Virtual Team Building Will Save Your Sanity

Earlier this week I ranted about all the teleseminars and webinars popping up and how much of a drain on your time it is to just stay up to date on the latest marketing trends through these calls.

I made it sound like I wanted everyone to stop and rethink why they were getting on so many calls and not getting anywhere. And I meant that, but now I am going to ask you to do that very thing: get on a call!

Here’s why…

I mentioned at the end of the post earlier that the topics you really need to hear about before you go any further are not going to be topics on the next call. Well, now they actually are!

If you want to build a big business (”big” meaning profitable and active) you are going to find out what running something like that is really like the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is to get on a free training call I am having with a professional business team-building expert tomorrow night.

The hard way is to get caught with orders coming in with too little organization, time, and resources to go any further with it because you had no idea how busy you would get once things started to take off.

The thing the gurus don’t talk about much is how hard they work to do what they do. Without a plan and a team, you might bring in some good money but have no time to enjoy it whatsoever.

Team building is the answer.

If you don’t know how to build the right kind of team around you to prepare for the success you are working toward day in and day out, you don’t need to bother being on any other calls or furthering your success training. Because when you succeed you are likely to become a slave to your success if you have no plan and no team to help you enjoy it by divvying up the work.

I have a team of 5 partners and several employees along with mentors and associates. All of us are succeeding together in ways you could never succeed on your own in the same time frame.

I had to learn to put this team together the hard way. You don’t have to. Be on this call and you just might manage to put all the things you want to do into action and turn your bus-y-ness into a real business.

Join Jack Humphrey as he interviews Melanie Benson Strick, The Entrepreneur’s Success Coach, on Thursday, August 30, 2007, at 4:00 PM Pacific / 7:00 PM Eastern, to discover these simple steps to revolutionizing the way work gets done in your business.

• How delegating just three simple jobs can free you up to double your income and time-off.
• An easy-to-follow formula that will help you determine what to delegate and what to keep so you stay focused on your highest payoff activities.
• The three deadly mistakes entrepreneurs make with their teams and how to avoid making them.
• A simple two-step plan to make money instantly by outsourcing and delegating
• The million dollar question you MUST ask yourself before you hire a team (hint: it helps you hire the right people, for the right reasons so you get the right results!)

Click Here To Register For This Completely Free Call!

Tags: business success, melanie benson strick, success coach, team building, teleseminars, virtual team building

Don't Miss Out On Free Traffic!
Subscribe to the FTR RSS feed or our email list so you don't miss out on real, traffic driving tips from Jack Humphrey!  Thanks for visiting!

How to hide header text on your Wordpress blog

Here’s a good Wordpress how-to video on hiding the default blog header text when you want to place an image in your header instead of the default, which is the title of your blog.

Here are more blogging and blog marketing videos…

Tags: blogging videos, wordpress header text, wordpress how to video

Aggressive Link Building or Stupid Link Building?

There are always discussions like this one going on in forums with people looking for help, salvation, or forgiveness after getting what they might call “too aggressive” in their link building.

Have you ever been tempted to just take up one of the myriad offers to spend $10 to “get your site linked on thousands of pages?” We all have at some point. It is frustrating waiting on Google. Sometimes you might let yourself actually believe you can speed up the process by “aggressively” adding hundreds or thousands of links to your site from extremely useless and junky “neighborhoods.”

It should be frustrating to wait on Google because waiting on Google is STUPID! Waiting on any single source of organic traffic to kick in as if you don’t have a thousand other things you can do to bring traffic is ridiculous.

Google will come around when they are damn good and ready. They will rank you when they feel like it. Yes you can make sure they know about you ASAP, but you cannot force a billion-dollar advertising agency to just drop everything and pay attention to your site with a #1 listing because you think it would be nice.

No amount of artificial link buying will make the process go any faster with results that you are going to be happy with in the long-term. You might fake Google out for a minute, but they will adjust to stupid link building and take appropriate action to knock you back down to earth.

And it hurts really bad when that’s the only significant source of traffic you have. This is when people usually see the writing on the wall and start realizing Google is one website on the internet. High traffic, yes, but still one source of traffic on a web with thousands of extremely high traffic sites.

Spending too much time on engines means you are neglecting all the other traffic available to you. Traffic from social media sites, satellite pages, and profiles on social or web 2.0 sites like Squidoo* are the bread and butter. Scoring in Google might feel likea steak dinner, but it doesn’t happen without buttering your bread first. *Yes Squidoo is alive and well as you will see in Vegas or shortly after if you aren’t coming.

Link building is one part know-how, two parts organic because of good content, and one part old fashioned hard work and dedication.

No where in the recipe is buying 1000 crappy links. It doesn’t work. Even if Google doesn’t penalize you for it you won’t get anything out of it. Believe me, I’ve tested it at least twice per year for the last several years just to make absolutely sure!

Tags: blog linking, free link building, getting links, link building

New ASC Case Study PDF

We’ve just released a new case study document featuring 8 members of ASC, their sites, stats, and stories. This is a very fair case study. Although we are in the business of marketing and selling our product, we don’t believe hype is necessary to do so. When you’ve got the goods, you can sit back and let the product speak for itself.

In this case study you will find real people explaining their journey before and during their ASC membership in their own words. You will find screenshots and stats galore, but you will also find stories of broad success beyond search engine rankings and link building.

You will find members getting radio show gigs and interviews and deals with national associations and power brokers at the top of market niches. These are results that only authority sites and stellar training can bring. Search engine marketing and all the other little things people focus on when it comes to website promotion is a tiny piece of a bigger puzzle if you want to truly dominate a niche.

It’s not enough to be #1 in Google, have thousands of links, and wrangle hundreds or thousands of visitors per day. There’s more. Much more to be accomplished. Books, major interviews, other media opps, consulting, product creation. These are the kinds of things authority brings to your door.

But let this case study show you what I cannot: a 3rd party perspective direct from members of ASC who have opened up their log files and their lives to show you what authority really means to them and their businesses.

Download the 2007 Authority Site Center Case Study (Adobe PDF, 37 pages)

Tags: authority site building, case study, site builder, site builder software

No Wonder You Don’t Have Time To Make Money!

I just took a look at IMNewsWatch.com and noticed that the vast majority of the front page is about teleseminars and webinars.

With really catchy titles like “The new ‘Success Secret’ of today’s smart professionals Teleseminar on August 29″ and “Jeff Walker’s Secrets of Pulling in Monster Profits Teleseminar on August 30.”

But wait, there’s more! On the same page there are no less than 7 announced webinars or teleseminars scheduled pretty much around the same times to round out August.

This is just the first page of IMNewsWatch.com. I didn’t go any further. I have panic attacks when I see too much of what’s going on at once.

Basically, it’s no wonder everyone seems to have such a hard time getting people on a teleseminar or webinar these days. Let alone getting them to spend more than 30 seconds on our sites before whisking themselves away to finish their information overload. This, just in time to wrap up the evening by realizing they haven’t done a thing with the last 12 things they learned on the last 12 webinars!

The internet marketing how-to niche is now 1000 times more fragmented than ever before. Opportunity is at an all time high, and that’s for real. Not hype. There are more things the average person can do to legitimately and steadily grow a profitable online business today than ever before.

And boy is the “average person” well heeled with information choices! What we used to charge for what’s being given away today would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value. 1998 dollars no less!

Ever see one of those old game shows where they lock contestants into a glass cage and fill it with hundred dollar bills and turn on a big fan? Keep that picture in your mind as you realize that people rarely ever walked out of that thing with much money, despite thousands of dollars floating all around them while they were inside. Easy pickings? Hardly. And that was the point.

There’s money and opportunity flying all around you right now. Good luck catching much of it if you are trying to get a PhD in information overload. You can’t do it all. You can’t know it all. And the good news is, you shouldn’t, so you can stop worrying about missing anything!

I know millionaires who pull down $300,000-$500,000 per month on the web who couldn’t tell you half of the stuff you probably already know. You are most likely now, or soon to be, more educated in internet marketing than people who’ve sold their online startups for millions or even billions of dollars.

Next time you get hit up for a teleseminar to learn the next great business model or trick, ask yourself if it fits the model you have started on already. If not, axe it. There will be one to replace it in a week and you can re-assess then.

Laser-focus on the prize, the end goal you’ve set for online business, is what will take you places. There are a lot of poor people online who know 1000 times more than they need to know to own a profitable business by now. Yet they are still in the forums and on the calls, night after night, thinking they are missing something.

They are. It’s called focus and commitment. And neither are going to be topics on the next call.

Tags: imnewswatch, information overload, internet marketing seminars, teleseminars, webinars

Seth Godin Speaks To Googl’ers…

It’s about time for a Seth Godin video. Watch as he helps Google become bigger and better. Because poor Google needs his help desperately. Did you see their last quarter profits? Poor guys…

Want to be a better marketer? Create better products? Read Seth Godin’s stuff - it’s truly the best.

Tags: all marketers are liars, seth godin, seth godin video, the dip

7 List Building Tools That Will Rock Your World

I get questions about the list building tools I use and recommend frequently. Below you will find the tools I use to build my opt in lists to incredible sizes.

All told our properties have a combined list total of over 40,000 members. Now that’s not nearly as much as others, but the way we have cultivated and nurtured our lists has provided us with a more responsive group of subscribers. We consistently out-pull lists up to 10 times the size of ours because of the tools we use to build our lists.

The best tools for list building are:

1. AWEBER: AWEBER is the only list management tool that builds lists with the highest delivery rate due to their undying attention to staying in good graces with the major email providers such as AOL, MSN, Comcast, Google and many others.

This is no small feat and it is something not to take for granted. If you use an email script on your own domain to gather and manage your list, you are 100% guaranteed to have a far lower delivery rate than using AWEBER. I am talking the difference between a 40% delivery rate (my average deliverability when I was using a script and mailing from my own hosting account) and between 85% and 98% using AWEBER.* *(My personal results.)

AWEBER is the industry standard used by tens of thousands of site owners from extremely large companies to the smallest mom and pop sites on the web and everything in between. Don’t bother building a list if you don’t use this tool!

2. XmailWrite: This free email creation, formatting, and deliverability tool has become the most widely-heralded email tool on the web in the short time it’s been around. It formats your emails (line wraps to any number of character widths) and does all kinds of checking to make sure you aren’t using too many words that will set off ISP filters and render your mails less deliverable. Everyone I know uses this one and we love it. And it’s FREE!

3. What Would Seth Godin Do? This is a Wordpress plugin that cookies your visitors and presents any kind of message you’d like to them about subscribing to your email and/or RSS feed. It turns itself off for visitors who have been to your site the number of times you specify. Many major bloggers use this tool and love it for simplicity and its inability to break your blog or cause conflicts with other plugins.

4. How To Build and PROFIT From Your Own Lists: This is the only course you will need to purchase to teach you about the fundamentals through advanced list building tactics. It is by my buddy Mark Hendricks and it covers everything you need to know about effective list building to build both fast and cultivate an active, hungry list.

5. Exit Grabber: This is a new list building tool that is pure genius and highly effective. What it does blows my mind and I still don’t know how it works on the technical level. Basically it senses when someone is about to leave your site and presents them with a message of your choice. The best use from feedback on this tool is to grab people leaving with a special offer to join your list. This is probably the best list building tool to come out in 2007, hands down.

6. You Ask Them Survey Software: List building is not just how fast you can add optins to your list. Having the biggest list is not the goal. Having the most responsive list is. To do that you must constantly check in with your list members and find out more about them to better target your offers to them. We use You Ask Them to survey our lists frequently about all sorts of things that make our mailings and our product development higher performing and more profitable.

7. Peel Away Ads Software: This is very cool, very effective, unblockable advertising for your list that gets attention. I have heard from clients who use this on their pages that they have drastically increased their conversions and list opt ins using this novel software. It’s extremely effective and extremely inexpensive.

Tags: getting subscribers, list building, optin list

Here’s a thought…

Hypothetically speaking…

Would you fly to Las Vegas to learn about one thing from one person if it meant you could come home and begin to dominate hot keywords in the search engines at will?

And by dominate, I mean be a significant part of the top 20-30-50-100+ results for a keyword topic. I mean up to the top 10 PAGES of results in Google!

Seems like anyone would want that information and be willing to pay a second mortgage to get it. What would it be worth to your business to do such a thing at will? You can do that math.

The opportunity is real actually. And it won’t cost much of anything to get this information. But time is slipping away. September 8-9th at the Tuscany Resorts in downtown Las Vegas we are having a little get together.

Just one of the speakers is going to show you the above technique.

And there are more mind-blowing things planned with the 7 other trainers including Mike Filsaime, Michel and Sylvie Fortin, Mike Stewart, Elsom Eldridge, David Bullock, Barbara Drazga, Mark Braunstein and yours truly.

I’ve watched people plunk down tens of thousands of dollars for ridiculous things in this business that got them nowhere. And they didn’t even get to see the Blue Man Group or Cirque de Soleil or learn how to play craps from our resident expert Mark Braunstein.

Time is running out to take your online business, no matter how successful it might be, to the next level (or skip several levels and go right to the top!).

So, would you travel to the entertainment capital of the world to learn how to take over your market niche?

Register now for the 2007 Authority Summit!

Tags: barbara drazga, david bullock, elsom eldridge, internet marketing conference

Dr. Mike Woo Ming, Affiliate Marketing, Oscar Nominee

I am nominating my friend Dr. Mike for either an Oscar or an Emmy (what does online video come under for Hollywood awards anyway?).

The level of expression and the deep understanding Dr. Mike has of his character in this short film, in my opinion, puts Russell Crowe’s performance in Gladiator to shame.

Not an affiliate link: Affiliate Heros You won’t learn cutting-edge method acting, but you will learn the next best thing: making money!

Tags: affiliate marketing, dr mike, woo ming

Sunday Link Building

I am going through a round of site optimization this week, so I haven’t been writing as regularly as usual.  What I am doing is checking each and every search engine ranking that brings me some traffic and going back to each page on FTR to further optimize with on-site and off-site tactics.

You know, things like earning deep links to pages and adding content to pages that would improve in rankings with some sprucing up.

I recommend everyone do this.  Bloggers are notoriously bad at remembering to go back and revisit posts they’ve gotten into the engines.  If you get 10 visits a day to a particular post because you are in the top 20-50 in, say, Google, there’s nothing stopping you from going back to that page and editing, optimizing, and getting some link love to that page to boost it in rankings.

I am one of the “notoriously bad” bloggers and I have a backlog of pages that can be easily raised in rankings with some tweaks.  It is SO easy to just write a post, get ranked, and live with whatever traffic that post gets from the engines.

However, the increase in overall site traffic by re-optimizing can be extremely rewarding.  I will have an example of this in my next post - possibly a video - to show how I do this.

For now though, enjoy some incredible content from my buddies:

• Dave Lakhani:  “Creativity vs. Profitable Creativity or how to make advertising make money“
• Howie Schwartz:  “The Greatest SEO Artist In The World” - Interview with Jerry West
  
• Mike Filsaime:  Get Mike’s latest informative internet marketing podcasts here.
• John Reese:  Now THIS is how to get a fire going at Digg!  John’s tank cleaner swimming in his fish tank!

Tags: link building, optimization, seo

Next Page »