’s system of generating $9000/month turbo-charged.
I have no idea how typical thoughs results are, but I regard Jack as an atypical trainer.

Here is another affiliate link

All affiliate links in this article come with 99.9% uptime SLA to take you through to Jack’s offer and potentially make me some money.

p.s. Jack has a $1 for 7 days trial

Update

Here is a direct link to the free training resources Jack provided in a run up to his relaunch of Blog Success

I am saying this as someone who even considered hiring some developers to make an app, or picking up a dying project and adding some viral life to it. There are ways to leverage the Twitter application market that will be attractive.

Before Mike really started selling information products, he had a huge amount of success with viral marketing applications many of which are still alive and generating revenue and traffic 4 years later.

See that second bar? Those are paid ads, though the more real tweets you post, the more ad credits you earn, but the amount you can earn is limited to 1 ad credit every 3 hours.
That is there for a reason – advertising is meant to be valuable.

The aim is also to clean up the Twitter stream that is currently plagued with people promoting stuff, especially marketers. Permission to see an agreed amount of advertising is a much better alternative, and if Mike has got his math right, lots of people will see those adverts.

Advertising is relatively cheap depending on how many see your advert and click – too many factors to speculate on now – I know I have got a ton of advertising credits to use from paid upgrades – Tweetglide is something I willingly paid to upgrade just to check it out.

Serious reasons to use Tweetglide

Take a look at my Tweetglide blog – Andy Beard on Tweetglide

It doesn’t look very special at this time, very much like your normal Twitter page

However Tweetglide isn’t a black hole of link equity – no link condoms.

At the same time there is no enforced blogroll – just because I follow someone doesn’t make it an endorsement, whereas normally when I link from Twitter it is an endorsement – that strange parallel of Twitter I have never been comfortable with – it has sucked for too long.

Tweetglide also supports long length tweets over 140 characters – they need a little bit of improving, but if you just have something quick to say, it is useful.

SEO By Andy Beard

Well kind of….

Over the weekend I exchanged a lot of long emails with Mike over the SEO shortcomings – I can see his team have already picked up a lot of what I suggested in just the rushed 2 days before launch, and my hope is that they will implement the whole of my “12 point list” of major structural changes to the site.

There are a few more tweaks I could add to the list, and as the site settles down I will add those to the suggestions.

I am probably too modest about my achievements with SEO and large user generated content sites, but as of yesterday I am pretty sure I will now helped 2 sites reached the Alexa Top 500 from modest beginnings, and it would be great to make Tweetglide a hat-trick.

The roadmap Mike now has for Tweetglide will make the blogs valuable properties with a flat architecture ideal for deep indexing – this is important as a lot of the information within the extended 140+ Tweets would otherwise just disappear.

As a property for reputation management, Tweetglide is going to rock – if nurtured correctly I am quietly confident it can replace Twitter in my own SERPs.

Serious Flexibility

I just spent 5 minutes on some obvious customization that isn’t possible with your normal Twitter page, I am sure there are a bunch more possibilities.

So there is a bunch of javascript widgets, static links with anchor text or call to action.

I bet I can get an autoresponder in there no problem

Popups? Exitpops? No idea, but seems like fun.

I have no idea how secure this is… Blogger has somehow been able to allow all these things for years, for some reason WP.com can’t handle it, but you would think the team who created blogger, who now work on Twitter would be able to add a little more flexibility.

Tracking?

This says it all

Monetization?

I haven’t tried, but I bet all kinds of advertising widgets plus Google Adsense will work.

No Custom CSS

This is all new, I am sure lots more flexibility will come for custom designs

Big Negative

Whilst I have been assured this is going to be fixed soon, currently Mike has Viral Inviter on the back end. I know Mike has taken action to nudge the devleoper over the issues, and Norman dropped by and left a comment yesterday to go over viral inviter new features.
I would suggest not using the tell-a-friend for now… Mike does have a large development team but this site is beta, going to be gaining a lot of attention, and any risk with a Gmail password is too much…

The rest of the site? Seriously much better than I expected, with a lot more long-term potential.

This is a referral link Andy Beard’s Referral Link and I think other links to the blog will count as that as well, and even search engine traffic.
I did encourage Mike to make everything “coupon” based just like all the web2.0 startups but the links are referral links for now.

But this annoyed me yesterday

Clickbank has required for some time (at least 2 years) that affiliates comply with FTC recommendations for WOMM. That could just be looked at as a legal “out” but it is there in writing.

There is lots of noise (and some signal) over the last couple of days about the FTC, so affiliates are using it in headlines for email promotions. I opened one and the link was a Clickbank promotion, I opened a second, and it was to a genuine blog post.

Here is what the person promoting an affiliate product sent

BREAKING NEWS: Making Money Online Illegal??

Hi,

It no longer matters if you are struggling to make your first
buck or if you are already killing it on the internet…

EVERYBODY is going to be effected by this…

This blog just broke the story and it is THE most important
information you will ever read this year…

[Go here now] and see for yourself:

No optin needed. This is a shocking blog video news post that
was just published a few moments ago.

It will change the way you look at your ability to make
money online…

[Find out here now]. Fast.

This is the scoop: There have been A LOT of changes
online recently and now the big question is “Has making
Money Online Become Illegal?”

The answer might shock you…

This WILL change everything. [Get the full story here:]

To your success,

• This was pre-written email copy supplied to JV partners as I have seen this email sent by 2 different unrelated email lists.
• The links in the email I added square brackets and are in bold like [this is a link]
• The deceptive headline did get me to open it, but a smart copywriter would have added some truth to the content
• The links proclaim a blog post
• You click the links and end up on a sales page
• The sales page itself is full of elements that are probably extremely dodgy now, and the biggest insult is probably the fake “trust marks”.

Fake Trust Marks

If someone is using fake trust marks, would you:-

• Believe their income claims?
• Actually trust them in any way?

Notice any similarities between legitimate trust marks provided by Trust Guard, and the fake ones?

That is an affiliate banner, and I have chatted with Garrett the affiliate manager in the past regarding my larger project. Trust Guard is one of the most affordable legitimate trust mark providers, and possibly the cheapest for things like PCI compliance though it has been a while since I did my research.
If you like what they offer, do your own due diligence and end up becoming their customer, there is a small chance if you haven’t cleared your cookies and the tracking works and countless other potential problems, that I might earn an affiliate commission.

Oh, and I have just lost trust in the people who sent me the email, and the chances of me promoting one of their products in the future, or even remaining on their email list are remote.

I wouldn’t want my readers to be sent dishonest emails if I referred them and they ended up on their list.

Real FTC Commentary From Marketers

There has been lots of coverage on technology blogs and “social media maven” blogs but I just want to highlight a few I have read you might have missed.

Michel Fortin has some great commentary about testimonials and vendor liability for the actions of affiliates.

The FTC’s Feebie Rule on Fashionista – included because sometimes I get free samples to review, and free samples I don’t end up having time to even look at, or find unsuitable. I also sometimes get free access to things based upon previous affiliate performance. I used to work in the games industry – do you think logos of hardware manufacturers end up on product boxes without some quid pro quo?

How much are PC adverts subsidized if they include Intel and Microsoft logos? How do they disclose the financial arrangements of pre-installed sample software?

Testimonials… does it really change how they look on a page to add disclaimers. Have a look at this sales page Howie just posted for one of his programs and look at all the disclaimers in the testimonial boxes. I am not using an affiliate link and am linking because it is the first example I have seen since the new rulings… I am not sure this is the best method – I think a “speech bubble” on mouse over might work better.

John points out us Euros have had to live with this quite a while (I have covered it a lot myself in the past) along with some sound tips – I suppose I should disclose that John leaves great comments and has been known to tweet my articles.

Don’t forget my old post defining 32 kinds of Blogging and Linking Payola – the FTC should really have addressed every form and more – I probably only covered half of them.

Lets finish up with a question… if I updated my old disclosure policy plugin to work with current versions of WordPress, would anyone actually use it? (well I know a few people who might for monetization as it was really effective)
I have had a few enquiries, and the download stats over the last few years suggest there may even be people using it still, though it only supported up to WP2.2 officially.
The plugin was contextual so now for instance Matt Cutts has a full disclosure policy finally he could add the plugin, and on every historical post where he mentioned Google, it could add a short disclosure with a link to a full disclosure policy, or even a specific disclosure policy about Google, both on the page and in his feed.

For me it is a bit of a dilemma, as I have quite a love <> hate opinion about Infusionsoft

On the plus side

I love marketing tools that help magnify your ability to make money from existing leads and Infusionsoft is one of the best tools for tracking and segmenting email marketing campaigns (within affordable limits for most online marketers)

On the negative

• The affiliate module sucks, although a lot of the blame can be squarely placed on custom integrations that break the affiliate tracking. One of these days I will write a much more detailed post.
• The people who provide the custom integrations you often seen used by big marketers for one-click upsells etc charge a fortune
• $2 to send each 1000 emails over your limit
• Infusionsoft have had tons of my feedback for over 6 months, and I can’t see any evidence of it being implemented

So lets look at what you are likely to receive in this special Stompernet module valued at $49/month

What Is In The Stompernet Infusionsoft Special Edition?

The following is speculation, as I don’t know all the details

Here is what the basic Infusionsoft plan currently looks like, which costs $199/month

Lets divide those numbers by 5

2 Users 1 user
10,000 Contacts /5 = 2000 contacts
25,000 Emails/month /5 = 5000 emails

I think divided by 5 is a safe bet, but they could be more generous.

Lets look at other features

Here is the full feature list (click to view)

I doubt you will get any of the shopping cart and affiliate modules, it will just be basic features.
With a bit of luck they will leave the API in

Many internet marketers are going to be turning their noses up at this, after all they would want all the bells & whistles, and will likely experience a heart attack when someone wants to bill them $15K-$20K to do what the gurus do, and then it doesn’t work. They will also be pummelling their lists every few days, maybe multiple times per day – those $2 per 1000 emails add up when only 10-15% open your email, even less click through.

But what about ecommerce?

• Most people starting out with an ecommerce store or doing consulting would be over the moon to get 2000 people on their mailing list, especially if they are all customers.
• You might well be processing credit cards in a different way, or using your existing shopping cart, or even looking to replace your existing shopping cart with Stomper Commerce.
• If the API is in, all kinds of integration is possible, provided it is achieved at a low enough cost – who knows maybe Stomper Commerce can add it as standard.

For anyone who has considered looking at Infusionsoft as an alternative, one of the major problems is their very short trial period (though I have heard their partners can get it extended a little), plus to be honest I bet a large chunk of Infusionsfot customers don’t need more than 1/5 of the capacity anyway.

It makes a lot more sense for someone interested in Infusionsoft who isn’t interested in their shopping cart and broken affiliate module to consider the route now open for them via Stompernet as part of their deal for just under $200/month – you get lots more training and useful tools.

I am offering a bonus for those who purchase through my affiliate link (don’t forget to clear cookies) and forwarding the receipt.

Many might mistakenly look at pure $$$ values offered as affiliate bonuses which is easy to magnify with digital products which you will never have time to use, especially in the run up to Christmas. All I can say is good luck to you.

At the same time I am quietly confident that I have already managed to help one article directory owner save Christmas.
If you don’t have immediate problems, there is value in insurance.

p.s. for those who have been wondering why they haven’t seen me inside Stompernet yet, active on the forum, blame Stompernet – some of the admin around this launch is leaving a lot to be desired, but I am sure things will settle down eventually.

Update From Infusionsoft

We now have 2 comments from trusted sources at Infusionsoft with details of the package on offer.

Tyler Garns (October 6, 2009 at 4:07 pm)

Andy and readers,

The edition of Infusionsoft being offered through Stompernet is not available on our website. We’ve actually created a specific “Infusionsoft Stomper Edition”. This edition is similar in functionality to our “Basic Edition” but, since its free, the limits are smaller. It has full CRM functionality, email marketing, autoresponder, follow-up sequences, direct mail, fax, & voice broadcast integration, web forms, automatic actions on web forms and email links, world-class list segmentation and targeted marketing. You can compare the editions here. The only difference between the Basic edition and the Stomper edition is that the Stomper edition is limited to 750 emails/month and 5,000 contacts. Any edition can be upgraded at any time. There are no long-term contracts required, but we do offer a 12 month “Double Your Sales Guarantee”. For more details, tune into the Stompernet webinar happening today. I’ll be on there to show Infusionsoft and possibly answer some questions.

Obviously you will need to purchase email credits, but at $2/1000 it works out very reasonable compared to many competitors pricing for “pay as you go” credits, for instance Mailchimp the cheapest you can pay for credits is $5/1000

Email costs for high volume low margin email marketers might be a little painful, but they tend to use brute force/mass bombardment anyway.

Damn, I have seen the sales page twice… you don’t need to mail the same email 5 more times, from 2 different autoresponders.

I think Stompernet with Infusionsoft is a truely complementary offer.

Update

The Stompernet Infusionsoft offer has a hard limit of 750 emails per month, and whilst I have discussed the possibility of added email packages extensively with Infusionsoft, I haven’t had any form of indication that these have been made available.
The offer has value as an extended trial period for complex setups, and possibly for consultants with very few clients.
There is also the possibility that you could use the email features of another service such as Getresponse along side Infusionsoft, but use Infusionsoft for tagging – that would however limit your ability to email a specific segment of prospects based upon tagging.

It was an amazingly successful offer, and I have heard (from memory) they shipped 18,000, though to be honest I am not sure whether that figure relates to the first “physical” offer on a DVD, or the more recent “digital” offer.

Either way, it is a product I look on as a solid foundation course in SEO, probably the best one available.

Today they are offering it for FREE

This is real FREE, no strings attached – no credit card required

Here’s what you’ll get immediate access to:

Stomping the Search Engines 2 – 7 Module Series – by Stomper SEO Faculty

7 Part Series:

1. Google Analytics 100A: Installing Google Analytics – by Andy Edmonds
2. Google Analytics 100B: Web Design Parameters – by Andy Edmonds
3. Google Website Optimizer – by Andy Edmonds and David Bullock
4. How to create Inputs for Your Test that Get Higher Response and Conversion – by David Bullock
5. What to test to increase conversion rate – by David Bullock
6. What to test now? Going in the right direction – by David Bullock
7. Creating a Landslide of Leads – with a few special methods – by Don Crowther

How To Get Stompernet STSE2 100% Free No Credit Card

You will have to create a My Stompernet Account but that doesn’t prevent you at a later date from purchasing the full Stompernet through any affiliate link you choose – here is my Stompernet Bonus if you do decide to join.

Enjoy!

Whilst he employs 80 people, he also has a team of 200+ website creation, content development, link building and social media specialists to call upon (native English speakers).

If you can avoid doing all the work yourself, either with automation or outsourcing it is more scalable.

Keyword Titan

Just over a week ago, Todd Hogan the founder of Keyword Titan approached me to see if I would be interested in taking a look at their new Keyword research automation tools.

Trust me, I have spent thousands on various keyword research tools in the past, some of them even still get updated by the authors despite changes in the way data can be pulled from the search engines, many of the services are still in business and even booming, and in many ways I am quite happy with what I already have available.

That being said, time is one of my most valuable commodities (though I tend to not use the resource to it’s full potential)

Another problem is grouping

It is fairly easy to group keywords if you are generating them from various root keywords.

{specialty} {profession} {location}

Annulment Attorney in Los Angeles

It is far harder, or at least more time consuming on researched keyword lists.

Keyword Titan Ultimate Challenge

I was already starting to prepare a monetization list to offer as an opt-in bonus, as a companion to Howie’s 36 Niche report. I knew he was covering keyword research in his training, along with monetization, but I wanted to help accelerate the success of anyone taking part in his competition, and continuing that into the future.

If you help people achieve results, good things happen.

The amount of time involved to research 36 niches, highlight 100s of core topics to focus on, and drill down into traffic data, grouping etc using conventional tools would have been astronomic.

2 hours per niche wouldn’t be unreasonable for a shoddy job x 36 niches = 72 hours

2 weeks work, maybe one if you are a machine

It would be less if all you were doing is generating the keywords using some kind of spinning technique, but you would still have to identify the root keyword lists, and then think about negative keywords, grouping etc.

So I challenged Todd to create me 36 keyword lists that I could give away, highlighting the best opportunities for competition and traffic, suitable for both SEO techniques and PPC.

Due to timezones, national holidays in the US, long weekends and various discussions on objectives etc, from start to finish it has taken 8 days to prepare these lists.

I asked Todd how much time it took to prepare all 36 keyword lists.

I couldn’t even contemplate that with any of the tools I own, or have seen. The closest were products like Keyword Bible, but on a broad topic such as Howie provided an initial cross referenced search would have been grinding away on my PC for 30 minutes or more, without any thought to whether the keywords were
actually useful, grouping etc.

These days such poorly defined keyword lists for Google PPC would be a liability.

36 “Opportunity” Keyword Lists Free

What we have prepared are what I would term “core opportunity” keyword sets, the kind ideal for small niche sites, social media promotion tactics etc.

These lists were prepared in exactly the same way as the demonstration video on the Keyword Titan website.

Each list is approximately 150 keywords highlighting the cream for traffic and commercial intent.

1 Complete List for Acne Niche

One complete keyword list for Acne, a $15 value yours free

Acne Keyword Research list is provided free of charge on http://nicheexposed.com

You can also get another free list covering the auto industry just for signing up for a free Keyword Titan account

Full Lists For Other Niche’s

Keyword Titan has 2 primary monetization models

The first is a monthly subscription which is ideal for power users. During discussions with Todd I discovered that their primary target market is specialist SEO & PPC agencies working with lots of clients, or large corporate account holder, not smaller internet marketers.

I believe however there is a huge untapped market (for Todd) within the internet marketing field, especially power users leveraging outsourcing or mass site generation.

From a single complete list, or even from the condensed lists we are providing for free, it would be easy to create 50 or more websites, or a few larger authority sites.

Thus for many a subscription would be overkill, and they should concentrate on owning one niche at a time.

The second monetization model is pre-built and custom lists purchased individually. The pre-built lists are a very affordable $15, and $30 for a custom list based on your own selection of primary keywords.

I believe all of the pre-built lists are available free to people who purchase a monthly subscription.

The 36 Niches Are Now Available as Pre-built lists

Other niches are also available as prebuilt lists

All the sample lists are now available for immediate access, including the complete keyword research list for Acne.

Get them here (Free)

Http://nicheexposed.com

Who is Keyword Titan ideal for?

• SEO & PPC agencies (time is money)

• Large corporate SEO & PPC managers – potentially less specialized skills and less time to manage 1000s of keywords

• Mega sites dealing with multiple verticals

• Mass automation niche marketers who would like some of what they throw against the wall to actually stick

• Niche Marketers looking to dominate single vertical markets (the single reports)

• Anyone who values their time

I haven’t played with the interface extensively, but the results speak for themselves.

Thanks to Todd for offering to help with these keyword lists

I spent the better part of a week and a few hundred dollars ($300-$400) on various WordPress sales letter and affiliate themes – I came to the conclusion that they weren’t something I would use.

• Some I would class as pretty but lacking substance (polite version of crap)
• Every single theme was designed around the concept that you run a single theme on your blog at a time
• They all suffered from what I regard as a horrible plague – theme option pages – if you need to set up lots of options after you have uploaded a theme, you have lost a sale, unless I can also import and export settings.
• The worst aspect of theme options pages is using them for the content that might appear on a page, because it is a nightmare to set up split testing, and when editing, you really want all the words on the page in front of you.

So I set about creating a solution for myself…

I started of with Thematic which I had already been playing around with for a good 8 months. Themeatic is an offshoot or branch of Sandbox of which I was also a fan, but built upon a grid system that hopefully I won’t totally destroy when I finally get around to theming on this site.

The first challenge was custom CSS for every page, and navigating my way through the maze of which functions initialized at which time within the WordPress core, such that the style sheet used is determined by the page selected in the default custom layout selector.

The end result is only 160 lines of code in functions.php, plus some in individual custom theme pages, and that may well get shorter as I optimize things, but the end result is something unique and useful.

I am a strong believer in doing things once

Once I have created a custom sales page theme for this system, though it is not limited to sales pages, it can be used without any setup overhead other than selecting it within a dropdown list and hitting save.

And of course, everything is created based upon a child theme of Thematic, thus when Thematic has one of its frequent updates, there will be very little if any pain in upgrading.

WordPress Split Testing With Google Website Optimizer

There are a number  of plugins that claim to provide support for Google Website Optimizer. Most only work with A/B split testing as the authors couldn’t figure out the best way to add tags to post content.

In addition often the GWO code was placed in the wrong place in the header, it needs to be after Doctype, but before the CSS to effectively fully replace the CSS – I realise CSS is meant to be cascading, and you can force your way through when it doesn’t quite work out, but sales pages are meant to load fast.

So our single CSS file by default no matter what style the page is gets wrapped with GWO selectors by default. The most important element on the page, the post title which most of the time is used as a headline also gets wrapped in selectors by default.

You don’t have to test them all the time, but they are there when you want them. 

I eventually selected one plugin solution, from an Italian company who do landing pages. I may end up tweaking things more, moving various thing from functions.php into the plugin, though many of the hooks I have used are specific to thematic, even the one I ended up using within the plugin to get the correct placement of the GWO code in the header.

Whilst I claim that this video would only be 5 minutes at the start, it is actually 8 minutes, but demonstrates the full process of setting up split testing with my current solution.

I am sure you are also curious about how it works, so here is the demo sales page from the video, with split testing currently enabled.

The reason I haven’t yet implemented shortcodes are 2-fold.

• I don’t need them
• Using PHP, it is quite easy to use most of the work I have done with any other split testing software, either javascript or PHP based, for those with tin-foil hats (most affiliates using Adwords extensively?)

The PHP plugin I discovered rocks – I tweeted about it a couple of weeks ago.

Implementation for other theme frameworks isn’t immediately planned, and code after some more tweaking will be made available in various ways (for the geeks whose shoulders I had to climb on to get this far), and I will probably package things in some way for those less technically inclined looking  for a “solution, along with modified versions of various themes I have rights for.

I must admit I am not a huge fan of linking to articles from Associated Press, simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the original source when these stories “go over the wire”.

A great example of the reasons why is when I reported about the appropriated story last year from the Museum of Hoaxes – that was Agence France-Presse to blame, a different organization.

Readers might also remember my run-in with The Guardian where I was a major source for an article, but didn’t receive a link. The author and editor of The Guardian explained their viewpoint in the comments, but it still wrankles a little.

That being said, there is a huge amount of PROFIT being made online in the form of online membership sites which is a paid content business model.

Highly successful examples include:-

• Strategic Profits – $10m+ business
• Stompernet – $25m+ business
• Success Chef (prelaunch)
• Double Your Dating – $20m+ business

I could the continue the list with the likes of Armand Morin, Mike Filsaime, Jeff Walker, Yanik Silver, John Reese, Ray Edwards, Jim Edwards, Frank Kern, Jason Postash and many many more. Among bloggers Brain Clark with Teaching Sells and Yaro Starak with Blog Mastermind immediately come to mind.

Then of course there are the mega information marketers such as Agora Publishing with multiple content channels such as Early to Rise

I should include affiliate links to all of them, but that isn’t the point – most of these guys are pulling in million dollar earnings on a yearly basis, and whilst they have diversified into physical products, exclusive coaching and seminars.

Agora might even be pulling in $1m a day by now, I don’t have recent figures.

Agora might be making more money than Facebook

Paid content certainly isn’t a dying business model