Mid Life Marketer’s Kick Start

As a newcomer to the Internet Marketing Life, I have had to start learning a whole raft of skills and techniques that were frankly, a foreign language to me a year ago. I have also started to follow my passion for snapping photos of everything that I pass by. I would hesitate to call myself a “Photographer”, it’s just something I enjoy with a passion. Website construction, FTP, panoramic stitching, the strange world of camera raw: these are all new worlds into which I have had to delve.

I am lucky enough to live in a corner of the world called Stanwix. It’s on one of the bits of Carlisle that’s up the hill and away from the floodplain of the R. Eden, so we were fortunate to be spectators to the carnage of the floods 3 years ago. As (allegedly) wealthy and upmarket as Stanwix is supposed to be it’s been very backward in not having a community presence on the web. What better way to combine … learning to drive a website … testing my virtual tours… and … giving something back to a place I really like.

So Stanwix’ Community website was born. This is my first attempt at developing a useful website that carries good quality content. The framework or template is in place and there is a small amount of original content there, but my hope is that residents and businesses within the area and its surrounds will see some value in the site and literally drive its development.

One of the useful techniques I have learned during this roller coaster year since I fell out of my teaching career and decided to focus on Internet Marketing, has been the almost viral power of on-line press releases. After a rather long break from the press room at Free Press Release.com I finally made it back to this often overlooked marketing strategy. My latest press release is aimed at promoting the Stanwix Community Website is entitled (rather grandly I thought!) Press Release: Stanwix Carlisle Gains a Community Web Site

There are many online portals for submitting your press release. All of them follow pretty consistent rules about content, quality and respect for other people’s information. My preference, even though I am UK based is Free Press Release.com The format they present is easy to use, even in the free service and you can buy into their paid service if you want higher placement of your article in the listings. A pretty cool sort of service. Although I am not a traffic superstar yet, the articles posted have certainly increased the click throughs to my Prosperizer website and my Building on a Budget Project.
Well that’s all for now. I’m back to beating my old laptop into acceptance of the fact that it has to process 6 image Tiff based panoramic view without crashing!!!!!!!

A couple of weeks ago I got a message from Dan Foley. Just another in a string of infommercials after I had subscribed to one of his list offers. That’s what I thought at first glance. I read on for a few sentences, because it was obviously a case of Dan TESTING his advertising and trying to get feedback about whether his readers favoured longer articles or “chunked” information. Thinking back, I don’t think I actually answered his original question… “Doh!”

The article was by a guy called Willie Crawford and I am going to put it up in 3 sections on the blog as it was a “Right Riveting Read!”

It set out out in words, even I could understand, how to set up your advertising copy and test the results. So here ya go! Here’s part 1.

My Ads Aren’t Working!
by Willie Crawford

My ads aren’t working! I don’t get much response to my ezine ads! How can I improve my ad response rates? These are comments I hear frequently from associates who advertise regularly online. After taking a look at their ads, here is the advice I often offer them on improving their ads:

First of all, the ad must be BELIEVABLE. Fully 80% of the ads that I review lack credibility. Yes - people want to believe that they can earn a fortune - in a month - with absolutely no work. However, things don’t work that way! If it were THAT easy, everybody would be doing it.

After all, we like to share secrets with our family and friends. Anyone discovering a way to earn money THAT easy would have shared it with their friends .. who would have shared it with their friends….. and they would have shared it with their friends. Soon everyone would know about it and be making a fortune.

This great moneymaker would not need to be advertised since it would be spreading so fast by word-of-mouth.

Your potential customers are very intelligent. They can spot a hyped-up exaggeration when they see one. Don’t use them - make your ads believable.

Starting with the most important part of your ad - the headline. It must be believable and it must grab their attention.

How do you get their attention? You tell them how you are going to solve a problem for them, or how you are going to prevent them from having a problem in the first place. There are many “hot words” that have been proven to grab a persons attention better than others. You need to use these in your headlines too. Examples of these words include:

“Free”
“You”
“Discover”
“New”

Any good book on copywriting will give you more of these terms so I won’t elaborate on that here. If you want a good ebook on how to write using language that excites a customer get a free copy of “The Net Writing Master’s Course”

Here’s a useful blog by Ron Castle on the noble art of copywriting:

After my initial growing pains in this game, I was pleased to find a plain English guide to getting the advertising right. I doubt I’ve got it right yet, but I am now working on it with a lot more of a “clue”.

Keep an eye out for part 2 coming soon to a blog near you!!

By the way; don’t forget there are a whole bunch of giveaway events kicking off at the moment so just have a look at the previous post on my blog. Details of my personal favourites.;-)

Sometimes we dive in so deep with projects we’re pursuing that we miss the most obvious first steps and waste our best efforts. Last time I posted, I said I was going to let you know how I had got on with Craigslist. I had put a big effort into setting up an advertising programme on that portal, following the steps in Mike Dillard’s Building on a Budget (BoaB) course. Sadly every single one of my ads was ghosted. My original plan for a 2 day hit and everlasting automation - and zillions of leads … became a 2 and a half week marathon of unique ad writing and organising followed by crushing defeat!! Additionally I had neglected a lot of other work in trying to apply the lessons from BoaB. Well I haven’t steeled myself for the return match with Craigslist yet, but I have been catching up on my other neglected areas of work.

I decided that I really ought to check what I was displaying in the traffic exchanges and check out the hits and misses - so to speak. I got a shock when I started checking the contents of the “My Web Sites” sections of the accounts I hold. Outdated links, links with typos, Web sites not enabled … I could go on but the list just gets more embarrassing. Like I said at the start, I had dived in and got involved at too deep a level in too many programme’s at once, completely failing to check whether I had set up my accounts properly. The up side of that, was that I did at least have thousands of credits sitting “in the bank” ready to be unleashed. So I have had a day and a half of solid graft, up until my ex-wife brought the kids back from their holiday, to get my accounts in order. I am looking forward to some better responses over the next few weeks.

The advice we are given, by the experienced marketers we look to for tips and tricks, is to constantly check and recheck our ads responses. Slowly I am beginning to understand just what that means, but a couple of interesting patterns did emerge. Despite the poor set up of my accounts, I was still getting some traffic and there were some TXs which were clearly more responsive to my ads. At present my top 3 would have to be:

CosmicRay’s Top Three Traffic Programs

Stan’s the MAN - he has set up a very responsive site with (even better) hungry users.

Paul Kinder has obviously learned his business from the top eggs!! Traffic Splash is giving me the second best response rate.

Matthew will give you lots of insider info with his exchange; Web Biz Insider.

These 3 are the ones that have been working best for me personally. What I have used as a kind of umbrella to organise my surfing activities is a programme called Vital Viral. Effectively this provides a programme where you can promote all your traffic Exchange affiliations at one fell swoop. If a member signs up in vital viral and subsequently joins any of the other exchanges below you they are added to your downline instead of some other promoter’s downline. There is also a very helpful support section which gives great advice about how to organise your surfing sessions; particularly - how to use multi tabbed browsing to use your time more efficiently - and importantly - how to give other advertisers at least a few seconds of your time so that the whole Traffic Exchange phenomena is a REAL benefit and remains a 2 way street.

While I was setting up my websites in HitSafari I chanced to look through their forum and found that it had a very well set out series of tips. I’m not entirely sure why, but the information here is much more accessible to us normal “non-geekers” than the info in most of the other forums I’ve checked recently. if you are new to TXs this is particularly helpful. Although I’ve only recently reactivated my HitSafari account, it is apparently well up the rankings at present and getting good responses. And - it does have the free option so you can’t really lose.

Well I hope that you newer traffickers will find the information helpful - remember, these are just my impressions - warts and all. CYA next time.

As a climber, of the rock and ice, rather than social persuasion and a bloke who was in an ivory tower, believing he was completely immunised against the influence of marketing; I still wake up some days and wonder what I’m doing following the on-line marketing path. When I started climbing, I didn’t have a lot of cash - frequently I had none. I used to make my climbing “breeks” from chopped off army surplus trousers and a touch of needle and thread. I was always a bit cautious about the contents of my cranium and I used to lug an old motor cycle helmet around the hills, I certainly looked a state and I certainly wasn’t pulling like some of my smooth talking mates. But the freedom, adventure and the feeling of escape from my hometown where nothing happened apart from the Country and Western Dance on a Saturday night and the after hours punch up on the way home; that feeling was indescribable. Scruffiness almost became my badge of rebellion - I was such a compliant “good boy” back then! What has all that got to do with our marketing businesses? I suppose it’s about looking past the veneer of first impressions when we are trying to crystallise our WHY!

When I look at the image so many people like to project; of the sports cars, luxury yachts and sunny beach lifestyle, I find it grates - at first. I sometimes think many people (myself included all too frequently) miss the real point of all the hard work we do, to have our own businesses. It goes much deeper than the material manifestations of wealth. Time freedom and the ability to be there for the ones you love are the key things for me. And … eventually, I am sure, financial freedom! To me those kinds of freedoms are worth far more than the big house, the Merc or the yacht. And then, when I wind my inverted snobbery down a notch or two and look carefully at the message that the “flash car photo” entrepreneurs are putting out; it’s actually the same as mine. We’ve all got dreams of an ideal lifestyle and we project a picture to catch people’s attention. It doesn’t necessarily define our values.

When I left my job and was able to see my kids out to school regularly, I knew I had found the start of my own road forward. I was looking at a pretty scary fall from high power assistant headteacher to unemployed and broken down ex teacher. I was ready for the change though and the initial “poverty” has been very “motivating”.

You might be amused by my tag of CosmicRay and it might surprise you to know that there isn’t a shred of hippy in me! It’s all the fault of a friend from York 25 years ago, who spotted me strung out on the crux of a hardish rock climb in the Lake District, when I was an aspiring hard(?!)man. “Blood*@ hell,” he shouted up in his wry way, “You’ve got better! You must be getting cosmic Ray!” He was shocked to see I’d progressed onto scary routes. Not too helpful at that precise moment, as I was looking at the prospect of taking a big fall, because I couldn’t work out the sequence to get around a steep nose of rock. When he realised I was in trouble, he quietly told me about the “secret” hold around the corner - I breathed again and an eighty footer onto a ledge was avoided (in contrast to a lad from our club the previous weekend, who had missed the hold). Fortunately he was young and bouncy and got over his battering in a couple of weeks.

This marketing game is a bit like trying to tackle a climb that’s harder than you have previously attempted at the sharp end. Jumping off the career carousel was just as scary in its own way because more was at stake - it wasn’t just me any more, I now had children in a disintegrating marriage to look out for. But now, as then, the quiet word(s) from a friend (and a competitor of sorts) was enough to see me on the road to success and safety. It’s turning out to be a rerun of that same tale, as people give me little pointers and go out of their way to steer me round some of the more obvious pitfalls. I have been amazed at the constant help that is available - we only have to ask. It is very difficult for a person upline of you to know whether your lack of success is due to inaction or a misunderstanding of a new technique you’ve been trying. At the moment I am trying to get to grips with advertising on Craigslist and I am running into all the problems that are mentioned, a bit too quietly in that new course you bought!! BUT I will succeed, I will put into action all the tips that I hadn’t absorbed from my course materials and the new information I am turning up in various blogs. In my next posting, I will try and explain how I have gotten around the difficulties of using Craigslist, without hopefully having broken the rules or misused the resource.

My measures of success may be different to yours, but whatever it may be I am here to help you achieve it, no matter how material or “Cosmic” it may be. What I can’t answer myself, I can soon point you towards an answer, because that’s the way we become successful - by networking and building up relationships with each other. It’s a relationship game! Just like the day when a pal who was very competitive about his climbing realised there was a real problem and was there with a ready answer, a “secret” key that those in the know had access to. If you are looking for a business where help is constantly available from myself and many more experienced folk, I’ve listed some character sketches of my main focus. I’m sure there will be one of these busineses that suits your individual approach.

CosmicRay and the NorthernView bring you a range of opportunities from fast money start ups for beginners to high commitment, serious long term earners.

Prosperizer - a great opportunity with all your tools in one place. Join a superb community populated by individuals who are committed to helping and guiding you to success

eLottery - the ultimate system for playing the UK lottery and EuroMillions. With a little effort you even play them for FREE. If you are looking for a more sensible way to have a flutter, with a business that has an extremely low initial investment then this could be the one.

Plug in to Profits with NorthernViewWealth this is one of many turn key full on solutions. It is almost the legendary “business in a box” that many people need.

uVme - this is going to be the standard by which all on-line skill game web sites are judged. Pure fun and games with a built in business plan, which avoids any gambling connections. :wink

Join me in any of these ventures and we will build strong supportive teams that last.

Many people, new to the Internet Marketplace, buy a series of poorly understood products and fritter away their hard earned cash, believing naively that the promises of rapid wealth creation are somehow more real or believable than the cruel world of traditional business. Not surprisingly, to those of us who have come through initial disappointments and disasters, newcomers fail by the shed-load! Prosperizer is a new kid on the block from a well established stable. It seeks to take the hype out of high income potential and set newcomers up with a realistic game plan for financial independence. MASSIVE plans for the future of Prosperizer are rolling out so that the new affiliate need not go out and waste a ton of money on yet more impulse “must haves”. The most significant enhancements to member benefits are: the implementation of the VIP club and RIS; the Residual Income Systems. Other changes to increase the value for paid members include: the end of the free trial; members only access to the community forum and redesigned squeeze pages to attract more visitors and improve conversion rates!

Prosperizer is the brainchild of a team of entrepreneurs from the UK who are all successful in their own right, but who want to improve the embarrassing drop out rate of around 95% among new Internet marketers. Following launch in January, members are already seeing increased numbers of sign ups and growing streams of income. The great thing about Prosperizer is the attention to detail, in the systems being developed for newbies, to get their businesses off to a solid start. There is a tremendous community within the Prosperizer organisation, which reflects the ethos of the guys and girls who put this project together. They realised that the dropout rate was high because in most programmes there is a gap in the support available to new entrepreneurs; between the point where they have got to the end of the auto responder series that comes with their initial purchase and that point where they feel confident enough to approach their upline. Everybody in this project is approachable and looking out for you! The Prosperizer team has recently developed important upgrades to the system, to increase its value to members.

The most significant enhancement for ALL members, is the Residual Income Systems squeeze page - with FREE Report. Prospects signing up here receive access to a concise report explaining frequently misunderstood concepts around building a residual income from the start. (Something the author wishes he had understood better in his early days). The member benefit here, is that the prospect is automatically directed to the member’s personal autoresponder so that the member’s own list grows. For the prospect, there is a multi-part email course that is relayed to them over the period of a fortnight. The content is basic, clear, concise and generic, making it highly relevant to developing Prosperizer or any business system.

The second major upgrade to member’s benefits is the launch of the Prosperizer VIP club. This is effectively an advertising co-op. Members subscribe to 1 or more shares in the co-op each month. The revenue is then used to buy advertising and leads from sources that the founders have used successfully over the years themselves. The first national media advertising appeared in the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror in the UK this week. The leads generated by the co-op are then directed to the individual affiliates squeeze pages according to their share investment. The focus is on helping new marketers to monetize their businesses at an early stage, using the clout and leverage of established marketer’s contacts. The signs are already good, with the Prosperizer forum buzzing!

On the 25th of February, the 7 Day FREE Trial with Prosperizer was terminated. Now; people who are interested, are required to show a little more commitment to building their financial future with Prosperizer. There is still a 7 day trial period which costs £19.99, effectively the initial set up fee. After a week, if the new recruit wants to continue, because they find the content valuable - and like me, they will - they start paying their regular monthly fee of £39.95. For the referring member, there is a commission of 50% on all fees paid by new affiliates. The membership gives affiliates access to some superb training materials in a variety of media. The training is cleverly differentiated for the member, so that materials can be accessed at a comfortable level. It is under the member’s control when they move themselves up to the next level. Another well thought out feature of the training materials in Prosperizer, is the way that fresh material is unlocked at different times. This allows members, particularly new starters, to take action on the basic steps before they are swamped with more tips and instructions. The emphasis is always on encouraging people to TAKE ACTION to build their Prosperizer business and any other business with which they are involved. Greg McKenzie’s technical training videos are also superb, in the way they explain unfamiliar concepts such as; pre-loading auto-responders and redirecting URLs: they could be destined for greatness as training gems - with a quality Scottish accent ;0). Great work Greg! Additionally there is a marketplace section where affiliates have access to a series of hot ebooks with PLR rights and affiliate marketer’s tools that will shorten the learning curve significantly.

Other improvements include the redesign of the squeeze pages by graphics and copywriting maestro Simon Tofield and the closure of the Prosperizer Forum to non members. Why do this you might ask? Because we feel, a freely accessible public forum devalues everything that we are trying to achieve with Prosperizer. And that is to create an Exclusive Wealth Building Club! We are taking the hard and fast approach. If you’re not in you’re out! However, the investment required for this scheme is superb value for starting up a business, with such life changing potential! Prosperizer is also intimately linked to - and provides a springboard, for some of the rising stars of the online marketing world: UVME, eLottery and GDI. Membership includes squeeze pages for these opportunities and the developers are determined to give all entrepreneurs the tools and the skills to develop a stable financial base within Prosperizer and then branch out into the other superb opportunities or build any other business of their choosing. The extra pages are:

1. uVme squeeze page that’s exclusive to each Prosperizer Membership. This will help members build their uVme online games business if they so choose. (See http://viralurl.com/Cosmicray/UVME for access to the games site and http://viralurl.com/Cosmicray/uVmeBiz to examine the business opportunity video)

2. E-Lottery DVD site - this is a funded proposal where members keep the £4.95 that is charged for the excellent quality DVD, promoting this well established, rock solid business. (eLottery has been in existence for nearly 6 years and is a market leader in on-line entertainment businesses. The parent company, Virtual World Direct, is also responsible for launching uVme)
3. Residual Income Systems - with FREE Report as described above.

These three squeeze pages alone would cost people in excess of £1500 if you were to hire web or graphic designers of the calibre of John McNiven and Simon Tofield. In fact, it would cost you nearly the price of your membership just to host these fantastic, high quality sites…. And finally not forgetting to mention the member’s existing Prosperizer squeeze page. And don’t forget there is a re-brandable Freedomizer magazine and The Prosperizer Report! There are more training materials in video and pdf form. There is real time marketing of E-lottery rollover mini-sites. And … much, much more….as the development team steadily ramp up the available resources.
Believe me when I tell you……people will be kicking themselves right this very minute that they never had the foresight to take the 7 Day Free Trial while they had the chance. That’s great news for the members who took the leap of faith and joined early. Prosperizer still represents a tremendous investment in yourself, if you are serious about starting your online marketing career. For the more experienced marketer, the team have some established best sellers and are also developing further novel projects that should whet the appetite of any marketer. The time to get involved is now so that you are in on the ground floor of an opportunity that is causing a frenzy amongst those who understand its supportive philosophy and its very strength within the founding group of entrepreneurs.

Are YOU ready to Power Up Your Income?

CosmicRay at The Northern View. http://viralurl.com/Cosmicray/Residual

This is virtually the text of an article I wrote about the Prosperizer opportunity for press releases and article directories which have gone online over the last few days. I am a newcomer to the delights of press releases and article marketing and despite basing this article on a ready made solo ad within the Prosperizer resources, It has needed several tweaks and additions, in order to suit the 3 basic writing styles required by the different text types found in: this blog, an article or a press release. An additional time eater was the learning curve involved in getting used to the different layouts of the various publishing portals. The real killer though, was when the Free Press Release site went down just before I copied the text of the article body into a notepad file … Coyses!!! This was a little ironic as I had just given my daughter a stern lecture on the importance of saving her work regularly if she was working at my computer!! Poetic justice!

What I have learned over the last couple of days has been very useful. I won’t profess to know a great deal about great copywriting yet, but there are a few little pointers for anyone who is venturing into the world of articles and press releases.

I used a very good FREE services to send out my press release about the changes to Prosperizer. Free Press Release.com is my first venture into online press releases. I found their site a wee bit tricky at first, but after a couple of visits, setting up my basic free account was very simple and once I had clicked around a couple of times I discovered excellent guidance on article writing and bashed away editing and redrafting my basic text to suit the sections of:

HEADLINE
SUMMARY
BODY
CONTACT DETAILS
KEYWORDS

Shortly after completing this article, I realised that I needed to do something to get my article higher in the rankings. I then took notice of the paid options and decided to cough up the initial $50 payment as there was a better value than paying the bare minimum. I converted my writing to a premium article for 1$. I was pleased to see my article on the homepage shortly afterwards, but I was way down the page in about 80th position. My next discovery was the article promotion section. It took me a few minutes to work out how this worked, but by bidding $20 my article was raised to 16th on the page and within half an hour I had noticed about 115 hits. Traffic is the whole point of Press releases and on first appearances that piece of hard work is beginning to have the desired effect. So from my initial experience I would highly recommend Free Press Release- and I don’t even get a commission!!

In my next post I will recount my entertainments when I tried to publish this work as an article. If you found this worth reading, many thanks for sticking around and all the best in your endeavours.
CosmicRay

Life Recast

I left my employment as a teacher on December 31st 2007.

I know my BIG WHY now, with a crystal clarity that I didn’t have before today. More importantly, I understand that nagging gut feeling that I couldn’t articulate for so many years. It was called unhappiness and I never knew.

So, as a newly “ex” teacher and newbie at marketing online, the rest of the entries in this blog will detail how I find ways to overcome the hurdles of a completely new and for me, an almost totally unexpected way of life. The details of how I went from scared beginner to gradually build a list of subscribers. I’ll detail the ways I am learning from experienced people, how the different courses and ebooks rate: the ones that deliver the useful information that is helping me grow my business. I’ll describe the opportunities that I am using to help me reshape my life, including: uVme and elottery from VWD; Prosperizer the most supportive of new start up projects; traffic exchanges and viral list building. I’ll tell it the way it is and describe my cock ups and crowning glories in the hope that you the reader can take something from my experiences and shorten your learning curve on the way to growing your business.
With all best wishes,
Ray of Team CosmicRays
aka MisterC
Oh and by the way, look out for The Northern View!

PS.
What wouldn’t we all do to be at the top of Google’s search results? Well for a limited time - and I suggest you’re quick- 1 on 40 are beta testing their package for getting subscribers to the top of, not just Google’s, but at least 39 other search engine’s results. They guarantee to do this within 120 days and if you get in during this beta phase, you won’t pay them anything until you are top for your 5 keywords for at least a week. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s got to be worth a punt! It’s the first no hype - no brainer I’ve come across in this game. When you go to the web site, just be aware that there is a client login and an affiliate login that you need to keep clear in your mind or your records, to navigate their websites easily. Get ready for the traffic and sales flood!