This goes out to James Brausch. Nobody else listens I guess.

Hey James, I am testing Rasof since yesterday and already understand the numbers in the report.
Here’s one question though  since there’s no sufaq installed for Resof I think…

How old/new/current is the data behind Rasof?

I understand the data changes not significantly over time, but for some variables, it does!
I understand that the rankingfactors product is an analysis of data from months and months, BUT:

How old/new/current is the data behind Rasof?

If  the base for the data behind Rasof is the very same as I can read in the Rankingfactors Report, I could just use that one to adjust my site and wouldn’t need Rasof to compare my site’s factors to the data from your research (except the nice points-system of course!). Correct me if I’m wrong!

Also, here’s my questions to your last longagodeadlined Q&A game:

How much of your whole income makes jamesbrausch.com and the products associated with the blog (in percenage)?
How many people do you employ (and where in the world)?
Are YOU programming yourself or “just” concepting the software you sell?
How many new visitors does yor blog have monthly (percentage) and if many, is taht the reason why your promote you software in new blog posts so often?
How many subscribers do you send out your announcements to? Is the “money in the list”?

Have the greatest day every day, mate!

Norman

P.S: The trackback to male you see this post follows:
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=646

Well… I just love it.

The moment I understood the concept of Simplicity and applying it, my life changed.
I will talk about that alot in the future.

It is about macheting down the jungle of information overload and eliminating the perfectionist inside.
Don’t misunderstand though: I always and still do believe in the power of QUALITY! Just that to achieve quality, it is not always neccessary to exhaust yourself, others and the idea you are working on by sticking to perfectionism.

By talking about simplicity, I mainly talk about doing things one-by-one whilst having the goal in mind and clearly defined.

As said, I will talk much more about it here in the near future.
For now, I at least changed the layout of my blog to become even more simple and easy to read.
I will test some more font-styles, but am pretty sure the current design is very easy to read. Cool abouit it: If you click to read a whole article, it opens without a sidebar!

Some may say that’s not good for navigation purposes. I say: It’s perfect for focusing on THAT article you read at the moment and not being distracted by more options.

I will let you know how I work on implementing Simplicity in my business workflow-systems in following posts. You’ll get real-life examples.

Have a great weekend!

Norman

Good morning everyone. Norman here.
Norman is a guy-name, here in Germany too.
Why I am telling you this? Read on.

I have been thinking about what really sells for a long time now.
I don’t mean “what sells” from a product view or what kind of service is in demand at the moment. I am talking about measurability.

So what makes your launch, your product, your list, your blog and your life a success?

For products and marketing, you would say something like: Distribution (list, promotion-partnerships, ads), Copy, features, benefits…

So have you ever thought about if one of those big guys that crank out 197$+ products every other month to lists (via JVs) of 300.000+ subscribers would be able to sell a product without any salesletter? Or, would someone not knows in the “IM niche” at all – like me – (yet ;o) be able to covert the same product with the same salescopy and the same list with the same conversion rate?

Well, I think not. Authority and influence are my favourite words of the day.
If Mike Filsaime (or any other of those guys) tells his list about a product, it’s not only about the story, the copy and the product. It has much to do with authority. And INFLUENCE!

I don’t know how to measure it yet, but maybe James Brausch is willing to help out. He is the only one I would trust in this whole marketing-circus to get an analytical product together to measure emotional variables in sales-processes.

Anyway, one measurable variable just proved itself: Influence.
Proven by the same guy btw: James Brausch.

He – what I appreciate very much – named my blog on his.
No particular incident to do so, he did it just because he likes my blog (way of writing?). That’s what he says.

But unfortunately there was one thing that caused a tail of actions been taken by different people. It was a tail that, from my view, was kicked off by the power of (unintended) influence.

To name it:
I had a header-graphic on my blog that showed me with long hair (and a business-suit btw!) like I had it grown for years. (Yes, I like Indie-Rock-Music!)
Somehow that picture seemed to look a little un-male (or at least not 100% male) to James.
Although he did not mean to be rude I am sure, he wrote about his concerns in this blog entry. Now think what happened?

1. (I am happy about this!)
I got some list-subscribers who were actively referred by James to my blog.

Sidenote: You can tell I was not only surprised but honored to be “featured” in James’ blog, since he (you might have recognized he is the ONLY blog I recommend yet!) writes a solid analytic style I like very much.
Also he seems to be way outside the “net of slaveristic freedom” (more about that later) which most “IM gurus” (I HATE the word guru…) decided to belong to.

2. (I am not sure about this one)
I got about 5-10 comments on my blog that made fun about me looking like a girl or both in my header graphic.

Sidenote: This does not sidetrack or hurt me. I have a wife, a kid and a wonderful life. I just tell you this for a reason: Influence! Read on.

Though some of those comments were not that nice, I can understand why they occured. Honestly, I think 90% of the IM-product customers seem to be like that.

Here’s the catch if you move your brain in this niche of wannabe Gialdinis:
You are influenced. Anywhere. Anywhen. Anytime.
Keep that in mind!

So I think if some of those commentators would have not read James Brausch’s post before they came to my blog, they wouldn’t have even thought about me being a man or a woman.
They just had it in mind after reading James’ post.
In fact, some of them might even have visited my blog for just THAT reason: To see my header graphic. I changed it atm, but will maybe change it back later. In fact, I changed it now because one of those people seemed to be so persistent with his (her?) thoughts about my gender that I finally changed the pic.

So what can you learn from this?
I would say two things:

First, BE AWARE that you are influenced every second of your life! You can not change that, but you can mix it with some SELF-THINKING!

Second, you COULD use the power of influence in your salesletter, ads etc. but that’s another post.

To sum it up:
Thanks, James! I was very surprised opening up your blog after watching your “How to create a newsletter from a remote Island” videos and found MY NAME on there. I not only appreciate that, but it also gives me some confidence to continue my way.
Hope to chat with you one day.

Yours,

NorMAN

The Original post by James Brausch (I honestly don’t know how this trackback technique works yet…):
http://www.jamesbrausch.com/wp-trackback.php?p=397

http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=397

The idea of being mere passengers on a ship meant to sail to the farthest points does not appeal to people who like to put their destiny into their own hands. They have the desire of maneuvering the ships themselves, of being able to be the ones to take it anywhere they want to. Being aboard a ship on its way to a particularly great destination is something each and every one of them dreams of, and the knowledge that they have the capacity to steer it themselves is what makes them actually want to.

Perhaps this is the reason why more and more people are succumbing to one of the most popular businesses around – affiliate marketing. It is because in this business, there are no bosses to order the employees around. There are no deadlines to meet and no clutter of work do to. One only needs to be equipped with the tools needed to succeed in a business such as this, and he is bound to get what his heart ultimately desires.

Just what are the things needed to be able to succeed in affiliate marketing? What must one have within himself to be able to do well in this industry? There is a lot of competition involved in affiliate marketing, and to be able to rise above the norm, one must be equipped with just the right stuff necessary to propel him forward. There are five things one must ultimately possess if he wants to achieve the glory he is yearning for in this business, and these five things are a must for him to possess to be able to stand out among the rest.

The very first quality one must possess if he wants to try his hand in affiliate marketing is the willingness to learn and be trained. Treading through unfamiliar territory is scary stuff if one is not properly equipped, and he might get lost amidst a jungle of the unknown. Learning the tricks of the trade is also an important aspect of the game, and one’s willingness to know it all will give him far better advantages in the business than he could ever imagine.

The second quality one must possess is the willingness to invest time and effort even if direct results do not seem at all apparent. Although several months may pass without good news, it is important for one who has his foot in the industry to hold on and wait. It is this quality which would save him from giving up after investing a lot of himself in the business.

The third quality one must possess is self-determination. If one wants to conquer the affiliate marketing world, he must have the ability to push himself ahead. Never having to say die is a quality each and every affiliate marketer should possess, and the ability to motivate oneself into scaling greater heights is an ability which would actually take an affiliate marketer there.

The fourth quality one must possess is discipline. If one knows how to teach himself to work everyday with all the energy he can muster, then he is close to achieving what he has set his heart to having in the first place.

The fifth and last quality one must possess is optimism. Negative attitudes and hearsays should not discourage an affiliate marketer from pursuing what he has to in order to make life better for himself and for everyone concerned. Neither should anyone influence his attitude toward the business, because once in it, it is a must for him to be the captain of his ship and the master of his soul.

The ingredients to success in a business such as affiliate marketing are diverse and manifold, but the most important thing one needs to be able to make it big lies in himself alone. It is he who has the capacity to do everything to be able to realize his prospects, and the desire which fuels his heart in doing so is the gasoline which should keep the engine going.

Affiliate marketing is all about putting one’s fate into his own hands. The right attitude is the key to being able to steer one’s ship into that part of the ocean where a certain kind of serenity can be found, one that permeates the atmosphere as the ship sails calmly on.

You have that site on-line for quite a while, its generating a good number of hits every day and you’re thinking whether or not to use AdSense advertising on it to make it generate some form of income.

Well this is a description of the pros and cons of this approach to Internet advertising. AdSense has definitely hit the Internet like something from another planet and people are very excited about it everywhere. There are negative aspects to Adsense and alternatives to consider.

AdSense is generally a great tool for webmasters. Whereas, they would use to worry about how to raise enough money to keep their sites profitable, or at least keep them on-line those worries are gone.

AdSense allows webmasters to forget about those worries and concentrate on creating good content for their sites. In fact, the emphasis is now on creating quality content (often associated with the top-paying words) which will bring you many visitors.

AdSense can also very well integrated with your website, it’s easily customizable in terms of colors, size and position which means you can experiment with it in any way you like to maximize your income.

AdSense is a very good means of generating a constant revenue on your site. All you need to do is create some quality content and keep it updated constantly and you can literally live off your website. A lot of people are doing just that nowadays with AdSense, so it’s become sort of a business in itself.

It’s also a great program because you can have the same account advertising on all your pages. This is great for webmasters wit a lot of content because it means they don’t have to create many accounts unnecessarily.

But as stated, above, there are some negative aspects to advertising with AdSense and here’s a small list of such cons.

Clearly the largest negative impact the AdSense program can have on you is through Google closing your accounts. Most of the time this happens because of so called ‘click fraud’, which means somebody would be producing artificial clicks on your page.

There’s one really nasty side to that. It doesn’t have to be you making those artificial clicks. It could very well be your competition doing this in order to shut you down, or the competitor of whoever is advertising on your page, looking to drive their marketing costs up.

The earning AdSense brings you are by no means constant. In fact, they’re not even close to that. Anything you do to your site could end up being a big mistake costing you a great deal of money. It’s that kind of pressure that has a negative impact on you.

First of all, you constantly need to make sure your site is in the spotlight of search engines when people are searching for whatever it is your site is about.

If you fail to do that you won’t have any visitors, and that of course means you won’t have any AdSense revenue. In a way this is nothing new, as any form of generating revenue on the Internet with advertising has such a drawback.

And finally, another major problem is that you constantly have to feed your site with better and better content. Now, of course, certain sites are very well geared towards doing this but with some types of content this is rather hard to achieve. This is often why the services of a copywriter are employed to generate more and more content.

When writing original content, the best thing a website owner can do is research a topic thoroughly and then return to writing with lots of information they can out in their own words, and show their own opinion on.

So there are the pros and cons of using the AdSense network for generating profits through advertising. Now the choice of whether or not these work for you is yours.

All the products that you want to sell online are ready. You have already signed up with the Google Adsense program or with other affiliate marketing programs and you have already prepared the ad you want to post on your affiliate’s site. Your mind is now set to being the next most successful online businessman. But is there anything else that you might have forgotten to prepare? Maybe none. But how about your landing pages? Are they all set for your business?

Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad. For affiliate marketing, landing pages would refer to the web page where you, as a merchant, would want your potential customer to be directed after clicking your ad on your affiliate’s website. Landing pages are, at most times, nothing really different from other web pages in a particular website, especially if the said website is an e-commerce site. Some online businessmen would even use the homepage of their websites as the landing page for their ads. Are these businessmen making a big mistake? Or should you follow their method in creating landing pages for their ads?

Well, you can always follow what most online retailers do, directing their potential customers to the homepages of their websites. But if you want to achieve something more from your online business, and if you want to earn a lot of profits, you better create a special landing page for your web ads. Why? Here are a few reasons why you need to use landing pages for your web ads. And take note, it would do you a lot better if you create a great landing page than a so-so one.

Reason no. 1: It is the only way you earn conversions in an affiliate marketing program.

There are a variety of affiliate marketing programs today, but most of these programs let the merchant pay the affiliate in a pay per click basis. Basically, all you have to do is sign up with the program and submit your ad. The program owner would then distribute your ad to various affiliates who would then place your ad on their websites. Whenever your ad is clicked, a visitor would be directed to your landing page and you would have to pay the affiliate for his service.

As a merchant, you earn in an affiliate program through conversions—that is whenever a visitor that is directed to your site actually buys a product on your site. Without these conversions, you actually earn nothing from the program. Also, the more visitors that your affiliates have directed to your site, the larger would your expense be. And the only way that you can recover from these expenses is through conversions.

Now, you sure won’t get any conversion if you have posted an ad on your affiliate’s site without an actual landing page for the potential customer to be redirected into. It’s just like advertising a product without actually having a store to sell your product. Your advertisement may be enticing enough to encourage people to purchase a product, but without the landing page, how will they know how to purchase the product

It is therefore important to have landing pages for your ads because it is the only way for you to earn something in an affiliate program. Without landing pages, all you do is spend money paying your affiliates without actually getting anything in return.

Reason no. 2: Other web pages may just not be enough.

Many people make the mistake of making their website’s homepage as the landing page for their ads. The same is true for those who make use of other pages like a “contact us” page or a product page. Homepages are often designed to serve multiple users and contains a lot of links to other pages or to other websites. The same is with the other two pages mentioned. If you want to be successful in an affiliate program, we’re sure that you don’t want your landing page to cater to the needs of various people, most of which may not be really interested with your product.

When choosing a landing page, you must always have the customer directed into that page in mind. Therefore, your landing page must be relevant to the keywords and the contents you placed on your ad. It is also important that the landing page can induce your visitor to take action—that is to purchase your product or at least provide leads for potential customers.

Final Word

You probably entered into an affiliate marketing program with these things in mind: to save on advertising expenses and to gain more profit. But if you get into an affiliate marketing program without actually having a landing page, you’ll end up paying too much without getting anything in return. So if you still don’t have a landing page for your ads, you better start creating one now. And don’t get us wrong; it isn’t enough for you to have just a landing page—it should be a great landing page!