You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

This post is part of the Mac Book Pro Challenge, but don’t worry it’s not to late to start, so why not join us?

Getting a face

Think of the Mac book Challenge as a marketing campaign the goal (ahem wish sorry) is to convince people to join in your version of the challenge by presenting them with the information, the incentive and the reason. Now for a little game who do you want to target?

Seriously its that simple forget careful keyword research or demographic studies go with your gut who do you think you can convince to join up and encourage their friends. The reality is just about any demographic over the age of 18 is going to be interested in a free laptop be they a student, a Gran or a Working Mum so which group do you think you can appeal to which group can you get your head in.

Once you got your target we are going to create a sales person an online persona who will front your campaign just like any good advertising campaign. Now before we even think about web sites etc I want you to think personal the key to a good campaign is when the person on the receiving end (believes) they are on a two way conversation.

So lets look at some social groups and try and decide the best person to front a campaign for each of them.

18-25 Male Students
You got to hand it to them by far my favourite source for this kind of affiliate marketing, they are generally poor, most want to get rich, nearly all want beer and they all like pretty young girls. Ok so a few sweeping generalisations there but on the whole pitching to sterotypes works even if its not politically correct.
Perfect Persona: Pretty Girl Next Door

House Bound Mum
Wants to earn a bit on the side, is more cautious about giving to much personal information away. Often looking for things to fill short gaps, ideas have to be pitched as not time consuming and not evasive.
Perfect Persona: House Bound Mum alternate: Dashing Gent

Silver Surfer
The internet is not just home to young, more and more elderly persons are getting online, highly cautious and much more careful with their details. The silver surfers are a great long term revenue source and have fantastic networking capability.
Perfect Persona: Silver Surfer

Affiliate Marketers
Strong willed and expecting a con, they have been there and done that however as they know the business they make great partners and can easily expand any affiliate network. In many ways they are the best and worst people to pitch to.
Perfect Persona: Me

These are all stereotypes and pretty generic in most cases like encourages like but such as the case of our 18-25 Male its not always the case. Once we have an image in our mind of our persona it’s time to go out and make them a reality.

Bring a persona to life

Your sales persona needs to be fleshed out; create a name, and find a suitable picture if you can’t use yourself try getting friend, family, local model to pose for you. If all else fails then look for a suitable photos online try to avoid the free stock photo sites like sxc.hu and instead look at sites such as stockxpert.com. The reason is simple buying an image or set of images that have been rarely downloaded means that the chances your model has been seen before is limited. Try where possible to get a few images which can be used throughout your campaign. Given that in our examples we are aiming to get people laptops it makes sense to promote with images of your model with a laptop.

Above all try to keep it real certain people are just not going to promote certain things, Jessica Simpson is not the next model for a free laptop. When using an image make sure the model has signed a model release form and that the image is licensed for commercial use.

The more details the more customers

The more people can be brought into the site the more likely they are to bite, this may sound a bit manipulative but that is what you are doing it’s what the local shops are doing. For the ultimate effect try using video, if you have access to your model, get them to record a personal greeting/ sales pitch. Developing a character with personality quirks does not take much, try to create a short bio, include 5 things your new persona likes and dislikes what star sign are they and age. The more the better even if you don’t use these details on the site it helps build a stronger character a more believable character.

What’s next?

Next post we are going to start building a suitable site as our main sales site, we will look at the various elements needed on the site and discuss how sites look can influence a person. Through out these next few posts I will be building a sample site for you to play with complete with persona (no you can’t use it) but it will help you to understand some of the ideas and psychology behind such sites.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

After some pretty terrible advice was being handed out over at Webdigity I thought it was time to look at Googles recent announcement that a Privacy Policy was required of course here in the UK this is nothing new as we have needed such a policy for years, how many people actually have one is another matter!

Anyway this is a short post so get your sample policy based on an early version its more robust then most and is in part built on the OIC Office or the Information Commissioner the people here in the UK who control data privacy policy. So hopefully it will be pretty solid. Given that most adsense users at least on Webdigity have more then one site the policy is designed to be global. so without further ado here it is the Tim’s quick guide to Google Adsense Privacy Policy

One final thing IANAL (I am not a lawyer) any serious commercial venture should seek professional legal advice so if your livelihood is based on Adsense (why?) then you should get a lawyer to help draft your documents

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

We so need to kick start the blog again, and how better then by helping you guys get a Mac Book Pro Each!

Why do you need a laptop?

When asked what is the single most important change in my life on the Internet I always answer my first laptop purchase with a wireless connection. Suddenly the world changes, now you can remain online in your own cocoon environment where ever you are in the world. I do not leave the house without a laptop, my laptop has gone with me to festivals, conferences, Hackdays, clients locations and even the shops!

If you don’t have a laptop then now is the chance to grab one, if you do have a laptop is it a Mac Book Pro? It is? ok well then you can just play for the cash!

The Challenge

So here is the challenge find 25 people and get them to join a site where they to can win a laptop each person to sign up needs to complete a single offer. When all 24 have completed 1 offer you receive a free Laptop or Cash!
Simple huh

Don’t panic it’s coming!

I bet most of you are chomping at the bit for the website address but I want you to hold on just 2 seconds more.
Before you sign up we want you to know we are here for you! over the next few weeks we are going to discuss not only the various offers, but ways to get people to sign up. In other words we are going to hold your hands through the whole thing!

One final thing before the address

One last thing before you sign up, it won’t cost you a penny! please, please make sure you read the small prints of offers but for everyone their is a free option so you do not have to part with money to take part* don’t be pressured into parting with cash on an offer unless you want to!

Let’s get started

Remember to successfully complete the challenge you will need to sign up 24 people, for Notebooks4free and have each person complete an offer.

Legal bits

We are not responsible for your earning potential, and while we will help as much as we can we can’t do the work for you. This is not a pyramid scheme it is a single tier affiliate program, we are using an affiliate link but any affiliates you recruit do not count towards our total. Please please please read the small print on the Notebook4free website. Only one entry per household etc. Finally not all countries can receive laptops in such cases the cash alternative is offered via Paypal.
Remember with free trials and offers always cancel them if you do not want them to continue!

*If in doubt sign up for Notebooks4free and stay tuned for ways to complete free offers even if you don’t have a credit card.

So who is ready to take on the challenge and join us on this simple but effective challenge? It doesn’t matter if your an affiliate marketing newbie or guru this is a great way to get a laptop or cash and what could be simpler then getting 24 friends together?

Taking the challenge to the next level!

• Goal driven challenges
• Creating your sales person

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Before I start this post I would like to appologise to our readers for my long absence from payment blogger. I am in the army for the last 3 months (and I will be there for 9 more months) so time is very limited.

Anyway, enough with me, let’s talk about making money with forums. In this post I wont tell you how to monetize a forum web site, but how you can earn money by selling services and products on other forums. Personally I use these techniques frequently with webmaster forums to sell sites or ads. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to sell a site, an advertising package or some ebook you wrote there are a few things you should take care of.

Reputation

Everything in the business world is reputation. In forums this is even more important as reputation is “trackable”. Most forums have the reputation badge, while others (like DP) have a specific user rating for transactions with other members called itrader. So let’s say you start right now with a forum, you have registered an account with the forum and you are ready to sell your product/service. At that point I would suggest you to stop what are you doing and pay attention to your reputation. Without a strong reputation in the forum it doesn’t matter if you give gold for free because none is going to buy from you.

Building a “name” in the community

Ok that part is time consuming, but it is very important as long as you wish to earn some money in the forum you have just got in. Bellow are a few things that you have to do before posting any offer:

Post in the forums

A member with no posts is not a member. You need to make as much posts as you can. Don’t post stuff like “Thanks, I like this” but try to be informative and helpful to the other members. By showing them that you know about what you are talking will create trust from the community.

Give something for free

People is going crazy when you offer them something for free. It doesn’t matter if this is a 2 page ebook or a descriptive article on a technique you are using. If you give them something for free your reputation will increase so give it a try.

Buy stuff from the marketplace

If there is a marketplace with itrader, then you should buy a few things before try to sell something. This is because this way you will be able to have a positive feedback itrader that you make you look more trustful to your future buyers.

Time to make some money

Ok now you are a well known member in the community with reputation and itrader, so you can post an offer. At this part the most important factor is of course the product you are selling, but still there are a few things that you can do to maximize your chances:

• Try to be as descriptive as possible
• Rate your own thread (yeah people like to see 5 stars in the top of the thread)
• Make people bump your thread. How? Just leave a bit of information for pms so everyone will post “Please pm me details”

That’s it, I hope this article was helpful enough

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Blackhat SEO: Simply means techniques that might get you penalised or banned from a major search engine. Blackhat is a very generic term and the Blackhat Forums do often include email marketing techniques that most would consider spam. This is not an endorsement of such techniques.

Quadzilla opened up his SEO Blackhat forums on Christmas day for a limited time as a Christmas present so I spent half an hour looking round, I was pretty disappointed and I left feeling sorry for those members who spent their hard earned cash on membership.

Let me put some background to this post, Quadzilla Blackhat forums cost $100 a month membership fee, not to steep but enough to make most people think twice. For the $100 you are promised a forum that has some top notch experts and to be fair there are some pretty impressive guys in there. The issue I have is they are not talking.
So what if you are a;

• Newbies ??? If you???re a newbie then you are after questions being answered, so it was disappointing to see lots of unanswered questions, sure most of them were very newbie???ish but still this is not the place to find answers.
• Intermediate ??? You probably will want to go straight to the parasite hosting and large database section and will be disappointed, Syndk8 and Wickedfire have discussions all at a similar level.
• Advanced ??? You will want to go to the labs, to see the sophisticated cutting edge stuff and yep you guessed it nothing sophisticated or cutting edge mostly old posts.

The overall feeling was one of depressing lingering and slow death, which is a shame because it could have been so much more. Of course with 30 minutes I did not read every post and I???m sure there are a few gems but if I???m going to spend $100 a month I expect a forum that is organised, is moderated, has question answered or at least be told my question wasn???t appropriate. I would want to see stickies with the cutting edge latest ideas. I would not want to shift through posts looking in vein for a thread which might answer my question though to be fair this would not take to longer, in that respect it does keep one of its promises, their are not 100s of threads to crawl through.

Quadzilla forums are not the only places to find Blackhat/Greyhat SEO information as already indicated Wickedfire and Syndk8 are both excellent places to find information on various techniques, Wickedfire also offers a paid for area, which is either invitation only or by paying $55 a month which is significantly less.

There is one good thing to come out of the Christmas day present, it reminded me to resubscribe to SEO Egghead a fantastic blog, so not all bad.